Reading here and there about what can only be viewed as corruption of various charitable agencies by an apparent flood of government dollars, I am certain now that I was inadvertently present at the very start of that corruption – a warping of charitable concern towards refugees, as well as non-refugee migrants, the homeless, the addicted and the otherwise socially maladjusted. I was a college student in my junior year at a no-name public university, at the time of the fall of the South Vietnamese in 1975. My adolescent years had been haunted by the ongoing war in Vietnam, a war painted in the most horrific colors by the then-extent national media. I grew up in a place, a time and in a class of Americans where men were much more likely to be drafted and sentenced to serve for a year in what was painted by the national establishment media as a pointless, endless, thankless war.
We were relieved when it was all ended in 1972 – you have no idea of how the horror lifted, or maybe you do, if you are of an age to remember. And then horrified by the pictures of the scramble to get out Americans, and those Vietnamese citizens unfortunate to be American-adjacent and thus fearful of North Vietnam reprisals, barely three years later. It seemed as if all the horrors were crashing in on us and the South Vietnamese again. The mobs of frantic Vietnamese at the gates of the US embassy, helicopters loading up and taking off from the pad on the embassy roof, small boats laden to the gunwales with frantic Vietnamese families setting out from the shore in hopes of being rescued by ocean-going ships waiting offshore … The North Vietnamese had won, after all – and was there anything that we could do for people who had been our allies?
It seemed that there was something that we could do; the pastor of the church we attended at the time sent me as a representative of our congregation to a meeting to discuss what steps our denomination could take to sponsor refugee families through the auspices of Lutheran Social Services. Within weeks, I was neck deep in a local ad-hoc organization since we decided that our congregation did not have enough resources to sponsor refugees. By sponsorship, I mean that everything to assist a family or two of Vietnamese refugees over their first months or years in the US would come out of our resources: rent, fitting out a residence with the bare necessities, food assistance, transportation, finding employment, schooling, language lessons if necessary, and help coping with various bureaucracies.
So our church clubbed together with several other congregations and some local chapters of fraternal organizations – the Lions club was one. We took stock of what we could offer and informed Lutheran Social Services that we thought we could sponsor a large extended family of up to 25 people. (It was our understanding that was the greatest need – support for large families.) We were informed several weeks later that we would be sponsoring three small families and three single young men – teenaged boys, really. We quickly found a small house and two apartments to rent and decided that perhaps the boys would best be situated with volunteer families, since the rent for three residences for two or three months was all that we could afford. It all worked out well, in the end – one of the families and the single young man who came to live with us stayed in touch for decades afterwards. They all found jobs, bought homes, built lives as Americans. A mostly happy ending, as these things go.
I must reiterate that all this support, monetary and otherwise, for the refugees that we and other local churches sponsored was the direct responsibility of our various local community groups. There were no grants of money passed on to us by Lutheran Social Services, although a Congressional act passed in May, 1975 allocated funds to each of the national refugee assistance organizations based on how many individual refugees signed up to be assisted by them. Those funds amounted to $250 per person, adult and child. That specific sum sticks in my head for a particular reason: at least one of the assistance organizations in 1975 just passed those funds on to individual refugees overseen by their agency as a gift: pin money to help them start new lives. Word got around concerning this generosity, and the father of one of our refugee charges asked us (demanded, really) – why didn’t his family receive $1,000, for himself, wife and two children? We passed the enquiry to Lutheran Social Services and received their answer: their decision was to use the funds granted by Congress to help cover unforeseen and out-of-cycle needs like extensive and expensive medical care needed by some refugees. It was their way of doing things. The complaining refugee father continued demanding what he believed to be his rightful due and eventually changed agencies to get it. We were honestly glad to be rid of him, and rather sorry for his wife, who was sweet and shy and possibly rather embarrassed by her husband’s cash grab.
When I read about how NGOs like Lutheran Social Services and Catholic Charities have since made bank out of getting government funds to resettle refugees and cart migrants all around the country in large groups, I am certain that 1975 was when the corruption of organized charity began. Refugee resettlement became a matter of getting a generous payout from the government, rather than depending on the efforts of small self-organized groups in local communities to help refugee clients settle into the US. Resettlement became a means of fattening on some of that big-government cash; a vital part of the refugee/migrant funding complex. Discuss as you wish.
Federalizing support for refugees sounds like a good idea, but it can’t help corrupting the effort by drawing the support source up to the national (= impersonal) level instead of the local personal one.
Politicians love federalizing because it creates new clients for them to service with public money and thereby more power and importance.
Local, self funded, groups will have limitations on how many they can serve and to what degree; once the bounty of the taxpayers can be accessed it removes those limitations because “money” is interpreted as being the same as “compassion and prudence” because many believe “compassion” is best displayed, and confirmed, when provided in large quantities.
My small hometown in Iowa (of all places) did much the same thing for one or two Laotian families. They stayed for a few years at most but then moved.
I also remember a lot of the ‘woke’ stuff starting very innocently back in the late 1980s/early 1990s. I was on the Christmas Party planning committee at work around that time when we made it more “inclusive” by changing it from a “Christmas Party” to a “Holiday Gathering”. If only I’d been more aware of what was happening…
The tell is the “executive compensation”, when a “charity” requires a list of people all taking home six figures or more to operate, it’s money laundering, not charity.
That was me, MCS.
My mother was head nurse at Bethesda Hospital in St. Paul in the mid ’70s when the Hmong were shipped in by the thousands. As a young boy she had to take me to work and I saw the stresses applied to the organization; I didn’t really understand the big picture, but I witnessed all the staff becoming very stressed.
Fifty years later those groups have become invaluable Americans, however, what has happened since Obama gave Catholic Charities billions starting in 2014 has been an unmitigated disaster for the country. All in the name of ‘The Great Replacement’.
A large part of the problem is that the concept of “refugees” has changed. Or, at least, the breadth of ones we feel the need to support has changed.
The Haitians which were such an issue during the election, for example, were not technically “illegals.” They were refugees and allowed in under a program (“TRP”) created by Congress to do that. Now, arguably, they shouldn’t have been let in under that program, but that’s part of the increase in breadth of “refugees for whom we must be responsible.”
The Hmong, Vietnamese, and Laotians made sense, because we had – to some degree – “caused” their plight. We didn’t cause the Haitians’ issues. But, because we had nationalized and weaponized “compassion,” and then cranked it to 11, we are now ostensibly responsible for helping everyone with so much as a hangnail.
It’s the Path of Progressivism. Take a Christian virtue*, remove the governor (whatever might limit or balance the application of said virtue), then make it absolute, mandatory, and crank it to 11.
(* But not those virtues that might cramp their style. All the ones against hedonism or in support of the Order of Nature must be abolished.)
“There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government. And that’s close to 40% of our national income. [In a Fox News interview in May 2004]”
? Milton Friedman
GWB- great comment and spot on about the legality of Haitians and how they differ from past refugees, say from Indochina.
There is no classification for economic refugees. If you want to come here for a better life you need to go through the same paperwork hellhole as everyone else. The other is that refugees who seek political asylum in the US cannot make a valid claim if they have moved through various countries to reach the US and not made similar requests. That’s the basis for “Remain in Mexico” A few years ago when there was that large encampment of Haitians under the bridge were found to have documentation from other countries.
@Mike, absolutely right. And, for the Biden administration (and 0bama, too) the refugee stuff was primarily a legal fig leaf to enact their globalism invasion. It was certainly an abuse of the system.
https://www.breitbart.com/latin-america/2025/02/19/honduras-renews-extradition-treaty-with-the-u-s-it-dumped-during-biden-era/
I was much like Sgt. Mom in my desire to see the Vietnamese refugees accepted and re-settled in the U.S. She certainly did more to make it happen than I did.
When I was in Vietnam, I tried to learn to speak more than just a little bit of Vietnamese. Once as I was passing an obvious refugee, I said “Good afternoon” in Vietnamese. The shock and pleasure written on his face at the greeting made my mental commitment to resettlement even greater than it already was.
A month or so after that encounter, I moved to Germany for two years. By the time that I returned to the U.S. the fervor amongst most organizations had peaked and returned to a more modest level. That allowed me to mostly forget about the entire problem.