Americanize ….. or else!

Last week the federal government released the results of a government-wide task force that has concluded a larger effort must be made to assimilate immigrants and predicts dire consequences if they don’t assimilate.

The United States must embark on an aggressive effort to integrate immigrants, including teaching them English and U.S. history, a federal task force recommended Thursday.

If this “Americanization” fails, the nation could see major problems in 20 or 30 years, with foreign-born populations detached from the larger society and engaging in anti-social behavior, said Alfonso Aguilar, who heads the U.S. Office of Citizenship.

Aguilar compared the potential strife to what is occurring in some Western European countries where foreign-born populations do not feel part of the larger society and are not accepted by many as full citizens.

I would like to see the report because if Aguilar’s gang is suggesting what is happening in Western Europe (riots in Greece and Sweden right now) is completely due to lack of assimilation, implying the natives are being mean to outsiders somehow and not accepting immigrants, they are wrong.   First, some of those immigrants, especially the Muslims, don’t want to assimilate and others leading the riots are anarchists who want to bring down democracies and replace them with Marxist governments.

“We should not be naive and assume that the assimilation process is going to happen automatically,” Aguilar said at a news conference.

As for this comment, it won’t happen fast if  there isn’t some real adjustment on the part of the multiculturalists first.    The cultural relativism that has seeped into governments and non-profits that manifests in acceptance of some of the most anti-American behavior—polygamy, abuse of women, female genital mutilation—needs to be dumped.   People must return to passing judgement on behavior that is unacceptable in America. 

One of my pet peeves has been the ready acceptance of ethnic enclaves throughout the US.  These non-profits settling refugees see nothing wrong with resettled Africans heading off to African communities in places like Minneapolis or Seattle.   It is understood that certain nationalities want to live together.   However, if someone wanted to set up a completely white European community all hell would break loose.

To achieve assimilation the task force recommends more and better English instruction as well as education about the US and its history.   Good yes, but of course we need to build more bureaucracies and throw more money at the problem.

The Task Force on New Americans recommends that the federal government take a leadership role in an “Americanization movement,” but also says that states, local governments, nonprofit groups and the private sector should play a key part.

[….]

The task force also recommends that every state create a “state integration counsel” comprised of state and local government officials, businesses, faith-based organizations, civic organizations, and nonprofit groups that work with immigrant communities.

So what might the ‘or else’ be?

On the same day we heard about the Americanization task force warnings we get word of a report from the Army War College entitled,   ‘U.S. Military Preparing for Domestic Disturbances.’    Any connection between the two?

A new report from the U.S. Army War College discusses the use of American troops to quell civil unrest brought about by a worsening economic crisis.

The report from the War College’s Strategic Studies Institute warns that the U.S. military must prepare for a “violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States” that could be provoked by “unforeseen economic collapse” or “loss of functioning political and legal order.”

Entitled “Known Unknowns: Unconventional ‘Strategic Shocks’ in Defense Strategy Development,” the report was produced by Nathan Freier, a recently retired Army lieutenant colonel who is a professor at the college — the Army’s main training institute for prospective senior officers.

He writes: “To the extent events like this involve organized violence against local, state, and national authorities and exceed the capacity of the former two to restore public order and protect vulnerable populations, DoD [Department of Defense] would be required to fill the gap.”

Freier continues: “Widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order … An American government and defense establishment lulled into complacency by a long-secure domestic order would be forced to rapidly divest some or most external security commitments in order to address rapidly expanding human insecurity at home.”

Read on, there is more.

Border fence is real, not virtual

Mark Krikorian at The Corner posts this link to a map of the fence along the U.S.’s southern border.  He comments that

the fence is finished or under construction along almost all the border from the Pacific to El Paso, though in some places it’s a vehicle barrier that prevents smuggling vans from crossing but not people from relatively easily hopping over. A spokeswoman for the border agency tells me that none of what’s shown is “virtual fence” as opposed to an actual one, and that they’re building about 50 miles a week at this point.

I had no idea it was so far along. Maybe President Bush had to be pulled kicking and screaming into getting the fence built, but somehow it’s getting done.

Ft. Dix Six (Five now*) found guilty yesterday in NJ plot

This story is all over the news so I won’t rehash it here.  We reported earlier on the case here where Muslim immigrants plotted to kill soldiers at the military base in the Jersey Pinelands, Ft. Dix, but were caught before anyone was killed. 

By the way, unlike Weatherman Bill Ayers’ plot 40 or so years ago to attack Ft. Dix that resulted in the death of three of his fellow terrorists while building the bomb,  Bill Ayers is free and hobnobbing with Obama and these guys are going to prison for a long time, but that is another story.  [Update:  note Ron Radosh column making this same point here.]

See Robert Spencer’s article today at Frontpage magazine about how Islamic groups are proclaiming the unfairness of the decision on the Muslims.

This is a prime example of how we extend our generosity to Muslim immigrants, at least one of whom was a refugee from Bill Clinton’s Bosnian war, and how Jihad supercedes our niceness as a Nation.

* One admitted to lesser charges a while back.

US News and World Report: no jobs for refugees

I guess the message is finally creeping up the mainstream media ladder—news that jobs are getting impossible to find for tens of thousands of refugees the State Department brings into the US each year with the help of non-profit government contractors.   Here is yet another story about mostly Iraqis not finding work.   Regular readers may be getting bored with my almost daily posts on the subject, but it’s a topic that has to be discussed over and over again.   So far, we have identified 14 states where Iraqis are complaining about not finding work.

US News [with my two-cents worth thrown in]:

Little hard data are available on current employment rates of Iraqi refugees. But at a recent meeting, says Robert Carey, the International Rescue Committee’s vice president of resettlement and migration policy, offices cited a 50 percent drop in their job placements.  [BTW, Carey makes a six figure salary mostly funded by the taxpayer].

“That was a fairly common story,” he says. “In my 27 years in this work, I’ve never seen anything that rivals this in terms of its really immediate effect on finding jobs.” [Yesterday’s story had a volag employee saying, “In my 20 years…”]

Even in past economic downturns, entry-level jobs were available to refugees. But those have never been ideal for Iraqis, who tend to be better educated than other arrivals, which means that they compete with Americans for higher-level jobs than do their refugee counterparts.  [A lot of higher level Americans are out of work too!]

“You have people who have college educations—who have been working their way up corporate ladders—and suddenly are doing menial labor,” says Debbie Decker, community resource developer at Los Angeles’s Interfaith Refugee and Immigration Service.  [I guess menial labor is better than being dead, if indeed it is that dangerous in Iraq]

Read on:

Then, of course, there’s the issue of simple competition—which is worsening as the recession deepens.  [no kidding]

Even in cities like Lancaster, Pa., which haven’t been as badly hit by the recession as other places, it’s difficult to find highly skilled Iraqi refugees jobs in their lines of work. Two thirds of the Iraqi refugees served by the city’s Church World Service office are professionals, says director Sheila McGeehan. But none of them have found employment in their own fields. 

 [Church World Service is one of the top ten government contractors and its subcontractor Virginia Council of Churches is the agency that was resettling refugees in the county in which I live without setting up in advance an extensive volunteer network of churches and others that might serve as the safety net for refugees as the economy went sour.  Thank God they didn’t bring more to our county having closed their offices here a year ago.]

That discourages the refugees, advocates say, but it also wastes an enormous pool of talent. The United States is getting, free of charge, people the Iraqi government spent thousands of dollars to educate and train, they say.  [Yes, that pool of talent should have been cared for in the Middle East so they would be ready to return and help re-build Iraq.  What good is it doing anyone if a highly trained person is competing for a hotel cleaning job in the US ?  What about the unfortunate person they are competing against?]

“These people are an enormous asset, but they’re only an asset if we allow them to be one, tap into their skills, allow them to develop,” Carey says. [They should have thought of that before all the do-gooder volags began a media campaign to bring more Iraqis to the US.]

A media and lobbying campaign continues spearheaded by Refugees International president, Ken Bacon, to bring even more Iraqis to the US in this fiscal year—he and others are lobbying President-elect Obama to allow over 100,000 Iraqi refugees to come to the US in one year!   In FY 2008 we brought 13,000 and can’t find them employment, what are we going to do for 100,000.

It strikes me that there are two choices.   Either begin to slow numbers of refugees to the US while the economy is so bad or do what I bet they are already planning—-figure out how to extend welfare benefits to refugees beyond what the present law allows.   With the on-going bailout mentality and the government  money printing presses running overtime, I bet they push for the latter.

One final comment from the US News article:

“In Jordan, they told us another thing: that you will be very welcome, you are a victim of the world, and we will start to put a new life for you; you will find a job as a doctor,” he says.

This is not the first time we reported on this comment, that Iraqis were led to believe everything was fabulous in the US.   I don’t understand how this happened.   Were the overseas processing people flat out lying?  If so, why would they lie?   Were they just trying to show Iraqis that afterall we are good people (not like those bad Bush people that attacked their country)?   Was it just a do-gooder mentality running amok?

Among our hundreds of posts (284 to be exact) on Iraqi refugees we had noted from time to time that not enough Iraqis were even signing up to come to the US, while the anti-Bush forces wanted so badly to show how awful Iraq had become thanks to the US even as the country was improving with the surge.  So, were those people (like Refugees International) pushing for more Iraqi refugees as a political ploy—lots of refugees would mean Bush was failing?

Or, was the push for more Iraqi refugees (and lying to them about conditions in the US) just a method to get more refugees into the US so the volags could get their government grants to keep offices open and salaries to staff flowing?

I don’t know the answer, does anyone?

St. Louis schools coping with refugee students

For regular readers of Refugee Resettlement Watch there is nothing new in this story about how St. Louis, MO schools handle large numbers of students speaking 25 different languages and having very different cultural practices.  Bosnian Muslims make up a large part of that group.  But, it occurred to me as a I read the article in the South County Times that some of this might be of interest to new readers.

The immigrant and refugee make-up of the metropolitan St. Louis area has exploded seemingly overnight, increasing by over 65 percent since 1990. In the trenches integrating these different cultures are the faculty, staff and administrators at St. Louis County schools.

Federal grants help reduce some of the burden but doesn’t come close to covering the cost to communities with large numbers of refugee children.   This school district has 710 students who do not speak English as their primary language.

St. Louis has been a magnet for Bosnian (mostly Muslim) refugees since the Clinton Administration allowed over 100,000 to come here during the 1990’s.

The Bayless School District, because of its location, became an integral part of the Bosnian refugee resettlement in St. Louis during the Bosnian War in the 1990s.

Bosnians have made St. Louis their destination city just as Somalis have headed to Minneapolis in large numbers.  Earlier this year we told you about a story at ‘Gateway Pundit’ about the huge Bosnian prayer tower under construction there.

Come to think of it, we have had some not very flattering stories about Bosnian refugees here, here, and here.    And, I do believe some of the Ft. Dix plotters found guilty just today in NJ of planning to kill soldiers at the base are also Bosnians.