Jordan: Trees or refugees that is the question

I just love it when two great missions of the political Left come in conflict.  This story from Jordan captured my interest this morning.  Environmental activists in the Middle East (I didn’t know they had any!) are trying to stop the destruction of an important forest ecosystem.

Turns out that one of the pressures on Jordan, its environment, and its water supply is the large numbers of Palestinian and Iraqi refugees living there.

From the Green Prophet :

As well as the threats posed to local ecosystems and economic activities, the Halt Ajloun Deforestation campaign say that the danger to Ajloun Forest from the new development has wider significance. Jordan as a country already has less than 1% forest cover and suffers extensively from a lack of water. It has a high population density for such an arid country (partly resulting from the large numbers of Palestinian and Iraqi refugees living there), and has been named one of the ten most water-scarce nations on the planet.

Save the Middle East—bring refugees to America!

So since the Sierra Club and other US environmental groups have become either outright in favor of open borders, or dead silent on the issue, we could just take all those refugees off Jordan’s hands and thus save Jordan’s environment.

As for the US environment, well, we have already noted that Somalis like reader Abdi, here, thinks America is pretty empty and they can just fill it right up by taking over and having lots of babies.

This is what I said about the Sierra Club most recently:

Why has the Sierra Club led a campaign to keep our borders open? I believe it is because Carl Pope, their longtime head honcho, is first and foremost a Socialist (maybe a Marxist) one-worlder.  Longtime advocates of closing our borders have horror stories to tell about how Pope has over the years fought any effort by Sierra Club members to get into the immigration issue.  In fact, immigration control groups like NumbersUSA,* FAIR, and the Center for Immigration Studies were initially created to counter the pro-immigration (through silence) bias of the major environmental groups.   Now, of course, they have a much broader mission.

I did a lot of research on Pope, here is just one story (with links to previous posts on Pope), he sits on the notorious Apollo Alliance board and is good buddies with Marxist Van Jones.

Maybe the Green Prophet should research that story!

ORR! Where is the Annual Report to Congress?

With each passing month that the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) continues to break the law and not send an Annual Report to Congress it sends a clear message— they are hiding something.  

The ORR is now two years behind having only produced Annual Reports up to fiscal year 2007, here.

This is the law:

 Section 413(a) of the Immigration and Nationalities Act states:

Sec. 413. [8 U.S.C. 1523] (a) The Secretary, shall submit a report on activities under this chapter to the Committees on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives and of the Senate not later than the January 31 following the end of each fiscal year, beginning with fiscal year 1980.

So, in just a few weeks, on January 31st, ORR will be behind three Annual Reports.  They already have broken the law for FY 2008, FY 2009 and soon they will be due the FY 2010 report!

What are they hiding?   My guess is that they don’t want Congress and the public to know the horrible employment rate for refugees, the increasing use of public assistance and the huge amounts of tax dollars going to the program via grants and contracts to federal contractors (here are the federal contractors, called VOLAGs*) during the great recession.

*VOLAG stands for voluntary agency which is such a joke because you are paying for the resettlment programs of many religious organizations.

Readers might want to visit our ‘where to find information’ category (we have 162 posts there!) which I just now revisited for some information.  We have quite a bit of good material posted.