Day: August 13, 2009

VDARE author tells us how open borders crowd blundered in Nashville

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Thomas Allen writing at VDARE has published an article this week that humorously demontrates that rather than being a powerful group of smart operatives and savvy Chicago-style community organizers the open borders crowd in Nashville is just a bunch of blunderers.    We were there and we told you about the events as they unfolded in May when the swanky Loew’s Vanderbilt Hotel (that hires immigrant labor to keep wages low) cancelled an educational conference about Jihad days before it was to begin. 

But, I don’t want to retell the story, Allen, who spoke at the conference, tells it so much better than I can.

Here are a couple of paragraphs I especially liked.  Negri, the hotel manager, had cancelled the Jihad conference fearing (he said) for the safety of guests and employees, but knew that on Monday he was having a press conference in which he was a principle participant.   Allen hypothesizes about what would make Negri do something so rash as renege on a contract and thus draw attention to the Jihad conference.

But, that brings up a third and, to me, completely plausible explanation for the abrupt cancellation. The Monday after the symposium there was to be a “press conference” held by the local Treason Lobby to kick off the national campaign for “immigration reform”, aka amnesty. The accidently publicized Jihad symposium would have been an embarrassment to Mr. Negri, who was publicly allied with the amnesty campaign.

Or maybe the cognitive dissonance required by having a symposium about Jihadists in America followed by a press conference announcing a strategy to let them all in was just too much.

Read the whole article and laugh.

Incidentally, as I watch the firestorm over health care reform (one of the questions always asked by participants, aka, the Mob, is about illegal aliens getting health care), I realize that efforts to drum up support for amnesty, like this one in Nashville have pretty much fizzled. 

A few minutes later:   I see that Obama says he is pushing immigration reform to the House and Senate floors in early 2010.  I guess he better hope the public fire of August is out because throwing amnesty into the mix right now is akin to throwing gasoline on an inferno.

Roanoke refugees plead guilty in kidnapping case

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Oh, well, I am only nearly a month late with the news, but better late then never, right!    What prompted me to search around and see if something was new on this story we reported back in May where 4 African immigrants (3 were identified as refugees) had plotted to kidnap rich local women and hold them for ransom, is that this afternoon nearly 20 people are visiting RRW and that old May kidnapping story.   I figured something must be going on with it.

This is all I found, a short piece from mid-July about how all four have pleaded guilty and face life sentences.   I suspect they got a little culture shock coming from Africa where kidnapping for ransom is likely just one more source of ill-gotten gain.

Four men have pleaded guilty to federal conspiracy charges in a plot to kidnap the wives of wealthy Roanoke area men and hold them for ransom.

U.S. Attorney Julia Dudley said 19-year-old Joshua Kasongo of Roanoke and 20-year-old Luke Elbino of Vinton entered guilty pleas Friday in U.S. District Court.

Two others, 20-year-old Mohamed Hussein Guhad and 18-year-old Anthony Eugene Boyd-Muse, pleaded guilty Tuesday.

Prosecutors say looked for houses in Roanoke County neighborhoods where they believed wealthy people lived, then used the Internet to research their intended targets.

The four face a maximum of life in prison. Sentencing is scheduled October 8.

I’m guessing that the Virginia Council of Churches has looked on Roanoke as one of those wonderful welcoming cities, not like mean old Hagerstown, MD.

Hagerstown Refugee article (Part II): Doesn’t this endanger some refugees?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I just told you in my previous post that I had been lazy about posting on a Hagerstown Herald Mail article about refugees in my county.  Go check out what I said, here.  However, when I saw this article published at something called Refugees United, it got my attention.

The Herald Mail story gives a pat on the back to George Miller who previously ran the Virginia Council of Churches in Hagerstown before he was let go during the political problems the organization faced  (the ones I told you about in the previous post).   Miller has befriended an African refugee, who is apparently doing very well in our county, but who literally ran for his life because he was reporting against his government in Africa.

So, now here he is with a big photo and a story that tells all about where he lives and works in the US and that he has family still in the Ivory Coast prominantly featured at a website for finding refugees.   Isn’t it just possible that while patting themselves on the back and wanting so badly to show the public they are good people that they actually endanger some refugees lives?  Who benefits, does the refugee (Diabate in this case) benefit or do the do-gooders just get to feel good while promoting their political agenda?  Can’t his enemies better find him and his family now? 

Here is what the Herald Mail tells us:

Miller has been inviting Diabate, 36, to celebrate holidays with him since Diabate arrived in the U.S. three years ago.

“We usually have him for Easter and Christmas dinners, and even Thanksgiving,” Miller said.

Before fleeing, Diabate said he worked as a teacher and then as a reporter, writing stories critical of the government.

His struggle, which included being arrested and brutalized by unidentified attackers in 2005, was chronicled on The Herald-Mail editorial page in February 2007.

Diabate ran from his attackers, and then walked 200 miles to Ghana.

He is still in touch with his family — brothers, sisters and four daughters. For the last two years, he’s been trying to bring his daughters to the United States.

Who is behind Refugees United?   I just went to their site and then to Guidestar to see what I could learn.  Guidestar gives us the following description of what they are about, sounds all warm and fuzzy doesn’t it?

Refugees United works to provide a global, anonymous and secure network to assist refugees in reconnecting with missing family members. Working across borders and boundaries, without taking into consideration the legal status of a refugee, or which conflict he or she has escaped from, the network is aimed at all in search of missing family.

Furthermore the platform operates in 23 different languages, providing an all-important function of anonymity, allowing any person to register with as much or as little information as he/she is comfortable with sharing with the world. Family-known traits such as nicknames, pet’s names and so on, coupled with data on age, former villages or regions, provides a seamless and global network able to restore family contacts.

It is the aim of Refugees United to continuous work with refugees, empowering them in their quest to find loved ones, bringing them into the decision making process and with the ability to make active choices in their own lives. Refugees United also actively seeks open partnerships with organizations in pursuit of alleviating the suffering of refugees, IDPs and stateless persons.

They really don’t have much of a website, but they have a blog where they have posted this Herald Mail story.   On their itty bitty site you find this disclaimer:

We do NOT recommend the service of Refugees United to people at risk of being traced by potential persecutors.

Well, now I am wondering if they asked Mr. Diabate if they could plaster his information and photo on their blog? 

Because Refugees United (New York City address) only began in 2008, they have no Form 990 on file at Guidestar, but they do have their funding sources:

Bitten and Mads Clausen Foundation – $200,000

The Way Forward – $75,000

JL Foundation – $50,000

The $200,000 is from a Danish leftwing foundation.   The other two I couldn’t find much information about because there are several ‘The Way Forward’ projects, one is at Ford the other at Chase Manhattan Bank and the only JL Foundation I found didn’t seem remotely connected to refugees and immigration.

I was thinking gee, it’s too bad that Obama didn’t have this site last year before he was surprised and embarrassed by the press discovering Auntie Zeituni living illegally in subsidized housing in Boston.  I wonder if he could use this site now to find the still elusive Uncle Omar?

Hagerstown Refugee article: a story I have been sitting on (Part 1)

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This article has been sitting around in my list of potential posts since August 3rd.  I’ve started to post on it several times, but didn’t want to get into a big dissertation on how refugee resettlement in Hagerstown inspired the creation of this blog, but decided when I saw the article published at another site that I really needed to get my energy up to write about it.

The story in the Hagerstown Herald Mail is your standard, immigrants are struggling but doing well, people are nice to them, but Hagerstown is “unwelcoming” because citizens ran out of town the Virginia Council of Churches—that’s the agency that had been resettling refugees to the city two to three years ago.   The “unwelcoming” attitude came in the wake of an unfortunate incident, we are told.

When they came to Hagerstown, a Virginia Council of Churches office in Hagerstown helped refugees resettle. That office closed in 2007, its officials citing an “unwelcoming” community after an incident brought to light the presence of a group of refugees in Hagerstown.

In October 2006, some residents and government officials discovered that refugees were being resettled locally after a Burundian woman experienced a severe case of morning sickness on West Franklin Street, where the refugees were living.

Because the woman’s translator was unavailable, authorities thought she and other refugees possibly had a communicable disease. Hazmat units were sent to the area, and the 12 African refugees were quarantined briefly.

This is a very simplistic description of what happened.    This incident served only to force the Herald Mail to report to the public in a front page story that refugees were quietly being resettled by an agency from out of state.    Some of us initially just wanted to know how the program worked, who decided which cities would get refugees, did local government have any say in the matter, who would employ the refugees, what services would they receive etc.  Here is a post I wrote in September 2007 in which I tell readers the questions I asked the Herald Mail to research and report on and they refused.

So some of us asked for a public meeting and got it.   The US State Department sent a couple of top people, Maryland sent its refugee people, and Church World Service, the contractor of Virginia Council of Churches, and VCC all attended and spent the evening dodging questions and talking down to us.

I thought about this yesterday because the contentious Townhall meeting with Senator Cardin on health care reform was held in the same theater at Hagerstown Community College and it occurred to me that the source of many peoples’ anger yesterday and two years ago is that citizens have had it with being dictated to from elite ‘smart people’ from Washington.  It wasn’t the refugees people were angry at two years ago, it was the big-government bureaucrats and their religious left minions (cheered on by editors of the Herald Mail) shoving a federal program down our throats that was so maddening to many of the residents of Washington County.

When Washington comes to town, we just want good and open government, not sneaky government!

And, finally what the Herald Mail and Virginia Council of Churches don’t tell you is that somehow VCC was screwing up badly here (the woman in the hazmat incident above was located in the worst building in the worst neighborhood in town, why?).   VCC was shut down from the top and sent back to Virginia by the US State Department and their bosses at Church World Service!  Calling us “unwelcoming” as a parting shot was just to advance their political agenda.

You can read all about the lead-up to, and aftermath of, that September 2007 meeting in our category on the subject, here.

It was this refugee debacle in Hagerstown, MD that inspired the creation of Refugee Resettlement Watch.   We want to be sure other citizens know how this federal program works and why it needs to be reformed.

See Part II to see what prompted me to finally get around to mentioning this article.

Campaign launched this week to educate the public about American workers losing jobs to imported labor

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

NumbersUSA and the Coalition for the Future American Worker have begun a nationwide education campaign with a TV advertisement that will be airing on cable TV soon.  Asking for a “time-out,” here is what they had to say in their announcement on Tuesday (you can view the ad here also).

NumbersUSA last November called for a suspension of most immigration.

With the launch of this ad campaign in August, NumbersUSA is accelerating its mobilization for a time-out on the importation of most foreign workers.

The fact is that U.S. immigration policies are on automatic pilot. It doesn’t matter how terrible the economy becomes — it doesn’t matter that 15 million Americans are looking for a job and can’t find one. No matter what, businesses can still seek to cut their labor costs by bringing in as many foreign workers as they did when the economy was booming.

We definitely have observed  how an immigration program is on “automatic pilot.”   There seems to be absolutely no talk of reducing refugee numbers even though half, if not more, arriving today will not find work.