Month: June 2009

Uniting American Families Act sounds like more opportunity for fraud

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update later in the day:  It appears that this bill is a way to begin breaking the so-called comprehensive immigration reform bill that was defeated in the summer of 2007, into smaller pieces.  See SEIU website here.

This morning when I was visiting the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS) website to prepare my earlier post,  I happened across their pitch for support of the United American Families Act (UAFA) which among other things extends immigration rights to anyone in a “permanent partnership” with someone already here in the US.

We learned that “Permanent partnership” is defined as:

The term “permanent partnership” means the relationship that exists between two permanent partners.

I kid you not!  And, by the way, LIRS (in that pitch linked above) never mentions to its supporters this “permanent partners” business.

Family Reunification is suspended.

We already know that the P-3 Family Reunification program has been suspended worldwide and as far as I know it still is due to widespread immigration fraud resulting from mostly Africans lying on their applications to re-join their supposed “family” in the US.    Now we are going to extend rights to this vague category of permanent partners, and mind you, this does not mean only married partners!

I still want to know how LIRS can spend time and money lobbying Congress.  On their site they tell people how to write to legislators on the UAFA.   Are they using our money, our taxpayer money?  And, shouldn’t they use every bit of time and money taking care of the refugees they are reportedly leaving in a lurch in New Hampshire and elsewhere.

Lutheran Social Services director tells people to ask for refugee bailout

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Your tax dollars:

Bob Kay, director of Public Policy for Lutheran Social Services of New England*, last Friday asked readers of the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire to write to their elected officials and ask for more money to bailout the refugee program.  

Well, that is reasonable you say, everyone else is asking for a bailout, but it’s his very resettlement agency that was the source of complaints from Iraqi refugees last fall who went so far as to protest in the streets about their treatment by this Lutheran volag.  They weren’t protesting about money, but their treatment!

Here is Kay on Friday:

To accomplish this challenging work, our government subcontracts with nonprofit agencies, like Lutheran Social Services. The vast majority of refugees are highly motivated to succeed in this country. Over time, most refugees adapt well to life in the United States and become productive employees, good neighbors and citizens. But the initial period of resettlement requires the provision of many essential and costly services.

In this area a crisis now exists brought on by years of under-funding. The reserves and fundraising abilities of the resettlement agencies are stretched to the limit. The capacity of local communities to cover these needs could be overwhelmed. Our federal government has resolved to continue resettling refugees and must now provide adequate funding.

As we continue to provide a safe haven for increasing numbers of refugees, please take a moment to make a phone call, send a letter, e-mail or fax to our two senators in Washington and your representative in the U.S. House and ask that the federal program for refugee resettlement be fully funded.  [Edit: it is fully funded they just want additional funding.]

Last fall I wrote a couple of posts on Lutheran Social Services and unhappy Iraqis in NH.  The first is here in September.   And, the second is a month later, here.  

The following is a portion of what I said in the later post.  Note the Iraqi complaints are not about money.

Then there is this curious comment. I say curious, because although I have heard of this before, volags shutting out other volunteer help (it happened in Waterbury, CT), frankly, it makes no sense. You would think these “church group” contractors would be looking for all the help they could get.

Each refugee interviewed for this story said he or she was told by Lutheran staff members not to take help from people outside the agency, a claim that some African refugees in Concord have echoed.

Lutheran Social Services say they just need more money and imply that the Iraqis are irrational due to war trauma.

She [Lutheran rep] said it is caused in part by a lack of funding by the federal government. And, she said, the Iraqis have experienced such trauma that adjusting to their lives here is particularly difficult.

Aleaa hits the nail on the head with this line:

“It’s like we’ve asked for millions of dollars or something,” she said. “They humiliate us. To treat a human with respect, does it require funds?”

Since Kay is asking that readers write to the New Hampshire Congressional delegation to ask for a bailout, maybe readers should also ask for a federal investigation into how Lutheran Social Services has been conducting itself there—-before bailing them out!

Or, instead of writing to Congress, how about lobbying the fat cats who are pushing more immigrants and refugees on us!

My suggestion:   Lobby the big moneybags George Soros, Wade Rathke and Drummond Pike and their fat cat buddies at the Tides Foundation to make up for all the shortfall, afterall it is they who are pushing for more immigrants, especially Iraqis, to flood the US. And, sadly, they have more money than the Federal government! 

* Lutheran Social Services of New England is a subcontractor of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services, one of the Top Ten (volag) Government Contractors.

Refugee industry converging in Michigan for conference

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The reason for the conference slated to begin at Michigan State University tomorrow is to bring together lots of levels of the refugee industry to discuss how to get refugees working; and in the case cited, recertified to work in certain professions in the US.

However, I’m wondering if the PR people couldn’t have found a better example of a suffering refugee.  The Associated Press story begins with Salah Hashem’s case:

DETROIT – When Salah Hashem slipped out of Iraq and into Turkey in 2006, he carried with him a host of papers, diplomas and official documents proving he had graduated from Baghdad University and had completed his medical residency.

When he arrived in the Worcester, Mass., area a year later, he put those papers to work, beginning a process of professional recertification in an attempt to resume his career in medicine.

But it was not to be.

The organization charged with validating foreign medical credentials told Hashem the name on his diploma wasn’t his.

The story sounds a tad bit shaky to me, but apparently not to the reporter who launches into this next paragraph without skipping a beat:

A stagnant economy, bureaucratic hurdles and difficulty adapting to a new professional scene are presenting refugees like Hashem and the organizations that serve them with a thorny problem: How to get highly skilled refugees in the U.S. back into their professional field.

Well, I guess you might call a name that doesn’t match on a medical document a bureaucratic hurdle, but it sounds to me that Mr. Hashem’s problems go beyond a stagnant economy and too much bureaucracy.  But, here is how it is all explained away.

In Hashem’s case, the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates raised questions stemming from an Iraqi custom — adding the names of several generations of one’s forefathers on formal documents.

“They rejected my application at that time. They said, `We need a paper from your medical school saying that you are a graduate,”‘ Hashem said. [Very reasonable request wouldn’t you say!]   Iraqi universities “make it difficult to get you your papers if you are in a foreign country. They don’t really want to help anybody that fled the country.”

The commission’s associate vice president of operations, Bill Kelly, said while the group is sensitive to cultural differences, the burden is on the candidate to prove the diploma is his or her own.   [Does that sound like too much bureaucracy to you? Sounds like the right kind of bureaucracy to me!]

“We have a responsibility to ensure that the diploma that someone gives us belongs to them. We tell them, ‘We need official legal documentation that both the names belong to you,”‘ said Kelly. “It may inconvenience them some but our feeling is that the integrity of our process must be protected.”  [Your integrity and the health of Mr. Hashem’s future patients!]

He barely failed!  When is the last time you heard that phrase.  We are accustomed to hearing “barely passed,” but “barely failed?’  

After retrieving the papers, Hashem registered for the first of four licensing exams. He barely failed his first attempt. Now, his brother has fled Baghdad after threats on his life and is unable to get the documentation a second time.

Barely failed!   Maybe more paperwork isn’t necessary afterall.

Environmentalism and Immigration, what do they have in common?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The logical first response is one that jumps right out at you—too many immigrants will degrade the environment because there will be a need for more houses, more roads, more schools, more water, and the list goes on.  Groups, like the Center for Immigration Studies, have one report after another showing that nexus.

Then why aren’t the major environmental groups (Sierra Club, etc.) taking on the issue of population growth coming now in the US almost exclusively from immigration?  

I have said previously, I was an environmentalist in my naive youth (a lobbyists no less!)  However, I woke up very quickly to what environmentalism was all about when the preservationists working with the National Park Service tried to take my family’s farm—mine and my neighbors.   I couldn’t understand why the government needed our well-cared-for land and why we would be the villains for owning property.

After helping people, small farmers and landowners, across the country fight back against government (preservationist-backed) takings, the full import of what it all meant has only recently sunk in.   Reading Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” was an eye-opener and I suspect that when I read Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism” more will become clear.   The elitist environmentalists/preservationists backed by big foundation money  just want to control us, to take our liberty.    They don’t care if I’m taking good care of my bit of the land, only that more private land come under government control (really their elitist control).   Those people behind the environmental groups today, the big funders, want control and understand that environmental regulation is a way to get it.

So how does my mind then link open borders and more refugees and immigrants to that?   The very same big players behind the environmental movement are behind the open borders movement as well, contrary to what one would think is the logic in my opening paragraph above.  They are following Alinsky’s playbook.  To bring about “change” one needs to produce “crisis” and “chaos” by fueling the war of the “have-nots” against the “haves.”    In America our “have-nots” were becoming fewer and fewer as they attained the middle class and became complacent.   No change and no revolution will occur if people are basically content with their lives.

So, as I said before, we now import the poor and angry.   The same big players behind the environmental movement are encouraging the creation of ethnic groups demanding their piece of the American pie and keeping people in constant turmoil.  Chaos (crisis) brings about change!   Change, as Obama and the big players mean it, is to take this country toward Socialism.  Although I need to throw in this caveat, Alinsky, an atheist, seemed to promote the idea that “change” was creativity itself, that it had intrinsic value to the “community organizer” even if it didn’t have a specific goal.

Enter the Tides Foundation.

Remember I told you about the Tides Foundation.  Glenn Beck has been unraveling their involvement with ACORN and the SEIU which I have written about on several previous occasions and how they are organizing immigrants.   Well, the Tides Foundation has been a huge funder of the environmentalists as well as pro-open borders and refugee groups, along with most other Leftwing causes.   Just go to their Form 990 I linked in the post above if you don’t believe me.

Someone the other day sent me the IRC report—the one we have been writing about—that says the Iraqi refugees are in crisis and the government needs to shell out more of our money for the refugees and the agencies that resettle them.  No one ever suggests slowing the flow of refugees.  The goal is to keep them poor and angry and in crisis.

On the opening page of that IRC report, I saw the connection.  There, among those on the IRC’s elite Iraqi crisis committee, was Drummond Pike— the king of the Liberal fascist funders, the money-launderer-in-chief.

So what puzzled me 20 years ago—why small private landowners were not encouraged and praised for their stewardship of land, or today why these refugee agencies and open borders groups are bringing so many people to America only to live in poverty—is clear.  It isn’t about care of the environment or the plight of the downtrodden, both are just pawns in the bigger game of changing our form of government and bringing us all under control of a few elitists who think only they have the brains to manage the rest of us—–the riff-raff!  It is aptly called liberal fascism.

Later clarification:  When I talk about environmentalism, I’m talking about radical top-down-control political and corporate environmentalism.   I am not referring to the average American who might consider him or herself an environmentalist cleaning up a local stream, enjoying feeding backyard birds, or otherwise wanting to protect their local environment.  The Tides Foundation is funding corporate/political environmentalism.