Actor says Canada “welcoming” and asks for refugee status

Speaking of Canada (see previous post), it appears that actor Randy Quaid and his wife Evi have skipped bail in California and hopped up to Canada and are now asking for asylum!  They say they are being persecuted by actor murderers!

From AP:

Actor Randy Quaid and his wife told Canada’s immigration board Friday they are seeking refuge in Canada because they are being persecuted in the United States, after they were arrested on U.S. warrants related to vandalism charges.

The pair were arrested on Thursday afternoon in a shopping area of an affluent Vancouver neighborhood.

The Quaids are wanted in Santa Barbara, where they missed a court hearing Monday on felony vandalism charges.

Other actors “murdered” so therefore we need refugee status in Canada—huh!

Evi Quaid begged a Canadian immigration adjudicator not to force them to return, saying on Friday that eight friends, such as actors David Carradine and Heath Ledger, have been “murdered” under mysterious circumstances and she’s worried something will happen to her husband next.

“We feel our lives are in danger,” she said.

Canada is “welcoming,” right!

“I love Canada,” Randy Quaid told the adjudicator.

“It’s been a very welcoming nation to me.

Quaid’s even got that refugee lingo down pat!

 Update October 26th:  One Canadians opinion, here.

Canada to increase number of Iraqi refugees in coming year

The interesting bit in this article to me is the reference to Canada’s Private Sponsorship of Refugees Program.  In other words, private groups and individuals take care of the new refugees and not the government.   I’ve said on many occasions that that is how our program should be run as well.   And, don’t let anyone tell you that groups like Catholic Charities, World Relief and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society are doing just that here—they aren’t!  Our program was originally set up as a Public-Private Partnership but increasingly American so-called charities rely on taxpayer funding to do their “charitable” work!

From Marketwire:

OTTAWA, ONTARIO–(Marketwire – Oct. 23, 2010) Canada will extend its measures for Iraqi refugees for at least two additional years, Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney announced today. As a result of today’s announcement, Canada will resettle an additional 8,600 refugees.

In 2009, in response to ongoing conditions in Iraq and requests from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Canada more than doubled the number of resettled refugees it would welcome through its mission in Damascus, where most Iraqi refugees apply. Canada committed to resettling approximately 2,500 refugees a year under its private sponsorship program between 2009 and 2011. In 2010, Canada also increased the number of refugees from Damascus it plans to resettle through the UN program as government-assisted refugees, from 1,400 to 1,800 per year.

More refugees sponsored privately in Canada than are government assisted.

In total, through the PSR Program, Canada has welcomed more than 200,000 refugees from all over the world, over and above the number of refugees resettled through the government assisted program.

Meanwhile, the Obama Administration is welcoming another 80,000 GOVERNMENT ASSISTED refugees to the US this coming year, here.

Terry Rusch retires after 30 years at the US State Department

There is one person who could write a book and tell us how the US Refugee Resettlement Program has gone awry and that person is Terry Rusch.  I had seen the news about this last week (or the week before) but really don’t know what to say about it.   So, I’ll let you see what Chris Coen at Friends of Refugees, who has spent years and years trying to get the State Department’s Office of Population Refugees and Migration to pay attention to mounting problems with the program, says about her departure.

Will she write that book?  I doubt it, but it would be a welcome opportunity for her to make some effort to fix a program I believe has gone very wrong —-for the refugees and for the communities in which they are placed.

Cool map: Where were Burmese resettled in US

I just came across this very informative “Visualization” of which states Burmese refugees were resettled to in 2009.   This is the sort of information that used to be readily available when the Office of Refugee Resettlement sent it’s annual reports to Congress in a timely manner as required by law (note here how far behind they are as of this writing—only up to 2007!)

Check out the map for 2009 and note the top three Burmese resettlement states for 2009 were Texas (3,086), New York (1,696) and Indiana (1147).    Since 2009, as I reported yesterday, resettlements have been slowed to Indiana because the various welfare support systems are not able to cope with a continued high number of refugee resettlements.

In 2009 we resettled a total of 18,202 Burmese nationwide mostly from camps in Thailand.  Disregard the obvious typo on the data here.

By the way, a couple of our commenters suggested here that concerned citizens should write to their Congressman and Senators and ask them to get on ORR’s case.  Tell them to get up-to-date on legally required Annual Reports!

World Relief in Ft. Wayne, IN is closing, not enough refugees being resettled

I laughed when I saw this story.   Two years ago this office opened likely because they (World Relief) got a whiff of more federal money going to Ft. Wayne, IN as hundreds of mostly Burmese refugees were being resettled there each year.  In June 2008 you could tell that Catholic Charities already had its turf in Ft. Wayne and didn’t want anyone horning in on their territory.  See Volag cat fight, here.

Then the State Department pulled the plug on new resettlements in Ft. Wayne —only family reunification cases are being resettled there now.  Since agencies like Catholic Charities and World Relief get their funding on a per capita basis, fewer refugees means fewer tax dollars to the so-called charity.

As I read this story, which I’m about to give you a link for in a minute, I wondered, couldn’t World Relief scrape together enough private funding  and volunteers to keep a CHARITABLE office open to help with assimilation problems that are huge in Ft. Wayne.  In other words, one can only conclude that this is not charitable and caring work, it’s all about the federal bucks.  No federal bucks, no charity!

From the Journal Gazette:

FORT WAYNE – One of Fort Wayne’s two refugee placement offices will close, a consequence of the federal government’s limitations on the number of refugees sent to the city.

World Relief, a faith-based international humanitarian aid organization, opened an office at Simpson United Methodist Church on South Harrison Street less than two years ago in anticipation of an increased flow of refugees.

The U.S. State Department resettled about 800 Burmese refugees in the Fort Wayne area the year before the office opened. Refugees have been fleeing persecution in Myanmar, as Burma is called by the ruling military government, for years.

The high number being sent here had social services agencies seeking help, and World Relief said it hoped to ease some of the strain on Catholic Charities of Fort Wayne-South Bend, the sole agency tasked with placing refugees in the area.

But the State Department has since severely restricted the number of refugees who can be sent to the Fort Wayne area, and World Relief’s local office has welcomed [notice how reporters are trained to use their preferred buzz words–ed] only about half the number of refugees for which it was approved.

Calls to World Relief’s headquarters in Baltimore and Midwest office in Illinois were not returned Thursday. Dan Kosten, World Relief vice president of U.S. Programs, said in a statement the organization has tried to have the restrictions loosened.

Without more refugees, keeping the office open isn’t viable, he said.

No indeed!  New refugees=cold hard government cash.  No new refugees=no federal funding=no welcome.

Senator Lugar (R-IN) got involved

I’m guessing the reason the US State Department halted new resettlements in Ft. Wayne is because Senator Richard Lugar (widely considered to be soft on the immigration issue) has asked for a GAO investigation of the refugee program and the financial and social impact it has on cities and states, here.  From my observation, it appears the only way to get the State Department to take notice of refugee problems is to get a member of Congress fired up.

For more information, use our search function by typing ‘Ft. Wayne’ into the search box at the upper lefthand corner.  We have written dozens of posts about the city.  If I had known Ft. Wayne would be such a hot spot when we first wrote about the health department there being overloaded with TB and HIV cases back in 2007 we could have made an entire category for Ft. Wayne.