A Somali refugee family resettles in Sioux Falls, S.D. (Flickr, UNHCR)

Stan Delp, a 67-year-old retired teacher living in Lansdale, Penn., was sitting in church in June, 2008, when he noticed four unfamiliar black-haired men by him. He found they were new to the United States, having spent 11 years in refugee camp in Thailand. Delp’s church is not big — about 200 people regularly attend — but nevertheless it has helped 47 such refugees assimilate to life in the United States over the past two years. When Delp met the men, he decided to do his part. He helped them buy clothes at Kohl’s and taught them how to use a refrigerator. He searched for jobs for them, and ended up waking at 5 a.m. to drive one man to work for several months, then allowed him to move into his home. Now that he lives in a retirement home, the refugees, now friends, visit a few nights a week.

“It’s like being a dad to them, really,” Delp says. “It takes 14 years to get assimilated into American culture. That’s a long time.”

[Immigration1] In the United States, the refugee resettlement system has always worked largely thanks to the generosity of people like Delp, as a public-private partnership with volunteer services and government backing. But the recession is threatening the stability of the program and the availability of resources to refugees. The government has stepped up its contributions to help new refugee migrants adjust to American life, but provides just eight months of resources. With jobs scarce, the churches and community centers that help after then are stretched to the point of breaking.

The government is aware of the problem, but thus far has taken only small steps to ameliorate it. The State Department doubled the amount of money it gives private resettlement agencies to help refugees when they first come to the United States, from $900 to $1,800. That amount helps the groups provide services for refugees and fund-raise for additional aid money for up to 90 days after the refugee enters the country. But the State Department knows $1,800 is not enough to support a refugee for three months, particularly with the difficulty of finding work, a State Department official told TWI.

“Part of the philosophy of our program is for people to reach self-reliance as quickly as possible,” says the official. “It used to be that very often refugees would have found work by the time our period of responsibility is up, and that’s much less true now.”

The Obama administration authorized in September 2009 the admission of up to 80,000 refugees in the 2010 fiscal year, up from 75,000 admitted in the 2009 fiscal year. In the authorization, the administration acknowledged that the “recent economic downturn has presented new challenges for this and other humanitarian programs.” To address these problems, the National Security Council was tasked with determining what needs to be done to improve refugee resettlement in the U.S.

“The basic set-up of the program hasn’t been altered in many years,” National Security Council spokesman Ben Chang told the Los Angeles Times in June. “It was time to take a fresh look.”

A few policy improvements have been recommended so far. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) introduced legislation in March that would allow refugees to apply for green cards immediately upon entering the U.S. and adjust refugee resettlement grants annually based on inflation and the cost of living.

Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, commissioned a report on refugee resettlement and found the process often places an unfair burdens local communities. Called “Abandoned Upon Arrival,” Lugar argues in the opening of the July 21 report that the government should modify its funding and admittance numbers — either increasing funding of refugee resettlement programs or decreasing the number of refugees it admits — so high costs are not passed on to local communities.

“We must acknowledge the costs associated with this activity,” Lugar wrote in a July 20 letter formally requesting a Government Accountability Office investigation on the refugee resettlement process.

The idea of cutting down on refugee admissions is not appetizing, particularly at a time when the need is so high. Of 42 million people forced by conflict or persecution to move from their homes, 16 million need asylum or refugee status, according to a 2009 report from the United Nations Refugee Agency.

Forcing refugees to wait in camps, which often cannot provide the same health and education services they could find in the U.S., can have a detrimental affect on them, says Susan Krehbiel, a vice president at the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.

“It does become kind of a Catch-22,” Krehbiel says. “Some of the refugees have been in camps for 15 to 20 years. There are some human costs to delaying peoples’ resettlement.”

Still, Krehbiel says the current system struggles to serve the refugees it does admit, and relies too heavily on volunteer donations of time and money. The Office of Refugee Resettlement, established in 1980 as part of the Department of Health and Human Services, provides funding for up to eight months of cash and medical assistance, and refugee families may be eligible for additional money through Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, and Medicaid.

The government also provides up to five years of employment services, supplemented by private programs. But with the sluggish economy, employment programs through the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service have seem a marked difference in the speed of job searches among refugees, Krehbiel says. While in previous years 80 percent of refugees were employed within four months, the recession dropped that number to about 60 percent. It usually takes about a year to get 80 percent of refugees in the program hired, she says.

Janet Panning, a program director at two Pennsylvania Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service programs, says she has seen a significant decrease in employment opportunities for refugees. Recent anti-immigrant fervor hasn’t helped the situation, as some employers are hesitant to employ refugees because they think they could be illegal immigrants.

“People are very afraid of hiring people they think might be illegal or not have proper work documentation,” Panning says. “Sometimes employers that aren’t up on the law might be reluctant to hire a refugee because they might not have a green card.”

If they are not able to find employment, single people are in an especially bad situation after government cash assistance ends. Some refugees have struggled to support themselves and pay rent. Panning says she knows of several refugees who have become homeless over the years, but typically secondary issues beyond unemployment contribute to the problem.

Panning says she worked with one refugee who nearly became homeless after her family dispersed around the country. The woman had a war-related disability that was difficult to show to employers and kept her from working steadily, and eventually was placed in subsidized housing.

“She never went on the street, but it was through the blood, sweat and tears of volunteers that kept her in housing,” Panning says

The government has attempted to stave off homelessness among refugees. The State Department provided $5 million in emergency housing funding last year. For next year, the Department of Health and Human Services requested an additional $25 million from Congress for case management and emergency housing.

But local communities often take on that task as well. Delp charges a refugee $200 per month — “not even enough to cover utilities,” he laughs — to stay in his house while he stays in a local retirement home. He also helps a seven-person family pay the rent on a five-bedroom house nearby. (They were living in a two-bedroom apartment until he helped them move out a few weeks ago, Delp says.)

He says he and the other members of his church see helping the refugees as something they must do. “Those of us who have been given resources, it’s up to us to reach out to these people,” Delp says. “I can afford to reach out, so I want to help as much as I can.”

According to several emails sent from Trimble to several BBG staffers, the NSC first didn’t want the VOA to join the statement if it mentioned “jamming.” Later in the email chain, the NSC modified its position to object to the use of the term “intensified jamming.”

“NSC is ok with our confirming that jamming continues, they ask that we not say for now that it has intensified,” one Feb. 11 email from Trimble to several BBG staffers read.

Dan Austin, the president of VOA, acknowledged that changes had been made to the statement, but declined to discuss the NSC’s role. He said that the U.S. government should not be interfering with the BBG’s editorial content, but acknowledged that on the communications and policy side, the lines were less clear.

Also less clear is why the NSC objected to “jamming” but not “intensified jamming.” Representatives didn’t respond to Rogin’s request for comment.

That proposal may be controversial in some circles — particularly in areas the development community, where there’s concern that USOCO might represent a more cumbersome bureaucratic structure. But Bowen’s idea is attracting some powerful allies, like the widely admired former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker. “I do support the concept,” Crocker, the incoming dean of the George Bush School of Government at Texas A&M University, emailed me. “The current situation requires a perpetual reinventing of wheels and a huge amount of effort by those trying to manage contingencies.”

Frontline’s reporter Meir Javedanfar thinks the violence heralds an “Iranian intifada.”

Judging from the events of Ashura, however, they now seem to have the potential to turn into a full scale-civil disobedience campaign, not unlike the first intifada that the Palestinians initiated against Israel in 1987. This will mean continuous periods of strikes and civil disobedience, as well as more confrontations between members of the public and security forces.

The main factor contributing to the new status quo is the unrelenting policies of the Supreme Leader, which have pitted his version of the Islamic Republic against longstanding Islamic institutions.

This is a battle that he will find extremely difficult to win. In fact, if developments continue in their current form, they can, at a minimum, result in significant changes to the structure of his regime, or more drastically, lead to its total demise.

A statement released by Mike Hammer, a spokesman for the National Security Council, on the violence, reads:

We strongly condemn the violent and unjust suppression of civilians in Iran seeking to exercise their universal rights. Hope and history are on the side of those who peacefully seek their universal rights, and so is the United States. Governing through fear and violence is never just, and as President Obama said in Oslo – it is telling when governments fear the aspirations of their own people more than the power of any other nation.

My original source for the post stands by the account provided. The individual, a National Security Council staffer who spoke on condition of anonymity, has provided truthful and verified information on past stories, and so I trusted the source for this one. Elements of the account have been subsequently borne out: yesterday afternoon, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that President Obama will ask his Afghanistan-Pakistan advisers to provide him with an exit strategy for the eight-year war, which is congruent with but not identical to my source’s information that Obama has asked the team to derive timetables for troop withdrawal.

But there are greater problems with the post. For one, the source was not actually present for the video teleconference that is the post’s central scene, and passed information to me second-hand. Furthermore, not only has the White House’s Tommy Vietor denied, on the record, that Ambassador Karl Eikenberry participated in a video teleconference yesterday morning, but the other two individuals I named as being present for the meeting — the inspector generals for Iraq and Afghanistan — have, through representatives, denied being present. I cannot subsequently stand by this account.

From the start, the post should have a) more clearly indicated that my source wasn’t present at the meeting; b) more clearly indicated that the account provided was single-sourced; and c) verified the information provided before publication. My enthusiasm for a hot story outpaced my professional judgment. For that I take full responsibility, retract the story and issue a full apology for its publication.

The interesting thing here is that there are no real policy disagreements among the Obama foreign policy players. By all accounts, they’ve been getting along just fine. But the Jones and Clinton moves may indicate some pre-emptive skittishness, a sense of–unjustified, I believe–insecurity on the part of the two principals.

And then the rest of Joe’s post doesn’t have a thing to do with policy, either. It’s not that personality clashes are unimportant. But after eight years of a foreign policy team that really did cleave along broad and deep and well-rehearsed arguments over what a wise and effective foreign policy ought to include, it’s tempting to superimpose that journalistic template over to the current administration.

What I do know is that Doug Ollivant, the National Security Council’s Iraq director, left the White House as part of a long-scheduled departure last week, and there has been no announcement of who’s going to replace him. According to both Al Kamen and Laura Rozen, Ross is nibbling off a bit of the Iraq desk for himself. Rozen reports that there’s some agita about this.

The Cable has learned that deputy national security advisor Thomas Donilon, among others, is positioning Ross to assume an uber-senior NSC position overseeing Iran, Iraq, and the Middle East. The Iraq portfolio formerly assigned to holdover war czar Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute will be shifted to Ross, leaving Lute to focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan. Puneet Talwar, the NSC’s senior director for the Persian Gulf, Iraq, and Iran, will report to Ross, as will Daniel Shapiro, the NSC’s senior director for the Middle East and North Africa.

Under the new NSC structure, there will be no dedicated senior director for Iraq and there will be only two or three directors for Iraq, reporting to Talwar.

Interesting. One grumble that’s starting to bubble up in some foreign-policy quarters is that the crush of immediate crises is leading the administration to neglect Iraq. No idea if the Ross move would reverse this or what.

“The whole concept of what constitutes the membership of the national security community — which, historically has been, let’s face it, the Defense Department, the NSC itself and a little bit of the State Department, to the exclusion perhaps of the Energy Department, Commerce Department and Treasury, all the law enforcement agencies, the Drug Enforcement Administration, all of those things — especially in the moment we’re currently in, has got to embrace a broader membership,” he said.

Those who talk about how the interagency coordination process broke down in Iraq or Afghanistan can take heart by this. One of the things that advocates of a more balanced civilian-military burden-sharing posture point to is a lack of NSC-level attention to the problem. It took, for instance, nearly six years of war in Afghanistan and four in Iraq before former President George W. Bush appointed a so-called ‘war czar’ to coordinate the implementation of cross-agency programs. (Obama asked that czar, Gen. Doug Lute, to stay on for awhile.)

Expanding the range of consideration for who contributes to national security is a key component of this. In Mosul in 2007, I saw overworked U.S. Agency for International Development contractors trying with very little help to sort out a provincial Iraqi government’s budgeting and legal systems. Don’t even ask about the absent agriculture experts. Considering that success in counterinsurgency requires addressing the concerns of a population for justice and prosperity — not just security — these are critical shortages. They won’t be solved just by having the agriculture secretary sit in on national security meetings: it’s not as if the department has a cadre of agronimists ready to deploy and embed with military units. But without that first step, the United States is never going to get beyond platitudes about how global development contributes to global security.

“This afternoon, I met with our Ambassador to Iraq, the commander in Iraq, and the overall theater commander in the region in order to get a full update on the situation in Iraq. Key members of my cabinet and senior national security officials also participated in this meeting.

“The meeting was productive and I very much appreciated receiving assessments from these experienced and dedicated individuals. During the discussion, I asked the military leadership to engage in additional planning necessary to execute a responsible military drawdown from Iraq.

“In the coming days and weeks, I will also visit the Department of Defense to consult with the Joint Chiefs on these issues, and we will undertake a full review of the situation in Afghanistan in order to develop a comprehensive policy for the entire region.”