Day: March 8, 2010

Student visas! Another Muslim immigrant fraud scheme!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We’ve told you about food stamp scams, home health care fraud, drivers license testing schemes, and money transfer scams by immigrants designed to rip off American taxpayers.  But this takes the cake!  Maybe you heard about it tonight on Fox News.  Hat tip: Blulitespecial

A 46 year old American has been arrested for helping more than a hundred Middle Eastern students keep their student visas by taking their tests for them thus allowing them to stay in the US.  It is really outrageous—the California colleges where this happened never noticed that Higgins and his white helpers weren’t the Muslim foreign students!  Unbelievable!

Daniel Higgins doesn’t look like a Middle Eastern student, but officials say he routinely portrayed himself as one for almost a decade, getting paid up to $1,500 per student to attend their classes and take exams so they could keep their visas current and remain in the U.S.

Officials say that records seized from Higgins’ home in Laguna Niguel, Calif., show that more than 100 students from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Lebanon, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates hired him to do their classwork and take their tests.

Higgins, 46, pleaded not guilty to conspiracy to commit immigration fraud when he appeared in Orange County Superior Court in Santa Ana on Monday.

Six others — Mohammed Alnuaim, Abdullah Alhogail, Khalid Almenaibi, Saeed Alfalahi, Ibrahim Almansoori and Mohamed Almehairi — were also arrested Monday and appeared with Higgins before a U.S. magistrate. All were charged with immigration fraud.

“This is unique and not something we have seen in the past,” said Jorge Guzman, a special agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “We don’t know the motive of these men coming from these countries, why they were here or why they were not attending classes.”

ICE agents said some of the foreign students involved in the fraud will be charged with crimes, and others will simply be deported.

Then get this! 

Sources said they do not know if any of the men are considered national security threats, but several are “persons of interest.” 

So any guesses on what these 100 or so Muslim men were doing when they didn’t have to attend class?

Manchester, NH mayor wants refugee agency to consult with local government

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

He does have the right to demand that!

Another city, same old story.  This time the Mayor of Manchester, NH is alleging that the International Institute of New Hampshire is overloading their city with refugees who are living in poverty and appear to be neglected by the International Institute, a subcontractor of the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI).

We have heard this same charge against an USCRI affiliate  just a few months ago in Bowling Green, KY, here.  We saw the US State Department close an USCRI affiliate in Waterbury, CT, here.   And, we have heard complaints from Akron, OH and Albany, NY among others, so USCRI has a track record!  For the problems in Manchester, NH over the years, I just now searched RRW and found these many posts mentioning Manchester, here.

This is what the Union Leader reported last week about the mayor’s letter:

Mayor Ted Gatsas is accusing a local refugee resettlement agency of steering newly arrived refugees into “substandard” apartments and failing to ensure their health and well-being.

The mayor assailed the International Institute of New Hampshire in a letter to the state refugee coordinator this week, saying the Institute “does not have the confidence or trust of the City.”

A top executive with the agency says the mayor’s claims are unfounded and, she suspects, politically motivated.

“I have to wonder what is the motive for writing this letter … and making it into a public, political issue,” said Carolyn Benedict-Drew, president and CEO of the International Institute of New England.

The March 2 letter asks the state to pressure the agency to change its ways. It calls for new regulations requiring the International Institute of New Hampshire to meet regularly with city officials and to notify the city before new refugees arrive.

The mayor’s letter also asks the state refugee coordinator, Barbara Seebart, to subject the agency to a performance audit “based on objective service and success standards.”

Seebart said her office does not have the authority to conduct such an audit, nor for that matter can it require a resettlement agency to consult the city about its work. She said she plans to refer the mayor’s letter to “the appropriate party,” though as of yesterday, she was not sure who, specifically, that might be.

Read it all.

The mayor is only asking for something the law requires but is rarely ever followed.  Resettlement agencies are required to consult local governments when resettling refugees!

Here is a link for the law (45 C.F.R Part 400) governing the Refugee Resettlement Program.

Section 400.5 (h) mandates local government consultation in preparing state plans.

(h) Provide that the State will, unless exempted from this requirement by the Director, assure that meetings are convened, not less often than quarterly, whereby representatives of local resettlement agencies, local community service agencies, and other agencies that serve refugees meet with representatives of State and local governments to plan and coordinate the appropriate placement of refugees in advance of the refugees’ arrival. All existing exemptions to this requirement will expire 90 days after the effective date of this rule. Any State that wishes to be exempted from the provisions regarding the holding and frequency of meetings may apply by submitting a written request to the Director. The request must set forth the reasons why the State considers these meetings unnecessary because of the absence of problems associated with the planning and coordination of refugee placement. An approved exemption will remain in effect for three years, at which time a State may reapply.

Everyone concerned with the lack of local government input and involvement in the refugee program should be contacting their state refugee coordinators and asking for the plan which is supposed to be submitted to the director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) each year.   See state coordinators here (click on the pdf )

The revolving door!

Oops!  But, can you believe it, the Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement in the Dept. of Health and Human Services was previously a vice president at USCRI! Here!

This is what I’ve learned 3 months late, the former Vice President of USCRI is now head of the funding source for refugee programs—the Office of Refugee Resettlement.    Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, appointed USCRI VP Eskinder Negash to that post in August.  Eskinder Negash would have overseen the expenditure of federal tax money that passed through USCRI to its affiliate the Bowling Green International Center! [And, in this case to the International Institute of NH!]

So, what do you think the odds are that he will be policing his former employer?  The revolving door between this federal program and its contractors is disgusting!

Is this the M.O.?  Federal government overloads a city with refugees and immigrants (and leaves refugees in the lurch) and then when people are mad as hell,  the federal government sends in the dogs from the Center for Prevention of Hate Violence to charge that Americans are racists and they need some NGO from another state to come in and get their minds right!  Manchester is one of four cities targeted by the Far Left Hate Violence gang to be chastised sometime soon.