Another day, another unhappy Iraqi refugee

These unhappy jobless Iraqi refugees are in Atlanta.  The International Rescue Committee whose annual budget is over $200 million (and almost half of that comes from the taxpayers) gave them a nice Thanksgiving dinner (big deal), when they want jobs!  By the way, the dinner didn’t look as fancy as the one in the New York publicity stunt.

Or they are going back to Jordan!   From CNN:

The man, Munir, and his wife, Fatima, hoped, like so many immigrants before them, that the United States would help them find a better life for them and their children.

But the couple, who asked that their identities be protected for fear of reprisals against their family and friends still in Iraq, are considering ending their American dream after three months of struggle.

College-educated and proficient in English, Fatima and Munir were shocked that the skills that provided them a comfortable living in Baghdad, as a mechanical engineer and lab technician, are of little advantage in an increasingly competitive U.S. job market.

They spend much of their day at the IRC office in Atlanta, searching for employment, but are considering returning to Jordan, where they say they can find work, albeit illegally.

“I am worried that I will be thrown out on the street,” Fatima says. “My Pakistani neighbors couldn’t find work and they were evicted and thrown out on the street. We are worried the same will happen to us. Many refugees we know have not found work and they have been here for eight months to a year.”

Until 2007, very few Iraqi refugees were resettled in the United States. For 2008, the Bush administration set a goal of accepting 13,000 Iraqis.

And now we have the ever-brilliant Refugees International urging its groupies to write to Obama and tell him we need 105,500 Iraqis this next year.

Didn’t anyone in the State Department think about this—highly educated Iraqis needing jobs in our miserable job market?  Was there no planning?  Did someone lie to these people?   Where is that big investigative reporter at AP, Matthew Lee, the one beating up Bush for not bringing enough Iraqi refugees?

You are all nuts, that’s all I can say!

P.S.   Mr. Lee, if you decide to take the initiative and do an investigation, I’ll direct you to our Iraqi refugee category where you will find many unhappy Iraqi refugee stories.  But, I am guessing you will never do the story because it is outside your world view.

Lets see so far we have unhappy Iraqis in Arizona, Maryland, New Hampshire, Virginia, New York, Michigan, Ohio and now Georgia.

Government grants available for Rohingya Muslims in Bangladesh

Your tax dollars:

All you NGO’s hurry on over to the State Department and get in line for grants available for Rohingya Muslim refugees in Bangladesh.   Yes, I know the theory—poverty breeds terrorism, so we are going to send American tax dollars to BANGLADESH!   What are we thinking!     Next thing you know we will be resettling Rohingya Islamists in a town near you.   See our whole category on Rohingya here

European Union to take 10,000 Iraqi refugees

From the BBC today:

The European Union says it is ready to accept up to 10,000 Iraqi refugees, many of whom are living in extreme hardship in Jordan and Syria.

The agreement came at an EU meeting in Brussels on Thursday, where interior ministers received a new report on conditions at refugee camps.

Germany said it would take in about 2,500 of the refugees.

Priority will be given to those with medical needs, torture victims, single mothers and religious minorities.

Don’t hold your breath that this means Europe will rescue the Christians.

Excellent review and a must-read book

Janet Levy writing at American Thinker  today reviews Robert Chandler’s book, “Shadow World: Resurgent Russia, The Global New Left, and Radical Islam.”   Levy concludes:

The United States is at a critical juncture in its history faced with threats from international Marxists, an internal socialist movement and global jihadists. Once any of these elements achieves significant positions of power within the United States, they will proceed with their plans to destroy Western civilization. Our freedom, sovereignty and way of life could be extinguished by any of these forces that are acting against our democratic republic. Robert Chandler’s warnings in Shadow World must be heeded if we are to survive.

Read the review, get the book, and get to work! 

Find your place, your role, in saving America.  Let me make a recommendation.  Don’t spend a lot of time being anxious and running around like a chicken with your head cut off.  Read this book, but don’t spend all your time wallowing in books like this.   If you care about our way of life, our freedom and our great country then examine your talents and find a place to apply them. 

Are you good with people in your community, then be a community organizer for the right side.  Find like-minded people and figure out ways to spread the word.  Create new groups.  Join existing community groups and speak up.

Can you write?  Then send letters to editors, government officials, etc.  Better still, start your own blog and find some area that needs to be exposed—don’t just yak, do research and figure out ways to make your work public, bypassing the mainstream media.  Comment at other people’s blogs.

Join some of the mushrooming number of conservative organizing groups on the internet.  Join a religious conservative group.  Join a gun club!   Help build coalitions of groups.  By the way, building coalitions is a bedrock strategy of the Alinsky school of community organizing.

I think conservative talk radio is great, but it can have the effect of making you think our views are being heard.  Encourage talk radio hosts to give more instructions on action that needs to be taken.  I don’t think conservative listeners always know what to do with the information they have been given.

Anyway, you get the gist!   Find your place, go to work and don’t get too anxious about the big picture (keep it in the back of your mind), but don’t let it consume you.

Update and review of the Greeley/Swift controversy

I have to warn you, this article I’m posting is a long and superficial piece about the controversy in Greeley, CO a few months back, the one we created an entire category to follow (here).    If you have been a regular reader of RRW and followed the recent news about Somalis getting into the US by lying about family members or that Somali young men are believed to be headed to terrorist training camps, this is the kind of story that will make you want to barf it is so one-sided.

The problem in Greeley, in a nutshell, is that Somalis flooded the town for jobs at the local JBS Swift meatpacking plant, then demanded special prayer breaks for Ramaden which Swift first gave them then took back when other ethnic workers at the plant protested.  Somalis walked off the job and were told to return to work by a certain time, those that did not were fired.   Swift stuck to its guns and many of the nomadic Somalis moved on to other meatpacking towns.

A few nuggets from yesterday’s article in Denver’s Westworld News follow.  Setting the scene for the clash of cultures:

Hispanics have been in Greeley for years, attracted by the many factory and agricultural jobs. But their numbers have swelled in recent decades, and they now make up at least 30 percent of the city’s population of 89,000, according to the U.S. Census.

Interestingly the clash of cultures came not from white Americans, but from the Hispanics primarily.  Other ethnic groups employed at Swift protested too.

How did the Somalis come to be in Greeley?

In December 2006, federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials descended on the Swift plant, arresting and deporting hundreds of illegal workers as their families sobbed outside. The raid was part of a national crackdown that shook the meatpacking industry and left Swift desperate for a new source of cheap labor.

Refugees — those who fear persecution in their native countries and have been screened by the Department of Homeland Security for resettlement in America — are both cheap and legal. After the raid, some Somalis say, Swift sent recruiters to African restaurants in Denver, offering them cash to work in Greeley. The word spread quickly among Somali refugees from Denver to Kansas City to California, as friends and relatives talked up the job openings and the larger paychecks to be earned at the Swift plant.

Now we know from recent news that many of the Somalis are not here legally and could never have been screened by Homeland Security because they lied about who they are.  Kind of hard to screen someone who isn’t who they say they are.

So, when Swift refused to hire back the Somalis who walked off the job did they stay in Greeley or move on?  And, how is Greeley today?

Suddenly, Greeley had a different problem: Scores of Somalis, out of work and worried about making their rent. Within weeks, the fired workers began leaving town for jobs at packing plants in Fort Morgan, Nebraska and Minnesota. They emptied out the Greeley Islamic Center mosque, left vacant apartments, even shut down the only African restaurant in town, creating a massive rupture in the community.

I guess just as local citizens were being told to adjust to their new neighbors, poof, they were gone.  Most of them that is!

Remaining are the “community organizers” who had intrigued me while the controversy was on-going.    Graen Isse was the guy who had showed up in town just before all this started and then busied himself by talking to the likes of Arabic news outfits, blaming the problem on the Hispanics.  He told the Arab publication he had worked in America since he was 16, but from this puff-piece it would appear he had a typical American high school experience.    And, with an education like his, what was he doing looking for meatpacking work (even as a translator)?

Graen Isse, a local Somali leader, understands these conflicting impulses well. In his fourteen years in America, he’s bounced between three states. Now he’s trying to figure out how to help Greeley’s Somali community survive, even if he’s not sure how long he’ll stick around himself.

Slim and amiable, the 27-year-old Isse is constantly in motion — knee tapping, cell phone wire hanging from his ear, eyes scanning the room.  [who is he talking to and what is he looking for?]

[Supposedly separated from his parents as a child by the everpresent violence in Africa, miraculously one day his parents were found.]

One day, Isse’s older brother appeared and announced that their parents had escaped to neighboring Kenya. As his family was reunited, another of Isse’s brothers, who had been injured in the war, made it to California as a refugee. He told the government about his family back home, clearing the way for Isse and several members of his family to apply for refugee status and move to San Diego.

So Isse grew up as an American teenager, running track and playing high school football. After he graduated from high school in Minneapolis, where his mother had moved, his globetrotting continued. He took college classes in California, then completed his degree in Kenya before ending up back in San Diego. There he worked for a transportation tracking company, drove a taxi, even took some law school classes.

Isse moved to Greeley last summer because a friend from California, Aziz Dhies, was working as a nurse there and suggested that Isse might like the town as well. Isse was hired as a translator at Swift and had only been on the job for about a week when the Ramadan controversy began. He was thrust into the midst of the problem as he negotiated on behalf of hundreds of people whom he had only just met. He, too, was fired because he went home to eat and rest on the day the dispute was resolved instead of returning immediately to work. But he quickly found a new job, working part-time as a translator at the Weld County courts. And he and Dhies dedicated themselves to community organizing, forming the East Africa Community, which aims to be “the middleman between the leaders and our community,” Isse says.

I believe that Isse is a professional community organizer brought in to agitate the Swift workers, but I guess the big question is, who sent him?