Baltimore, MD: another bunch of unhappy Iraqi refugees

Update Nov. 8th:  Oops!   I can’t believe I forgot to give you the link to this story.  Check out the story and comments here.

Here we go again.  Where is Matthew Lee?   Lee is the Associated Press reporter who has been an advocate for groups like the International Rescue Committee pushing for more Iraqi refugees that they can’t afford to take care of.  

I know there will be howls at what I’m going to say, but what the heck, here goes.  I know a little about animal rescue and there is a psyciatric condition known as ‘Animal Collection Syndrome.’   I’m wondering if there have been any studies on refugee collecting?  

The only other explanation for what I’m reporting here is that these volags like the money too much that they get from the federal tax payer, while the State Department is bringing in too many refugees.

The latest group of unhappy Iraqi refugees are in our home state, Maryland.  The International Rescue Committee dismisses them as having “unrealistic expections.”   Gee where have I heard that before (here, here, here, and here)?

This month 15 refugee families from Iraq, most with children, face the loss of their rental assistance. Without jobs, transportation or English-language skills, some fear they will be evicted and left homeless.

The families, which have been in Baltimore since August and September, say they were promised eight months of assistance, including food stamps, rent, and utilities, along with language and job-training and placement assistance. But in October they learned that their rental assistance would end after only two months, and some have outstanding utility bills of hundreds of dollars, according to Dr. Nasir Al Khalidi, an Iraqi-American who has been helping the refugees. “Some of them say return us to die in Iraq–it would be better to die in Iraq than die of starvation in America,” Al Khalidi says. “Can you believe that?”

The International Rescue Committee (IRC), a nonprofit U.S. State Department contractor that resettles refugees from around the world, says Iraqi refugees often have unrealistic expectations, but that things work out.

A VP for the IRC basically calls them ingrates:

The family says it has no money even for bus fare to reach English-language classes at Baltimore City Community College downtown. The man says he has been asked by the aid agency to repay airfare totaling $2,400 for the family [ The IRC gets a cut of the airfare they collect that you the taxpayer paid for]. He retrieves a bill from Baltimore Gas and Electric totaling $370.90, which arrived on Oct. 18, the same day the family received a $138 phone bill.

A woman who answered the telephone at the International Rescue Committee’s Baltimore office referred a reporter to Bellor, IRC’s resettlement vice president, who is based in New York City. While unfamiliar with the specifics of the Baltimore families, Bellor acknowledges that many Iraqi refugees feel swindled by the resettlement process.

“The story is the same as you’ll find in other places,” Bellor says. “What they expected and what they encountered were different.”

Bellor says Iraqis tend to be harder to please than, say, Burmese refugees, in part because many Iraqis had professional careers and middle-class lives before the war. “What often happens,” she says, is “a job is found for them. They’re like, ‘What? I have to go make beds in a hotel?’ Some of them refuse these jobs.”

Just send us more federal tax money and we can make it right!

Bellor says that IRC is doing what it can with the resources it has. “I think the U.S. refugee program could use a serious review,” she says. “The amount of money that’s available for refugees hasn’t kept pace with income and cost of living.”

Vice Presidents at the IRC make between $100,000 and $200,000 a year.  Maybe they could just cut a VP slot and help the refugees with the money they saved.

Remember that wise Iraqi boy in Tucson?

It is better to have 10 Iraqi refugees who are satisfied with their lives than having 100 angry ones with no life at all.

I got sidetracked today…..

I told you this morning that I was going to get back to work and here I am 12 hours later, just getting around to it.  And, now I have even more stories piled up to post on! 

One of the things that kept me occupied today, besides necessary family stuff, is that I began studying literature on community organizing, or more accurately, community disorganizing.   I’ll be writing on this from time to time but the basic idea of what I learned today is that to effectively destablize communities you need people who are different—immigrants being the obvious first choice—to use as your reason for demanding change.

Another thing I learned is that some of the leaders of the community organizing movement may not even have any ideological goal.  Oh, some definitely are Marxists and want to see America become a socialist country, and others have some vague idealistic notion of forcing their idea of equality on others,  but some of the brains behind the concept of “change” are really just hooked on change itself.   Having no real moral core they are addicted to the disruption they bring to the lives of those they see as not fully alive.  That would be you—a conservative who wants to work hard, pay your bills, raise your family, follow your faith, do your patriotic duty, and lead a peaceful (boring to the change addict!) life. 

It strikes me as the basic disconnect we experienced in this election.  This is why conservatives don’t get it about the ultra change agent himself—Barack Obama.    Lacking somehow somewhere (I’m not going to play psycotherapist) Obama is fighting for change (of whatever sort) because it gives him a high—a reason to be alive.

I haven’t gotten there yet in my studies, but I know that this strategy to manipulate communities involves getting in regular folks faces.  And, because those regular folks are those I just described, just wanting a peaceful family life, they (the community disorganizers) know the regular folks will back down and look for ways to appease the manipulators.  

One of the main things the disorganizers and manipulators want from communities (or our whole nation for that matter) these days is for us to accommodate Islamic practices.   That would be part of the stealth jihad Judy wrote about yesterday.

Look for that effort going on in Shelbyville, TN this week.   Likewise, it is probably happening in Grand Island, NE as we speak. 

We already have a category called “changing the way we live,” but this doesn’t quite fit there.  It does fit in Stealth Jihad, but may not always, so I guess for now I’m creating a new category called “community destablization” so I can fill you in on what I learn as I go along.

Getting back to work!

I don’t know about you but I’ve been distracted for days and am now raring to get back to work.  We have a lot to do.   A quick trip around to other blogs reveals that things are pretty tense.   Obama may wish to govern the whole country but there sure doesn’t look like much hope of that.    People still want to know who he is, where he was born, who bought his mansion, who paid for Harvard law school, what are his relationships with Marxist radicals, how close is he to the Islamists, etc. etc., and there will be no let-up of investigations on the blogosphere.   (As I have said on many occasions, start your own blog.  Since “professional” journalists aren’t doing their jobs, you do it!)

If you think Hillary’s Whitewater and Bill’s philandering were on-going thorns in the Clintons’ sides, they were small potato issues having to do with run-of-the-mill greed and sex.  Thanks to the mainstream media’s abrogation of its duty,  Obama’s open questions go to the core of the security of our country.   Remember there was no blogosphere in the Clinton years, and not much talk radio.  

Whew, there is one good thing though, America has now proven to the world that we aren’t a racist country—what a relief!   So as we proceed to recommend reform of the Refugee Resettlement Program and to seek to curtail immigration we can do that without some black racist like Rev. Wright suggesting we have evil deep-seated bigoted hatemonger motives. 

I am also really looking forward to the waves of love coming our way from Europe and the Middle East.

Having nothing further to say (surely nothing profound), the following comment yesterday at Jake Tapper’s blog, where Tapper points out that Bill Ayers and Louis Farahkan both voted at the same polling place as Obama, gave me a good laugh.

Hey, let’s look at the bright side: If Obama wins then everything bad that happens from now on will be his fault. Yes, that’s right. Global warming. Global cooling. Hurricanes. Tidal waves. Until he pulls the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan (and whatever other countries that are so-called illegally occupied) every single death will be the Messiah’s fault. Until he lets all the Gitmo prisoners go every non-event that happens there will be his fault. The economy will be his fault. Price of oil will be his fault. Endangered species will be his fault. Jobs going overseas will be his fault. Every time your car stalls it will be his fault. etc…Get the picture?

So get ready Dems. If your messiah wins, get ready to be treated like the way you’ve treated Bush supporters for the past 8 years. From now on, IT’S YOUR FAULT! (Woohoo, feeling the relief already). Dems, get ready to feel the love…

With a completely Democratically-controlled Washington, there will be no confusion about who is responsible for what happens next. 

Now, back to the piled up posts that need to be written.

Endnote:  See Steve Sailer’s analysis of what went wrong in the McCain campaign, posted yesterday at VDARE.