Some of us were appalled by the message given at the National Cathedral Prayer Service. It was not Biblical and was not appropriate. (article here) Well, as usual, it turns out that there was more to the story than meets the eye.
On Friday, The New York Post reported the following:
Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde’s sermon to President Trump during an inaugural prayer service, coupled with her church’s advocacy for humanitarian immigration programs, reveals a striking hypocrisy — one that could be seen as self-serving and even a conflict of interest.
That’s because the federal contracting arm of the church, Episcopal Migration Ministry (EMM), is paid to bring in people on resettlement programs that Trump has temporarily paused and targeted for re-evaluation.
EMM budget figures for 2024 are not available yet, but in 2023 it earned $53 million from various taxpayer-funded government programs to resettle 3,600 individuals.
…Unlike everyday immigrants, these new arrivals receive government assistance and, most importantly, are immediately eligible for all forms of welfare, such as Medicaid and cash assistance, on the same basis as a US citizen.
Further, they can immediately sponsor friends and relatives under a recent Biden expansion of the refugee resettlement program.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement was projecting 656,500 new arrivals in 2025, who would fall under its care. Clearly this is a program wildly out of control.
In an wild understatement, a 2012 Government Accountability Office report quotes an official noting that “funding is based on the number of refugees they serve, so affiliates have an incentive to maintain or increase the number of refugees they resettle each year rather than allowing the number to decrease.”
The article concludes:
Of course, it is not fair to question the Episcopalians alone on this.
Their resettlement contractor is the second smallest of the 10 contractors in the industry. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) dwarfs EMM.
Forbes reported that USCCB affiliate Catholic Charities USA, which has its hand in all aspects of immigration and seems to get money from every government agency except NASA, received $1.4 billion in taxpayer dollars in 2021. That’s 68 times more than EMM got that year.
It was never intended that the sponsoring organizations, formerly known as “Voluntary Agencies,” would be purely federal contractors, with all the behavior, untoward incentives, money, and influence-peddling that this brings, not to mention questions of church-state relations which are never raised in this context.
Any re-tooling of our humanitarian immigration programs must put the bulk of responsibility back on the “sponsoring” entity and limit new arrivals’ access to welfare.
As for encouraging the church to practice true sacrificial charity, Bishop Budde may have put it best when she said in an interview with Rachel Maddow, “the first and primary role that we have is [to lead] by example.”
I would have no problem with the church sponsoring immigrants if the church took care of them after they got here rather than making the taxpayer pay for the church’s generosity. This is a racket. These facts make the Bishop’s remarks seem even more hypocritical than they seemed to be at the time they were given.