Month: February 2008

More on Erie, PA and the International Institute

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is sort of an update, but really should have been the preview to the post I wrote last week about the firing (dismissal, resignation or whatever) of the International Institute of Erie director.    Last week I posted on a news report from Erie that the director had been fired for misusing funds and escorted from the non-profit’s offices by Peter Limon of the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI).  The International Institute is USCRI’s subcontractor.

However, this article from a week earlier says that the director, Mr. O’Brien, had already resigned and the article reveals that the Institute had been in financial trouble for some time.

He stepped in at a difficult time. The institute’s last executive director, Michael Murnock, had resigned in March, saying at the time he did so to save the institute his $55,000 annual salary. The International Institute then was in financial trouble; in 2006, it had a budget of $1.4 million, according to federal tax forms.

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The U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, a Washington, D.C.-based aid agency, took over management of the institute in February. However, a formal agreement to merge the two organizations has been delayed. The merger originally was expected to be in September.

Although they have been short on funds that isn’t stopping them from bringing hundreds more refugees to Erie.   They will keep bringing refugees as long as the city and its citizens are “welcoming” and don’t say a word.  But, it’s this business of bringing in hundreds of refugees on a shoestring budget that gets these organizations in trouble as its sister organization in Connecticut has recently demonstrated.

The number of refugees settling in Erie is up. The institute accepted 200 refugees in 2007, including families from Myanmar, Iraq and sub-Saharan Africa. In October, O’Brien said that number would rise to 300 in 2008.

Then it strikes me as extremely strange that the guy, Director O’Brien,  who was helping to find more taxpayer money for these non-profits and who has helped the Institute work together with other Erie non-profits despite being competitors for tax dollars in refugee procurement, is getting the boot by being unceremoniously led from the office by an USCRI bigwig from Washington.

His departure shocked the directors of other local refugee programs. O’Brien had met regularly with them to draft a state grant application that would expand refugee services in Erie County. The measure would add family counseling and a shuttle between the institute and the Hispanic American Council.

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The groups once had a contentious relationship. O’Brien improved it, said Joel Tuzynski, the executive director of the Hispanic American Council.

The bigwig, Peter Limon (any relation to Lavinia Limon the CEO?), is not listed as an employee of USCRI either on its website or its Form 990.  So, what’s up with that?   If any reader knowledgeable about the situation would fill me in on what is going on in Erie, e-mail me at Ann@vigilantfreedom.com, I would really appreciate it.   If you want to tell another side of this story, please speak up.

Expert responds to Nashville news about more refugees

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We told you in two posts last week (here and here) that Nashville, TN would soon have more refugees in a city already experiencing severe problems with the ‘joys’ of multicultural immigration.

National expert on Refugee Resettlement, Don Barnett,  himself a resident of Tennessee, weighed in yesterday in the Tennessean on this latest inititative in an opinion piece entitled, “Refugee resettlement making someone rich.”  

After citing facts about refugee resettlement and the amount of welfare useage among refugees, he says what we have said here too, that non-profit church groups collecting taxpayer funds are driving refugee resettlement.

This program would end tomorrow if the refugee resettlement agencies such as Catholic Charities were required to use their own resources to keep it going. At one time refugee resettlement was the work of organizations practicing true sacrificial charity. Unfortunately, the resettlement agencies have morphed into profit-driven federal contractors.

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Naturally, they and their parent organizations have a huge incentive to advocate for resettlement to the U.S. as a solution to the world’s refugee problem.

Mr. Barnett has been researching and writing on this topic for nearly two decades.

Latest on Lionheart

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

If you have been following the case of the British blogger, Lionheart, who got in trouble for posting information on his blog about drug dealing immigrants in his home town of Luton, UK, you can get the latest update on his request for asylum in the US at Us or Them blog here.  Listen in on the phone conversation between Lionheart and the police.

We think this is a critical free speech case that should be followed closely by all who value the most important pillar of western society.   Creeping Sharia law in the UK promoted by the large Muslim immigrant population and what appears a wholesale cave-in by the native Britons is forcing people like Lionheart to seek refuge in America.

See our earlier posts on this issue here.

Help Save Maryland makes the Washington Post

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Although Help Save Maryland is about putting a stop to illegal immigration in Maryland we have written about their efforts previously here.   Today this fledgling grassroots organization is featured in the Washington Post.  One interesting angle is that the effort to stop illegal immigration is drawing other minority groups to the cause due primarily to the competition for employment.

Albanian refugees celebrate the first Muslim country in Europe

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Have you been wondering what the heck is going on in Belgrade that would cause Serbs to burn our embassy there this week?   The mainstream media would have you think that this is very cool—-an ethnic group of people have gotten their independence and now have their own country.    Others are predicting that President Bush, apparently egged on by his State Department, might have made the biggest mistake of his Presidency, and that says a lot.

We have just helped establish the first Muslim country in Europe—Kosovo.   Never mind that the Christian population is scared to death.  

In an opinion article in World Net Daily,  James George Jatras spells out what we have done.  One of the questions he raises is whether this effort by a major world power will give encouragement to other separatist movements demanding their own countries too when an ethnic population reaches a certain level.  Our own Southwest perhaps?

At a special press briefing, outgoing Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns – who is often mentioned as a possible secretary of state under a Democratic administration – hailed support for Kosovo from the Organization of the Islamic Conference and Muslim governments. Happily claiming that a “vastly majority Muslim state” has been carved out of Serbia, a European Christian country, Burns said: “We think it is a very positive step that this Muslim state, Muslim majority state, has been created today.”

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Burns’ remarks reflect a desperate hope by the Bush administration that displays of American pro-Islamic favoritism in the Balkans and support for a Palestinian state (its domination by Hamas notwithstanding) will buy the good will of hostile devotees of the “religion of peace and tolerance.” Their gratitude is manifest in the jihad terror plot to attack Fort Dix, N.J., where four of the six defendants are Albanian Muslims from the Kosovo region. The offenders’ presence in the United States – three of them illegal aliens and one brought to the U.S. by the Clinton administration as a refugee, another example of “gratitude” – stems from the fact that a broadly based support network for the terrorist “Kosovo Liberation Army,” KLA, has been allowed to operate with impunity in the New York-New Jersey-Pennsylvania area, raising funds and collecting weapons, not to mention peddling influence with American politicians.

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Meanwhile, Christian Serbs in Kosovo are bracing for the worst. “We are all expecting something difficult and horrible,” said Bishop Artemije, pastor of Kosovo’s Orthodox Christians. “Our message to you, all Serbs in Kosovo, is to remain in your homes and around your monasteries, regardless of what God allows or our enemies do.”

In the US some of the thousands of Albanian refugees we brought to our country through the Refugee Resettlement Program are whooping it up in New York (NY received the largest number of Albanian refugees from Bill Clinton’s war).

Sunday, [Faruk] Krasniqi joined thousands of Albanians in New York City’s Times Square to celebrate Kosovo’s independence. His family also celebrated at their home on Syracuse’s North Side.

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“I was excited. I was going crazy,” said Krasniqi, who became a U.S. citizen two years ago. “I haven’t slept since Friday. I’ve been partying every single night.”

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Krasniqi’s family was among 100 Kosovars who were settled in Syracuse by refugee programs run by Catholic Charities and the Center for New Americans in 1999.

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Some of the Kosovars returned home after living here a few months. The Krasniqi family is among 50 or so ethnic Albanians who stayed behind, according to officials in the Syracuse school district’s Refugee Family Program.

I’ve wondered about the level of so-called “persecution” a refugee has experienced when they return home to their country after being resettled here.   Taxpayers funded their trip, gave them food stamps, a subsidized apartment and an employment case worker and yet according to this article a bunch just went home.

Fadil [Faruk’s father a truck driver] bought two apartments, which he rents and uses when his family visits.

Maybe in light of their joy for their new Muslim country and the fact that they have zipped back and forth and purchased apartments they should just go home.

We’ve written about Albanian refugees on several previous occasions here.