Month: May 2009

Despite recession, State Department Refugee admissions have not slowed

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

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

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

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.

Reform suggestion #3: Penalize volags* that don’t fulfill their government contract

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

In response to my post yesterday in which I ask for suggestions for reforming the Refugee Resettlement Program, Mark says:

Right now there is no incentive for refugee resettlement agencies to follow rules or abide by their contracts, since there are no penalties for failure to do so. As a result refugees often do not receive the few material items that are required by government contracts, or they receive broken junk. Resettlement agencies also regularly give refugees inadequate community and cultural orientation, fail to assist refugees to find work during their first few months here, and don’t even bother to answer the phone when refugees call and ask for help with something. Why should taxpayers pay for items and services that are not supplied, or are supplied in a deficient manner?

Penalties for refugee resettlement agencies caught not meeting the minimum requirements of their government contracts. No lamp – $10 penalty. Broken chair – $15 penalty. Mattresses on the floor with no bed frame – $30 penalty. Not helping refugee look for a job for first four months – $100 penalty. Believe me, if the refugee resettlement agencies’ friends in the State Department actually put some teeth in the program requirements, overnight there would be massive improvement.

* For new readers volags stands for Voluntary Agencies, it’s really a misnomer because they aren’t voluntary when they receive taxpayer funding through grants and contracts with the federal (and sometimes state) goverment.  There are ten major government contractors who in turn subcontract smaller groups to resettle refugees.

No hope for Palestinian “refugees” as long as UNRWA is in charge

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Dissolve the UNRWA is the title of an article on FrontPage Magazine today by Joseph Puder.  UNRWA stands for United Nations Relief and Works Agency, and its sole responsibility is the Palestinian “refugees.” There are many reasons to put “refugees” in quotation marks; one is that alone among all agencies, UNRWA counts as refugees all descendants of those who were originally defined as refugees after the founding of Israel. That is why from the original 5-700,000 Palestinian Arab refugees there are now  many millions.

We’ve posted on UNRWA and the Palestinians many times. The agency is a hotbed of terrorism, with the great majority of its employees members of Hamas, and diligently funneling much of the aid money it receives directly to Hamas, which uses it to buy weapons. Instead of doing what refugee agencies are supposed to do — resettle refugees — it is devoted to perpetuating the refugee status, and the misery, of the Palestinians under its care, as a way to put pressure on Israel through the media, who almost always report only on the pathetic conditions of the “refugees” without giving any context or the reasons that they are in that condition.

Puder’s article discusses the dramaic contrast between the agency in charge of the post-WWII refugees and UNRWA:

Prior to the creation of UNRWA, the allies organized the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in 1943.  True to its mission, UNRRA provided relief as quickly as possible and ably rehabilitated millions of World War II refugees; then having accomplished their goals, they were disbanded.

….UNRRA was created in November 1943, at a White House conference attended by 44 nations.  Its mission was to provide economic assistance to European nations after WWII, and to repatriate and assist refugees who had come under allied control.  The U.S. government funded almost half of the UNRRA budget.  UNRRA assisted in the repatriation of millions of refugees in 1945, and managed hundreds of Displaced Persons camps in Germany, Italy, and Austria.  UNRRA provided health and welfare assistance to the DP’s as well as vocational training.    

Voluntary Jewish welfare agencies such as the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), ORT (Organization for Rehabilitation through Training), and HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) which operated in the DP camps had as its aim normalizing the lives of the refugees and assisting them in finding permanent homes throughout the world, especially Israel, and the U.S.    

By 1947, UNRRA completed its mission as millions of Holocaust survivors and non-Jewish slave laborers from throughout Europe, who were pressed into service by the Nazi military machine, were settled.   

Then, its mission accomplished, it disbanded. I would add that many more people were resettled after WWII in population exchanges among European countries. They were not considered refugees because their destination countries were not in question.

We’ve made similar recommendations to Puder’s. Here’s what he concludes:

The U.S. and western governments have allowed UNRWA to continue perpetuating a problem that should have been resolved decades ago and have been remiss in not demanding from the Palestinian Authority (a recipient of U.S. and E.U aid) their assistance in demolishing the refugee camps and providing their people with permanent housing, jobs and health care.  

…. The time has come to dissolve UNRWA and unburden the U.S. taxpayers of this failed U.N. agency.  The UNHCR, a less politicized and far more effective organization should take over some of UNRWA’s functions, while other functions should be assigned to the Palestinian Authority (PA).  It is also high time that the U.S. and its Western allies stop coddling the PA by providing it with millions in aid without accountability (much of the aid is funneled into accounts that are used to pay terrorist gangs) and the responsibility to take care of their own unfortunate people.     

We’ve also mentioned the idea of pressuring the neighboring Arab states to take in the Palestinians, as Israel took in close to a million Jewish refugees forced out of Arab countries at Israel’s founding. But strangely, other countries don’t want the Palestinians. In fact, in 1971 Jordan kicked out thousands of Palestinians and killed thousands more. So it’s up to the UN to stop this absurd and dangerous state of affairs. I’m not holding my breath. Meanwhile, if we had a government with any sense, we would stop our aid to UNRWA. But I’m not holding my breath on that either.

Al-Shabaab’s hip-hop recruitment video, hundreds recruited

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

According to this article from CNN (Hat tip: Women against Sharia blog), al-Shabaab is using western style hip-hop in a recruitment film— a strategy believed to have been master-minded by the American-Somali we told you about here.    It is not clear to me if this is another video or whether CNN is just a month late in catching on to the story.  Nonetheless, here it is.

Intelligence experts say the video was probably made in recent weeks and comes on the heels of an audio message in March purportedly from Osama bin Laden. In that recording, the al Qaeda leader calls on his “Muslim brothers in Mujahid Somalia” to overthrow President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed for cooperating with the West.

Al-Shabaab is the militant Islamic wing in Somalia. It means “Youth” in Arabic.

“We’re seeing perhaps their most sophisticated attempt so far to really reach an audience of potential recruits in America, and that’s one of the things that made that video very significant,” said Ben Venzke of the IntelCenter, a Washington-based research group that tracks al Qaeda’s development and messages.

“They’re casting it in a way that’s going to speak to the youth of today,” Venzke said. “Most of the time, what we’re seeing in their videos directly parallels what the groups are doing operationally, what they are targeting, where they’re recruiting.”

It has been quiet for sometime now on the Somali missing youth story that we have followed since last November, but this CNN report has added a bit more new information in addition to the old news about the recruitment film.

Sheik Ahmed Matan knows that (that recruiters are speaking to today’s youth) firsthand. A respected member of Britain’s Somali community, Matan said he knows of hundreds of young Somali men who have returned to Somalia for terrorist training. 

“A lot of young people from here, from America, from Canada, from everywhere from Europe — they went there,” he said.

He added that these men are capable of being sent back home to conduct terrorist operations, even suicide bombings.

“It can be, they can train anytime and send them here, anytime,” Matan said.

Hundreds!  That is the first time we have heard that hundreds of former refugee youths have returned to Somalia for terrorist training.   Matan goes on to say that mosques in Great Britain must be monitored to root out recruitment activity—FAT CHANCE!  British authorities are the biggest chickens in dealing with Islam on any level.