It’s March 31st, do you know where Matthew Lee is tonight?

 Update April 3, 2008:   Still no sign of Mr. Lee’s monthly report to complain about the Bush Administration not bringing enough Iraqis to the US.   I can only conclude that the numbers were up this month and thus it was not worth reporting.    Or, maybe he is waiting for the big pow-wow tomorrow. 

Time for our monthly Matthew Lee Watch

We are waiting for AP reporter Matthew Lee to tell us how few Iraqi refugees arrived in the United States during the month of March.   The time of his reporting varies slightly.   Last month he posted his story about 8 hours into the first day of the month, but he was early and reported late in the evening of October 31st, so who knows it could be soon!

He will tell us how many Iraqis are in Syria and Jordan, and that we have a moral obligation to bring them to America (even Bush says so!). 

He will tell us that the Bush Administration promised to resettle 12,000 in FY 2008 which began on October 1, 2007.   Then there will be a little subtraction to show how many the Administration will need to bring to fill its quota for the year.

He may make an oblique mention of the fact that Homeland Security and the State Department were in a tussle over security issues.  I guess, by at least mentioning it, he covers his bases, but never goes into much detail about Homeland Security’s concerns about terrorists getting in as refugees.

I would really like to see him find out how many of the refugees coming from Iraq are Christians and how many are Muslim, now that would be an interesting bit of investigative reporting.

If any of you see his report before I do, please comment here and send a link!

So who is coming with the Bhutanese?

If this article is accurate, it looks like there could be others of unknown nationality resettling in the West from the refugee camps in Nepal.

KATHMANDU, 30 March 2008 – As one of the world’s largest third-country resettlement processes started this week in Nepal, with over 10,000 Bhutanese refugees scheduled to be resettled in various Western countries by the end of 2008, Bhutan has disputed that all the refugees are in fact from Bhutan.

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Sonam Tobgay, head of the policy division of the Bhutanese Foreign Ministry, told IRIN on 27 March: “It is… factually incorrect to term all the people in the camps [in eastern Nepal] Bhutanese. Bhutan cannot accept a blanket reference to all the people in the camps as being ‘refugees’ from Bhutan.”

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Tobgay said the problem of the people in the camps in eastern Nepal was not straightforward: “It is a highly complex issue with its genesis in illegal immigration, in a region marked by vast population movements, porous and open borders, poverty, environmental degradation and political instability.”

We’ve heard rumors that there is rampant corruption when United Nations employees approve refugees for resettlement; we hope that is not the case here because literally tens of thousands are expected to be brought to the West from Nepal over several years.

Some refugees have complained there has been an unclear process of selecting refugee families for interview.

This article says some of the first are headed to Arizona.    We reported several resettlement cities last week here.   Start reading back from here if you want to follow our coverage of the decision to bring Bhutanese to the US and the conflict that decision has created in the camps where many do not want to come. 

Kansas Somali refugee arrested in rape of students

Thanks to a tip from Us or Them, here is a story that our friends in Kansas will be surprised to hear (or maybe not).   A Somali refugee has been charged with intoxicating and raping two boys from a Catholic High School. I am not making that up!

 A Leavenworth substitute teacher accused of unlawful sexual relationships with high school students is a Somalian refugee in the United States under political asylum, officials said Thursday.

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Mohamed A. Dirshe, 26, has been charged in Leavenworth County District Court with three counts of unlawful sexual relations and three counts of furnishing alcohol to a minor for illicit purposes, which are all felonies.

The article goes on to tell us what a terrible story Mr. Dirshe has, as if somehow that might excuse the behavior.  I’m going to suggest that some of these tales of terror are fabricated to open the doors to the good life (complete with a college scholarship) in America.

At the age of 9, he witnessed the murder of his father, uncle and older brother outside his home in Somalia by militia men from a rival clan, according to an article in the winter 2005 edition of Aspire, the university’s alumni magazine.

Lest I am accused of shadenfreude, the situation is horrible.  However, the irony of this happening at a Catholic School, since it is Catholic Charities that is being paid to resettle refugees in Kansas will not be lost on folks in say Emporia, KS where the Somali refugee issue dominated the news for months.   Mums the word from Catholic officials.

Officials with the Leavenworth Regional Catholic Schools could not be reached for comment Thursday.

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Police are investigating whether there were more victims.

Mohammed is a very lucky fellow in one way.  If he were subject to Sharia law, it wouldn’t be long before he would be hoisted by one of those cranes with a noose around his neck as we saw in “Fitna.”

NY Times: Fraud in the non-profit world

No, you don’t say!  This article from the New York Times rounds out my troika of posts this weekend that began with Chicago non-profits getting boatloads of charitable money that go for political organizing, Chris Coen’s charges that although well paid, Chicago charities have a bad record of caring for refugees.  And, now a report that says these groups are losing billions to fraud every year.  

…. what is getting the attention of nonprofit leaders is the report’s estimate of the overall cost, which the authors put at $40 billion for 2006, or some 13 percent of the roughly $300 billion given to charity that year.

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“It’s a surprisingly large number,” said Paul C. Light, a professor of public service at New York University who does surveys of public confidence in charities. “We really need to take a good hard look at what’s going on in these organizations.”

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The new report is based on data from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, which, the report said, found that “all organizations,” whether government, for-profit or nonprofit, “lose on average 6 percent of their revenue to fraud every year.” Applying that percentage to nonprofits’ total 2006 revenue of $665 billion — donations, government payments and other income — the authors came up with the $40 billion estimate.

Read it all!    And, I can’t believe I’m saying this, good for you New York Times!

Friends of Refugees born out of Chicago experience

Last night I wrote about how your tax dollars were being used in Chicago to do “community” organizing for the political promotion of grievances by the multicultural crowd.  You know it’s a shame they don’t use all that money to help refugees and immigrants assimilate—-too busy organizing I guess!

I had recently asked Chris Coen of Friends of Refugees to tell us how he got started helping refugees after we posted this from the “Notes from the North Country” blog.  I had known that somehow Mr. Coen started helping refugees in North Dakota.     The post at “North Country” has prompted a good exchange between the blogger, Jen, and Chris Coen (be sure to read it).

So, I found it an interesting coincidence that Friends of Refugees was born in this same Chicago immigrant community that has so much taxpayer money sloshing around.  You know the one that Senator Obama was busy organizing.

Read Mr. Coen’s shocking story!

In the summer of 2001 I was driving some of the ‘Lost Boys of Sudan’ refugees from Fargo to Michigan to visit their friends, when we stopped in Chicago to see some of their refugee friends there. While we were in Chicago many of the refugees complained to me about how they were being neglected by their refugee resettlement agency, USCRI affiliate Heartland Alliance for Human Needs and Human Rights. The young refugees were placed in dilapidated, roach-infested apartments. Many of them had stomach pains and where told it was all in their head (years later we would learn that public health agencies such as Heartland Alliance’s had failed to test the Lost Boys for schistosomiasis – a stomach parasite that many of them were afflicted with). A Somali case worker at Heartland Alliance had also threatened two of the Lost Boys, saying he would deport them for complaining that the agency had done nothing to help them find jobs. Many of the refugees were also being beaten-up and/or robbed on the streets by thugs, and neither Heartland Alliance nor the government oversight agencies would do anything to intervene.

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I wrote several letters to the State Department documenting what was going on. The State Department then got on the phone with USCRI and told them to investigate themselves – an ultimately useless strategy for rooting out problems – but this is the essence of the ‘public/private partnership’ notion of refugee resettlement. The USCRI so-called investigators then flew to Chicago and wrote a report concluding I – surprise surprise – had poisoned the refugees’ minds with distrust of their agency, and that their affiliate Heartland Alliance had gone above and beyond requirements in helping the refugees.

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After that defamation report USCRI did on me to cover up their abuses I was told by the State Department people that they would be making a monitoring trip to Chicago and I could meet with them at its conclusion if I wished to. I got in my beat-up car and drove all the way to Chicago (this was just after caring for a Sudanese refugee who died from liver cancer). When I got to the expensive downtown Chicago hotel the State Department people were staying at (that’s your money) I had to pay $40 just to park the car in the hotel parking structure. The State Department people were dressed in expensive clothing and aloof. They had their buddy, the Illinois state refugee coordinator with them – a Dr. Silverman – he’s real hostile and has to get up frequently to go out to smoke. We sat down to talk and I gave the State Department people additional information I had collected from the refugees. They didn’t believe any of the complaints the refugees made that I was forwarding to them.

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Yet, I had been in the dilapidated apartments and I had seen much of it with my own eyes. The State Department monitors also didn’t believe that the refugees were being assaulted on the streets (later, using a FOIA, I would get one of their own monitoring reports from Chicago from two years prior in which the State Department people themselves documented that one of the Lost Boy refugees had been robbed and assaulted in the lobby of his apartment building – and that the resettlement agency case worker had failed to tell them about it even though he had visited the refugee in the hospital after the assault). Yet, now they claimed it was not credible that refugees were being attacked and refused to take any action. Approximately a month after this meeting a dozen of the Lost Boys were playing basketball in a nearby north-side Chicago park and were attacked by the Latin Kings gang. They were beaten with bottles, fists, and a metal rod and three of them were stabbed. (I later gathered six Chicago police reports documenting attacks on dozens of the refugees).

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After my first meeting with the government monitors, they said that I could meet them again the next day at Heartland Alliance at the conclusion of their monitoring visit. I went with another Lost Boy refugee who had been resettled by World Relief. I figured this Heartland Alliance wasn’t his agency, so he wouldn’t be in a strange position. The State Department people refused to let him in. They said, “no way”, and wouldn’t explain why he couldn’t participate in the process. At the meeting I got lectured by a Bosnian case worker who said that the Lost Boys of Sudan are actually lucky being practical celebrity refugees in the U.S., and when she came here as a refugee no one looked in on her. The State Department people said that most of what the refugees had claimed that I had told them was not true. Dr Silverman was there again, seemingly there only to “defend” Illinois as a good refugee resettlement site (i.e. “bring in more government grants and low-wage labor”), and had to run outside in the middle of the meeting for another smoke.
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At the conclusion the State Department personnel promised to send me a copy of their monitoring report when they finished it, and then I left. They then never sent me the report. I had to do a FOIA and wait about 16 months for the report. When I finally read the report I observed that they had covered up most of the neglect, abuses, and contract-cheating that had gone on (that’s your tax money at work paying for so-called government ‘monitors’).

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After that, I founded my group and got to work on the issue, seeing that the root of the problems seemed to go all the way to the top in Washington. I’ve been at it ever since. I have used my own time and my own money to help refugees to resettle. Rather than finding refugee resettlement agencies and their supposed government oversight agencies being of assistance to the resettlement efforts, I have often found them getting in the way, if not outright siphoning off public money while neglecting refugees.