Month: April 2010

DeKalb County, GA has special school for immigrant children

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We’ve heard many times at RRW about the problems faced by school districts with large refugee populations where American parents complain that their children are held back in the classroom by large numbers of students who speak little or no English. (Here is one such story from Vermont just last month.)  But not every community can afford an International Student Center where all the foreign immigrant students attend a school just to get them up to speed to enter a traditional classroom.

For all those communities with growing refugee and immigrant populations, you might start to think about budgeting for this type of separate system or request that the State Department and resettlement contractors slow the flow to your town.

In DeKalb County they are cutting the school budget except not for the International Student Center.  Hat tip: Ralph

From AJC News:

Earlier this month, the school board approved a tentative budget with $115 million in cuts, including 430 layoffs, staff furloughs and program cuts.

But the International Student Center is not among those cuts, district spokesman Dale Davis said.

Board members and administrators say it’s too valuable to the students and to the county, which is one of the nation’s most diverse school districts.

Board member Eugene Walker, who represents the district the Center is in, said that the county could never consider cutting the program.

“It helps the youngster get ready for the traditional classroom,” he said. “DeKalb is an international county and we need tools to prepare them for success in the system and the world. It’s an essential.”

11,000 students in the district speak no English!

“We have no teachers who speak Burundi, but that doesn’t mean we can’t teach them. We have picture dictionaries, visuals and videos,” said Sandra Nunez, director of DeKalb’s English Language Learners Program, which oversees 11,000 students who speak a language other than English. That’s more than 11 percent of the district’s enrollment.

About 2,200 of those students have been declared refugees by the federal government, according to Davis. DeKalb educates 85 percent of the refugees who come to Georgia, officials said.

While all school systems work with foreign language students, DeKalb’s International Student Center takes children who not only don’t speak English, but those who have no formal education.

[….]

The Center, which houses children from ages 7 to 20, has students from 168 different countries speaking 142 different languages and dialects. The greatest numbers are from Mexico, followed by Burma, Nepal, India and Iraq.

[…..]

The students at the Center are still required to pass the CRCTS *– in English – in the same grades as the American students.

Go to DeKalb County, Georgia for schools, public transportation and affordable housing.  But, does it have jobs?

In 2008, 2,325 refugees settled in Georgia, according to the federal Office of Refugee and Resettlement. Sixty-six percent of those refuges came from Bhutan, Burma and Iraq.

Many of them chose DeKalb, which offers the International Student Center, affordable housing and public transportation, Mixon said. “It definitely is the most diverse school system in the Southeast.”

Readers should know that unless refugees are joining family members they don’t get to choose where they will be resettled in the US.  That decision is made in some mysterious method by the federal resettlement contractors who divide up the so-called free-cases among themselves.  The federal government gets involved in the decision only (it seems!) when the media starts picking up on complaints from refugees and citizens of a community about a refugee overload.  I’ve called it the squawk factor—if citizens squawk too loudly (or refugees squawk) over some egregious situation that arises and it starts making the news, the State Department will step in and close down the resettlement for awhile.  It is really very poor managment on their part.

*In other news: While reading the above article I saw a side-bar story about possible high levels of cheating in Atlanta area schools on statewide CRCTS tests, here.

Ethiopian shooter at Knoxville hospital, kills woman and wounds other strangers then kills himself

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Here is another story that the politically correct mainstream media missed right along with the white nationalist lawyer murdered by a black man in Mississippi last week.  Thanks to a reader who just sent it our way.

An Ethiopian, presumably a former refugee (we take a large number of Ethiopians), opened fire at a hospital in Knoxville a week ago killing one woman and injuring two others.  Then he killed himself.  Apparently his mission at the hospital was to find a surgeon he claimed implanted a chip in him in order to track his whereabouts.  

You have to wade to the bottom of the article to find out his whole name, Abdo Ibssa Mohammed.  He must be a Muslim, so is that why this story hasn’t made the news in any big way?

From Scripps News:

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. – Abdo Ibssa believed a doctor had implanted a tracking chip in his body and was beset with legal and financial woes when police say he killed a woman, wounded two others and then killed himself Monday at Parkwest Medical Center.

Ibssa, who would have turned 39 Tuesday, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Ethiopia, used a stolen .357-caliber magnum pistol to shoot the women and then himself about 4:34 p.m. Monday, Knoxville Police Chief Sterling P. Owen IV said Tuesday. [based on the dateline on this story this would be the 19th and 20th of April–ed]

Ibssa was suffering psychological problems and had been committed by his family to a mental health facility in February, Owen said. Police have yet to determine what facility treated him or when he was released.

CIA manual on tracking and deception found in his car.

Owen said Ibssa apparently went to Parkwest on Monday looking for a surgeon who had performed an appendectomy on him in 2001. Owen said a half-page, handwritten note police found in his apartment after the shooting led police to determine that Ibssa believed the surgeon had implanted a computer chip in his body during the procedure. Inside Ibssa’s maroon 1996 Nissan Maxima investigators found a book entitled “The Official CIA Manual of Tracking and Deception.”

“The suspect believed he was being tracked as a result of that chip,” Owen said.

For new readers:  One of the top ten federal refugee contractors is the Ethiopian Community Development Council (ECDC) if some enterprising reporter wanted to look into this story more carefully.  They probably have some information on the guy.  But, that is unlikely to happen because the whole case will just be dismissed as some crazy nut job who has gone off the deep end.

Al Qaeda is looking into disguising terrorists as refugees to get into Israel

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I have scarcely any time to post these days, but I wanted to bring this article from Haaretz to your attention:

The Yemen-based arm of Al-Qaida is examining the possibility of infiltrating terrorists into Israel disguised as Somali refugees crossing the border from Egypt or even as new immigrants from Ethiopia.

Shi’ite rebels yesterday sent another letter to Haaretz, the latest of several, in which they quote from a letter sent by Al-Qaida to members of a Salafist group in the Gaza Strip that is opposed to Hamas.

(Italics are because the icon for indenting has disappeared and I don’t have time to figure it out. That’s a quote from the newspaper. My comment follows.)

Israel has traditionally had a humane policy toward refugees, lax even until recently. Trust Islamic terrorists to find a way to take advantage of it.

Reform recommendation: Make big companies help support refugee labor force

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Just now I was thinking about the mess in meatpacking city St. Cloud, MN and other meatpacking towns where issues with an overload of immigrants has been a problem—Garden City, KS, Greeley, CO, Shelbyville, TN, Grand Island, NE, Amarillo, TX, Ft. Morgan, CO come to mind right off the top of my head.

Why not have a federal law (or maybe states could do it) requiring large employers of legal refugee labor pay for some of the cost now borne by the public, afterall those industries benefit with reduced labor costs when hiring immigrants?

I envision any company hiring say more than 10 low-wage immigrants (from any legal program) must at minimum offer mandatory English language classes as part of the work day.  They should offer classes in assimilating to America in addition to helping the local community foot the bill for other public programs such as housing support, food stamps, school costs, emergency personel/police, and medical care. 

As it stands, the companies inundate cities with immigrant workers who are paid less now at meatpacking work (probably other industries too) then American workers were paid twenty years ago to do the same job.  The difference is that the taxpayer now picks up the cost of living for such low-wage employees through public assistance (welfare!).  And, just think, it might level the playing field for American workers.

11 Somali pirates brought to Virginia to stand trial for piracy

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I don’t often get into the Somali piracy issue, but this story is concerning.  For firing on Navy vessels, shouldn’t these guys be treated as military combatants.  Why are they in civilian courts in Virginia?  Think about it, we are going to pay for their trials, then their incarceration for life (if they get life in prison) and what if they don’t, say they are released in a few years, where do they go then—will they seek asylum here?  We don’t send asylum seekers back to ‘war-torn’ Somalia!

The Washington Post:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Eleven suspected pirates from Somalia have been brought to the United States to face piracy and other charges for attacks on two U.S. Navy ships off the coast of Africa, the Justice Department said on Friday.

It said the suspects were scheduled to appear on Friday in federal court in Norfolk, Virginia. The 11 men had been held on U.S. ships for weeks off Somalia’s coast as U.S. officials decided what to do with them. [You can bet Holder’s gang in the Justice Dept. was saying, s…, we can’t send them to Gitmo]

Five defendants were captured after the March 31 attack in which the Navy frigate, the USS Nicholas, exchanged fire with a suspected pirate vessel in the Indian Ocean west of the Seychelles, sinking a skiff and confiscating its mother ship.

Two of the accused pirates opened fire at night on what they believed to be a merchant ship, but it actually was the Navy vessel, according to U.S. court documents filed in the case.

In the other incident, six defendants were charged with the April 10 attack on another Navy vessel, the USS Ashland, in the Gulf of Aden. They allegedly opened fire on the vessel with small arms from their boat.

In addition to piracy, the criminal charges included attacks to plunder a vessel, assault with a dangerous weapon, and use of a firearm during a crime of violence.

If convicted of piracy, the suspects face a mandatory sentence of life in prison, a Justice Department spokesman said.

Thomas Jefferson knew what to do with Muslim pirates on the African coast and he didn’t bring them to Virginia to stand trial in a civilian court.

For more information, see this post from April of last year about how quasi-American Omar Jamal of Minneapolis (now of the UN!) dashed off to NYC to defend the only other pirate brought to the US.  Look for more of the same sort of publicity hounds as this story develops.

Update:  Andrew McCarthy weighs in on piracy here.