Month: December 2007

Shelbyville is still roiling…..

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Just as I was about to say good night and Happy New Year, someone sent me the latest from Shelbyville, TN.  Yes, can you believe it there is more!

Times-Gazette reporter Brian Mosely responded today to the criticism and the praise for his series on Somalis in Shelbyville.

Also mixed in with the comments and criticism were several messages from refugee advocates and Somalis themselves [all from out of town, some in other countries] who want to help me “understand” our new neighbors. One of them said that the Somalis “are some of the friendliest, most inviting people I know.”

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Now they want to talk to us. This is months after the failed efforts of this paper and local officials to get members of the Shelbyville Somali community to sit down with us and communicate. We repeatedly offered the chance to get their story told to the public and we never got an answer. Not even a “no, thank you.” Just silence.

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Well, I will do a follow up with their input now that this issue is fully out in the open, but it will have to wait until next year.

This was just the warm-up!  Go to the article here and read the rest, and don’t skip the comments.

Immigrants and Food Stamp fraud

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

After we had a recent federal raid on a convenience store in Hagerstown, MD where the owner, Mohammed Tariq Khan, allegedly purchased food stamps  for 50 cents on the dollar,  I’ve occasionally noticed articles about this illegal practice.  Here is an old one published at Free Republic entitled “New Immigrants Masters of Food Stamp Fraud.”

More recently, food stamp fraud has been refined by “asylees” — asylum seekers — fleeing Somalia, where rampant starvation serves as the basis of those asylum claims. Asylees are one of a very small number of immigrant groups who are normally eligible for food stamps. Last year, according to documents filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office with the District Court in Seattle, Wash., a ring of Somali couples based in Washington leveraged their skills into a multi-layered public assistance fraud that even involved cash payments from the government.

It’s going on a month now and there has been no further word about our local raid or whether anyone has been charged with a crime.   At the time the Herald Mail (our local paper) only briefly mentioned it in a police log and when I called the local AP reporter to see if they were writing on it he said that although he had received the police report,  “he hadn’t thought about writing on it.”    Is it any wonder then why the general public has no clue this stuff is going on!

Who decides which cities will get refugees next? What are the cities?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

As we end the year and begin a new one, we have to get down to work.  Shelbyville, TN and the Times-Gazette have given us lots to write about in the last 10 days or so (see our whole series here), but we need to do some basic research.  Will you help us?

First, who really decides which cities will be direct resettlement cities?  In an article in the Houston Chronicle a few weeks ago this statement intrigued me. 

In the U.S., the refugees are helped by local charitable organizations coordinated by Refugee Council USA, the Washington-based coalition that helps choose their final destinations.

I thought the US State Department was deciding which cities were to receive refugees, but if this is true, then non-profit groups are making that determination.   Are members of the Refugee Council USA just sitting around a conference table in DC with a large map of the USA looking for fresh cities to bring refugees to?   Frankly, I think this is how Hagerstown became a resettlement site a few years back. 

It is our understanding that once a city has been ‘chosen’, the volag (voluntary agency) with the contract for resettlement can then place the refugees within a hundred miles of that site.

Is there any analysis of the sites chosen?  Is there any determination made by anyone in government about the economic and social viability of the site?    Any studies done?   Apparently not.    As I said before, if the residents don’t squack then the site is a good one (“welcoming”) and more refugees are brought in.

Here are some designated resettlement cities we have already identified:

Kansas:  Bowling Green, Garden City, Wichita

Missouri:  Kansas City, Jefferson, St. Louis

Tennessee:  Bristol, Chattanoga, Memphis, Nashville

Help us find more!   If you go to this site at the Office of Refugee Resettlement and choose your state, you will get the name and contact information for your state director.  E-mail or call that person and ask for the cities that have been chosen as designated resettlement sites.  Then please tell us so we can keep an updated list.

BTW, since people can move around in America and refugees are free to leave their resettlement city in only a few months, this information does not apply to secondary migrations such as recently occured in Emporia, KS or Shelbyville, TN.   It’s the first destination site when entering the country that we are looking for in this project.

We have made a new category entitled “Resettlement cities” in which to put the information you report to us. Thanks in advance for your help.

Refugees or displaced persons?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Here is an article today from the Houston Chronicle; another article about Iraqi refugees—this time in Egypt.  The article jumps back and forth between Iraqis who are happy to learn they are going home to Iraq, happy that Saddam is gone, unhappy with the Americans for not keeping them safe and unhappy because they can’t get to America or Australia this minute.  Frankly, it’s a bit hard to follow.   However, this line caught my attention and made me think about something Judy said the other day.

They do not look like typical refugees found in camps throughout the world. They are clean, well groomed and not starving.

That’s right they don’t look like typical refugees,  but those advocates in the refugee industry (and the liberal press) want you to have that image in your mind—the starving camp image.   These are displaced persons as Judy (and Derbyshire) said in this post yesterday.

Derbyshire notes that many of the people called refugees would have been called displaced persons in earlier years. I am struck by this, because the two terms have different connotations and sometimes call for different solutions. Ann and I have always advocated more emphasis on resettling refugees in their countries of origin or neighboring countries that have offered to take them in (and sometimes been refused by the UN agency). In the past, displaced persons were seen as a group that needed to be resettled in an ethnically similar place. For example, the ethnic Germans who lost their homes in other countries as a result of World War II were taken in by Germany. Nobody suggested that we should take in small groups of Germans and scatter them around our small towns. I’d like to bring back the term “displaced persons.”

But you see, the term ‘displaced person’, doesn’t illicit the same emotional response that ‘refugee’ does.  And, besides, the ‘refugee’ label is important because it entitles the immigrant to a grab bag of American welfare goodies when they get here.

Vanishing American on Shelbyville!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Go over to the Vanishing American blog and read the excellent post on Brian Mosely’s Opinion piece on Shelbyville Somalis entitled, “Is there a method to the elites’ madness?”

Wow. I am stunned to find such an honest story in any newspaper; I commend the writer, Brian Mosely, for his honesty. How does it happen that a newspaper dares to deviate from the approved PC template? It’s unheard of.

And then this further down in the post.

I remember too vividly the TV news images of Somalis dishonoring the half-dressed corpses of the troops who were shot down by those warlords [Black Hawk Down]. At the time I was still quite a liberal, but I experienced a visceral response to the sight of American boys’ remains being trampled and dragged by these savages. And savages is the appropriate word. If we can’t apply the term ‘savage’ to them and their behavior, we may as well drop the word from our lexicon.

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So those people I saw on TV, jumping up and down on the bodies of dead Americans, are the kin of the people we are now having to welcome into our communities.

Read it all here.

UPDATE December 31st:   VDARE blog posted on Shelbyville here.