US Army looking for a few good immigrants

A slippery slope?  I don’t know, but I thought this story would interest our readers.  I immediately wondered if we were going to be recruiting Somali youths from Minneapolis.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Although the Army has been meeting or exceeding its recruiting goals, defense officials say there is a shortage of soldiers with medical, foreign language and cultural abilities needed in the war on terror and peacekeeping efforts around the world.

“What we’re looking for are critical, vital skills,” said Naomi Verdugo, assistant deputy for recruiting in the office of the assistant secretary of the Army.

The Army hopes to enlist 333 healthcare professionals, including doctors, dentists, nurses and others. It is also looking for 557 people with any of 35 languages, including Arabic and Yoruba, spoken in West Africa. Spanish is not on the list. An additional 110 slots are earmarked for other services, which have not yet started taking applications for the program.

Although the effort is limited in scope, it has raised concerns among some veterans groups and advocates for tighter immigration controls. They question whether the policy shift could pave the way for large numbers of foreigners, including ones who might have entered the U.S. illegally, to join the armed services.

“By aggressively recruiting foreigners abroad, or illegal immigrants who could use such a program to get legalized, we could easily create a situation where the Pentagon comes to rely on cheap foreign labor,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington D.C.-based think tank.

“That’s not where we are now. . . . But we always need to be careful that we don’t start going down a steep, slippery slope.”

Read it all.

Despite recession, State Department Refugee admissions have not slowed

There are few jobs and Iraqi refugees especially are not staying quiet about the conditions in which they are living, yet we are on target to reach the ceiling permitted for refugee resettlement this year.   President Bush set the admissions ceiling for 2009 at 80,000 and seven months in we are already at 36,702.   Normally the refugee admission numbers increase dramatically in the last half of the year.   For contrast note that at this time (end of April) in 2008 we had admitted 23,072.

We have a major recession, jobs are not available, refugee agencies are closing their doors and we keep the spigot wide open.  You would almost think someone wanted the system to implode.

To answer some readers questions here are the top six sending countries:

Iraq:  9581

Burma:  8149

Bhutan (Nepalese):  6651

Iran:   3093

Cuba:  2672   (I thought the Obama Administration regards Cuba as a lovely place to live)

Somalia:  2232 (see my post earlier this morning on this, here)

After that the numbers drop off into the hundreds or less for myriad countries.   I thought some other interesting numbers were:  Russia (305), Ukraine (330), Vietnam (693), Afghanistan (228), and Palestine (10).  I put this last in here to point out that NO we are not bringing large numbers of Palestinians right now.

Newsmax story links Somali pirates to al-Shabaab

That’s the catchy theme of this article but for us the more interesting part is that Somalis are once more pouring into the US through the Refugee Resettlement Program of the US State Department and as early as June the flow could turn into a flood as the fraud-riddled and  presently suspended family reunification program is reinstated.   Hat tip:  Blulitespecial.

The Obama administration is preparing to reinstate a fraud-riddled immigration program that has brought over 36,000 Somalis into the United States under questionable circumstances, including two dozen Minneapolis men that the FBI fears may be planning a terrorist attack.

The FBI has launched an “aggressive” manhunt for the men, who have “gone to ground” and have mysteriously disappeared, terrorism experts tell Newsmax. Authorities fear the men may have been recruited by extremists to carry out suicide attacks inside the United States, or abroad.

Critics of the State Department programs that brought the Somalis to America express grave concerns about the practice of admitting refugees from failed nation-states known to harbor extremists. It can be difficult or impossible to verify a person’s identity in such a country, let alone obtain knowledge of their past associations, several experts tell Newsmax.

Important note!  We are back to admitting Somalis at a very high level without the family reunification program in place.  In the first seven months of FY 2009 we have admitted 2,232 Somalis while in the whole of last year we admitted 2,523.   It seems that neither the threat of terrorist recruitment, a record of fraud among Somalis or the recession has slowed anything.  See numbers of Somali admissions since 1983 here, note that more than half of the 80,000 plus came since 9/11!

Pirate-terrorist linkage suspected.

Critics of the program that grants immigrants their refugee status, even when their past activities and associations cannot be thoroughly documented, point out that since 1991 Somalia has exhibited the same type of failed-nation status associated with the rise of Islamic extremism in Afghanistan. That nation provided al-Qaida with a safe haven prior to 9/11.

[…..] 

Conservative foreign-policy expert Frank Gaffney, founder and president of the D.C.-based Center for Security Policy, is among those who perceives a definite link between Somali’s pirates and its violent Islamic extremists.

“Shariah-adherent Somali pirates are a threat to the world’s shipping,” Gaffney tells Newsmax. “Their refugee counterparts being dumped into American communities are a threat to our country and its people. It adds insult to potentially enormous injury that, as the State Department has acknowledged, 80 percent of those refugees are here on the basis of fraudulent family-reunification grounds.”

Gaffney says the State Department “imports pirate/jihadist types into this country.”

We reported extensively on the P-3, family reunification program and its suspension here.   And, last month we told readers that the program would likely be running again by year’s end, here.   Whether June or later, it appears certain that the program will be back in 2009.

Barnett [Don Barnett a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies] tells Newsmax that the State Department is prepared to resume the troubled P-3 program in June. He also criticizes the P-1 program, due to U.N. refugee programs he describes as “one big long running fraud.” He adds: “The U.N. referral program itself has been subject to bribery and fraud.”

The State Department spokesman tells Newsmax it is unclear if the P-3 program will be reinstated by June, adding, “We do anticipate that the program will restart. A little later this year, we will have this program reinstated.”

Read the whole Newsmax article, its long but full of other interesting information.