Month: October 2013

Kentucky: Tales of woe grow as federal shutdown continues to impact resettlement contractors

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The program is grinding to a halt until possibly the end of the month.  Church World Service (one of nine US State Department contractors) says some refugees may be delayed for three months.

Elizabeth Kaznak: might have to dig into private resources to pay our staff!

Here is the news (emphasis mine) from the Journal-Courier which begins with a sad tale (and intersperses sad tales in between the news-worthy bits):

Now more than 2 weeks old, the shutdown forced the U.S. State Department to suspend most refugee arrivals and enact a travel moratorium, partly because the financial, medical and federal benefits or services aren’t available in some areas to help newcomers from Somalia, Iraq, Myanmar, Bhutan and a host of other countries, officials said.

Although most expect Congress to reach an agreement to reopen the government, resettlement won’t restart until at least Oct. 28 — and even then, the shutdown’s cascading effect on complex approval, documentation and travel logistics will delay many arrivals for months.

[….]

The shutdown “really has a domino effect,” said Darko Mihaylovich, director of Louisville’s Catholic Charities Migration and Refugee Services.

The Obama Administration had just announced on October 1 the goal of resettling 70,000 more refugees in FY2014, see here.  Some delays might be as long as three months!

In Kentucky, October arrivals have been canceled across the commonwealth — 40 in Louisville, 19 in Lexington and 14 in Bowling Green and Owensboro — according to local and state resettlement officials.

Church World Service, one of a handful of federally approved resettlement agencies, reported that nearly half of the refugees under its authority, initially cleared for travel in October, will be delayed as long as three months.

Refugees here already shouldn’t worry yet—-they will still have their welfare benefits.

Darko Mihaylovich says welfare/food stamps continue (so far).

For the refugees already resettled in Louisville, help is still available. Mihaylovich said state aid such as food stamps and other aid have continued in Kentucky so far.

The shutdown has prevented some refugees from getting Social Security cards, which they need to obtain work permits.

Oh no!  Since “non-profit” resettlement contractors are paid by the head to resettle refugees, they might have to use their own money while times are tight!  Kentucky Refugee Ministries is a subcontractor of Church World Service.

Kaznak [Elizabeth Kaznak, executive director] of Kentucky Refugee Ministries said Kentucky Refugee Ministries, which operates on a tight budget, is having to use reserves to continue to pay caseworkers and provide services, partly because the shutdown has kept the agency from getting the federal reimbursement of $750 per arrival budgeted for October.

Maria Koerner, assistant director of the Kentucky Office for Refugees, said the shutdown has delayed disbursement of some of the $9 million in federal funding Kentucky gets annually to help pay for cash assistance and medical help for new arrivals, but so far it’s not harming services.

Check out Kentucky Refugee Ministries recent Form 990 (here).  They took in $3.7 million (rounded number) in revenue in 2011.  $3.3 million of that came from GOVERNMENT CONTRACTS while only $290,000 appears to have been privately raised (see p. 9).  Just a reminder: these were supposed to be public-private partnerships when the refugee law was first enacted, not quasi-government agencies.

On page 10 we learn that they paid out $1.6 million for salaries and benefits.  Office expenses and rent came out to approximately $285,000.  So we can see things will be tight if the federal government (the taxpayer!) pipeline continues to slow.

Sure, looks like they don’t have much of a private reserve to fall back on.

Ethiopian war criminal got into US as refugee by lying about his identity

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Imagine that!

Kefelgn Alemu Worku has been found guilty in US court in Denver and will likely serve 15 years in prison for lying.

Kefelgn Alemu Worku

Thanks to Creeping Sharia for tipping us off to this latest news.

I searched our thousands of posts and voila, I knew I recognized the name, we first reported on Worku here in 2012.  It is really worth visiting that post to see how complex a fraud was perpetrated on the US State Department.  Worku didn’t just claim (in isolation) to be someone else, but “kids” in America (not his kids) actually helped perpetrate the scam and allowed him to assume the identity of their ailing father.   He came to the US through ‘family’ reunification.

Here is the news of the conviction yesterday at East Africa News (emphasis is mine):

A United States court has convicted an Ethiopian immigrant, who is suspected of having committed war crimes in his home country, on charges of immigration fraud and identity theft.

Prosecutors told the court that the accused, Kefelgn Alemu Worku, had lied about his past and stolen someone else’s identity before immigrating to Colorado in 2004 as a refugee. Worku admitted that he had used a false name to gain entry and citizenship in the United States but denied allegations that he had tortured and killed political prisoners while working as a prison guard in Ethiopia in the 1970’s.

The accused was arrested in May 2011 after Ethiopian Immigrants, Samuel Ketema, 53, and his brother, Kiflu, 58, identified and confronted him at a cafe in Aurora, Colorado. Kiflu claims he witnessed Worku torturing and killing several prisoners – including one of Kiflu’s best friends – while serving a prison sentence in Ethiopia.

So we taxpayers absorbed the expenses of his resettlement, his use of social services, his legal case and now we get to take care of him in prison for the next 15 years!

Worku now faces up to 15 years in prison following his conviction. Dozens of Ethiopian immigrants who thronged the court during the trial seemed satisfied with the verdict.

The charges brought against Worku in Denver were for immigration violations and not the war crimes that he is accused of having committed nearly four decades ago. Ethiopia already tried him for those crimes in absentia and sentenced him to hanging.

I guess what this really means is that in lieu of deportation and hanging, we get to pay for him in prison for 15 years, then what?  Will he be released into America to collect his senior citizen benefits because he is a US citizen?  But, wait! is he a US citizen if he used another person’s identity?

Clamp-down on illegal boats seems to have cooled Rohingya plans to make a run on Australia

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Gosh, could strict border enforcement work!

For new readers, the Rohingya are Muslims, some of whom have lived in Burma, others in Bangladesh.  They are often called “stateless” by the human rights industrial complex which has made them a cause celebre in a public relations campaign we have followed for over five years.   We have a category specifically for Rohingya posts, here (156 previous posts!)

Chris Lewa of the Arakan Project, second from right, is quoted often in support of Rohingya.

 

Australians, fed up with the thousands of mostly Muslim illegal migrants coming to their shores in recent years, has elected a government which is sending signals that it won’t be a push-over as some recent governments have been on the subject of illegal immigration.

Here is an article in The Irrawaddy which reports that Rohingya people (already in their own “cultural zones” of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Bangladesh) are now having second thoughts about trying to reach Australia.  Emphasis below is mine.

KUALA LUMPUR — Australia’s clampdown on refugees and migrants trying to reach the country’s shores by boat has prompted uncertainty among Rohingya who, facing state oppression and attacks by Arakanese Buddhists, have fled Burma in the tens of thousands in recent years.

Since Australia’s now-ousted Labor government decided in July to prevent refugees traveling by sea from landing in Australia—saying that would-be arrivals would be taken to processing centers in neighboring Nauru and Papua New Guinea (PNG)—some Rohingya who had hopes of making it to Australia are now in a bind.

“We are disappointed, we feel like we are stuck,” said Zafar Ahmad Abdul Ghani, president of the Myanmar Ethnic Rohingya Human Rights Organization Malaysia (MERHOM). “Many of us do not have papers here [in Malaysia] and we have no status in Burma. It is a difficult situation for anyone who hoped to travel to Australia,” Ahmad told The Irrawaddy.  [To “travel” or make an illegal run for Australian shores!—ed]

Thousands of Rohingya refugees undertake a treacherous maritime journey from western Burma to Thailand or Malaysia. From there some in turn hope to reach Australia, usually attempting another dangerous maritime crossing through the Indian Ocean.

[…..]

Rohingya arrivals to Australia are difficult to quantify, as those who do make it are listed as “stateless” by Australia, while some others who arrived in Australia over recent years claimed to be Rohingya but were assessed by Australia to be either Bangladeshi nationals or Burmese Muslims, according to Chris Lewa.  [I suspect that those Rohingya getting into the US through refugee resettlement are being referred to as Burmese Muslims as well, since the word ‘Rohingya’ is associated with some pretty rough types.—ed]

Australian government statistics—covering the years from 1998 to 2012—list 2,204 stateless maritime arrivals to Australia, a cohort that includes Kurds, Palestinians and Rohingya.

The boat people issue became a major election issue as immigration restrictionist Tony Abbott was elected as the new Prime Minister last month.

A voter backlash against the arrival of over 40,000 asylum seekers since 2007, when policy was relaxed for a time, prompted both of Australia’s main parties to suggest tighter controls.

I found this bit of the story of interest too:

Indonesia is a common transit point for refugees trying to reach Australia, Rohingya included. At least 28 Middle Eastern migrants drowned when a boat, which was aiming to reach Christmas Island, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean, sank off Indonesia in late September.

Note they are simply referred to generically as ‘Middle Eastern’ migrants with no mention that they were Lebanese pretending to be Syrian refugees as our commenter ‘pungentpeppers’ reported here.

The photo is from this story about a UNHCR meeting in June.  In a cursory search I can’t find a specific website for Lewa’s Arakan Project, lots of references to Lewa and the status of the Project as an NGO, but no website.  if any industrious readers find one, let us know!

Rioting in Russia: Not even Russia is immune from ethnic conflict, anti-migrant anger

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment
Police attempt to detain anti-immigrant rioters in Moscow.
Photo: RIA Novosti / Ramil Sitdikov

We post almost daily on one European country or another having problems with migrants, both legal and illegal, but we’ve rarely mentioned Russia.  It seems that Putin too has his hands full with anger toward immigrant masses as we see in this story about recent anti-migrant riots inflamed by the murder of an ethnic Russian in Moscow.   (Hat tip: Judy)

From RT:

Moscow police detained some 380 people during the mass rioting in a southern district of the city. A mixed crowd of nationalists and locals attacked a warehouse run by natives of the Caucasus, blaming a migrant for the fatal stabbing of a local.

Authorities lifted the emergency plan codenamed “Volcano” after midnight, several hours after public order had been restored. The plan, put into effect in the afternoon, involved sending scores of riot police to the scene of the clashes, and placing police officers across the city on high alert.

[….]

The violent scenes came after a similar rampage took place at a nearby shopping center, where the rioters had originally gathered. The outraged crowd demanded that the police find the killer of a 25-year-old Russian, who was stabbed to death on Thursday allegedly by a man from the Caucasus or Central Asia.

The locals also lashed at the the authorities, accusing them of covering the wave of migrant crime and the illegal immigration in the area.

Although the ‘M’ word is never mentioned, Muslims make up a large percentage of the population in the Caucasus region and I suspect are a large part of the illegal flow into Moscow.

The lengthy article is well worth reading (lots of photos too).

In case you are wondering, I’ve never heard of Russia accepting refugees.  And, I have no idea how much legal immigration they allow.  I’m guessing not much!

New IRC CEO Miliband makes the news defending Marxist Dad

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment
David Miliband: Maudlin response to criticism of Marxist Dad!

Former British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who only last month took the reins of one of the largest US refugee resettlement contractors in the US, the International Rescue Committee, took to the media on Friday to defend his Marxist father (“best academic Marxist of his generation!”).

I wonder if this is the sort of publicity they expected out of their new highly-paid (over $400,000 in salary and benefits mostly from the US taxpayer!) front man.  See a couple of previous posts on Miliband here and here.

Here is the brief story at Politics.co.uk:.

 David Miliband has expressed hurt over the Daily Mail article which claimed his father “hated Britain”.

Speaking as the row over the article started to die down, the International Rescue Committee president said his Marxist academic father was a loving presence in his childhood.

“It’s hateful when you have your father targeted in that way, traduced in that way,” he said.

[….]

“The important thing for me is that he was an ¬incredibly loving dad who meant a huge amount to me and obviously to Ed and to my mum as well. I hope that the right lessons are learned.”

I didn’t care enough to read the original offending article, but surely it didn’t call into question whether the Marxist Dad was loving or not toward his children?   And, I’m wondering, if the Dad were alive, would he be appalled by the fat pay check his son now receives from the masses.  Oh yeh, the World Socialist website has already weighed in on that, here.