Month: February 2013

Food Stamp use by refugees jumped dramatically in first year of Obama Presidency

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Your tax dollars!

Sheesh, I just a few minutes ago told you I wouldn’t have time to look at the newly released 2009 Annual Report to Congress on the status of refugees in the US in Obama’s first year, but I couldn’t resist a look at the food stamp usage data.

Ahhhhhh!  70% of refugees in the US were on food stamps in 2009!  That is up from 50% the year before and a jump of 30% from 2004 when only! 40% were on food stamps (p. 109).

95% of Iraqi refugees were using food stamps in 2009 (p. 124), but that is understandable because the UNEMPLOYMENT RATE for Iraqis was 46%!  46%!  (p.115).  And, we are told we need MORE immigrant labor!

Visit the tables in Appendix A to see the numbers of arrivals from various countries to your states.

We resettled 17,180 Iraqis in FY 2009 bringing the grand total of resettled Iraqis to 76,205.   We resettled 88,915 Somalis through 2009.

These annual reports are a treasure-trove of information. You all need to go to this one (unfortunately a snap-shot now nearly 4 years out of date) to check out info. on your state.  If I read it correctly (as I scanned quickly) top states for refugee welfare were California (80% on some form of welfare!) and even states like Pennsylvania and Georgia were awash in needy refugees.

Pakistan wants the Afghan refugees to go home

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

And, they are paying them to go back to a safer Afghanistan (provided to them by US blood and treasure).

So much for Muslim charity toward the stranger that we so often hear about.  Pakistan blames the Afghan refugees (some have been there for decades) for crime and terror attacks, according to the LA Times.

Pakistani officials have long expressed their frustration with the lack of progress in repatriating the world’s largest refugee community — Afghans who fled the Soviet invasion and later, Taliban rule. Many refugees have lived in Pakistan for more than three decades. Their presence is resented by many Pakistanis, who see the refugees as a source of escalating crime and accuse them of involvement in terror strikes across the country.

The news this morning is that Pakistan has extended the time they have to repatriate to their homeland and is paying them (and upping the anti!) to get the heck out of Pakistan.

They don’t want to go ‘home’ according to an earlier story in the Business Recorder.

From the Business Recorder:

ISLAMABAD: Minister for States and Frontier and Frontier Regions Abbas Khan Afridi on Monday informed the National Assembly that currently sophisticated computerized system was in placed for the registration of Afghan refugees and period for voluntary repatriation of the refugees was extended till June 30.

Replying to a various supplementary questions during Question Hour, he said the repatriation package for the refugees was also enhanced from$ 100 to $150 per returnee in order to encourage and motivate the Afghan refugees.

Earlier, the amount was paid to them in Pakistan, now it was being paid to them in Afghanistan to discourage their re-entrance practice, he added.

The minister said that over 55,000 Afghan refugee families comprising 296,192 individuals (registered refugees) were repatriated during the last four years, bringing the total repatriation to over 3.8 million since 2002.

He said that presently around 1.6 million registered Afghan refugees were in Pakistan and the Prime Minister has recently constituted a Cabinet Committee under the Chairmanship of the SAFRON minister to deal with repatriation of the remaining refugees.

We are bringing Afghan refugees to the US (we’ve resettled over 30,000 already) and I expect that as Obama withdraws our troops you will hear the lament that we ‘broke’ Afghanistan so we have to bring their people here.

Photo from the Business Recorder, here.

2009 Annual Report to Congress is now available

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I was just looking for statistics on Afghan refugees coming to the US in large numbers (for years) because of a post I’m writing about Pakistan wanting them OUT of their country when I came across the existence of the missing 2009 ANNUAL REPORT TO CONGRESS on the refugee program.

Here it is!

Now we can see what the program looked like in the first year of the Obama presidency.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement needs to now get cracking on reports for 2010, 2011, and 2012 which they are still LEGALLY required to produce and are breaking federal law every day by not producing them!

I won’t have time to scan the 181 pages chock full of information about how much this program is costing the taxpayer today, but look forward to reading it soon!

Refugee Resettlement Watch is tweeting!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know how I’ll find time to tweet when I have only a little time each day to post stories here, but it’s high time we pushed RRW to another level in order to reach people—in order to get around the mainstream media block on examining the wisdom, or even discussing the value and costs of importing certain segments of the third world to the first world.

So, I’ll be tweeting @RefugeeWatcher.    If you have a twitter account please follow me.    I won’t be overloading you with tweets all day, but there are so many excellent articles on this aspect of legal immigration (some on illegal too) that cross my desk each day which I don’t have time to post and I’ll be sending those out to you.

Besides my desire to get with the modern times (how do you like the photos?), you may be seeing some changes in the format here at RRW, but that won’t happen overnight.

I was reminded in this must-read article by Angelo Codevilla at Forbes magazine last week, that our best hope of overcoming the Ruling Class (Republicans and Democrats) who disrespect  the wishes of the average American citizens on this and myriad issues is to go around the politically correct mainstream media.

Here is Codevilla on the Ruling Class vs. The Country Class (which has been largely abandoned by the Republican Party and was decades ago considered too uncool to be Democrats).   It’s not so different than the ‘jocks and cool kids’ vs. the ‘nerds’, except of course the stakes are higher!

Very relevant are sectors of America’s population increasingly represented by groups that sprang up to represent them when the Republican leadership did not.

[….]

This representation is happening by default. It is aided by the internet, which makes it possible to spread ideas to which the educational Establishment gives short shrift and which the ruling class media shun. In short, the internet helps undermine the ruling class’ near-homogenization of American intellectual life, its closing of the American mind. Not by reason but by bureaucratic force majeure had America’s educational Establishment isolated persons who deviate from it, cutting access to a sustaining flow of ideas that legitimize their way of life. But the internet allows marginalized dissenters to reason with audiences of millions. Ideas have consequences….

[….]

The internet also spread the power to organize.

[….]

Thus informed with facts and opinion, sectors of the country class have felt represented and empowered vis a vis the ruling class.

[….]

The countless Tea Parties that have sprung up all over have added their countless attendees to networks of information and organization despite the ruling class’ effort to demonize them. The same goes for evangelicals, gun owners, etc. Though such groups represent the country class fragmentarily, country class people identify with them rather than with the Republican Party because the groups actually stand for something, and represent their adherents against the ruling class’ charges, insults, etc.

Only last week Ruling Class exemplar Grover Norquist attempted to insult immigration restriction groups here, demonstrating Codevilla’s principle—the Republicans aren’t standing up for the millions of Americans who think there needs to be some limit on the number (and origin!) of immigrants entering the US.

Anyway, I need to stop talking, but every one of you who are concerned with this or many other issues the media and the Ruling Class elite are attempting to censure must find your way to spread the word—write a blog, set up a facebook page, get a twitter account, nag a news outlet with your comments and even write letters to the editor (but those are of decreasing value as mainstream publications increasingly edit or don’t even publish what they deem to be politically-incorrect views).

@RefugeeWatcher

San Diego: Four Somalis convicted of aiding terror group in Africa

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is the latest on a story we reported, here, in January.

From  AP at ABC News:

 A federal jury in San Diego on Friday convicted four Somali immigrants — including an imam from a local mosque — of conspiring to funnel money to a terrorist group in their native country.

After a three-week trial and three days of deliberations, the jury convicted the four men of conspiring to raise and send money to Somalia’s al-Shabaab. The men coordinated fundraising efforts and sent nearly $9,000 to al-Shabaab between 2007 and 2008, prosecutors said.

The U.S. Department of State designated al-Shabaab a terrorist group in 2008, saying it was responsible for targeted civilian assassinations and bombings in Somalia. Federal prosecutors have since cracked down on the group’s U.S. support with the arrests of some two dozen people.

Those convicted Friday include 40-year-old Mohamed Mohamed Mohamud, who prosecutors said used his connections as a popular imam at a mosque in San Diego’s City Heights neighborhood to raise money for the group.   [Photo is from this 2010 story on the case.—ed]

Photo by Amita Sharma
Masjid Al-Ansar, a mosque located in City Heights, is where Mohamed Mohamed Mohamud, has led prayer services during the past 10 years.

A money transfer business, Shidaal Express, was used in the transfer of funds to Al-shabaab.  In 2009, I wrote about the feds busting a business by that same name for fraud also in San Diego, wonder if it’s the same one?

The other defendants were two San Diego taxi drivers, 36-year-old Basaaly Saeed Moalin and 56-year-old Issa Doreh, and 37-year-old Ahmed Nasir Taalil Mohamud of Anaheim, whose financial transfer business Shidaal Express was used to route the money, prosecutors said.

The AP actually mentions how the Somalis got here—that’s something new and novel—through the Refugee Resettlement Program of the US State Department, but I can assure you the number of Somalis in the US now far exceeds the 87,000 AP says are here.   Here are my stats for the last 30 years and these don’t take into account the numbers of Somalis who got into the US through other programs or illegally across the border.  LOL! nor does it take into consideration the high birthrate in the Somali “community.”

Most of the 87,000 Somalis living in the United States have arrived through U.S.-sponsored refugee resettlement programs. The largest two U.S. Somali communities, and the sites of most of the arrests in the crackdown, are in San Diego and Minnesota.

What a coincidence:  San Diego was also on the Somali underground railroad out of the US for those Somali youths we raised who returned to the Horn of Africa to learn the Jihad trade, here, in 2009.