Month: March 2009

Comment worth noting: Why do we “resent” Iraqi refugees?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Here is a comment from reader Liz posted at our fact sheets link above.

I volunteer for the List Project, which resettles Iraqi refugees who worked for the U.S. government in Iraq as translators, doctors, engineers, to name a few. As a result of their association with Americans, they are hunted, killed, and have their houses burned down.

Why would you not want to help resettle and fund these Iraqis? They suffered terribly while working for OUR GOVERNMENT in a war we started. They come here as very highly educated people who simply want peace and a safe place to live. They are muslim and christian.

Please explain why you resent them?

Thank you

Dear Liz,  we have written 341 posts on Iraqi refugees and if you read even a small fraction of those, I doubt you could make the statement:  “Please explain why you resent them?”   (Note, Liz places a question mark here but she isn’t really questioning, she is stating what she believes is fact.)   I contend that we have a greater concern for the well-being of the Iraqis than Liz does.

This is how leftists operate—they attempt to shut down a serious public policy discussion by vilifying anyone who disagrees with them.  

“[R]esent them?”   How on earth do you get that we “resent them?”   Bringing Iraqi refugees to the US in large numbers at this time of economic turmoil, not encouraging them to return to Iraq to help rebuild it,  placing older Iraqi professionals in jobs cleaning motels,  having Iraqis come here then fear eviction and complaining about the resettlement agencies neglecting them, aren’t these issues that warrant serious public debate and discussion?   Instead you, Liz,  and many others like you, emotionally driven,  just wish to shut down a serious discussion by attempting to silence any critics.  It won’t work (we are hard-hearted afterall!)

Sincerely,  Ann

P.S.  It just occurred to me that maybe you don’t know about all the unhappy Iraqis in the US, because I bet your leaders at the List Project aren’t telling you (if they even know).   Check out our Iraqi refugee category where we have reported from 17 states where recently resettled Iraqis are unhappy and wishing to go home to the Middle East.

Another refugee who went home

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We are told it is “rare” for refugees to go back to their homeland, it may well be, but I think there are more than we are told about.   It would undermine the refugee resettlement program if too many of these cases were made public.

Buried in a puff piece on refugees in North Carolina is this little bit of information about a homeless African refugee.

It can take up to five years to assimilate, Ognodo (director of the Neighborhood Good Samaritan Center)  says, but some never do. In December, Ognodo said he found one former student homeless and involved in drugs. The teen’s father had died. The youth had stopped visiting the Samaritan Center. Ognodo helped send him back to family in Africa.

Reform needed:   If a refugee wishes to return home, his or her airfare should be paid by the volag (government contractor) whose job it was to resettle the refugee in the first place.  The volag should also use its own funds and not taxpayer money for the plane ticket!   It would be a way of identifying which volags were not doing a good job of caring for and assimilating refugees.

Obama “heartbroken” over homeless…..

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

…..then why are we bringing more people here to make them homeless? 

Here is an AP report on something Obama said Tuesday evening at that boring press conference.

WASHINGTON (AP) – At a time when millions of Americans are losing their jobs and their homes, President Barack Obama says he’s “heartbroken” that any children are without a roof over their heads.

Obama says the “most important thing” that he can do for those children is make sure that their parents have jobs. And he again pointed to his plan to save or create 3.5 million jobs through his economic stimulus package.

[….]

And the president told reporters at a Tuesday evening news conference that there needs to be a “change in attitude” in the country, so that it isn’t seen as “acceptable” for children and families to be homeless.

Honest to goodness, would someone please tell me then why we are bringing more immigrants and refugees to the US  and making them homeless?   Only two days ago we told you about an Iraqi family that became homeless and decided to return to Syria.   Then there was a discussion in Boise, ID of possible tent cities for homeless refugees.  Or, how about the refugee in Dallas worried that he would soon be living under the bridge.

I’ll answer my own question, I think there are political powers in this country that want people to be homeless and living in poverty because those poor people continue to fuel the Alinsky battle of the ‘have nots’ vs. the ‘haves.’   If people are content they do not demand change (see our category on Community Destabilization here on how that works).  The change Obama is after is to make more people dependent on government and thus bring about socialism.    And, since we were running out of our own poor and angry people, we import them.

By the way, check out this American Thinker article that Judy sent to me yesterday entitled, “What kind of President thrives on chaos?”

I don’t believe Obama is at all “heartbroken.”

More “refugees” arrive in the US from Malta

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

If you are wondering how someone is a refugee from Malta, they really aren’t.  The “refugees” are actually people who arrived in Malta as illegal aliens and then thanks to former US ambassador “tea party Molly,” get to come to the US as refugees.   It is a policy that I believe is resulting in the huge problems Malta is having with boatloads of Africans arriving on its shores—get to Malta and then to mainland Europe or you might really hit the jackpot and get to the US.

This is a family that I think is destined for heartbreak in America.  Their hopes are so high and they are going to MICHIGAN, normally a fine state but with one of the highest unemployment rates in the country!  By the way, what happened to the State Department plan to pull out of Michigan?  And, judging by the photo it looks like they have a pretty nice place in Malta; who knows what sort of place they will live in in Michigan where they were scheduled to arrive yesterday (or today).

Nine years after refugee Brima Kabba landed in Malta he is finally getting the “better future” he was searching for when he escaped the maiming civil war in his homeland, Sierra Leone.

Before most people would have woken up this morning, Mr Kabba, his wife and their three children will be at the airport waiting to travel to Michigan, under the US resettlement programme.

There they will finally be able to live without having to worry about what will happen next since, once they get to the US, they will receive citizenship within five years.

“I don’t know exactly what will happen once we’re there,” the 38-year-old father says with beaming eyes. “But my main plan is to give my children what I didn’t get when I was young.

Read the rest of the story here.  Some enterprising reporter should follow their story over the next year to see how they do.

For our coverage of the immigration mess in Malta, see our archives here.  We have been posting on Malta since July 2007.

See the latest on immigrant riots in Malta just this week here.

UN Report: Asylum seekers increase, but overall number still only half of what it was in 2001

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This news account in the International Herald Tribune of a report by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reminded me that we don’t write often enough about asylum.   Asylees are people who claim persecution of some sort (political, religious, etc) but have usually already arrived on a country’s doorstep.  Simply being an economic migrant doesn’t count.

Once granted asylum, at least in the US, the person is given the same perks that a refugee receives—a caseworker, food stamps, cash help, job counseling and so forth.

The UNHCR says the number of asylum seekers worldwide has risen in the last year, but is still only half of what it was in 2001.

PARIS: Turmoil in Afghanistan and Somalia swelled the ranks of asylum-seekers last year, driving refugee numbers higher for a second consecutive year after they dropped to a two-decade low in 2006, the United Nations refugee agency said Tuesday.

Iraqis remained the single largest population of people seeking protection in industrialized countries, but their numbers fell 10 percent in 2008 from the previous year, the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said.

Overall, the United States remained the chief destination for refugees from all countries, receiving 13 percent of total applications.

In all, about 383,000 people made new asylum requests in 51 countries in 2008, according to the U.N. agency. That was 12 percent more than the 341,000 who sought protection the previous year, and more than the 307,000 who sought assistance in 2006, when numbers fell to a 20-year low.

Still, the 2008 figures were well below level of 2001, when 623,000 people lodged new asylum claims, the U.N. agency said in a report on asylum trends in industrialized countries in 2008.

You can get the full report here.  See also the 2007 Yearbook of Immigrant Statistics for more fun with numbers, here.     We actually have more asylees entering the US than refugees and those asylees had the where-with-all to get here and are not screened in advance by Homeland Security as are refugees.

And for those who think Sweden is so kind, so diverse, so humane, so much better than the US, take note.  Looks like they may be full-up.

Sweden tightened its rules last year, resulting in a drop of two-thirds in the number of Iraqis who requested protection there.

See “Muslim immigration killing Sweden” here.