Month: April 2008

Beware of Rohingyas

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Today we get news that 60 asylum-seeking Rohingyas set fire to a camp in Malasia after being rebuffed for third country resettlement by the UN.   These Burmese Muslims have been admitted to Canada and we know that the US is considering admitting them, or perhaps already has.

Here is the entire article from BBC News this week:

More than 60 immigrants from Burma have set fire to a building at a Malaysian detention camp after their request for asylum was refused.

The migrants – who claim refugee status – torched the administration building of the camp in the central state of Negeri Sembilan, according to police.

More than 200 security personnel were called in, but there were no injuries.

Police said some detainees grew angry when they were not selected by the UN for entry to a third country.

About 800 men and more than 200 women had been housed at the Lenggeng detention centre, but they have now been moved to other camps. The authorities said the rioters would be charged with arson.

Disputed status

Malaysia does not recognise political refugees and asylum seekers, and treats them as illegal immigrants, who if caught are detained and can be caned and deported.

But the UNHCR is allowed to send refugees to a third country.

It says around 39,000 registered refugees live in Malaysia, most of them from nearby Burma.

Of the total, about 13,000 are members of Burma’s Rohingya Muslim minority, and another 12,000 are members of other minority ethnic groups.

The Rohingyas arrived in Malaysia in the 1990s, but the Burmese government disputes their origin and refuses to let them return to Burma.

See our coverage of Rohingyas here.   I’ve been wondering if the murder suspect in the rape and murder case of the little Burmese Karen girl in Utah is Rohingya, but no one is talking.

New York Times: More on the Iraqi refugee drumbeat

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Everywhere you turn these days, there is a new op-ed on the Iraq displaced persons issue.  It is part of an organized campaign to continue to tell the public that the Iraq War is horrible, Bush is incompetent, and now we need to bring tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands if they had their way) of so-called Iraqi refugees to live in your neighborhoods. 

Judy wrote on the Washington Times Op-ed here yesterday.   And, now here is one from the New York Times.   These are not spontaneous articles but part of an organized campaign and they begin with this theme.

They are clustered not in camps but in overcrowded urban neighborhoods, crammed into dark, squalid apartments. Many have been traumatized by extreme violence. Their savings are dwindling; many cannot afford to pay for rent, heat and food; few have proper medical care.

Then they inevitably say it’s our moral duty to bring them to the US now, nevermind that most are Muslims who have a duly elected Islamic government in Iraq thanks to the US.  Oh, and there is never any mention of the truly persecuted Christians.

Incidentally, one of the authors here, George Rupp, Pres. of the International Rescue Committee has a taxpayer funded salary greater than the Vice President of the United States or the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.  See the post I did last fall on the subject of beating the drum. 

This is big business, refugee resettlement, and there is money to be made as long as they can keep the hype going, and the refugees flowing in.

See our “Iraqi refugee” category if you want to have a greater understanding of this issue.  We have written 137 posts on the subject.

 

Resettlement cities: old article refreshes my memory

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

In response to my post this week on Boise, ID,  a reader (Infinicat) brought to my attention an article in the Washington Post from 2006.   The article is entitled “More refugees are settling in mid-sized cities, study finds” and discusses a Brookings study by Audrey Singer.   We wrote about the Singer report here last year.

Reading the Post article today brings to mind a few points we raised long ago, but perhaps need to be brought to the forefront again as citizens in various cities are wondering how their city was chosen as a resettlement city.

We’ve written previously that it is our understanding that the Clinton administration directed that refugees be resettled throughout the US, thus taking pressure off the traditional gateway cities.   This is pretty much what has happened.   

The article on Boise added more information when we learned that the volags meet once a week to choose resettlement cities.

It also reminded me that the National Governors Association wrote the following in its Policy Position on Immigration and Refugee Resettlement in March 2007. 

The Governors continue to be concerned about the lack of adequate consultation on the part of the voluntary agencies (VOLAGs) and their local affiliates in the initial placement of refugees and on the part of the federal government in the equitable distribution of refugees and entrants.

States have continually urged the federal government to establish a mechanism to ensure appropriate coordination and consultation. However, significant progress has not been made and the following mechanisms need to be considered to address this problem.

Read the rest of this important Policy document and see the Governors’ recommendations.

So, it was especially interesting to see (in the Washington Post article) that the states of Pennsylvania, North Dakota and Iowa were losing population and actually lobbying for refugees.   But, who in the state? —the Governor, the legislature or a bunch of volags in need of more clients. 

Some states, such as Iowa, Pennsylvania and North Dakota, have been lobbying for refugees, Singer said. “Iowa is experiencing population decline and looking into its future and sees refugee resettlement as a vital way of keeping up population,” she said.

Read the whole 2006 Washington Post article, it contains some interesting numbers and a very informative graphic.

Readers in Pennsylvania, Iowa and North Dakota might want to look into the claim that your states are actively lobbying for refugees.

 

 

Nashville might be stowing the welcome sign

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Here is an article we missed  last week about Nashville, TN, a city until now in competition with Boise, ID, Ft. Wayne, IN, Dearborn, MI, and Erie, PA in the most welcoming city in America category.  Hat tip:  Infinicat

Nashville’s refugee count stands at more than 10,000 resettled by the State Department since 1997, though unofficially that population is much higher because the city’s welcoming reputation has spread throughout the United States, drawing thousands of refugees who first settled in other cities.

We’ve previously written about the Kurdish gangs, the refugee murders and the Somali Center scam of taxpayer money.    I guess people are finally getting fed up.

 Many foreign newcomers still find Nashville more open to them than other U.S. cities polarized by immigration controversies — but the honeymoon seems to be coming to an abrupt end.

Steps are being taken on all sides to avoid a war over immigration. 

Last year, the local sheriff reached an agreement with the federal government to train 15 deputies solely assigned to identify and process arrested undocumented immigrants [not all illegals in Nashville are  Hispanic].

The program has paid off, Davidson County Sheriff Daron Hall said. Nearly 3,000 immigrants have been sent packing.

Though highly controversial and derided by immigrant advocates, the collaboration was welcomed as a positive development for anti-illegal-immigration activists who believe Nashville’s cultural identity is threatened by too many new faces in town.

“We don’t know who these people are, why they’re coming here and even what diseases they may be bringing in,” said James Carter, a lifelong Nashville resident who leads the Minutemen of Tennessee, formed three years ago and now claiming 250 members.

For some, such talk is reminiscent of a hate-filled vernacular from decades ago that led to the creation of his agency, said Kelvin Jones, director of Nashville’s human relations commission.

Founded in 1965, during the tumultuous Civil Rights Movement, the commission is now working toward bringing all stakeholders to the table to prevent an all-out war over immigration.

All you cities with your welcoming signs out might want to take note of what is happening in Nashville. And you volags sitting around the conference table in Northern Virginia might want to take Nashville’s pin off your map.

See all of our posts on Nashville here.

P.S.  Guess that billboard campaign didn’t work so well for Nashville.

More Muslim refugees for Boise, ID

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update (a few hours later):   At the end of this post I encouraged readers to visit this article in USA Today and read some of the hard hitting comments.  Seems that USA Toady (as I’ve been told it is occasionally called) has decided to yank the comment thread.  Unbelievable the lengths the mainstream media will go to cover up controversy on this sacred cow issue.

 

Wow, Boise must really have the immigrant welcome sign out.  We’ve written about Boise and its growing Muslim population on many previous occasions, but this lengthy USA Today article is loaded with interesting information.   

For that matter, “most New Yorkers don’t know where Idaho is,” says Boise Mayor David Bieter, who says his city, whose population is 92% white, has “a good history of assimilation and accommodation.”

I wonder if Mayor Bieter ever heard of Imam Yahya Hendi’s prediction of 30 Muslim mayors by 2015. 

Leslye Boban agrees. She says that when she moved to Boise from Miami two years ago to open an office of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), one of three resettlement agencies here, all she knew about Idaho was “potatoes and white supremacists,” a reference to neo-Nazis who briefly were prominent in the state’s northern panhandle in the 1990s. What she found was “a really open community that for the most part has really embraced its refugees.”

Since 1975, Idaho has absorbed 12,000 refugees from 40 countries. In a sign of the impact refugees from largely Muslim nations are making, there now are three mosques in Boise and at least five hookah bars where people smoke traditional water pipes.

Boise is one of 350 cities that have volunteered to take in refugees since the fall of Saigon in 1975, Reeves says. In just eight months that year, the United States admitted 131,000 Vietnamese refugees.

Now that last is absolute bull ….  Three hundred fifty cities have not “volunteered” to take refugees.  No one asks the cities.   These non-profit groups just merrily bring refugees to cities hoping no one will notice and when the population of refugees is high enough (because no one has complained), they deem the city “welcoming.”   Then for cities like Boise, there is no turning back.

Read further and think about the fact that representatives of ten NGO’s (volags) are sitting around a table each week figuring out where they can get away with dropping off more refugees.  And, I don’t say ‘dropping off’ lightly.   This blog is filled with stories about refugees being left uncared for by these groups that are contracted by you, the taxpayer, and then the refugees are left high and dry. 

Workers at 10 private resettlement agencies meet every Wednesday morning in Arlington, Va., to pick the future homes of refugees waiting in the Middle East. They weigh family size, job skills, living costs and housing availability. The newcomers are free to go elsewhere besides their assigned cities, but most initially go where they are placed to qualify for up to eight months of government support.

The agencies take care not to cluster many refugees in towns that might be culturally or economically unprepared to absorb them. The aim is to avoid tensions like those that arose after anti-Muslim protesters threw a pig’s head into a Somali mosque in Lewiston, Maine.

Agencies do their best to find the right place, but “there’s a fair amount of movement in the first year to 18 months,” says Terry Rusch of the State Department’s Office of Refugee Admissions.

Then this:

Rare hateful rhetoric aside, there is tension here among some locals regarding the newcomers. “They come here too easy, all the out-of-the-country people,” says Chet Wilemon, 62, a construction worker. As for the Iraqis, “How do we know that they’re not building up their own terrorist communities here?”

There is always a slight mention of the tensions in the city, but reporters like this one, make it sound as if concerns are only coming from crackpots and the KKK.

Be sure to read all the comments on this article at USA Today.

Reforms needed:  As I have said on other occasions, refugee resettlement policy needs to be reformed.  The first step is a process at the federal level to require an economic and social impact study prepared for each city that is “volunteering” to take refugees.  The process would include public meetings so the citizens would have an opportunity to discuss in an open forum whether refugees will be a net plus or net minus for their city.