Month: March 2011

Apartment building fire displaces Iraqi families in Worcester, MA

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

A fire a month ago has resulted in a whole group of Iraqi refugees living in a motel.  The bill is being paid for by the state of Massachusetts.

From the Telegram:

When the early morning fire hit their apartment building on Feb. 22, the first thing the refugees attempted to save — after themselves — was their documents. They waited years to receive refugee status, and were not about to lose more ground to red tape.

While the refugees escaped without physical injuries, they still endure psychological damage.

Mr. Jabar’s daughter has been experiencing emotional stress since the fire.

“She re-experiences the events every day. When she hears a voice or a loud noise, she thinks it is a fire alarm,” said Mr. Jabar, whose family lived in Syria for four years while they waited for their refugee status to be approved.

Because of the fire, he said his daughters felt safer in Syria.

Their resettlement agency and the apartment building owner paid the hotel tab for a few days, now the taxpayers of Massachusetts are footing the bill.

The next day, the refugees were transferred to the Quality Inn located at 50 Oriol Drive. The hotel costs were paid for by the property manager Bill Holmlund and Lutheran Social Services.

A week later, their case was transferred to the state Department of Transitional Assistance, because almost all of the families involved had children [one woman without children was sent to a homeless shelter]. The refugees remained in the hotel, but the bills began being paid by the state.

My questions are many.  How did the fire start, I see nothing in this story about a report from the fire marshall?   Didn’t the property owner have insurance to take care of tenants in such a situation?  What is the financial relationship between Lutheran Social Services and Bill Holmlund or the unnamed property owner?  Since Lutheran Social Services (with funding from the US State Department) placed the refugees in this building, why is it not LSS’s responsibility to now take care of those refugees’ needs? Why has it become the Massachusetts taxpayers problem? Is this one more story about refugees placed in unsafe housing?  And, I could go on and on and on….

More measles in Minnesota; baby brought it from Kenya

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is an update on the Minnesota measles story I posted the other day.  Number is increasing.

From Fairwarning:

Seven children in Minnesota have come down with measles since February in an outbreak that public health officials are blaming, in part, on parents’ fears about having their youngsters vaccinated for the disease.

The seven children with measles have ranged in age from 7 months to four years, and they include two Somali children who had not been given the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. Officials said the vaccination rate has dropped in Minnesota’s Somali immigrant community, largely because of concerns about a possible link between the vaccine and autism.

One doctor estimates that as many as 70 percent of the Somalis he knows have not given their children the vaccine. “Every family will tell you that, ‘We’re not going to give our children the MMR. We’re afraid that they’re going to get autism,’” Dr. Abdirahman Mohamed told Minnesota Public Radio.

State Epidemiologist Dr. Ruth Lynfield said that before the current outbreak, there had been only six measles cases in Minnesota over the previous five years. Investigators have traced the outbreak to an infant who traveled to Kenya and returned home in the beginning of February.

Nationally, as the Associated Press reports, the most recent federal figures show only 140 reported cases of measles across the country in 2008. Worldwide, however, the disease strikes nearly 10 million people, and kills 200,000, annually.

I thought the refugee resettlement agencies were supposed to make sure Somali kids got vaccinated.

So whatever happened to the Obama refugee reform we were promised?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

It’s been a while now since the Obama Administration with much fanfare took up the project of “reforming” refugee resettlement.  That was after they took the Iraqi refugee issue away from the State Department and put it in the hands of Samantha Power, head honcho of the National Security Council, in the White House, here.   Ultimately Samantha Power (wife of Obama regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein) was tasked with reforming the whole refugee program, but all they did was throw more money to the contractors, here.  Last June, I gave up on seeing any reform, here.

Samantha Power, one of George Soros’ groupies, was previously on the board of  perhaps the wealthiest, judging by the nearly half million dollar salary and compensation of its CEO, federal contractors—the International Rescue Committee, so it would be no surprise that Obama would pick her to lead a reform effort.  But, none has ever come.

Now I see that Ms.(humanitarian) Power has buried the hatchet with Hillary and has turned into one of three female  hawks in the Obama orbit.  Guess she is too busy advising war (and creating more refugees) to lead any reform of the refugee program.

Foster care for refugee kids—contractors work all the angles

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

A while back someone raised a concern with me about the possibility that federal refugee contractors were breaking up refugee families in order to get more taxpayer money spread around to the general refugee “community.”  I’ll admit right up front that I don’t know a thing about the foster care system, but always thought it was a state and county concern and responsibility and didn’t see how the feds were in on foster care.  But, they are…..

It seems the Federal government (Office of Refugee Resettlement) through its “Unaccompanied Refugee Minors” program and with the help of contractors have the power to break up families and pay other families to raise the kids “to assist them in becoming integrated members of our global society.”

I wrote about the Unaccompanied Minors program last year, here, as it related to Catholic Charities scooping up Haitian kids as new “clients.”  I also knew that some illegal aliens coming across our southern border were purposefully abandoning kids so that they would then be cared for as “unaccompanied minors,” but I am surprised now to learn that two federal contractors in particular have the power to break up families and spread the kids around—the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services—and in 2007 (when the last ORR annual report went to Congress) it was a $95 million dollar a year business (see the most recent annual report, 2007,* available).

Below, in a joint fact sheet published by the two “religious” federal contractors, is one of seven reasons why children might become “unaccompanied minors:”

Family Breakdown Cases: Minors who enter the United States with a caregiver or are placed with them after arriving might experience a breakdown in this relationship and as a result could become eligible for placement into the URM program. Breakdown can occur as result of abuse, neglect, abandonment or an inability on the caregivers part to meet the child’s needs.

Holy cow!  So who the heck is deciding whether the caregivers are meeting the child’s needs?  Federal “religious” contractors?  Federal “religious” contractors who need more clients?  Where are the champions of separation of church and state—the ACLU? Or does the ACLU not get involved when the “church” happens to be on the religious Left?

How did it come to be that the federal government and unelected contractors now make foster care decisions that should be a state and county concern?

And, by the way, one huge problem with the supposedly religious federal contractors is that you can’t put your hands easily on their financial records because as “churches” they claim exemptions from some federal tax reporting requirements.  If state agencies were involved at least we would have some recourse through our elected officials to complain if we saw something fishy going on.

* The Office of Refugee Resettlement is now three years behind in its legal requirement to report the costs of Refugee Resettlement to Congress.   Please complain to your Congressman and US Senators about this flagrant violation of the law.

Five Somali pirates sentenced to life in prison in the US

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Your tax dollars

I haven’t written much on this issue since it obviously doesn’t have much to do with refugees or immigrants, but I’m posting this story because I’m outraged to know that we are going to care for these guys at taxpayer expense for the rest of their lives.

Of course some of the commenters to this story had some more creative ways to punish them, but maybe they aren’t so crazy when compared with feeding (halal food?), clothing, entertaining, and supplying them with their needed religious paraphernalia for about the next sixty years!