Month: June 2008

Today’s Washington Post ‘Storm’ story made me laugh

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This isn’t a story about refugees or immigration, it’s about blogging, addiction and some serious things too.  The Post article I could laugh about this morning is entitled “Storms’ Fury Cuts off Data lines that bind.”

Yes, I could laugh moments after the power came back on this morning.   I was reading the Washington Post on the porch with my convienence store cup of coffee in hand, just as I’ve done for a couple of mornings this week, ever since we lost the power in a freak storm on Wednesday.   

I wasn’t laughing as I tripped and stumbled up our farm lane that first afternoon—a lane that had become completely impassable with downed trees and saw our storm ravaged farm.   I wasn’t laughing either when I had to figure out how to haul in hundreds of gallons of water for livestock in ninety degree heat.   And, I can assure you I wasn’t even giggling a little when I packed garbage bags full with our food from the refrigerator and freezer to take to the dump.

All I could think of was how to survive day to day.  Yes, I know it was only two and a half days!    It felt like two and half years without the computer.   That was what was so funny about the Post story.  One more night and I would be checking into a hotel room (like the family in the article) just to have internet service and get back to the news and your e-mails and of course, researching posts for RRW.

It all seems very funny now.   But, it isn’t.   It really hit me this week how vulnerable we are.   My whole town was not affected by this not-quite-tornado and certainly I am not comparing our situation to those who have lost much more in recent real tornados.     I could still get in the car and get what I needed (like my morning cup of coffee), and neighbors not hit so hard came with chainsaws and a bobcat to help clean up, but imagine if our power system was destroyed on a large scale.    (I’m not telling terrorists anything they don’t already know!)  Chaos would follow.

For two and a half days I can assure you I wasn’t thinking about immigration or Iraq, or the latest from the Hillary-Obama-McCain show.   I was cut off from my addiction to the world wide web’s minute by minute news and the security it appears to provide—somehow just knowing what is going on helps one feel somehow in control (I know that doesn’t make sense). 

So, just give it all some thought and prepare your families a little.  It might not be much worse for you than me—trying to figure out what food wasn’t spoiled and could go on the backyard barbecue grill—but then again it could be very very bad and we need to be sure we are ready.  Back in January I wrote about how we all need to get a blog to save free speech and a gun to keep America safe.   To those two essentials I’ll add—-get a grill.

Getting caught in Kansas, and Candy—you go girl!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Here is a story we wrote about back in April.  It seems that this Kansas city has one problem after another with immigrants.  First, Emporia had to deal with a roiled citizenry over Tyson’s Food hauling Somali refugees to the city and then closing the plant. (See our whole category on Emporia here).  And, now it turns out that imported Filipino workers were hired illegally for a construction project in the same city.

Although the Filipino ruckus did not involve refugees, it just demonstrates again points we have made recently about the public making no distinction between legal refugees and other immigrants (legal and illegal) when they see the connection to foreign worker hiring practices that allow companies to avoid paying for American workers.

Here is the gist of the story today from the Emporia Gazette:

The subcontractor that supplied unauthorized foreign workers for the construction of the Emporia Energy Center apologized to Sen. Jim Barnett and citizens of Emporia in a letter sent to Barnett late last week.

Integrated Service Company, a Tulsa, Okla.-based company also known as InServ, said “an unintentional error” was responsible for the employment of Filipino welders and pipefitters during the construction of the Westar Energy peaking plant. The Filipinos were in the United States on H-2B work visas, which allow them to fill jobs for which there are an insufficient number of American workers.

In order to properly certify the workers for the Westar project, InServ would have needed to notify the Kansas Department of Commerce, which is federally required to verify that not enough American workers are available to fill the jobs. That notification never took place. InServ was a subcontractor for Overland Contracting, a subsidiary of Black & Veatch, which contracted with Westar for the plant construction.

And, now here is the good part! 

Rep. Candy Ruff, D-Leavenworth, began an inquiry into the Westar worker situation in March and had been exploring whether federal action can be taken against InServ, Black & Veatch or Westar. Ruff, who is completing her last term in the Kansas Legislature, said that when companies like InServ are exposed for illegal hiring practices, they go to great lengths to cover their tracks.

“Now, do I trust those bastards? Not in a New York minute do I trust ’em,” Ruff said before being sent a copy of Donaldson’s letter. “Because I think that, although they’ve gotten kind of their (expletive) in a ringer right now with the kind of things that they have been exposed to having been done, same (expletive), different day — they just got caught in Kansas. …

“This is all about making money off cheap labor, and I don’t think that’s gonna stop anytime soon. I really don’t.”

Barnett said the immigration laws that require businesses to employ legal workers should have teeth.

“If laws have been broken, then, like everyone else, there should be appropriate consequences,” he said.

 

I love you Kansans!

We buy plane tickets for Iraqi refugees and they don’t show up!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Last night a reader sent the transcript of the State Department press briefing where intrepid reporter, Matthew Lee, must have gotten his information.   Our reader pointed out that the whole thing reads like a shopping trip — how many Iraqis can we dig up and get to America to stick with our quota?   (By the way, they are aiming for 1000 a month.)   You gotta read the transcript and laugh because the reader hits that nail on the head.

But, then here is a part of the transcript and an example of the sort of thing the Associated Press isn’t mentioning in its articles because it presumably doesn’t fit the points they want to promote.  You know: desperate suffering refugees, it’s all our fault they are refugees, we must bring them to America ASAP and Bush is bad.

Ambassador (we deserve to be whipped) Foley mentioned that in the last month there were 114 no-shows—refugees who had been processed and reached the point of having airline tickets in hand and they never showed up at the airport. 

We also had, unfortunately, 114 “no shows.” In other words, these were refugees who had passed successfully every stage of the process: they were approved, they were cleared, they were booked, they had tickets, they were supposed to get on airplanes and they were unable to travel because it turned out that either they did not have the necessary exit permits or it was believed that they did not have the necessary exit permits. We also have some, frankly, as I told you before, refugees who simply don’t – for unknown reasons – appear even though they have been – have their airplane tickets. So there’s a certain amount of attrition that we have to deal with, and the arrival numbers would have been really in the 1,250 range had we not had those no shows.

Just wondering what that cost the US taxpayer? 

This admission intrigued some reporters who jumped in with questions.   Terry Rusch (In charge of Admissions at the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration) had an answer:

 Yeah (inaudible). In one or two countries there – some places are very straightforward. In Turkey, for example, refugees who are registered have to go and live in assigned communities all around the country. And some of them do this and others don’t. If they don’t, and they haven’t completed all the requisite paperwork for registration, showing evidence they have been there throughout this period, their getting exit permits is a more complicated process. And the people who are issuing these exit permits – or not – are either not mindful or it doesn’t particularly bother them that somebody has a plane ticket for the United States. That’s not their main concern. Their main concern is they have regulations that people are supposed to have done X, Y, and Z before they issue an exit permit. So I don’t think it’s anything people are trying – preventing people from leaving to go to the United States. It’s more of a bureaucratic red tape exercise. 

Foley then reiterates how very important it is that they get this problem solved because as the year progresses they need every one of those refugees to meet their shopping quota. 

It’s bureaucratic, but these countries also take those requirements very seriously, and so we are looking at this problem. We are certainly aware that as we get near the end of the fiscal year, and we’re mindful of reaching our goal, that we want to make sure that the refugees themselves are keenly aware of the requirements so that they can meet those requirements in the various countries and not be barred from getting on airplanes.

The discussion of how hard it is to get exit visas in many countries led into a discussion of where are these refugees anyway.  I bet most reporters (and me too) thought they were exclusively in Syria and Jordan, afterall isn’t that where we keep hearing the millions of suffering are located?

But our capacity was much more robust and remains more robust in Jordan. So I believe that we are still seeing more arrivals from Jordan than we are from Syria. But they are one and two. And then the other source countries are Egypt and Turkey and the states of the Gulf. And also, we have Iraqi refugees in disparate parts of the world, and that requires us to schedule, in effect, circuit rides not only for DHS adjudicators but for our processing entities which don’t have installations in the region. So they need to do the same thing and we send – Terry, could you describe some of the far-flung places we will process Iraqi refugees?

 Then Ms. Rusch again:

New Delhi. I think there was one processed in Beijing recently. Malaysia. Well, far-flung – Greece. But they’re turning up in lots of places.

What!!!  We are scouring the world for Iraqis?  They are in India, Turkey, the Gulf States, and China and Malaysia, and even Greece.  If those Iraqis have the wherewithal to get to China and Greece, why do we need to track them down, at enormous expense to the taxpayer, and get them to America?

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.