Day: June 19, 2010

Zimbabweans top list of world asylum seekers

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Who would have guessed?  They go mostly to South Africa says the UN.   From AP:

HARARE, Zimbabwe — The U.N. refugee agency says Zimbabweans top the list of people seeking asylum abroad.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said in its latest report 158,200 Zimbabweans sought asylum last year, fleeing political and economic turmoil and uncertainties over a fragile coalition government.

By comparison, about 48,600 people from Myanmar, also known as Burma, applied for asylum.

They were followed by about 39,000 Afghans, 39,200 Colombians and 37,900 Somalis.

The report, available in Zimbabwe’s capital on Friday, says nine out of 10 Zimbabwean asylum seekers sought refuge in neighboring South Africa.

Comment worth noting: Watching the Muslims take over in England

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Here is a comment from a reader, Margot, who responded to our post yesterday about Oklahoma’s preemptive move to ban Sharia law from the state.

Hi, thanks for the link to jihad watch.* I am in England just now, I come every summer, and it is frightening to watch the muslims taking over. Their sharia courts are allowed to rule on non-muslims’ problems as well, and the UK government recognizes and accepts those rulings!! Even if they dealt ONLY with muslim individuals, there is still the “law of the land” which is NOT sharia, here in England, and which should be everybody’s law who lives here. Their problem, I think, is that they have no written constitution. They think they have to be tolerant –and you should listen to BBC to become sick inside– but one of these days they’ll find themselves in a siege where they won’t be able to extricate themselves from. A case of closing the door of the barn after the horse is gone… We have become so stupid in the US that we may very well start doing the same as here.

I think the state of Oklahoma is getting that barn door shut before the horse escapes!  Thank God!

*Here is the link for Jihad Watch which I recommend everyone read daily.

Dysfunctional immigration court system lets illegals walk

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Hans von Spakovsky reports at National Review’s Corner on our broken immigration court system:

On Thursday… the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law held a hearing of its own. Mark Metcalf, a former immigration judge, was one of the witnesses, and he had some startling testimony that went completely unnoticed by the media (full disclosure: Mark and I worked together at the Justice Department).

Mark Metcalf’s research on the deceptive statistics released by the Justice Department is quite shocking. From 1996 to 2008, the U.S. allowed 1.8 million aliens (many of them here illegally) to remain free upon their promise to appear in court when their cases were scheduled to be heard, and 736,000 of them never showed up for their hearings. After 9/11, court evasion by illegal aliens exploded — from 2002 to 2006, over 50 percent of all aliens summoned to court disappeared.

And then, for those who do show up …

Only 9 percent of aliens who lose their cases actually bother to appeal; most of them just walk away and disappear. Those dodging deportation orders issued by immigration judges number in the hundreds of thousands.

It’s not the fault of the judges.

…because the immigration judges are just administrative judges and employees of the Justice Department, they have no ability to enforce their orders. So enforcement of all of these deportation orders is left up to the whims of the political appointees who run DHS and set the priorities of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, and whose lackadaisical attitude is one of the reasons that Arizona felt compelled to act on its own.

It’s gotten worse since President Obama took office.

In August 2009, ICE announced it would not remove aliens who skipped court or disobeyed orders to leave the U.S., which gives even more incentives to illegal aliens to treat both our laws and our courts with contempt. So, as Mark pointedly says, “noncitizens who disobey immigration court orders are treated remarkably better than their citizen” counterparts in state and federal courts who are subject to arrest, contempt and incarceration for disobeying court orders.

As von Spakovsky comments, it’s appalling.

Friends of Refugees: The Real Spirit of World Refugee Day

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

June 20th is World Refugee Day and you may see gushy self-promotion of their supposed humanitarian work by the Volags (federal contractors) and their hundreds of sub-contractors.  You have already seen that Clinton’s State Department had a star-studded event yesterday (for those with papers).  But what they won’t tell you, and you likely will not read anywhere else, are the excellent points raised here by Christopher Coen of Friends of Refugees.  (Emphasis mine.)

June 20th marks World Refugee Day, a day when we look at the plight of all refugees, not just those resettled to the U.S., but the overwhelming majority of refugees who will never be resettled here or to any other nation. While the world’s refugee population is growing, the world is able to resettle less than 1% them. The cost of resettling refugees is inarguable enormous, which always brings up the issue of what is the best way to spend limited resources on the world’s refugee population.

A 2002 study by North Dakota State University in Fargo estimated that a refugee family of four costs the taxpayer $21,965, just for the initial resettlement period. Although there are certain advantages to resettlement — refugees who are able to thrive in the U.S. are then able to significantly aid their cohorts who stay behind — there is no doubt that we could aid far more refugees by redirecting the dollars used on resettlement for those who stay behind in limbo. The 99% of refugees who stay behind are desperately in need of food, medicine, medical care, and protection. Only people deluded by the PR of domestic refugee resettlement agency contractors — exalted “partners” in refugee resettlement speak – who claim that resettlement is unquestionable, would not be bothered by this dilemma.

It would help if the U.S. refugee program did refugee resettlement well, but we are regularly deluged with accounts from refugees whom resettlement agencies have placed in deplorable conditions, often times in dangerous urban neighborhoods, and left to fend for themselves with little of the minimum-required help that the agencies promise to give when taking public funds.

Read it all.