Here is your chance to voice your opinion on the refugee program

Each year the US State Department, in planning for refugee admissions for the next fiscal year, invites the public to either in person or in writing give testimony about the number of refugees to be resettled beginning on October 1, 2011.

Here is the Federal Register announcement (Hat tip: Mark):

There will be a meeting on the President’s FY 2012 U.S. Refugee Admissions Program on Thursday, May 12, 2011 from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. The meeting will be held at the Refugee Processing Center, 1401 Wilson Boulevard, Suite 700, Arlington, Virginia. The meeting’s purpose is to hear the views of attendees on the appropriate size and scope of the FY 2012 U.S. Refugee Admissions Program.

Persons wishing to attend this meeting must notify the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration at telephone (202) 453-9257 by 5 p.m. on Thursday, May 5, 2011, to reserve a seat. Persons wishing to present written comments should submit them by 5 on Thursday, May 5, 2011 via e-mail to spruellda@state.gov or fax (202) 453-9393.

If you have questions about the public meeting, please contact Delicia Spruell, PRM/Admissions Program Officer at (202) 453-9257. Information about the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program may be found at http://www.state.gov/g/prm/.

Dated: March 30, 2011.

David Robinson,*

Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, Department of State.

Please send in your comments!

You will be focusing on the number of refugees and from what parts of the world they should be allowed to come.  Sometime during the last weeks of September the State Department will prepare a Presidential Determination letter for Congress in which the Obama Administration will recommend how many refugees should come in the upcoming fiscal year.  During the Obama years the ceiling has been 80,000 each year (even during the great and on-going recession).  I don’t know that Congress has ever said ‘no’ to whatever number the President wants.

Please be polite and professional.  Also, and this is VERY IMPORTANT, send a copy of  your comments to your US Senators and your Congressman.

* I assume this is the same David Robinson who wrote this incredible and shocking report for the National War College in which he admitted that the Clinton Administration airlifted refugees here during the Bosnian war as a kind of make work (and give money) project to the volags (federal resettlement contractors).  The refugees were ultimately airlifted back home (at taxpayer expense)!

It’s Tennessee today, your state tomorrow…

Update April 27th:  Jerry Gordon writing at New English Review has more on the Tennessee controversy here.

Longtime readers know that Tennessee has been a hotbed of Islamic activity and today Muslims were scheduled to rally at the state capital to among other things oppose a state bill that would bring some control of the refugee program back to a local level.

Muslim political activists and supporters of shariah law do not want local people to have a say in who is resettled in their home towns and they want to practice Islamic law when they get there.  You can bet the citizens of Sioux Falls, South Dakota (in my previous post) were never consulted about Sioux Falls being chosen by unelected government “church” contractors and the federal government as a “preferred community” for Muslim resettlement.

From WSMV-TV Nashville:

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Hundreds of Muslims are expected to rally on Tuesday against two controversial bills in the Legislature.

Committees in the House and Senate are scheduled to vote on measures outlawing Islamic holy law and giving local governments the ability to limit the number of refugees living in one area.

Presently Catholic Charities and the State Department are running the Tennessee refugee program and Senator Jim Tracy earlier this year introduced a bill to regain some state control over the program.   We told you about it here.

Update:   Here is how some of the debate went today—on the shariah issue.

Sioux Falls, SD Christian woman threatened; home, car vandalized

The woman and former Catholic nun questioned the need for four mosques in the small city of Sioux Falls plus invited the showing of Iranium to a city audience and then the intimidation began.

From RedCounty (Hat tip: Richard Falknor, Blue Ridge Forum)

Lisa Marie Johnson is a very brave woman. Lisa is a former Catholic Nun living in South Dakota. Lisa was on the forefront of the American Laws for America Courts legislative battle in South Dakota. Lisa has been on the forefront of the effort to expose the bizarre situation of four (4) mosques in Sioux Fall, SD a city of a mere 120,000 people. Most of the Muslims in Sioux Fall are from Somalia.

Most recently Lisa organized a very successful screening of Iranium to a standing room only crowd of 300, with Frank Gaffney, Founder and President of the Center for Security Policy, South Dakota Sen. Dan Lederman, Tom Trento, President of The United West and Captain Joel Arends.

In fact, Lisa is on her way to Iraq, with Captain Arends, to film a documentary about the slaughter of Iraqi Catholics by shariah Muslims in Baghdad.

On several occasions, Lisa has been confronted by Muslims who do not like her. Not long ago, Lisa’s tires were slashed, yes, in the quiet mid-west town of Sioux Falls. The attacks against Lisa have been reported to local police and homeland security.

[…..]

Both on Holy Thursday and Good Friday of the Easter weekend, Lisa’s home was stoned. Several rocks were thrown thru her front windows shattering the glass and landing on the stairwell to her bedroom. It appears that Lisa is being targeted and the attacks are becoming more frequent, bold and symbolic.

Is Sioux Falls a Tuula?

We have a Somali reader who calls herself Khadra who visits from time to time and over the last year or so she has been telling us about Tuulas —literally villages, or sections of cities where Somalis seek to create their own separate societies.   Last summer I told you about Jamestown, ND and wondered whether it too was evolving a Tuula.   Be sure to click on the links below as Khadra tells about a large Somali conference in Canada where the topic was discussed.

We learned from Khadra, a Somali commenter here at RRW, that Somalis are creating what they call Tuulas (villages) in many US cities.  Frankly she calls it an “invasion” and says that Somalis have no intention of assimilating.  You can read Khadra’s shocking discussion here and then here she was back again yesterday commenting about the situation with the growing Somali population in Southwest Kansas.  This is what she said yesterday:

I have read about what is going on in Kansas and in other small towns like [in] Maine. Somalis will turn these small towns into a largely populated Somali town, because if Minnesota is the U.S capital of Somali people then a small town or city cannot stand a chance.

Be sure to also read Khadra—a huge storm is coming to small town America—here last September.

So, how did so many Somalis come to populate these towns in the Great Plains?

The US State Department’s Refugee Resettlement program working in tandem with large employers—especially meatpacking companies—is responsible.  In fact Sioux Falls is a “preferred community” designated as such by the Office of Refugee Resettlement.  That means that the federal contractors, like Lutheran Social Services are encouraged with grant money to send refugees there.

Scouting around a little, I see that Somalis started being resettled in Sioux Falls in 2003.  Here is an article saying that Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services is the federal contractor and Lutheran Social Services is the sub-contractor.  New readers, don’t get confused and think these are just well-meaning church folks passing the collection plate for this—they are well-funded contractors paid to do this work by you (the tax payer).

The Rapid City Journal article I just linked above says that the first group of Somalis are Bantus, however, I am guessing they may have been the core group, but Sioux Falls probably then became a secondary migration site for regular Somalis as well.   That would help explain the desire for many mosques—Somalis are tribal, plus the regular Somalis don’t particularly care for the Bantus which they consider of a lower class.

Here is another article on Sioux Falls and its refugee program.  400 refugees with health issues arrive there annually.

A 2009 article in The World calls Sioux Falls the Ellis Island of the Great Plains!   The interview posted here helps us see this is all about re-populating the Dakotas with cheap labor (they don’t say cheap, I do) for the food processing (ie. meatpacking) giants.   Once again a reminder of what drives the refugee program—money—hidden beneath the veneer of humanitarianism.

So, you can see why the forces are arrayed against the former nun trying to raise some concerns about creeping Islamification of her town.  The Somalis have their goal—tuulas.  Lutheran Social Services (and its big boss Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services), a far Left Open Borders organization in George Soros** sphere of influence, has its goal (their borderless utopian world!) and the big companies worried about their bottomline want to keep the labor pipeline open (and don’t discount the union thugs who need the immigrant union members).   And, by the way, one more thing, the do-gooders wanting their utopia just don’t get the fact that there are some cultures that are incompatible with our ideals and are here to destroy America.  Any of those actors could be behind recent threats against Ms. Johnson.

*For new readers: We have admitted well over 100,000 Somali refugees to the US.   To check out the numbers visit this post, one of our most widely read posts over the last few years.   In FY2010 which ended September 30th the US State Department resettled 4,884 Somalis (here) to towns near you. BTW, this statistics website appears to be not publishing the numbers for 2011.  I wonder why?

Also, after being closed for nearly two years, the US State Department is on the verge of resuming the fraud-ridden family reunification program that admitted as many as 36,000 Somalis fraudulently to the US between 2003 and 2008.  See the latest on new regulations, here.  The State Department is on the verge of re-opening the program and may already have done so.

** The present Asst. Sec. of State for Population Refugees and Migration, Eric. P. Schwartz, is a Soros protege.  Use our search function for Schwartz and see what I mean!

Moving more “refugees” to Gaza…

.….and they are Palestinians who’ve never been there before.

Continuing with the major disruption in North Africa (partially due to Obama’s policies) comes this story.  I don’t know what to make of it, but now Palestinians are being taken to Gaza.   Why add more so-called “refugees” to Gaza (to build an even greater army against Israel)?

From Ma’an News Agency:

CAIRO (Ma’an) — An eighth group of Palestinians was evacuated from Libya and transferred safely into Gaza on Saturday evening, officials in the coastal enclave said, as battles between pro- and anti-government forces continue to rage in the North African nation.

The group, accompanied by Palestinian consular representative in Egypt Mohamed Hammad, consisted of 48 Palestinians who had been living in Libya when anti-government protests turned into clashes.

[…..]

Most have been Palestinian refugees working in Libya, few have ever visited Gaza.

As refugee numbers mount, Libyan stalemate could be Obama’s undoing

We were told by the French, the British and the UNITED NATIONS that we had to save the people of Libya from Qadhafi.  President Obama said, oh sure, as long as the UN says it’s about humanitarianism we’re in!  There was apparently no serious planning, no serious thought when Macbeth’s “weird sisters” Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power told Obama to jump (and he did).  Now we are faced with a “slow motion humanitarian crisis” according to the Politico:

Obama originally justified U.S. involvement on the grounds that it was needed to avert an imminent humanitarian crisis there, including the possibility that large numbers of civilians would be killed if forces loyal to Qadhafi overran the rebel-held city of Benghazi.

Now critics see a stalemate producing a similar, slow-motion humanitarian crisis that could linger for months.

“Deterring Qadhafi’s forces from moving forward doesn’t remove him from power, doesn’t create a functioning economy, doesn’t solve humanitarian problems of people being out of their homes, out of work — all of which comes from having this war drag on and on,” said Anthony Cordesman, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution. “What gets totally lost here is you have hundreds of thousands of people displaced here — refugees … you’re losing economic opportunity, losing jobs, the educational system is breaking down, the whole infrastructure is coming under pressure.”

“The problem we face, is, having started this without evidently any clear plan as to what the outcome would be, we are everyday making this worse.

Moral duty?

And, now we have the UN running to Russia for help with, what else, the “humanitarian crisis” that was unleashed by the UN itself!   We have two stories on UN officials begging Russia for help.

Here is UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in Moscow telling the world the fighting must stop—-waaahhhh! Make it stop!   The United Nations (presumably with Ban’s blessing)  unleashed the three witches in the first place!

Moscow – UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Friday renewed his call for an end to the violence in conflict-ridden Libya.

‘I urge the Libyan authorities to stop fighting and stop killing people,’ he said during an official visit to Moscow.

He said the United Nations’ priority right now was to implement a verifiable and effective ceasefire so that humanitarian aid efforts could be stepped up. Only then, he said, could the flow of refugees out of the country be stopped.

He estimated that half a million people had already fled Libya.

Also in Moscow we learn that the UN is begging for money for the refugee crisis of its own making!

More than $160 million is needed to help refugees from riot-hit Libya, President of the UN General Assembly Joseph Deiss said in an interview with Russia Today TV channel.

[….]

Libyan opposition leaders earlier requested the international community to protect the Libyan people “from any further genocide and crimes against humanity without any direct military intervention on Libyan soil.”

“On the one hand, the UN stands for member states and their sovereignty, and on the other hand there are fundamental values the UN stands for,” Deiss said.

“And, beyond certain limits the international community has the moral duty to protect those who are at the mercy of the governments who are not coming up to their obligations,” he added.

Protect!  It would be so ironic if  one of Obama’s national security advisors, Samantha Power, and her scheme (with George Soros) called the “Responsibility or Right to Protect” would destroy far more lives then it saved.  But, I guess that’s what happens when we put immature ideologues and community organizers together in the White House.