By Allan Wall
08/10/2014
There’s more than one way to skin the American people. Illegal immigration isn’t just about cheap labor, growing the welfare state, and strengthening the ethnic lobbies. The so-called charities and nonprofits are also part of the scam.
They don’t just want your moral praise — they want your tax dollars. Indeed, without the government, few would even exist.
You might think that a government-supported charity is a contradiction in terms. After all, the whole point of charity is that it’s voluntary. But in the eyes of the Main Stream Media, those sanctimonious social workers and religious hypocrites whose salaries you pay aren’t greedy capitalists but “humanitarians.”
Good work if you can get it.
Catholic Charities U.S.A. has been at this for a long time. As VDARE.com’s Brenda Walker reported recently:
“…Catholic Charities gets billions of taxpayer dollars for refugee resettlement and general immigration services, which puts it into the category of a smallish government agency. For example, in 2010, 62 percent of Catholic Charities’ budget was funded by the unwilling taxpayer. The feds and the Catholic bishops are partners.”
Government dependence has only increased since 2010. As of November of 2013, the group’s total revenue was $4.39 billion. Of that total, more than 66% — $ 2.916 billion — came from the government.
Government agencies that have contracts with Catholic Charities include: the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Justice, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Homeland Security. [President’s Budget Proposal 2014, Catholic Charities]
So much for passing around the collection plate.
Needless to say, Catholic Charities is hardly a neutral observer in the immigration debate. Not surprisingly considering its financial self-interest, the group supports amnesty.
But don’t worry — treason is ecumenical. Protestant groups aren’t letting the Catholics get all the government funding.
For example, Baptist Child and Family Services (BCFS) sounds like a Red State charity out of Richard Dawkins’s fever dreams, but it’s actually the government contractor that snagged a $50 million deal to purchase the Palm Aire Resort hotel in Texas. BCFS was to make it into a resort hotel for illegal alien minors. [Feds to Open $50 million resort for illegal children — complete with tennis courts, sauna & pools (updated), by Kristinn Taylor, Gateway Pundit, July 16, 2014]
After the story was posted on the Drudge Report, BCFS withdrew its bid because of the negative attention. But don’t worry — it has plenty more government contracts where that came from. [UPDATE on BCFS: Using the word “Baptist” in the Government organization title doesn’t make it a Church, by Mara Zebest, Gateway Pundit, July 17, 2014]
As Time Magazine reports,
“…This obscure charity has emerged as one of the biggest players in the federal government’s response to the influx of more than 57,000 unaccompanied children who have trudged across the southern border so far this year. It runs two of the largest facilities for temporarily housing immigrant children, as well as six permanent shelters in California and Texas. Since December, BCFS has received more than $280 million in federal grants to operate these shelters, according to government records. On July 7, two days before [BCFS president Kevin] Dinnin met Obama in Dallas, the Department of Health and Human Services awarded BCFS $190,707,505 in a single grant.[This Baptist Charity Is Being Paid Hundreds of Millions to Shelter Child Migrants by Alex Altman and Elisabeth Dias, Time, August 4, 2014]
In fact, BCFS is garnering obscene revenue from the “refugee crisis.” According to Time, BCFS is
the largest recipient of money disbursed to contractors to temporarily house unaccompanied children until they can reunited with family members or placed in foster care.
While the BCFS is getting 40% of the grant money for “sheltering unaccompanied children,” other “charitable” groups getting money include Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
In the end, your tax dollars go into the pockets of people like Kevin Dinnin [pictured right] President and CEO of Baptist Child and Family Services Emergency Management Division . He receives a salary of at least $477,799 annually. The organization’s entire payroll amounted to $33 million.
This isn’t unusual. Time’s Altman and Dias report:
The median salary for the CEOs of nonprofit organizations like BCFS was about $285,000 in 2011, according to a 2013 survey by Charity Navigator.
Altman and Dias also explain why the government is so secretive about all this:
To shield vulnerable kids from angry opponents of immigration and the media spotlight, the government declines to disclose the locations and activities of many of the facilities operated by BCFS and similar organizations.
But while the Left says it aims to “shield vulnerable kids,” it is really protecting profiteers like Dinnin.
Needless to say, secular groups are also getting in on the action. An outfit called Wolverine Human Services received federal funds to dump illegal aliens on the small town of Vassar, Michigan. [Wolverine Human Services on housing refugee teens in Vassar: ‘We can’t make everyone happy,” by Lindsay Knake, Michigan Live, July 9, 2014]
As these groups have learned, illegal immigration isn’t just government policy. It’s a moneymaking scam that eliminates the distinction between charities and business.
As Brenda Walker reported, one “deluxe detention center for illegal aliens” in Texas is run by The GEO Group, a private prison company. However, this “private” company relies on the same government sources for funding as supposed “charities” and religious groups.
Perhaps some of the people involved in these groups have good intentions. But the U.S. government does not exist to cater to their pathological altruism. And the government should certainly not be redistributing our tax dollars to these people and calling it “charity.”
In the face of this massive conflict of interest, what we need in dealing with these multimillion dollar “nonprofits” and their millionaire “charitable” executives is more cynicism.
These alleged charities are indistinguishable from the self-interested plutocrats of the Cheap Labor lobby — what VDARE.com calls the “Slave Power.”
Above all, these privileged recipients of state largesse have no business lecturing Americans, who provide their ill-gotten gains, about morality.
American citizen Allan Wall moved back to the U.S.A. in 2008after many years residing in Mexico. Allan’s wife is Mexican, and their two sons are bilingual. In 2005, Allan served a tour of duty in Iraq with the Texas Army National Guard. His VDARE.COM articles are archived here; his Mexidata.info articles are archived here; his News With Views columns are archived here; and his website is here.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.