Update July 30th: More here at Forbes magazine.
Update July 17th: The Wall Street Journal has more information on the story, here.
Update July 11th: American Thinker had an opinion piece on the Iraqi Palestinian refugees yesterday with a lot of interesting comments posted as well, here.
Update later on July 10th: Advocates for open borders (people who have apparently no concern with the numbers or where immigrants come from), call Mark Krikorian a “nativist” and “racist” for his comments in this Christian Science Monitor story, once again demonstrating that they, none of them apparently, can have a discussion/disagreement on immigration without demonizing anyone who disagrees with them. That is classic Alinsky in “Rules for Radicals.” See the aptly named “Wonk Room” Progressive blog here to see what I’m talking about.
It continues to amaze me that these commenters (calling Krikorian a nativist) can’t see that the refugees we bring here are virtually turned over to big businesses in order to keep wages low. They are largely being exploited, and at times live in terrible conditions here when government resettlement contractors leave them in a lurch. I bet in the last two years we have nearly a hundred posts about refugees living in the US in squalid conditions, and we have written extensively about Iraqi refugees returning home to Iraq or the Middle East where they are culturally comfortable after being here for a few months. So it’s not so easy to tell who are the good guys, as the Progressives would have you believe, in this discussion and who are the bad guys. Are the open borders folks really the good guys they like to portray themselves to be?
More information from Jerry Gordon writing at New English Review yesterday, here.
Original post starts here:
It really is no surprise to hear, we have reported on many occasions* about the lobbying/public relations effort that groups like Refugees International** have been waging , that it has been confirmed by the US State Department—-Palestinians, who were in Iraq at Saddam Hussein’s invitation, would be coming to the US. About ten days ago we speculated that this might be in the works, here.
From the Christian Science Monitor (hat tip: three of our readers!):
Atlanta – The State Department confirmed today that as many as 1,350 Iraqi Palestinians – once the well-treated guests of Saddam Hussein and now at outs with much of Iraqi society – will be resettled in the US, mostly in southern California, starting this fall.
It will be the largest-ever resettlement of Palestinian refugees into the US – and welcome news to the Palestinians who fled to Iraq after 1948 but who have had a tough time since Mr. Hussein was deposed in 2003. Targeted by Iraqi Shiites, the mostly-Sunni Palestinians have spent recent years in one of the region’s roughest refugee camps, Al Waleed, near Iraq’s border with Syria.
“Really for the first time, the United States is recognizing a Palestinian refugee population that could be admitted to the US as part of a resettlement program,” says Bill Frelick, refugee policy director at Human Rights Watch in Washington.
Given the US’s past reluctance to resettle Palestinians – it accepted just seven Palestinians in 2007 and nine in 2008 – the effort could ruffle some diplomatic feathers.
I must say, if the State Department is sending them to California, they must be in on bringing down the economy of arguably the most financially-beleaguered state in the US. Maybe the Obama/Clinton State Department is following the Cloward-Piven principle on how one brings down a government by overwhelming the welfare system! (To learn more about the Cloward-Piven strategy start with Judy’s post, here. To those of us who cannot understand the idiocy of the Left’s drive to import more poverty, it is the explanation!)
Mark Krikorian at the Center for Immigration Studies charged that the State Department is dropping off its problems in a town near you, and not necessarily a California town.
But some critics say the State Department is sloughing off its problems onto American cities, especially since in this case the Palestinians were sympathizers of Hussein, who was deposed by the US.
“This is politically a real hot potato,” says Mark Krikorian, director of the conservative Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, adding, “[A]merica has become a dumping ground for the State Department’s problems – they’re tossing their problems over their head into Harrisburg, Pa., or Omaha, Neb.”
To further illuminate Mr. Krikorian’s point, why didn’t the UNHCR and the US State Department put pressure on rich Arab countries like Saudi Arabia to take their Muslim brethren? To their credit these camp-dwelling Palestinians caught at the Iraq-Syria border themselves called their co-religionists in Arab-run countries hypocrites for not taking them in—where is the much ballyhooed Muslim charity? We know why they don’t take them—Islamists must keep the refugee thorn in the side of the Israeli government. They must keep the hate going.
And, by the way, these Palestinians will come to the US in the Iraqi refugee quota, so besides residents of the resettlement cities not really knowing who their neighbors are, presumably they will take 1350 places from possibly Christian or other minority refugees from Iraq. I hope the State Department at least takes care not to resettle them in the midst of Shia Muslims in your town, thus bringing the problems of the Middle East closer to home.
While the US generally doesn’t accept Palestinians, Todd Pierce, a spokesman for the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, says that the Iraqi population of Palestinians falls under a different category from those in Gaza and the West Bank. Each applicant will be carefully scrutinized for terrorist ties, he adds.
The US reluctance to accept Palestinians is because it “doesn’t want the refugee program to become an issue in its relationship with Israel,” says a diplomat in the region, who requested anonymity because he is not cleared to talk to the press. But these Palestinians, he says, will be processed as refugees from Iraq.
Mr. Krikorian says the US should be the last refuge for those fleeing persecution. Only Jordan of all the Arab countries routinely grants citizenship to Palestinian refugees, he notes. More recently, says Mr. Frelick, Jordan has also shut its borders to Palestinians coming from Iraq.
* For those readers wanting to know more, I just used our search function for ‘Iraqi Palestinians’ and realized we have mentioned this group of refugees in nearly 40 posts.
** Review these posts to start with on Refugees International, the lobbying arm of the refugee industry. Here I point out the lobbying campaign of RI for the Palestinians but no mention of the persecuted Christians. Then in this post I told you that RI Chairman of the Board, Farooq Kathwari, has been criticized for his alleged connection to radical Islamists.