Morning Wire - Religious Groups Funding Illegal Immigration | 2.11.24

Episode Date: February 11, 2024

Non-profit groups including some tax payer funded religious organizations are in aiding mass migration into the U.S. Get the facts first on Morning Wire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

According to customs and border protection, a record 1 million illegal immigrants have entered the U.S. since October. As a result of the influx, nearly 60% of Americans now characterize the situation on the border as a crisis. But how are so many migrants from far-flung nations able to make the treacherous journey to the U.S.? How are they feeding and housing themselves before and after they enter the country? The answer to both of those questions centers on non-profits, many of them faith-based organizations, who administer taxpayer-funded aid on both sides of the border. Critics argue these groups are incentivizing illegal immigration and promoting policies that many Americans oppose.

In this episode, we explore the role religious non-profits play in both legal and illegal immigration. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire, editor-in-chief John Bickley. It's Sunday, February 11th, and this is Morning Wire. Joining us now to discuss how faith-based charities provide aid to immigrants and why their work has become controversial is Daily Wire Culture Reporter, Megan Basham. So, Megan, most people are probably pretty aware that religious charities do minister to all classifications of immigrants. They may recognize some of the big names like Catholic Charities

USA, Lutheran Social Services, World Relief, just to name a few. But when we think of these groups, I think most people think they're probably funded by private donations. But that's not correct, is it? No, very much not correct. In fact, the vast majority of the funding for the best known and largest tax-exempt NGOs who are involved in this immigration work comes from federal grants and contracts. So think taxpayer money. And we are talking about billions to provide aid, as you said, to both legal and illegal immigrants, and that includes refugees and asylum seekers.

Now, this information is a few years old, and the numbers are certainly higher now. But just to quantify it a little bit, in 2018, Capital Research, a think tank, that studies non-profits, put out a report that found, for example, that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops received 48 million just for refugee resettlement. World relief, which is an arm of the National Association of Evangelicals, received 215 million for the same purpose. And the report called that a slow year. It also said that these numbers are dwarfed by what these NGOs received to administer assistance to unaccompanied minors who are now showing up at the border in record numbers. there, we're climbing into the billions. And it's worth noting here that an estimated 75% of

those minors are aged 15 to 17, and many of them are young men. So I spoke to Todd Benzman, who is Senior Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies. Now, he was actually on his way to the border when I caught up with him, so the audio's not perfect here, but he did shed a lot of light on how these NGOs partner with the federal government and why it's really hard to pin down just how much immigration-related money they're receiving. Honestly, I don't think anybody knows completely because it's like, you know, they're building the aircraft while flying still. The numbers of NGOs are burgeoning. There are two different things.

There's contracts and there are grants and they're different animals. And contracts are harder to track than the grants. And a lot of the NGOs have gotten so big that they split up into kind of components. Like, you know, Catholic Charities, USA, but then there's friends of Catholic charities. There's Catholic charities, you know, Pennsylvania, there's Catholic Charities. And each one of them is kind of their own, you know, I don't think anybody's really done how much money is being let. But every once in a while you hear about $400 million contract, no bid contract, a highest or to Catholic charities or to, you know, it's huge, huge money. I think it's in the billions and billions of dollars.

It's an industrial complex. I call it sometimes the migrant advocacy industrial complex, because it's very much like, in my mind, the military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us all about. So the largest NGOs essentially administer funds for the government and distribute it to smaller NGOs who then in turn help settle immigrants in pretty much every state and city in the country. So just focusing on immigration aid and refugee resettlement, what percentage of the budgets for these groups are coming from taxpayers?

Well, you know, it depends on the NGO, but it can be anywhere from half to almost all of it. So Mark Corcorian, who is the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, was actually traveling with Benzman to the border. So I got a little bit of a two-for-one interview here, and he put it this way. The interesting thing is that the grants are often constitute either a majority, sometimes over 90% of the income of the revenue of these organizations. They're essentially government contractors posing as religious organizations. So we're paying for this border crisis that would probably happen whether we were paying for it or not, but we're definitely helping it and speeding it and moving it along. Now, that said, the NGOs do receive private donations as well, and they also receive support from some very large private foundations. The group Welcoming America, for instance, receives grants

in the hundreds of thousands of dollars each from George Soros's Open Society's Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, and other really large grantmakers like that. So what exactly are these NGOs doing with all that money? Well, just about anything you can think of that might touch on immigration. So things like helping migrants get across South America and the Dary and Gap to providing for their needs as they're waiting on the Mexican side of the border to arranging legal representation to make asylum claims. Here's what Benzman told me. They operate south of the border all the way to South America.

At least 248 of them are working directly with the United Nations, IOM and UNHCR, spreading cash, debit cards, cash and envelopes, food, clothing, shelter, medical, transportation, subsidies to get them moving. Really, every basic human need that a U.S.-bound immigrant would require for a long journey from wherever at waste stations throughout Latin America and Mexico all the way to our border. so that nobody who's thinking about leaving their village need ever really worry too much about going without anything. That's what they're doing on the southern border. On the north, there are a great many more than 248. Nobody really knows they're proliferating.

Little tiny groups, big groups, there's contracts and subcontracts and sub-sub-contracts that all come from the government. What that does is kind of a conveyor belt. It's a transportation conveyor belt that processes immigrants from border patrol release to buses, planes, and automobiles all along the border from Tijuana to Matamoros. And it transports them into cities, towns across the country, where other NGOs then take over who do more of a resettlement, you know, helping them, find housing or kind of semi-permanent housing or even permanent housing. Welfare and benefits and getting the kids at school and also making sure that all their needs are met. So it's really complex.

It's the NGO infrastructure stretches from Argentina and Peru all the way to Chicago and New York and San Francisco and Dallas and Washington and Boston. everywhere. So again, you'll note there that Benzman mentioned the UN's cash and voucher assistance program. So that provides immigrants prepaid debit cards, cash, bank transfers, and mobile transfers just to help them get to the U.S., often from South America. So for 2024, the U.N. has budgeted $372 million for these groups to pass out cash and payments to an estimated $624,000 in-transit migrants. And I'll tell you what's fascinating about that was that the head of some of these groups

don't always seem to know that they're involved in this work. Though Samaritan's purse is active in South America, last year, Samaritan head, Franklin Graham, denied to Newsmax that his organization is helping migrants get to the U.S. southern border. Here's what he told anchor Greta Van Custrin. We're working in Columbia,

which is a long way away from our border, trying to help these people that have come from all over the world. And you've seen people that have come from places is like a Yemen. We are feeding people down there. We're not helping people across the border. We're not aiding illegal immigration. We don't do that.

But then last week, the Federalist released a report that found that around 700,000 of the donations and federal grants that Samaritan's purse receives went to the UN's interagency coordination platform for refugees and migrants from Venezuela. So that's a bit of a mouthful. But what it means is that direct payments are going to these aliens to use how they want en route to the U.S. So I asked Corcorian if it's possible that Graham might just not know that his organization

was involved with the U.N. in this way, given how very complicated these associations are. And he thought that was entirely likely. I think you're probably right that Graham didn't know about it, and there is naivete about this. And that what that suggests is, you know, maybe a rethinking of how they do charity, in other words, help institutions or help people in ways that don't just involve giving them a cash card so that they can just hop on a bus and head to Panama. Now, the attractions for entering the U.S. illegally have expanded as it's become much easier to claim asylum, even though only about 32 percent of asylum claims are granted.

But it can take years for a claim to be processed, and the Biden administration has expanded certain benefits that used to be reserved only for those who had been granted refugee status before they were admitted to the country. So think like refugees from Afghanistan. So that's also providing an added attraction for new migrants as well. Now, it's understandably controversial, though, to criticize these religious aid groups because, I mean, essentially they're just aiding needy people. Yeah, and it can be difficult to weigh helping vulnerable foreign populations with the needs of citizens. And on the other side of this question,

there are those who have been harmed by illegal immigration, and many of them are opposed to this broad federal funding for NGOs to carry out this work. I spoke to Marine Maloney. An illegal alien killed her son in a hit and run while driving drunk in 2011. And she now works as an advocate for victims of illegal alien crime.

So Aviak is the name of her group, and she told me she doesn't believe that many of the migrants who are streaming across, South America and Mexico toward the U.S. border would make this dangerous journey if they didn't have religious groups offering support. Somebody is feeding them and providing for them through their whole journey year. And you know it's coming from these big NGO organizations, either providing before they

cross the border or after they cross the border. And, you know, that's what really needs to be stuck. Because a lot of that is coming from taxpayer money. And so, you know, that's just another form of incentivizing them because we know these people are coming from very poor countries and having to pay smugglers or cartels to get here. And then you're hearing about these journeys that they have, especially those that are trying to that need to get through the Darien Gap. You know, that's like a week I think it takes to get through there. Somebody is funding it. And so the more organizations that provide funding for people to get here to the southern border cross over and then continue to fund them once they're here,

they're just going to keep coming. I asked Maureen if Aviak, which is a national organization, ever hears from any of the NGOs interested in learning about the negative impact of illegal immigration, and she told me no, she's never heard from any of the NGOs. Now, how much influence do these NGOs have with regards to lobbying power? A huge amount. So one example is World Relief. Their VP of policy, Matthew Sorens, has been very vocal.

in backing the recent failed border bill. Now, it was clear that the GOP base, which includes a lot of evangelicals, did not like that bill at all, as it was basically dead on arrival. But Sorens and World Relief have done a lot of work on the ground encouraging evangelicals to back particular reforms. This was what he said a couple of months ago on the Holy Post podcast, which is a program hosted by Phil Vischer. You might recognize him as the creator of Veggie Tales, so pretty well-known, influential guy

in the evangelical world. One thing we've supported at World Relief is called the Dignity Act. That would dramatically increase asylum adjudication capacity. It would also create campuses at the border where people could be held in humane settings to have that initial processing done instead of being held between the border fences, which is what's happening here in San Diego right now in some cases. That bill has Republican and Democratic co-sponsors, but not nearly enough to pass into law. And it does a lot of other really positive things from our perspective,

with immigrants who've been to the country for 20 years, who would have been able to pay a fine and earn permanent legal status, dreamers to be able to get citizenship. And Benzman tells me that opinions like Sorin's are absolutely having an impact because many of the political appointees in DHS and the domestic policy council in the White House

who are handling immigration come from the ranks of these NGOs. One unusual development about the Biden administration and its immigration policy is that it recruited its political appointees from the ranks, not of think tanks, which is usually where, you know, administrations get their political appointees,

think tanks and former, you know, government officials and political donors, but they recruited from the ranks of these NGOs. And those NGOs engineered the policies that created this greatest mass migration crisis in U.S. history. And their former employees, or employers, rather, are now reaping an incredible bounty. And I think people don't really understand that that's who's kind of running the policy

here, the immigration portfolio. Well, notwithstanding the debate over funding, there are a lot of these volunteers who would say this work is essential for their faith. I know, for example, World Relief referenced Jesus' call to welcome the stranger. Yeah, that's very true. And Sorin's did explore that theme during a talk he gave to a large church in 2020. And it's very representative of the stance that world relief takes. Jesus is a refugee. They didn't have a legal definition for that as far as we know at the time Jesus was alive, but we do now, both in the U.S. and internationally. A refugee is someone who has fled their country of origin because of a well-founded fear of persecution on account of their race, religion, political opinion, national origin, or social group.

or I put on the screen there, maybe Jesus was an asylum seeker. The difference, again, would not have applied at the time Jesus actually lived, but in U.S. law, we have these distinctions. An asylum seeker is someone who claims to be a refugee. That is to say they say they have fled their country because of a credible fear of persecution. But until a government has verified that that is the case, and in the U.S. case, you have to get to the U.S. before you can request asylum.

You're just considered an asylum seeker. Of course, we don't know how the country of Egypt, or the people of Egypt responded to Jesus, Mary, and Joseph when they arrived, we could speculate. There was probably some people who welcomed them. There's probably other people who didn't want them there or weren't sure they should be there. It's possible that some people thought they were spies sent by Herod instead of people fleeing from him. Or maybe Joseph heard something like, you know, we've got enough carpenters in this economy without you stealing a job. That's just speculation. But what's not speculation is that for the roughly 26 million people in our world today who are refugees,

who've been forced to flee their country because of persecution. They have someone in Jesus who can very personally identify with that experience. So Sorinz argues that that should prompt Christians to support things like a higher cap on refugees and maintaining robust avenues for immigrants to seek asylum. But Corcorian told me that he's a Christian too. In fact, he's an ordained deacon, and he doesn't think Sorin's and world relief are taking the whole council of Scripture into consideration. In fact, he believes they are conflating Christ's command.

about how Christians are to respond to the needy right in front of them with national policy. But more than that, he really believes that this aid would be better devoted to helping aliens in their home countries. Our refugee resettlement program, in my opinion, is immoral because it costs dramatically more money. We did the estimate, and we estimated it's 12 times more expensive to resettle a refugee in the United States. we're using Middle Eastern numbers here, then it does to take care of them

in the country where they took refuge, like Syrians and Turkey, say, or something like that, 12 times more expensive. And, you know, it could be eight times, and for some Europeans, Norway did the estimate, it was like 27 times more expensive to resettle somebody.

Well, what kind of justification is there to take one person who basically wins the lottery and resettle them in the state, St. Louis than to help 12 people in Turkey. Now, it's obviously better. Even St. Louis is probably better than being in Turkey, but the fact is that refugee resettlement shouldn't be about picking one lucky family to make yourself feel better when you greet them at the airport rather than helping 12 times as many people where they are. Ultimately, most refugee resettlement is self-indulgent.

So obviously a lot of competing impacts and a lot of competing analysis of religious texts that are complicating and already very complex subject. Well, it's just a great case study and how difficult it can be to map scripture onto politics. Megan, thanks for reporting. Anytime. That was Daily Wire Culture reporter, Megan Basham. And this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.