Month: December 2009

Somali Bantu becomes US citizen, but…

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This story is titled, “Somali refugee celebrates long road to citizenship,” and like so many mainstream media reports it’s all so upbeat until one reads further down the article. 

You are too old for school, said Catholic Charities in Pittsburgh (yes, must be the same one the Burmese are protesting here):

Mr. Muya was 20 when he came to Pittsburgh, and was told he was too old to go to school. Officials at Catholic Charities, which helped resettle the Somali Bantu families here, told him he needed to find a job.

Government refugee polices focus on the goal of self-sufficiency above all else, which “isn’t easy,” said Claire Kushma, director of marketing and public relations at Catholic Charities.

Because only limited resources are available to the refugees upon their arrival, “they must obtain a job quickly to provide for basic needs like food, shelter and clothing,” she said, noting that Catholic Charities will be launching an expanded program in 2010 to provide work force and English language skills to refugee who have found jobs. [Edit:  that should be a small number since so few refugees are finding work.]

No one is keeping track of the refugees!   Where have we heard this before!

And while his new citizenship may symbolize how far this group has come, an estimated dozen families living in Lawrenceville are still enduring tough challenges, said Ms. Tsapis, a grant-writer and strategic planner for Magee Womencare International, a humanitarian outreach arm of Magee-Womens Hospital of UPMC.

While the children, who make up most of the 250-plus community of Somali Bantus, have picked up English easily, they still encounter hostility during the schools days. All are Muslim and they’re teased for the turbans and heavy robed clothing that many wear, their accents and their customs, she said.

The biggest problems? The language and cultural barriers, and “safe affordable housing with decent landlords,” Ms. Tsapis answered, noting that the families have experienced vandalism and assaults in their homes and on the streets.

“Most don’t feel safe in their homes, have uncooperative landlords or housing that just isn’t affordable.”

While praising the good intentions of resettlement programs, she said no one organization keeps track of this group or other resettled refugees or of the services that are being provided.

“Nobody’s talking to anyone else,” she said.

The refugee resettlement program of the US government is kept from scrutiny and ultimately reform by this presumption of good intentions!

More Somali Bantu on the way?

Here is a Somali Bantu website, Somali Bantu Community Association of Boise, I came across a few weeks ago and have had in my queue.  It’s dated December 4th, so maybe they know something we don’t know—14,000 more Somali Bantu are on the way?!

How many Somali Bantus are coming to America?

About 14000 , mostly families with young children. now there are 12,000 Bantu in United States.

For a backgrounder on the Somali Bantu see the article by Don Barnett at the Center for Immigration Studies.  Thanks to reader, JLM (here), for pointing it out to us.

Cambodia deports Uighurs seeking asylum, returns them to China

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Wow!  The Cambodian government just put them on a plane sent by China and deported them.  This is a story I have mentioned recently here.  No messing around with human rights concerns and human rights activists—bam, just sent them back.  From an AP story posted on a Cambodian blog:

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — A group of Muslims who fled China after deadly ethnic rioting and sought asylum in Cambodia were sent back home Saturday, even though rights groups fear they face persecution there.

Interior Ministry spokesman Lt. Gen. Khieu Sopheak said the 20 members of the Uighur minority had been put on a special plane sent from China that left Phnom Penh International Airport Saturday night.

“They are going back to China,” he said.

Cambodia has been under intense pressure from China to deport the Uighurs, whom Beijing has called criminals after they fled the country with the help of a secret network of missionaries. The expulsion came a day before Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping visits Cambodia as part of a four-country tour.

The United States, the United Nations and human rights groups had urged Cambodia to stop the deportation. A spokeswoman for the U.N. refugee agency said it had not finished evaluating the Uighurs, including two children, for refugee status.

The Uighurs were being deported because it was determined they entered the country illegally, Foreign Ministry spokesman Koy Kuong said earlier. He said two other Uighurs who had been with the group are missing.

Some countries have refused to send Uighurs — such as those released from U.S. detention at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba — back to China over concerns about retribution and abuse.

“It is hugely concerning that Cambodian authorities are not giving this group an opportunity to seek asylum, or for authorities to assess their asylum case,” Brittis Edman, a Cambodia researcher with Amnesty International, said late Saturday before the group left.

“This group will be particularly vulnerable to torture. Because of those concerns, Cambodia shouldn’t send them back.”

Uighurs say Beijing has long restricted their rights, particularly clamping down on their practice of Islam.

Bottomline is that it looks like China isn’t going to mess around and get squishy with Islamic supremacism in China.  Since our Marxists and Maoists, especially in the Obama Administration (Anita Dunn, where are you?), are bending over backwards to appease Islamists, I’m wondering how their reverence for China squares with this latest action.

For new readers, we have been following Uighur issues ever since the Uighurs detained at Guantanamo Bay were considered for release into the refugee community in the US. See ‘State Department calls Gitmo prisoners refugees’ here.

Here is a post Judy wrote in October of 2008 where she quotes Andrew McCarthy on the Uighurs:

And Andy McCarthy, who has more experience than practically anybody at prosecuting jihadists, wrote :

Jihadists — and there is not question that the Uighurs are jihadists — do not recognize distinctions based on the Westphalia world of nation-states. In their view, it is Dar al Islam or Dar al Harb: i.e., you are either part of the realm of the Muslims or the realm of war, and the goal is to turn Dar al Harb into Dar al Islam by any means necessary. Releasing trained jihadists into the United States on the theory that their beef is with the Chinese and they have no problem with us would be a delusional act of suicide.

Also, note that we learned just a few days ago that we have an exiled Uighur leader living in a town near you, here.

You can bet that the Obama Administration tip-toes around this issue so as not to tick-off the Chinese who hold our financial future in their communist hands.

To find all of ours stories on Uighurs, you may have to use our search function for several spellings of the word:  Uighurs, Uyghurs, and Uighers.

Comment worth noting: Rohan Swee on the Ft. Wayne Burmese debate

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know how many of you are following the discussion on-going here at another comment worth noting.* Commenter Ellen spoke forcefully about her frustration with an overload of refugees in Ft. Wayne, IN.  Then another commenter, whose name is “Reader,” responded critically with the usual flagrant attempt to silence critics by impugning Ellen’s character.  After some back and forth, which you should see if you haven’t already, comes another commenter, Rohan Swee, with a brilliant comeback. 

But, it’s more than a comeback!  What Rohan says sums up much of our thinking at RRW.  I only wish I could say it half as well!

First “Reader” says:

“I have noticed that native-born Americans have a VERY short memory.”

Rohan Swee’s response:

No, Reader, you haven’t “noticed” any such thing, because you can’t “notice” a non-existent phenomenon. You aren’t “noticing” anything, but rather giving expression to your belief in the smug, lazy-minded, and convenient fiction that only the ignorant or the “haters” could possibly disagree with your views on this issue.

“Native-born Americans” are not, as a matter of fact, unaware of their own ancestry and the history of immigration in this country. Seriously, would you take one minute to ponder how silly your claim, and every straw-man that follows from it, is? It does not take immense erudition or unusual intelligence to reflect that times and circumstances change, and that refugee or immigration polices that are appropriate at one point in history might not work as well at other times – something I think any sane person ought to be able to recognize – and that decent people can disagree about what those optimum policies for a given time and circumstance are. The history, hardships, and success of your or my immigrant grandparents at a certain juncture in history are not necessarily relevant to setting contemporary policy. I doubt you’d really be on board with the “classical” immigration policy of grandpa’s day that you’re so wistfully invoking, as it was no-aid, “sink or swim”, and upwards of 50% of immigrants had to go back home because they couldn’t hack it. So how about letting go of the childish and self-serving falsehood that people disagree with you about this and related issues because they either don’t know, or are strangely in denial about, nigh-on universally known points of fact, or because their personal qualities of compassion and justice are just so inferior to your exalted self’s.

This endless, vacuous invocation of “but your ancestors were immigrants”, as if that is all one needed to know, and as if it were a fact that rendered all opposition to your viewpoint obviously misguided, is beyond lazy and thoughtless. And it is getting very, very tiresome.

Reader says:

“What offends me at core of my being is the accusations made against resettlement workers who give their heart and soul to their work and refugees who only are seeking a safe place to live that actually presents them with an option for a future.”

Rohan again:

The fact that you immediately leap to personalize the issue – my heart, my soul, my personal experiences – exemplifies the sheer emotionalized mindlessness that befogs this debate. Your personal compassion, dedication, or whatever is irrelevant to whether our current refugee programs are prudent and sustainable, or imprudent and damaging. It’s not all about you.

Reader, there are millions of people on this planet in the same situation as the unfortunates you work with. We cannot take them all in, and our first obligation is to our own. The fact of their misfortune does not give you, or any unanswerable agencies, some unimpeachable claim to arrogate policy-making to yourselves, on the basis of self-alleged superior compassion.

Rohan, whoever you are, thank you so much for putting into concise language what we have been trying to say with thousands and thousands of words over the span of more than 2 years.

* Comment worth noting is a category we set up some time ago to highlight comments that we thought needed to be more prominantly posted or they would be lost to new readers.

Australia: Murder of Sudanese refugee not racially motivated

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

There must be more (a lot more) to this story from Australia.   A judge has ruled that the murder of an 18-year-old refugee from the Sudan was not racially motivated.  And, it’s not clear to me what such a ruling in Australia would have meant anyway.

The murder of a Sudanese refugee was not racially motivated despite his killer spraying racist graffiti just hours before the bashing, a judge said.

Just hours before the attack, Clinton David Rintoull sprayed the abusive words on the wall of a house in suburban Noble Park in September 2007.

He later stood outside the house armed with a metal pole and shouted: ‘These blacks are turning the town into the Bronx. I’m going to take my own town back. I’m looking to kill blacks’.

Expressing anger and remorse that she had even brought her son to Australia, the victim’s mother had this to say.

Mr Gony’s mother Martha Ojulo Alama expressed her outrage at the decision.

‘My son was preyed on and killed like a dog on the street and today the justice didn’t give me what I was hoping to hear, what I was hoping that they deserved to get,’ she said, in Sudanese, outside court.

Ms Alama said she could not forgive herself for letting him die a violent death in Australia.

‘He could have died where there is a cause in Sudan … but here someone is killing you for nothing.’

As I said at the outset, there must be more to this story.

Yemen detains and deports refugees other than Somalis

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Since I was on the subject of Yemen (and Obama ordering a missile strike there), I thought this story from UN Radio was interesting.

The number of people making the perilous journey across the Gulf of Aden into Yemen has risen by 50 per cent.

United Nations refugee agency UNHCR says more than 74,000 Africans have reached the shores of Yemen this year up from 50,000 recorded in 2008. Patrick Maigua reports from Geneva.

UNHCR says the refugees and migrants, most of them fleeing desperate situations of civil war, political instability, poverty, famine and drought in the Horn of Africa make the dangerous journey on smuggler’s boats across the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea under harrowing conditions. In some cases they are beaten, raped, killed or thrown overboard into the shark infested waters.

More Ethiopians  than Somalis have arrived in Yemen this year.

“Unlike in previous years, Somalis are no longer the majority of arrivals. With nearly 32,000 Somali arrivals this year their number remains steady in comparison to 2008. However, the number of Ethiopians reaching Yemeni shores more than doubled this year – totaling over 42,000 people.

I don’t know why Yemen would discriminate and not grant asylum to Ethiopians unless these are non-Muslim Ethiopians.   I wish the UN would stop being so politically correct and tell us why there is a  double standard.

Yemen currently hosts over 150,000 Somali refugees. UNHCR says it does not have access to Ethiopian nationals arriving in Yemen, but has raised its serious concern over the continued detention and deportation of Ethiopians without granting them access to asylum procedures.