Day: May 12, 2009

Campaign underway to kill diversity visa lottery

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

NumbersUSA is today calling on everyone who wants to halt the colonization of America to ask their Representatives in Congress to support HR 2305, a bill that seeks to kill an outdated and frankly dangerous immigration program known as the diversity visa which I told you about here late last year.

Congress and the Administration still plan to take 50,000 U.S. jobs later this year and raffle them off to foreign workers on pure chance. Never mind that 14 million unemployed Americans are looking for a job. If that doesn’t make any sense to you, get passionate about Rep. Bob Goodlatte’s SAFE for America Act (H.R. 2305). Let’s kill this absurd lottery before autumn.

OK, the Visa Lottery doesn’t actually raffle off jobs. But it does raffle off U.S. citizenship — without any regard to a person’s education, skills, character, family relation, humanitarian need or the impact on American workers, taxes and quality of life.

The fact is that every year the federal government raffles off greencards (and path to U.S. citizenship) to 50,000 of the millions who play the lottery.

Nearly all of those 50,000 will immediately seek a job.

Those 50,000 foreign lottery winners will either take a job from an American, or fail to find a job and become a total net consumer of taxpayer benefits and infrastructure.

The  fax campaign is underway:

We are starting a faxing campaign today to push every Member of the House of Representatives to co-sponsor H.R. 2305 and protect 50,000 American workers this fall.

See if your Representative is a co-sponsor and if so, be sure to thank him or her.

Is your U.S. Representative on the co-sponsor list? Check it out.

By the way,  I always thought the Diversity Visa Lottery winners were pretty much on their own when they arrived, but this article from Shelbyville, TN in February indicates that Egyptian Lottery winners are getting some help with job searches and seem to be in direct competition with refugees (and Americans!) for meat packing jobs.

Tensions mount between police and refugees in Portland, ME

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update May 13th:   This story is making the rounds with blogs like this one, and here is another.

 

We told you just two weeks ago about the death of a Sudanese refugee who pulled a gun on Portland police and was subsequently shot to death.   Now, thanks to reader ‘whuptdue’ comes more news about conflicts between refugees and police in Maine.

PORTLAND — Several juveniles and adults face charges following a melee at Franklin Arterial and Fox Street that began when police stopped and arrested a shoplifting suspect and an unruly crowd gathered.

Police responded to a report that a man had stolen two bottles of vodka at 7 p.m. Friday at the Hannaford on Forest Avenue.

Workers at the store provided a description of the suspect and the car he left in, and police pulled the car over at Franklin Arterial and Fox Street a couple of minutes later, police said.

As police were arresting Jimmy Odong, 19, of Portland and recovering the stolen merchandise, a group of about 15 to 30 people gathered, with about 10 of them becoming aggressive toward police, officers said.

A number of other officers were dispatched to the area, which is alongside the Kennedy Park housing development. Members of the gathering group, some of whom are Sudanese, like Odong, and some who are from other African countries, began calling the officers names, including “killers” and “murderers,” in apparent reference to the police shooting of a Sudanese immigrant, David Okot, last month.

When police prepared to tow the car Odong had driven, some of the crowd jumped on the car to try to prevent it from being taken, police said.

Three juveniles eventually were arrested, two of them on charges of assault after they allegedly punched the officers, police said.

In March we reported that Iraqi secondary migrants (refugees resettled elsewhere who are now moving) are also headed to Portland, Maine.   The word is out about the good social welfare and the joys of living in multicultural Maine , hmmm!

Endnote:  Just a reminder of the Sudanese refugee rampage in Utah last week, here.  Did anyone ever see this story in the national mainstream media?

Unemployed Iraqis in Albany; can’t reporters use google?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Albany TV station, WNYT, reports that Iraqi refugees are unemployed in that city. Ann reported in February that the refugee agency there, U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, was “maxed out” and was asking for volunteers. She also mentioned that Albany is a preferred community for refugee resettlement. Somebody has stepped up to help them.

The Iraqi refugees are being helped by several local groups, including Women Against War and the Bethlehem Neighbors for Peace.

One of the men in the story is an English speaking electrical engineer; the other is in IT.  They can’t find any work.

Now here’s a question for reporters. We’ve read dozens of stories about unemployed Iraqi refugees. Almost all are just human interest stories. Some give some information about the refugee program, but very few look at their local problem as part of a national phenomenon. I just googled “unemployed Iraqi refugees” and came up with 141,000 hits. Many of these are about refugees abroad, but it looks like just as many are about refugees in the United States. In this era of shrinking media and job losses, wouldn’t you think that some enterprising reporters could do the small amount of research it would take to put their local story into a larger context? Maybe someone higher up would notice.