Category: 2008 Presidential campaign

IRC’s Rupp says they want more taxpayers’ money, working with campaigns

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Your tax dollars:

George Rupp, President of the International Rescue Committee traveled recently to Boise, Idaho to visit their newest satellite office.  In an interview with the Boise Weekly he told the reporter how he came to leave his job as President of Columbia University because he needed to satisfy his activist streak.

I had been president of Columbia [University]. I was 58, and it was a good time for a transition. And so, to the shock of the trustees, I announced I was going to leave my position. I loved higher education and scholarly work and writing books and all those things, but I had always been kind of restless and an activist, and I was looking for something that was a little closer to the ground.

I’m guessing though that he didn’t take much of a pay cut to be an activist.  We reported previously that he is paid in the mid $300,000 range.  That was in 2005, it’s probably higher now.

I’ll bet there is some tension in Boise with all the refugees resettled there in recent years, or otherwise there wouldn’t have been this pow-wow that Rupp attended.  Meetings like this one don’t usually happen if everything is going along swimmingly.  It is amazing how the choice of words makes it all sound like a lovefest.

We had a lunch with representatives from the governor’s office, the mayor’s office, the school system, police, a couple of health clinics. These people were all really engaged in trying to figure out how to make sure that it worked having refugees resettled in Boise.

We have been noticing an uptick in stories about how strapped the volags (supposedly voluntary organizations) are, and how they can’t make ends meet, so this is revealing.   These government contractors are already working with both Presidential campaigns to get more money out of you, the taxpayer—you know, to spread the wealth!

We’ve already been working very hard with both campaigns to restructure the whole resettlement program. The resettlement program that the State Department runs is grotesquely underfunded. There’s been no increase in the last 10 years, and the populations we’re resettling have greater needs.

I have loads of ideas on how to “restructure the whole resettlement program” and it involves more private charity as the top agenda item.   And, it needs to be more discriminating about who is invited to resettle in the US.  And, it needs to take into account the economic and social conditions of the community in which they are to drop-off refugees.   And, as for dropping off refugees, they need individual sponsors to take care of them for years if necessary.  And….

Maybe I can talk to the campaigns too!

We’ve written a lot about problems in Boise, so just type “Boise” in our search function for more information.

Who among your friends and neighbors is funding Obama?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is completely off topic, completely!  However, it is fun so I’m sending it to you.    

Did you know you can see which of your friends and neighbors are sending money to the Presidential campaigns and how much they are sending?    Go here to the Federal Election Commission and follow instructions. (Be patient though it takes awhile to open sometimes!)   It is pretty simple, you find your zip code (or at least the first 3 numbers of it) and you will see who likes, in this case, Obama.

I found this mentioned at Atlas Shrugs last night, but now can’t find the link there.   As you look at the lists it is fairly instructive.   One thing I noticed is that sometimes students give over and over again and it makes you wonder where they are getting that much money.   Also, I was always under the impression that the Hatch Act hinders Federal employees from getting into campaigns, but apparently they can donate because there are loads of contributions from people working for the federal government.

Atlas had asked that you look for your own name, in case someone is using it to donate money to candidates you don’t support.   But, it might also be fun to see if there are people listed in your neighborhood that you know don’t exist.    Enjoy!

Muslim electorate growing in strength, optimistic about Obama

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This information is no surprise, go here and check it out.   

What interested me most was this discussion of how Grover Norquist (Americans for Tax Reform) took pride in delivering the Muslim vote for George Bush in 2000.    Then, as we know, Muslims had buyer’s remorse.

According to many, the Muslim American electorate’s “official” coming out party was in 2000 when they emerged as a small but powerful voting bloc. This new group consisted mostly of first- and second-generation South Asian and Arab immigrants, who favored George W. Bush. (In the 2000 election, George W. Bush garnered 42% of the Muslim vote versus 31% for Democrat Al Gore according to Zogby International and Project MAPS, which conducted the first American Muslim Poll in November 2001.)

Upon the advice and counsel of Republican lobbyist extraordinaire Grover Norquist, President Bush actively sought these votes by pledging to repeal the use of “secret evidence” in detaining immigrants, personally reaching out to mosques, imams and Muslim community leaders for their support. A delighted Norquist boasted, “George W. Bush was elected President of the United States of America because of the Muslim vote.”

In hindsight, many Muslim Americans liken that myopic decision to a naïve, well-intentioned prisoner personally polishing and loading a rifle and handing it to his own executioner.

Acting as if they were betrayed by Bush, Muslim Americans seem to forget there was a little event called 9/11 that changed the entire dynamic of Muslim/American relations.   And, despite 9/11 the Bush Administration has bent over backwards (beyond what many of us think is reasonable) to carry out the apparent Norquist strategy of salting the federal government with Islamists whose allegiance is not first and foremost to the United States of America.

How does all this fit into Refugee Resettlement?   What does the Muslim electorate need to move forward?Numbers, of course, and our US State Department and the do-gooder “church” groups are happy to oblige. 

Grover Norquist too has been advocating for larger numbers of Iraqis to be allowed to resettle in the US.  How does that fit with tax reform?  It doesn’t!   Immigrants of all sorts require more government benefits than they return in taxes.

Congressman Lamar Smith reminds us of the cost to America of low-skilled immigrants

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Your tax dollars:

This week as I, and you too I presume, became increasingly shocked at the precipitous fall of our economy, I wondered how on earth we could continue to import low-skilled immigrants to America.    Congressman Lamar Smith (R-TX) must have had this on his mind too when he blasted the US Chamber of Commerce on the bailout.  The Chamber said they supported the bailout and said it put Americans first.  In an opinion piece published this week,  Smith contends that the Chamber’s position on amnesty put a lie to that statement.

When the U.S. Chamber of Commerce called on Congress to pass the financial rescue bill, they asked us to “put the American people first.” I agree with that sentiment. However, I can’t help but point out the irony of the Chamber’s statement given its own refusal to put the needs of the American people over those of illegal immigrants.

Smith then goes on to discuss other Chamber of Commerce positions regarding immigration and how those positions hurt Americans.

He reminds us of a study by the Heritage Foundation in the spring of 2007, “The fiscal costs of low-skilled households to the US taxpayer” by Robert Rector.   

According to a study by the Heritage Foundation, each low-skilled immigrant [legal and illegal] household received $30,160 in government benefits – including education, medical care, transportation and sanitation services – but paid only $10,573 in taxes. That means the average low-skilled immigrant household costs American taxpayers almost $20,000 per year. Also, the Center for Immigration Studies estimates that low-skilled American workers lose an average of $1,800 a year because of competition from low-skilled immigrants for their jobs. Driving down the wages of American workers is not a route to “economic opportunity” the chamber claims is its goal.

Like it or not I believe we have all had a lesson in economics over the last two weeks and it’s a pretty clear lesson.      As jobs are lost, people can’t pay taxes, or as people lose money in the stock market, money is not there to collect in taxes.   If people lose houses, then local governments can’t collect property taxes.  If people aren’t buying stuff, then sales taxes are not paid.   If taxes don’t flow to various levels of government there will be diminishing services by the government to those newly created poor people who will be demanding more services in the form of welfare from already bankrupt governments.   (To my tax expert friends, don’t laugh at my simplification!)

So, how on earth can any rational person continue to promote the importation of more low-skilled labor?

Whoever becomes President of the US in next month’s election will have to face this ‘nut-cracking’ issue, and they aren’t even talking about it!

McCain getting hit from both sides on immigration

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I know this is a blog about legal immigration, but every once in awhile we throw in some stories about the illegal side of immigration.   This one about the Presidential election may give us a hint of what could come should McCain be elected or if Obama is elected.  From Politico:

Despite championing immigration reform in 2007, John McCain is poised to lose the Hispanic vote by a landslide margin that is well below President George W. Bush’s 2004 performance.

Polls show Obama winning the broadest support from Latino voters of any Democrat in a decade, while McCain is struggling to reach 30 percent, closer to Senator Bob Dole’s dismal 1996 result than to Bush’s historic 40% four years ago.

McCain seems to have wound up with the worst of both worlds: He appears to be getting no credit from Latino voters for his past support for immigration reform, while carrying the baggage of other Republicans’ hostility to illegal immigration.

And he’s been unable or unwilling to attack Obama—who was once thought to have taken a lethally liberal stance by supporting granting drivers licenses to illegal immigrants—from the right.

So when McCain joined Kennedy in the summer 2007 and sought to ramrod a bill through Congress that would have given amnesty to millions of Hispanics living illegally in the US, he got nothing for his pains.

Also, note the last sentence in the quote above and go back and read how Hillary Clinton’s people thought that Obama’s support of driver’s licenses for illegals was his death knell.  And, of course, it is unlikely that McCain is going to bring that up in light of his own stance on immigration.