Public Radio International posted a glowing puff-piece yesterday about how the burgeoning Rohingya population in the Chicago area is now well established and members of the ‘community’ are becoming US citizens.
The article features one man in particular, but it is generally informative and gives me an opportunity to remind readers that there is no Trump Muslim ban. Certain countries might be temporarily excluded from sending refugees to America, but that prohibition does not extend to the Rohingya.
The Rohingya are strict adherents to Islam and are unwelcome in Burma and their original home in Bangladesh. For ambitious readers, I have been writing about them for over a decade and have archived over 200 posts in my category entitled, Rohingya Reports. (So glad to have all that material back!)
When I first began following the Rohingya, the US State Department had banned them from resettlement here.
What it’s like to become a US citizen after a lifetime of statelessness
Zakaria’s [Nasir Zakaria, the star of the story] path to US citizenship included years of hard work supporting his community. Three years ago he founded Chicago’s Rohingya Cultural Center, a community space on the city’s northwest side that has become a hub for some 1,600 Rohingya refugees who have settled in the area over the past decade. The center offers English lessons, Quran classes, cultural events and after-school homework help for children.
(I told readers about the founding of the Rohingya Cultural Center, here, in 2016.)
Zakaria family with judge (center). His wife is on the right.
The center also offers citizenship classes, which gives adults English-language skills and an overview of US history, politics and civics knowledge. The classes help them pass their naturalization interviews with US Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Tens of thousands of Rohingya refugees have been resettled to the US in the past five years, the majority of them between 2015 and 2016, according to State Department statistics.
The Trump administration has made steep cuts to refugee admissions in recent years. As more and more of Rohingya approach the five-year mark of permanent residency in the US, they are becoming eligible to apply for citizenship. Zakaria was among the first from the Chicago community to be naturalized.
Zakaria founded the Rohingya Cultural Center in 2016 with financial backing from the Zakat Foundation of America, an Islamic nonprofit based in Chicago. It’s often the first place local Rohingya refugees turn when they need help deciphering a cable bill, job application or letter from a government agency.
The idea for the center stemmed from his own experience acclimating to life in the United States.
Zakaria had already been granted refugee status in Malaysia, a safe Muslim country.
Is it America’s duty to give employment and public services to the world?
Zakaria fled Myanmar alone as a teen, he said, to escape capture by the country’s armed forces. He lived in Bangladesh, then Malaysia, where he was granted refugee status. But like other Rohingya refugees in Malaysia, he did not have access to public services, education or legal employment.
It would be another two decades before he was resettled to the United States in 2013, along with his wife, Laila Binti Mohamad Husan, and his grandfather. They were sent to live in Chicago. Zakaria and his wife now have three children.
[….]
On the way out, he picked up a voter registration form.
I’m actually stunned that they think that the Trump Administration could be forced by a judge (ortwo judges) to shoot for a refugee “ceiling” number set by Obama for a year he would no longer be President.
For the zillionth time, even if Obama was still in the White House there is no legal requirement that the President reach the CEILING he set for admissions the previous fall.
As we showed youhere—they never reach the ceiling! Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service and World Relief mentioned in this story are federal refugee resettlement contractors paid through your tax dollars to place refugees in your towns and are most assuredly part of the ‘Religious Left’ Itold you aboutearlier this morning.
Calling all Lutherans! You need to know what is being done in your name!***
Here is the story from Religion News Service:
CHICAGO (RNS) It was her desire to hear the stories of real people — “not just faceless refugees or immigrants” — that brought the Rev. Elizabeth A. Eaton to a refugee resettlement agency that provides a range of services to refugees in the Chicago area.
Presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America
“Especially now, when there’s this fear that’s been stirred up and anti-refugee sentiment, it’s really critical to say, ‘No, these people are our grandparents, our aunts and uncles,” said the presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the nation’s largest Lutheran denomination.
Her visit last week (March 21) to RefugeeOne, a resettlement agency supported by Lutheran Immigrant and Refugee Service, comes at a time when the status of the U.S. refugee resettlement program is uncertain.
On March 15, a federal judge in Hawaii blocked an executive order by President Trump that would have more than halved the number of refugees accepted by the United States from the current ceiling of 110,000.
Now, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service is “cautiously hopeful” resettlement will return to the numbers that had been planned for 2017, said Kay Bellor, vice president for programs.
***According to LIRS websitethese are the Lutheran groups affiliated and supportive of bringing refugees to the US:
Rooted in Lutherans’ faithful and caring response to the challenges facing uprooted peoples, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service celebrates strong collaborative relationships with three national Lutheran church bodies. They are the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod LC-MS, and the Latvian Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (LELCA).
Go herefor our extensive reporting on LIRS, a preeminent member of the refugee industry.
Don’t miss this post—Will Lutheran bigwigs see pay cuts? I am forever confident that one day, mainstream media will report on how much of your money these groups are gobbling to promote their progressive world view!
Thanks to Joanne for sending this storyabout supposed discrimination against non-English speaking workers at O’Hare airport in Chicago. Explain to us again how we are security-screening the Rohingya who have fled Burma (Myanmar) and Bangladesh in boats and are scattered throughout Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. Do they have any documents in plastic baggies on these boats? I doubt it! https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2016/04/07/illinois-zakat-foundation-to-open-cultural-center-specifically-for-rohingya-muslims-in-the-state/
Before you read it consider these points:
~The ‘star’ of this story and his Rohingya Muslim fellow worker are ‘boat people’ who arrived in Malaysia, likely with no papers, and only stories about abuse in Burma, or possibly Bangladesh. We brought them as refugees to America.*** So while Congress and others focus their energy on Syrian refugees who CANNOT be thoroughly screened, we admit Rohingya Muslims who have been wandering all over Southeast Asia and we don’t know who they are either!
~This article describes a growing practice of hiring Muslim refugees in airports!
~While there is squawking about companies, like the airplane cleaning company, using non-English speaking workers with suggestions they are being cheated, there is no suggestion that the notorious union SEIU is also using them for its purposes!
~We have admitted (Wrapsnet.org) 13,500 Rohingya Muslims during the Obama Administration. 543 arrived in the last three months.
WEST RIDGE — A Rohingya refugee who immigrated to the U.S. two years ago from war-torn Myanmar hoped he would find opportunity and a second chance by settling in Chicago, with a job at O’Hare. Instead, Amir Hussin Bin Mohamadur Rahman has found himself at the center of a workers rights struggle unfolding within Chicago’s labor force.
Rahman, 25, got a job shortly after his arrival in June 2015 with Scrub, Inc., a company that employs workers who clean the cabins of planes after flights.
That relationship ended in late November after Rahman publicly rallied alongside Service Employees International Unionmembers and other airport workers in a one-day strike with the “Fight For $15” minimum wage campaign.
Rahman also spoke out at an employee meeting advocating for Scrub, Inc. workers to unionize, an act he alleges led to his firing.
[….]
At different times, Rahman and Ahmad made their way to Malaysia before immigrating to the U.S. and resettling in the Rogers Park/West Ridge area where an established Rohinga refugee community exists. [It exists because the US State Department and a refugee contractor place them there. Just what Chicago needs (poor refugees competing with poor Americans for jobs)—ed]
The new UN High Commissioner for Refugees (after visiting Senator John McCain in Washington and signing an agreement to get more money from US taxpayers) visited Eli’s Cheesecake Company in Chicago. Arizona Senator John McCain warmly greets new UN High Commissioner for Refugees as Grandi comes to DC for his annual dip into the US Treasury. Grandi is ‘head hunter’ for American big business. https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2016/03/15/united-nations-and-us-state-department-have-close-working-relationship-when-deciding-who-comes-to-america/
We learn that a federal refugee contractor lines up jobs for refugees with Eli’s!
ContractorRefugeeOne took in $2.1 million from taxpayers in 2014 to act as an employment service for refugees. It brags that it brought 16,000 refugees to Chicago since 1982! What! no Americans willing to make cheesecake? Or, is there some special tax incentive for Eli’s to hire foreign labor?
The UN trumpets the news here:
CHICAGO, United States, March 18 (UNHCR) – During a week-long visit to the United States, the head of the United Nations refugee agency welcomed Washington’s longstanding commitment to resettling more refugees than any other country and emphasized that managing the refugee crisis is a global responsibility.
Speaking on a visit to Chicago, where he met with refugees, US lawmakers and resettlement agencies, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said: “Resettlement addresses the needs of the most vulnerable and is the safest way to move people from one country to another. Refugees flee terror, they don’t bring terror to countries. Their arrival is very carefully vetted, so there should be no fear.”
[….]
While in the Midwestern city, Grandi visited RefugeeOne, a Chicago area non-profit that works with refugeesfleeing war, persecution and terror, helping them to build new lives of safety, dignity and self-reliance.
Eli’s CEO Marc Schulman gets cheap immigrant labor and bakes cakes for Obama! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eli%27s_Cheesecake
Finding employment is a major step for a refugee to become self-reliant and one of the businesses that RefugeeOne has long partnered with is Eli’s Cheesecake Company, which has been employing refugees for over 25 years.
[….]
“It takes UNHCR to protect us, RefugeeOne to place us in jobs and people like Marc to help us become productive,” he added, referring to the President of Eli’s Cheesecake Company.
RefugeeOne is a subcontractorof three BIG contracting agencies of the US State Department: Church World Service, Episcopal Migration Ministries, and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.
So, no low income Americans want the jobs? Or, it just isn’t cool enough for these Christian charities to help Americans first?
See Leo Hohmann at WND about African Americans being hammered by competition with immigrant labor, here.
The Daily Caller has posted a list of the groups (it wasn’t just Media Matters!) who organized the disruptive and at times violent protest that shut down a Donald Trump rally on Friday evening in Chicago. ICIRR’s Fred Tsao http://icirr.org/content/fred-tsao
One group is the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR). (Note the Daily Caller reporter has garbled the name.) But below andhereis what the DC says of a group we have reported on many times over the years. (See our lengthy archive on ICIRR here.)
I can’t emphasize enough that ICIRR and its companion groups, like the ones in Tennessee and Massachusetts, are not driven by ‘humanitarian’ zeal, but are hard left community agitation groups working to change America by changing the people!
This radical leftist group, specializing in immigration, is a more extreme version of the far left version of National Council on La Raza in Illinois.
The group was featured in an article profiling some of the groups intending to protest Trump’s rally in the left-wing website, Progress Illinois on March 8 entitled “New Americans Hit The Polls In Chicago As Immigrant Advocates Gear Up For Anti-Trump Protest.”
“There’s a lot of really hateful rhetoric with respect to immigrants being voiced by candidates out there, “ICIRR’s Senior Policy Counsel Fred Tsao said in that article. “We want to show that immigrants are patriotic, contributing and eager to participate in the political process and to integrate into society.” [Hey Fred, hint! It doesn’t help your cause to get poor immigrants and refugees out to events like this!—ed]
This group was not only instrumental in creating not only the most radical local immigration ordinance but championed the case which inspired the DREAM Act.
Go hereto read more about ICIRR and other groups that organized the anti-free speech rally in Chicago.
Remember readers that when you make that foolish distinction and say LEGAL immigration is good and illegal is bad, groups like ICIRR are making no such distinction. It is all the same to them—they want large numbers of immigrants to build a permanent voting majority for their Leftwing wet dreams. See a list of their ‘partners’ here.
ICIRR’s former director, Joshua Hoyt, has moved on to a larger ‘change agent’ role, see a mention here. He is the Executive Director of the National Partnership for New Americans, here.
