FPI / November 17, 2019

Corporate WATCH

By Joe Schaeffer

Last week we focused on how the former red bastion of Virginia has been flipped to blue thanks in large part to demographic change spurred by massive Third World immigration.

Having lived in Northern Virginia for some 20-odd years in the 1990s through the Oughts, I watched with my own eyes as respectable middle-class neighborhoods in Falls Church, Fairfax and abutting towns were transformed into decrepit crime-plagued eyesores due to the "enrichment" that comes with Third World immigration.

There really was little left to do but find a way to earn well over $100,000 a year and join the "tolerant" white liberals and privileged career federal employees in their upscale Leesburg and McLean zip codes or leave. I never did make it to McLean.

So it is sad to see the process repeating itself all over again in, of all places, the natural beauty of Big Sky Country.

Establishment media titan The New York Times caused a bit of a stir with an Oct. 30 article revealing ongoing efforts to settle Congolese refugees in Missoula, Montana. The article openly explained that such an obviously incongruous location for dark-skinned Africans is no coincidence. "To supporters… the Congolese are filling a void of cultural diversity in a town that is nearly 90 percent white," the Times bluntly reports.

"In the 1980s, Hmong refugees from Laos settled in Missoula. The children of immigrant families are usually the few students of color in city classrooms, while their parents work long hours at businesses eager for the help."

Nice wink and a nod to the wonders of exploited cheap Third World labor at the end there, NYT [See: Fruits of open border policies: Discrimination, exploitation].

In short, our ruling globalists are determined that there be no corner of America left untouched by Third World immigration. A powerful global NGO called the International Rescue Committee helped settle Hmong refugees in Missoula in the 1980s. The IRC was able to successfully re-open its refugee resettlement operations in this city of 74,000 inhabitants in 2016 thanks to the emotional distress felt by a group of Missoula female book club members upon seeing the infamous photo of a drowned Syrian boy on a Turkish beach in 2015.

“Most of us are mothers and when those photos came out, it destroyed us. I mean we all just sat there sobbing… It just hit home," Mary Poole told the leftist Public Radio International website. "All those little tiny shoes on that beach, and that face down child, and I saw my son. I think we all did. I think the world did. It was a huge wakeup call and it started to evolve very quickly from there."

This was really the start of it all. Because a "hormonal" woman (Poole's own description of herself at the time — she was pregnant) and her fellow female book club members became emotionally overwrought over a photo of one dead child half a world away, a tranquil small city in Montana was soon required to open itself to the entire world.

"Syrians aren't the only refugees – you have to be open to anyone," Poole told The Missoulian newspaper in 2015. "Everyone agreed that a person in need is a person in need."

Poole went on to found an organization called Soft Landing Missoula that is dedicated to helping Third World refugees resettle in the city. The group partners with IRC and openly boasts of bringing refugees from Syria, the Congo, Iraq and Eritrea to Missoula. "Once refugees arrive in Missoula through the International Rescue Committee (IRC), we work alongside incredible partners and community members to provide ongoing support to our new neighbors as they settle into our community," Soft Landing says of its work.

"We will show that Missoula is the kind of place where diverse people feel valued and want to put down roots," the group's website declares. "Don't speak 24 languages? Neither do we, so here's a little help," it blithely states before listing all the different languages that are now being spoken in this Big Sky community.

Montanans protested. "This is an invasion. It's a government-sponsored invasion," Brad Trun of Seeley Lake told The Missoulian in 2016. Rallies were held. But Soft Landing was able to button up the support of local elected officials and the refugees came.

Poole was toasted by leading media and political figures. A Starbucks "docuseries" called "Upstanders" directly praised her for overcoming the opposition of her neighbors on the issue.

"We met a woman in Missoula, Montana, Mary Poole, who against all odds, with no training whatsoever and against the mentality in Montana… brings refugees from Syria,” Starbucks then-CEO Howard Schultz repulsively said in 2017 while touting his corporate propaganda film series. "These are people who are ‘upstanders,’ people who are not listening to Washington and doing things that I think speak to the American spirit."

If you want to know how Virginia was lost, this is how it begins. Beyond all the virtue signaling about diversity and openness there of course lie very genuine concerns about importing foreigners who do not share the traditional American values that buttress our Constitutional freedoms. This is especially prevalent with Muslims from the Middle East and Africa. Then there are the shocking health fears. The Ebola plague is currently raging in the Congo. Also underreported are the high financial costs to struggling U.S. taxpayers that come with resettling refugees.

A 2018 report by the Federation for American Immigration Reform states that "the annual cost to U.S. taxpayers [of refugee resettlement programs] is $1.8 billion and over five years, that financial burden skyrockets to $8.8 billion." FAIR notes that its numbers do not include ancillary costs associated with the importation of the Third World to America, such as additional national security and law enforcement measures "and federal homeland security assistance to state and local agencies," which "is hard to quantify."

Once again, a plethora of nationally known corporations is financially supporting this corrosive effort to destroy the unique local charm of Missoula and turn it into just another strip-mall-pocked outpost of a homogenous globalized world. The International Rescue Committee, which brings these refugees to the folks at Soft Landing, is backed by powerful activist charitable foundations such as Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Tides Foundation, and, of course, billionaire progressive George Soros's notorious Open Society Foundations.

According to IRC's 2018 annual report, its corporate supporters in the $1 million-plus category include the Citi Foundation, the IKEA Foundation, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and TripAdvisor.

Among six-figure corporate donors are American Express, the Chipotle Cultivate Foundation, LinkedIn, Marriott International, the Mastercard Foundation, Newman's Own Foundation, PayPal and the Starbucks Foundation.

"In 2018, refugees were too often demonized and denied their rights," the introduction to the annual report reads. "While poised to resettle 19 percent of refugee arrivals to the U.S. in 2019, making the IRC the country's largest refugee resettlement agency, we deplore the more than 70 percent reduction of refugees allowed into the U.S." under the Trump administration, the group mourns.

Insanely, IRC points to violence-racked Germany as one of its success stories.

"Even as U.S. refugee admissions fall, IRC’s experience is informing refugee resettlement and integration work in countries like Germany and Uruguay," the group declares.

Germany was infamously hit with a widely reported sexual assault epidemic during the height of Chancellor Angela Merkel's refugee invasion of that Central European nation.

"Germany's migrant rape crisis has now spread to cities and towns in all 16 of Germany's federal states. Germany is effectively under siege; public spaces are becoming increasingly perilous," the Gatestone Institute vividly detailed in a 2016 report.

This is the brave new world globalist organizations have in mind for formerly stable American neighborhoods from Manassas, Virginia to Missoula, Montana. If their work continues, Democrat majorities will hardly be the only distinguishing feature of these sullen heterogeneous, multilingual locales.

Joe Schaeffer is the former Managing Editor of The Washington Times National Weekly Edition. His columns appear at WorldTribune.com, LibertyNation.com and FreePressInternational.org.

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