Month: August 2008

Puff piece on Virginia Council of Churches refugee program needs some balance

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday I told you what a great year we have had at Refugee Resettlement Watch—over 100,000 visitors to this site to learn more about the refugee program in the US.  You have the Virginia Council of Churches (VCC) to thank for that!    I have been meaning to write about them anyway because this time last year we were having a heated public discussion about VCC in Hagerstown, MD (all recorded in the category ‘September Forum’)  Now, I can use this article from Harrisonburg, VA to remind long-time readers and to tell new readers how we got here.

A year and a half ago Judy and I knew nothing about the Refugee Resettlement Program of the US State Department, until that is, we started reading about problems refugees were having in Hagerstown (MARYLAND), our county seat.   The case that got the public’s attention first involved a sick African woman who sent a child out on the street to find help which was followed by a series of miscommunications that could have been resolved quickly if someone knew how to reach the VIRGINIA Council of Churches.  To fire and rescue it was a mystery  how this African woman came to be in the worst neighborhood in the city.   As a result of the language barrier the incident blew up into a Hazmat situation because medical personel thought the woman (and others in the building) might have some dangerous communicable disease.

Shortly after the incident, Virginia Council of Churches asked our county government for $15,000 for their program—now people wanted to know how this Virginia “church” could be bringing what turned out to be hundreds of refugees to our county without any local say in the matter.

I asked a reporter at our local paper to find out and tell us all how the Refugee program worked.  The Hagerstown Herald mail refused and here we are telling you for over a year now how the refugee program works and attempting to balance the news coverage of the program—like this article from Harrisonburg.   We believe each community should know the whole story about how refugee resettlement will effect one’s community, we think the coverage has been way too one-sided (everything is just lovely everywhere).   I believe that if people are given all the facts, a government program can then be weighed fairly in a city or town.  It was very clear to us that facts were being withheld in order to sell the refugee program to Hagerstown. 

We also hope that by bringing the facts to you, this program will ultimately be reformed! 

To make what is now turning into a long story short, we ultimately had a public meeting (the September Forum) so that federal and state officials, Church World Service and VCC could tell the citizens the facts.  I had high hopes for a better understanding through this meeting.   The meeting was contentious with citizens once again feeling that they weren’t hearing the full story.  A week or so later it was announced that the Virginia Council of Churches was leaving town (State Department pulled the financial plug through its contractor, Church World Service), and we, and Hagerstown were labelled “unwelcoming”.  Really what happened is that the VCC had done such a lousy job caring for refugees and working with the general public that they were sent back to Virginia with their parting “unwelcoming” shot at Hagerstown.

Now to the Harrisonburg article:

Refugee Resettlement functions as an arm of the Virginia Council of Churches, a network of 37 churches spanning 22 denominations in Virginia. The Harrisonburg Refugee Resettlement office helps refugees get resettled in a geographical area from Winchester to Roanoke.

I guess this (above) means that their region has shrunk (no longer jumping across state lines), and note the implication is that the churches are doing the resettling.  As for Roanoke, no mention of the BIG problems there between the black American population and the Somalis that these government contractors have resettled in their midst.

According to its Web site, the Council formed the Refugee Resettlement Program in 1962 in response to a large number of Cuban exiles entering the United States. Nationally, the program admitted 70,000 refugees a year until 2001, Sokolyuk said, when the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 resulted in tighter security measures for refugees.

After 2001, the State Department reduced the number of refugees allowed in the country annually to 29,000, Sokolyuk said.

Lately, said Sokolyuk, the State Department has relaxed such restrictions.

Doesn’t Mr. Sokolyuk know that the ceiling for FY 08 is 80,000 refugees to be admitted to the US and the number could go higher if special legislation mandating more Iraqis is successful?

After receiving 50 refugees a year from 2002 to 2007, the Harrisonburg Refugee Resettlement already has processed applications for 123 people this year, said Sokolyuk.

The Virginia Council of Churches budgets $1.3 million a year for its three Refugee Resettlement offices to process refugees, said Sokolyuk. Each office receives its share of the budget based on the number of refugees it processed the previous year.

Since VCC is now getting 123 refugees their ‘time out’ inflicted by the State Department must be over.  No mention here that almost all of VCC’s budget is from the coffers of the US taxpayer through the primary government contractor Church World Service.  Last year a representative of VCC said 90% of their budget comes from government.  Of course, one can’t confirm that because they have filed as a “church” with the IRS and are not required to file a Form 990 that other non-profits are required to file.

Sokolyuk is quick to point out that the general public often confuses the terms “refugee” and “immigrant.” There is a huge difference between the two: Refugees leave their native lands with more urgency than do immigrants, who have more time to plan.

“With refugees, the body goes first, and the mind follows,” said Sokolyuk. “With immigrants, the mind goes first, and the body follows.”

What the heck does that mean?   You see—this is why we started this blog.   Instead of complete straightforward information you get this B.S. —-“the body goes first and the mind follows.”    The major difference between other legal immigrants and refugees is that refugees (and asylees) must show that they are persecuted or have a reasonable fear of persecution because of such things as religion, race, nationality, a particular social group or political opinion.  Other immigrants seek visas for various reasons and bascially wait in line.

The other huge difference is that refugees receive travel loans (loans from the federal government) to get here, they get help(?) from groups like VCC, they get apartment subsidies, medical exams, ESL lessons, food stamps, SSI, etc. etc.   And of course that is why there are so many people in the world trying to figure out how to be refugees.

On the travel loans, go to the article and see the comment by Chris Coen of Friends of Refugees and see how that works.  VCC gets a cut of any loan it can collect from refugees.  We were told by sources that refugees in Hagerstown could barely speak English and were getting dunning letters from VCC and didn’t understand what that was all about and were frightened by the letters.

This next part, about finding individual church sponsors, is absolutely not true:

First, refugees contact the United Nations, which refers applicants to the State Department. Such volunteer groups as Church World Service and Episcopal Immigration Ministries review applications and contact localities throughout the U.S., seeking churches or other organizations willing to sponsor refugees.

Batches of sometimes hundreds of refugees are sent to a “welcoming” city where a volag (supposedly voluntary agency, but paid by you) is supposed to resettle the refugees.  Here in Hagerstown they had maybe 3 churches and a mosque and resettled over 200.  The reason so much went wrong is that they didn’t have individual churches taking individual families and the few churches and the mosque ultimately threw up their hands because volunteer church members were completely overwhelmed by the numbers.    In other cities, Waterbury, CT comes to mind, the volags actually discouraged individual church volunteers and screwed up so badly the program was halted there too.

One of the reforms we advocate is that we should go back to the old system where individual churches would use their own private charity to sponsor a family and acclimate them to America—the present system of paying groups to resettle masses of people is not working!  This blog is filled with stories of waste and abuse by volags.

Sorry this post got way long, congratulations to readers who got this far!

Tyson’s Food drops Labor Day holiday in favor of Muslim holiday in TN

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update August 13th:  More thoughts on this from Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch.

Update August 12th:  JIm Boulet of English First says Tyson’s reversal a big victory for America, here.  And, be sure to see Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy here on Tysons, Sharia creep and Brian Mosely.

Update August 10th:   CAIR calls critics of Tyson’s Islamophobes here.

Update August 8th:  Union overturns the contract here.

Update August 7th:  Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch at Frontpage here, and a lot of informative comments at Jihad Watch here.  See the Shelbyville Times-Gazette editorial today too.

New from the Times-Gazette on August 6th:  Brian Mosely has a follow-up article here.  And, my response to the bigotry charge here.

Update August 6th:  My comments on this story, where are the investigative journalists?

Update August 5th:  Here Fox News adds a bit more information.

More on this story on August 4th:  Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies made a few additional good points here.

My latest update:   This post has led to renewed interest in what happened in Emporia, KS, go here.

Update! August 4th:   Bloggers (here) are now going after Mosely for exposing one critic of his reporting as an employee of a refugee resettlement volag.  What, he isn’t allowed to question critics motives who are questioning his?   It seems to me that if you put your employer’s name on the internet, it is public information.

Update! Update!  August 3rd:   See reporter Brian Mosely’s blog today on how this story is spreading like wildfire here.

Another shoe has dropped in Shelbyville, TN where Somalis now make up a large percentage of the workers in a Tyson’s chicken processing plant there.  

Workers at Tyson Foods’ poultry processing plant in Shelbyville will no longer have a paid day off on Labor Day, but will instead take the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr in the fall.

A recent press release from the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) stated that a new contract at the Shelbyville facility “implements a new holiday to accommodate the … Muslim workers at the plant.”

The RWDSU stated that “the five-year contract creates an additional paid holiday, Iidal Fitil, a Muslim holiday that occurs toward the end of Ramadan.”

I’m trying to figure out what is the magic number of Somalis that would be required to begin to change our American customs in a community.  

The press release stated there are approximatly 700 Muslims working at Tyson’s, but Mickelson said that Somalis only represent approximately 250 of the 1,200 employed at the plant, a little over 20 percent of the workforce.

To clarify the above, it seems the Union says 700 Somalis work at Tyson’s while Tyson’s claims only 250.  So what is up with that?   Seems like an awfully large miscount on someone’s part.

Read the whole article by award winning reporter Brian Mosely, and don’t forget to read the comments!

Through 2007 we have admitted 82,000 Somalis to the US through the refugee resettlement program.  Between 6000 and 7000 came in 2007 alone.   Go to this post where a reader and I discuss those numbers.

P.S.  If you are a new reader just joining us, see the Shelbyville Somali rampage of last week here.

We are celebrating!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Refugee Resettlement Watch is one year and one month old today!   This past week we have passed several milestones.

We passed the 100,000 visitors mark a few days ago and had our best month ever.   We had 15,118 visitors in the month of July!   This is not much compared to some blogs but we are tickled to be reaching that many people on such a specific subject.

We have also been very regular in posting and have to date posted 902 stories.  In addition to noting our categories, you might want to try our search function, it is pretty good.  You can put in a couple of words and find posts that we have written on subjects that might be of interest to you.

You can also e-mail us at that address at the right.  (It’s spelled out to eliminate some spam.)

Tell your friends about us because we are the only news outlet in the country for information on refugees that the politically correct mainstream media is not telling you about.

Oh, and in case you are wondering—we are true volunteers, no one pays us for our volunteer work!  It is a labor of love.

International Crisis Group says there is an Iraqi refugee crisis

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Somewhere recently I said I wanted to see an independent study of the Iraqi displaced people issue.    I wanted to see something written by some group that had no dog in this hunt.   So someone sent me this report entitled, “Failed Responsibility: Iraqi refugees in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon”  published just last month.

First thing I noticed was that it used the word “crisis” about a million times.  Actually I am exagerating but I searched the word “crisis” and gave up after about 10 pages of the 47 page report.   The word was used on every page at least once in the text and another whole bunch of times in the footnotes because virtually all footnotes were from information gathered by themselves—the International Crisis Group.

But, it’s on page 47 that I found the most telling information about the “independent” report.    I don’t know all the names on the International Crisis Group Board of Trustees, but here are a few I know:  George Soros, Wesley Clark, Kofi Anan, Richard Armitage, Zibigniev Brzezinski and the best of all HRH Prince Turki-al-Faisal.   LOL, such a bunch of independent members of the anti-war crowd.    As security improves in Iraq, this refugee “crisis” is the last thing they have to wrap around the neck of the Bush Administration.

Besides looking at who wrote the report, here is one of the ways I can tell if an Iraqi refugee report is legit.   If the report mentions the FACT that prior to 2003 and our arrival in Iraq, the Saddam Hussein government had displaced about a million people (many Shiites in particular went to Syria) and the volags were squawking about the refugee “crisis” then.  I could find zero mention of this fact—it’s all about the bad US.  Most of those pre-2003 displaced people are now counted in the group we are expected to bring to a city near you.

As for His Royal Highness Turki, I searched the report for any mention of Saudi Arabia and the fact that it had done nothing to help Iraqi refugees—-zip, zero, nothing!   Except check out Appendix A (map) on Page 37.   If you are not up on your geography of the region you might not know that the southwestern part of Iraq shares a very long border with Saudi Arabia.  Note how all countries joining Iraq have at least some Iraqi refugees—EXCEPT Saudi Arabia.   In fact, refugees have skipped over the Kingdom and gone to Egypt.   So, maybe old Turki had some role in that ommision?    Saudi Arabia is scared to death that a democracy could evolve in the Middle East, so they don’t want a bunch of people with democracy ideas settling in their midst (especially Shiites!).

Funny thing, I don’t think the Saudis ever resettled any Palestinian refugees either.  As a matter of fact, I will venture to guess that the ‘International Crisis Group’ kind of likes the Palestinian model and just maybe some of these folks want to recreate the model with Iraqi refugees.   It has been so successful beating the Israelis over the head with the so-called Palestinian “refugees” that they may see the same opportunity to beat the US over the head with the Iraqi refugee “crisis”.    And, lazy lap dog reporters in the mainstream media will suck this report right up and never mention who was behind it!

See more on the International Crisis Group here (this report says some Obama advisor is part of this “crisis” group too).  If any of our readers can point to anyone on this Board of Directors who might be a pro-America conservative, let me know!