Month: May 2008

What is the truth about HIV and refugees?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday the Washington Post published an opinion piece by Andrew Sullivan who says that all immigrants with HIV aids are barred from the US.     He begins “Phobia at the Gates”:

Twelve countries ban HIV-positive visitors, nonimmigrants and immigrants from their territory: Armenia, Brunei, Iraq, Libya, Moldova, Oman, Qatar, the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Sudan and . . . the United States. China recently acted to remove its ban on HIV-positive visitors because it feared embarrassment ahead of the Olympics. But America’s ban remains.

It seems unthinkable that the country that has been the most generous in helping people with HIV should legally ban all non-Americans who are HIV-positive. But it’s true: The leading center of public and private HIV research discriminates against those with HIV.

HIV is the only medical condition permanently designated in law — in the Immigration and Nationality Act — as grounds for inadmissibility to the United States. Even leprosy and tuberculosis are left to the discretion of the secretary of health and human services. 

I am sure that last fall when we had our September Forum (see our whole category) in Hagerstown, MD about refugee resettlement that the State Department representatives told us the ban on refugees with HIV had been lifted by the Clinton administration.    Here is a post in which I mentioned the supposed lifting of the ban.   Now I’m wondering if it isn’t really lifted but just ignored by those admitting refugees to the US.

By the way, one of the flaws in Sullivan’s argument involves who pays for HIV treatment of immigrants.  He says they should be required to carry private health insurance.  That is not going to happen with refugees who get medical care gratus from local governments.

Take a look at the problems some county health departments are having with the cost of health treatment for refugees.  Ft. Wayne, IN (Allen County) comes immediately to mind.

Would treating HIV like any other medical condition cost the United States if such visitors or immigrants at some point became public dependents? It’s possible — but all legal immigrants and their sponsors are required to prove that they can provide their own health insurance for at least 10 years after being admitted. Making private health insurance a condition of visiting or immigrating with HIV prevents any serious government costs, and the tax dollars that would be contributed by many of the otherwise qualified immigrants would be a net gain for the government — by some estimates, in the tens of millions of dollars.

Sullivan does mention that immigrants with all other diseases including leprosy and tuberculosis are not legally banned.   A Somali refugee died of TB in a Tyson’s meatpacking plant in Emporia, KS last year—funny you never heard that reported in the mainstream media.

I would really like to know what is the truth about refugees with HIV.

Farooq Kathwari Watch

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I used to joke that we should have a Ken Bacon Watch.    Bacon is the head of Refugees International the lobbying arm for the refugee industry.  One of the things they do is to make sure we get more refugees into the US, especially from Muslim countries.   But, a more interesting person to watch is their Chairman of the Board, Farooq Kathwari, CEO of Ethan Allen Furniture.

See my post of May 3 for more on Kathwari.

Yesterday (May 13), the Washington Times ran a photo/with caption on the bottom of page A13 of Secretary of State Rice kicking off a new Public-Private Partnership to “empower” women in Muslim countries  (if anyone finds a link for this photo and caption please send it to me).  

The caption begins:

Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice addresses a State Department audience about the One Woman Initiative, a public-private sector effort to raise $100 milliion to educate and lend to women in Muslim countries.

Sitting to Rice’s left are co-chairs Carly Fiorina (former CEO of Hewlett-Packard and now a chief economic advisor in the McCain campaign) and a sour looking Farooq Kathwari. 

What a joke, “empower” women in Muslim countries.   Women have few property rights or little opportunity to be educated in Muslim countries because men control their lives and their money, so who do you think is going to get most of this Public-Private money?    Let Kathwari lend his private money and leave us taxpayers out of this project.

P.S.  Anyone still guessing about which influential Muslim Americans got the State Department to stop using the word “jihad” in connection to terrorism, I’ll bet you Mr. Kathwari is one of them.   He seems to be spending a lot of time at the State Department these days.

“System of Neglect” declares Washington Post

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Neglect indeed by the reporters of this massive frontpage article that whines and moans about the health care we give people who break into America.   The ‘above the fold’ photo is of the dead body of 34-year-old Yusif Osman in a white bag awaiting a Muslim burial.  

The subheading to this overly long story is:  “As Tighter Immigration Policies Strain Federal Agencies, The Detainees in Their Care Often Pay a Heavy Cost.”    Implicit in the entire story is that any of us who want to secure our borders are causing the deaths of innocent, poor and downtrodden people of the world.

Here is how the article begins:

Near midnight on a California spring night, armed guards escorted Yusif Osman into an immigration prison ringed by concertina wire at the end of a winding, isolated road…..

Then we are told that there were medical screw ups and Osman died.  The Post says that he might have had a health problem that government medical personel didn’t notice.  His family says he was healthy.   He was 34 years old afterall!  Post reporters then declare and set the tone:

Osman’s death is a single tragedy in a larger story of life, death and often shabby medical care within an unseen network of special prisons for foreign detainees across the country. Some 33,000 people are crammed into these overcrowded compounds on a given day, waiting to be deported or for a judge to let them stay here. 

So, I’m wondering how this African guy (supposedly from Ghana, but his name sounds Somali to me) was detained coming across our southern border.   To find out the reader must go through what seems like thousands of words to get to what Osman did to get himself locked up.

Yusif Osman had been living in Los Angeles as a legal resident for five years when he was detained crossing back from Tijuana in 2006 with a passenger, also from Ghana, who had a false ID. Osman was arrested on a smuggling charge, which he denied and was fighting while locked up at Otay Mesa. 

If Osman was here legally he most likely was a refugee resettled by the US State Department and a volag.  Or, he himself was smuggled into the US and gave a credible-sounding story about being persecuted and then granted asylum. 

We have this ‘Pavlov’s dog’ response to the word asylee, it connotes suffering and persecution,  when increasingly those seeking asylum are just a glorified version of illegal alien who have come up with some great story that usually involves watching his or her (she would have been raped) family being killed somewhere by some bad guys.  And, we are such suckers for this stuff.

So, note to Washington Post,  Osman’s story is not one I would have started my whine fest with. The guy was living in America legally and should have been grateful for that chance and instead he was caught coming across the border escorting an illegal alien.  It is not the fault of health workers that he was in detention center in the first place.

I thank the Washington Post for one thing—the article alerts the public that illegal Muslim smuggling is happening on the Mexican border. 

Another meatpacker/Somali love story

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Here is a yet another article, this time from from Greeley, Co, about how great it is for a Swift meatpacking plant to have all these Somali refugee men handy, ready, and willing to work.   Yesterday’s article is here. Today’s news account begins:  

GREELEY, Colo. — The four Somalis moved into the apartment last August, six floors up in a downtown Greeley building. The living room is furnished with only a metal folding chair and small table covered in papers and a laptop computer. A Somali flag, a white star against light blue, is the only wall hanging, draped behind the table. 

Is it just me, or does this strike anyone else as a bit strange?   Four Muslim men living in an apartment with not much else but a laptop computer and a Somali flag on the wall.   Hum.

Back to the article which is nothing more than the boilerplate meatpacker story we see all over the country. 

Doug Schult, who heads employee and labor relations at Swift, said refugees are coming from several east African countries. They are working at Swift plants across the nation, from Greeley to Kentucky. 

Ibraham Mohamed is a Greeley caseworker for Lutheran Family Services, which provides refugee resettlement services. He estimates that about 300 east Africans are in Greeley, and that “every day, 20 or 30 people are coming to get started at Swift, maybe 15 (a day). It depends on how they get the job.”

I just checked our archives and sure enough I wrote about the opening of this refugee office for Ft. Morgan and Greeley back in July, read especially this post on July 13th with a link to Greeley’s historical role in the origin of modern day Islamic terrorism (yes Greeley!).  Those 4 guys with the laptop and the Somali flag probably have had a private little chuckle about the irony of that.

This meatpacker/Muslim refugee marriage doesn’t come together by happenstance.  The US State Department was probably working with Swift all along and helped them get the refugee workers out to Greeley, but they needed an office there to make sure the Swift workers had all of their other needs met compliments of the US taxpayer.

New readers, use our search function and find the many many posts we have written about meatpacking plants and refugees.  Check especially Shelbyville, TN and Emporia, KS.

Rohingya: sorting out whos who and who is going to kill whom

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

My title is misleading, I am not really sorting out this mess of groups, just giving you bits of information that hopefully one day will come together.    Our interest in the Rohingya is that these Burmese Muslims are agitating for third country resettlement to the West.   The recent devastating cyclone in Burma has given them an opportunity to be heard in the media.    New readers go to our category “Rohingya Reports” for background.

Today I came across a press release from something called the Rohingya Youth Development Forum appealing for humanitarian aid for the Burmese in the wake of the storm.   Checking out their website where most pages didn’t open, I came across the following list of groups that they are presumably affiliated with.

National Democratic Party for Human Rights (exile) HQ, USA

Arakan Rohingya Organization-Japan (JARO)

Rohingya Youth Development Forum (RYDF), Arakan-Burma

Rohingya Human Rights Council (RHC), Norway

World Rohingya Congress (WRC), USA

Burmese Rohingya Association in United Arab Emirate (BRA-UAE)

National Council for Rohingya (NCR) Malaysia

Arakan Rohingya National Organization (ARNO)

Arakan League for Justice and Freedom (ALJF), Bangladesh

Union of Rohingya Communities in Europe (URCE), Denmark-Norway

Rohingya Community in Norway (RCN), Norway

Burmese Rohingya Community in Australia (BRCA)

Burmese Rohingya Association in Japan (BRJA), Japan

Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO) Arakan, Burma

Burmese Rohingya Association in Thailand (BRAT), Thailand

Arakan Rohingya Refugee Committee (ARRC), Malaysia

Ittihad-Tullab Al-Muslimeen (ITM), Arakan, Burma

 

Rohingya News Groups

Kalandan Press Network (KPN)

Rohingya Information Center (RIC), Malaysia

RohingyaNet

Rohingya Yahoogroups

I’ve highlighted ARNO  because in more searching I came across this article from a group called the Council for the Restoration of Democracy (CRDB is not listed on the Rohingya Youth Development Forum list) in which its leader asserts the following and claims that his life is in danger from ARNO.  He says before 9/11 ARNO was called the Arakan Rohingya Islamic Front.

Our attention has been drawn to a press release issued by a petty Rohingya communalist group led by Mr Nurul Islam, the President of Arakan Rohingya Islamic Front (ARIF) who changed the name of his organization into Arakan Rohingya National Organization (ARNO), after September 11 incident.

The fall 2007 article goes on to explain.

 

In addition, one petty Rohingya communalist group have brutally killed a group of valiant Rakhine freedom fighters in the jungle which has turned majority of Rakhines against the innocent common Rohingyas and which has later resulted in the killing of thousands of Rohingya men, women and children in the communal violence. And finally we appealed to the international community to take necessary steps to stop Burmese military persecutions and genocidal operations against the Rohingyas from one and on the other hand to restore peace and communal harmony between two sister communities of Arakan – the Rakhines and Rohingyas.

These statements of ours against the communalist forces of Rohingyas who are very few in numbers, has seriously infuriated them and then they started all their attempts to exterminate us. Later, Mr Nurul Islam, the then President of Arakan Rohingya Islamic Front (ARIF) made three attempts to kill me in collaboration of another Rohingya communalist so-called leader Maulan Saiful Islam, the then vice president of Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO) with their armed cadres and in one such attempt, Mr Khairul Amin also participated as he was a central executive member of RSO’s student wing.

But since the existence of both ARIF and RSO was not recognised in Bangladesh being the rebel groups of Arakan, I had no chance to file any case with the police against their attempts to murder me. However, in 1994 we changed the name of the Rohingya Refugees Action Committee (RRAC) in to The Council for Restoration of Democracy (CRDB) for the greater interest of Burma and Rohingyas. Notably, on July 12.1995, we have held another press conference in the Chittagong Press Club on behalf of the CRDB which was also widely covered by different national and international media.

However, today the time we have announced our programme to hold a press conference in the national press club at Oslo with a view to let the world know the untold stories of Rohingyas’ plight and predicament as well as the Burmese military persecutions, those petty Rohingya communalist groups have been coming again forward to endanger my life. Now, the only option left for me is to produce all the evidences and witnesses of their past crimes against humanity and to seek the help of international humanitarian community to save my life from those petty communalists and their collaborators who have already endangered the life of thousands of innocent Rohingyas.

 

So, bottomline, what the heck is going on?  Are we supposed to sort these groups out in order to let the correct Rohingyas into the US?   How about if we don’t let any come to the US and let them work out their differances somewhere else.