The new Nonprofit Migrant Industrial Complex takes advantage of the US border crisis

If I hopped into the Time Tunnel to go back 15 years or more, I’d find that Seliger + Associates was writing a fair number of proposals for nonprofits providing services to refugees and immigrants—the term migrants was not yet in vogue and, depending on the client, we’d still sometimes use “illegal alien” rather than the softer “undocumented person” now de rigueur in polite society (to quote an old English writer of some note from Romeo & Juliet, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”). Still, not only have we not written any grants for this target population* in at least 10 years, we don’t even get any calls for this project concept. Seems odd, since Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) says there were at least 3,200,000 migrant encounters nationwide in 2023, not counting the millions of gotta-ways, compared to just 314,000 in 2013.

With a 10-fold increase in only a decade, one would think S + A would be doing lots of proposals for migrant services, but this is not the case. We know why this conundrum exists, but what passes for the US media these days is incurious because the answer doesn’t match the preferred narrative of the moment. Then along comes a real investigative reporter, Madeleine Rowley, writing in Substack,  Nonprofits Are Making Billions off the Border Crisis: Federal funding has turned the business of resettling migrant children into a goldmine for a handful of NGOs—and their top executives. So, now the rest of you know.

Rowley writes:

Although the federally funded Unaccompanied Children Program is responsible for resettling unaccompanied migrant minors who enter the U.S., it delegates much of the task to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that run shelters in the border states of Texas, Arizona, and California. . . The Free Press examined three of the most prominent NGOs that have benefited: Global Refuge, Southwest Key Programs, and Endeavors, Inc. These organizations have seen their combined revenue grow from $597 million in 2019 to an astonishing $2 billion by 2022, the last year for which federal disclosure documents are available. And the CEOs of all three nonprofits reap more than $500,000 each in annual compensation, with one of them—the chief executive of Southwest Key—making more than $1 million. While some NGOs have long had operations at the border, “what is new under Biden is the amount of taxpayer money being awarded, the lack of accountability for performance, and the lack of interest in solving the problem,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that researches the effect of government immigration policies and describes its bias as “low-immigration, pro-immigrant.”

Rowley focuses on one aspect of migrant funding, the Unaccompanied Children Program, but the same crazy funding for various other migrant services exists across the migrant grant spectrum; this has been the case at various funding levels since the Obama administration. Going back into the Time Tunnel to, say, 2010, most funding for migrant services originated in DHHS Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). While ORR still has some small competitive, discretionary grant programs, the big grant money, and the grants that Rowley writes about, does not seem to originate in ORR discretionary grant programs—I’ve never seen any of these RFPs at grants.gov. I’m pretty sure these are essentially no-bid contracts, and if RFPs are issued they must be being published in an alternate fed portal than grants.gov and be wired for particular nonprofits.

A truism of the US grant making process, which I learned decades ago, is that most grant programs are simply the federal government offloading something congress and/or the administration wants done but doesn’t want the government to do directly. In other words, the feds are “hiring” nonprofits via discretionary grant programs. While nonprofits traditionally were funded by donations and memberships, not government grants, this began to change in the 1930s during the New Deal and took off in 1965 with the blizzard of President Johnson’s War on Poverty programs. It didn’t take very long for nimble nonprofits to realize that money could be made by tailoring the agency’s programming to incorporate whatever the government wants to fund. This is in line with the following analogy we often use when a nonprofit CEO calls about grant seeking in general. We’ve all seen the pictures of bears in Alaska fishing for salmon. A bear that only bites coho salmon is going to be a lot skinnier when hybernation time comes than a bear that bites pink, king, coho, etc., salmon. The same is true for nonprofits seeking grants: it pays to bite any more or less appropriate grant-salmon than to wait for the perfect grant-salmon to swim by.

At the same time that nonprofits discovered the emerging grant gravy train, politicians and bureaucrats realized that grants could be used as a form of patronage like the old days of Tammany Hall in NYC and Boss Pendergast in Kansas City. Instead of rigged construction contracts with “no show” jobs, as depicted in The Sopranos, the same result could be achieved via grants, particularly at the city/county level. Even better, cloaking the potential corruption with the saintly aura of nonprofit charities as the “cutout” provides a lot of political cover. Clearly, a match made in heaven, or as The Band put it in Up On Cripple Creek: “A drunkard’s dream if I ever did see one.”

The combo of the COVID-19 epidemic, border/migrant crisis, and climate change Green New Deal has created an unprecedented tsunami of federal funding starting in 2020. Since these were pitched as EXISTENTIAL CRISES (all CAPS intentional) with the media fanning the flames of hysteria, congress passed huge multi-trillion-dollar funding bills and the bureaucrats started shoveling grants out the door with little, if any, oversight. Hence, the boondoggle that Rowley writes about. But the corruption and rot is likely much deeper than the three bloated nonprofits she cites.

*For years, the phrase “target population” was standard in RFPs and grant writing. Somehow, the word “target” has become pejorative, and we now often see this phrase in RFPs instead: “population of focus.”