Day: June 3, 2008

Matthew Lee (AP reporter): Iraqis admitted to US increasing, but Bush is still bad

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Well, by golly, Matthew Lee, intrepid AP reporter is back  (two hours and twenty minutes ago!), but a couple of days late.  Every month like clockwork Mr. Lee bashed the Bush Administration for not admitting enough Iraqi refugees to satisfy the insatiable non-governmental agencies and the volags appetites for new immigrants to resettle in a town near you.   I remember back in October he was on the story before the stroke of midnight on Halloween with the paltry numbers for October.     I missed him for a few months, but here he is again. 

The story is basically the same although the numbers were up for last month. 

First, he always tells us how bad the numbers have been, better now, but overall they have been abysmal:

After months of falling short of the average number of admissions needed to meet the target, officials said 1,141 Iraqi refugees had been admitted in May, the first time since 2003 that the 1,000 per month mark has been surpassed. Officials also for the first time released figures for Iraqi refugees in the processing pipeline who have not yet been allowed in.

Then we learn AGAIN that compared to benevolent Sweden we stink (oh, never any mention that Sweden is having problems and deporting Iraqis, don’t confuse anyone with the facts!): 

The 12,000 target is still far lower than other many countries, notably Sweden, which has admitted about 40,000 since 2003, and only a small slice of the some 2 million Iraqis who have fled to neighboring countries, mainly Syria, Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and Egypt.

There is always the mention of “critics” (hey, Matthew why don’t you ever ask non-critics like me and Judy) and the United States’s moral duty: 

The United States has come under criticism from advocacy groups and lawmakers for its poor performance on admitting Iraqi refugees who have fled violence since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. Many critics say, and officials acknowledge, that the administration has a moral obligation to the refugees and is not doing enough to help them.

And, finally James (we deserve a whipping) Foley the State Department coordinator admits that they know they have fallen short but they are trying oh so hard:

We have a long way to go and we recognize that,” said James Foley, the State Department’s coordinator for Iraqi refugees. Foley was appointed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to streamline the admissions process and meet the goal of admitting 12,000 Iraqi refugees during the current budget year.

“It’s a tall order,” he said. “It’s a difficult hurdle, but we are determined to succeed and we are increasingly confident that we can. The infrastructure is now fully in place.” 

There is NEVER any mention of security concerns that Homeland Security has about admitting Iraqis (the Muslim Iraqis that is).   And, NEVER NEVER do these lazy reporters discuss the alternatives to bringing tens of thousands to America, or NEVER any mention that hundreds of thousands of the Iraqi refugees in nearby countries have been there since Saddam Hussein drove them out of Iraq.

It’s always the same old story:  Millions of suffering Iraqis, it’s all our fault, bring them to America ASAP and Bush is bad.

If you have the stamina and the interest, go to our Iraqi Refugees category.  We have written 163 posts on the topic in the past year.   I’ll bet we know more about the subject then Mr. Lee.

Another city with too many refugees, what else is new

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Here is an article from Aurora, IL.   It starts out with the usual heartwarming template story about a struggling but happy refugee family and all the wonderful help they are gettting from World Relief, the resettlement agency.   But, as you read down through the lengthy story, a picture of a city trying to cope with a rapid influx of low skilled people who speak virtually  no English begins to emerge.

The first place the trouble is obvious is almost always the school system.  Teachers are overloaded as it is and when a group of students arrive unexpectedly (it is always unexpectedly) everyone is scrambling to figure out how to handle the costs and the stress of it all.    Local taxpayers are forced to cough up the money for what basically is an unfunded mandate by the Federal government.

A local alderman stated in one simple sentence what so many are saying in cities large and small: 

“God bless these people,” he said, “but at what point, Aurora has to ask, how much can we handle?”

It doesn’t have to be this way.  These local elected officials can just say ‘no’, we can’t handle anymore.   There is no federal law that says they must absorb an infinite number of refugees just because some volag (NON-GOVERNMENT agency) arrives in town and tells them they must.   Just because the US State Department brings refugees into the country and contracts (pays) these volags to resettle them, I repeat, does not give the Volag authority over the local elected governmental bodies.  

The more refugees a city takes, the more they will get.

Reforms needed:

The refugee resettlement program must be reformed.  I suggest an economic and social impact study to be done in advance of refugees being resettled in a particular community.  The report would periodically be updated and elected officials could then monitor the capacity of their city/county to handle a specific number of low-skilled workers who do not speak English and need welfare to supplement meager incomes. 

Oh, one more thing, I would get rid of the volags.  Let government agencies, accountable to taxpayers, run the resettlement.  Those agencies can still go out and find local churches and other groups to help with the volunteer work.  Based on local experience, most of these volags are doing rotten jobs finding volunteers anyway.

Gateway cities: the Sacramento example

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Check out this article “Twenty-First Century Gateways: Immigrants in Suburban America” at Immigration Daily a publication of the ILW.com.  (You might even want to subcribe to the free publication.)

We’ve mentioned Gateway cities in the past.  Traditionally immigrants arriving in the US went to certain cities. Two that come readily to mind are  New York and Los Angeles.  All that has changed and immigrants and refugees are spreading out not just to large and medium-sized cities but to suburban areas as well.    Audrey Singer and co-authors have written a book entitled, “Twenty-first Century Gateways: Immigrant Incorporation in Suburban America” in which they describe the changing demographics throughout the US.

Here’s one example from this article about the book:   The apparently ‘welcoming’ city of Sacramento, CA 

Sacramento, although it is the capital of California and located in a traditional settlement state, had been largely bypassed by immigrants during the mid-20th century, but its foreign-born population began rising during the 1980s and 1990s due mainly to refugee resettlement.

[…]
 

 

Geographers Robin Datel and Dennis Dingemans identify a host of forces that have led to the re-emergence of Sacramento as a gateway of immigration. These include a history of immigrant settlement, the region’s role as a refugee magnet, the availability of inexpensive suburban housing, and the demand for both brain and brawn migrants.

Sacramento had about 250,000 foreign-born residents in 2000, and it gained another 100,000 by 2006, making it 17.6 percent foreign born. Forty-one percent of this population is from Asia; 33 percent from Latin America; and 11 percent from Eastern Europe. Furthermore, Sacramento ranked tenth among all US metropolitan areas in the absolute number of refugees that were resettled between 1983 and 2004.

 

Wow, 100,000 immigrants added to the city in just six years. 

* Note to cities:  You can say ‘no’ after awhile.

Friends in high places: Muslim immigrants helped by Norquist

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Grover Norquist is President of the Americans for Tax Reform and a prominant GOP political mover and shaker (supposedly best friends with Karl Rove), but he also has promoted stepped-up immigration of Muslims to the US.  We reported last year that he played a key role in pushing the Kennedy bill to allow more Iraqi refugees into the US.     And, for a guy supposedly concerned for the taxpayer, his organization supported the Bush-Kennedy Amnesty bill that the voters resoundingly defeated last summer in Congress.

This morning comes a Frontpage magazine article by Paul Sperry (Hat tip:  Janet) explaining how Norquist is also playing a role in planting Muslim Republicans in elected office.    The article begins: 

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. That appears to be the strategy of GOP powerbroker Grover Norquist in his wicked project to dress Islamists up as patriotic Republicans so they can infiltrate the government.

While he’s managed to get some of his Muslim proteges jobs in the Bush administration, getting them elected to public office has been another story. Voters aren’t buying their makeover.

Last November, his crony Faisal M. Gill lost a bid for a seat in the Virginia state legislature. Now another protege, Kamal M. Nawash, has lost his third political race in seven years. Republicans in Virginia’s most affluent county last month overwhelmingly rejected Nawash as their party leader.

Gill and Nawash failed despite the ringing endorsements and behind-the-scenes maneuvering of Norquist, who founded the Islamic Institute (where he met his Palestinian wife) with the express purpose of promoting such Muslims into positions of power.

The article describes the deception used by GOP candidates Norquist supports and ends as follows: 

Early last decade, the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in America wrote an 18-page manifesto, titled “General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America.” Their secret plan was to form legitimate-sounding Muslim NGOs like the MSA and AMC and use them to infiltrate and subvert the U.S. political system. Translated from Arabic, the document reads in part:

“(Our) work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

Another document in Arabic found on the home computer of al-Arian states:

“Our presence in North America gives us a unique opportunity to monitor, explore and follow up. We should be able to infiltrate the sensitive intelligence agencies or the embassies in order to collect information.”

In other words, their goal is to infiltrate the U.S. political system and undermine it from within.

Scandalously, they have in Norquist a powerful inside-the-Beltway friend who’s still helping them run influence operations against the government – now under the cynically patriotic guise of GOP candidacy. 

Read all the troubling details and fascinating examples of how Muslim immigrants use the principle of taqiyya.  Lying is permitted in Islam and it is something that we Westerners who grew up with the Ten Commandments need to wrap our minds around.

And, remember Thirty Muslim Mayors!

P.S.  To any BAMs (Black American Muslims) reading this, the IMMs (Immigrant Muslims) do have a strategy led by the Muslim Brotherhood and I think they are leaving you out.