Month: April 2011

Why the UN is so hot on pushing the climate refugee issue

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Reader John Williams sent us a link to an insightful post  on the Volokh Conspiracy that explains the motives of the UN on the climate refugee issue that we’ve started to follow again. 

We are used to reading such stories as the politicization of science and its corruption by the politics of the UN, funders, and, to be sure, the desire of some scientists to switch professions from research to policy.  We hear about it because it is correct.

But there is another — no less unimpressive — way to understand the story.  That is from the standpoint of the long term incentives of the United Nations and its many agencies.  Seen from the standpoint of climate change and its scientists and environmental activists alone, this story looks to be about hyperbolic claims about the immediate effects of climate change.  Seen from the standpoint of the longer history of the UN, it is much more about the long-running movements by the UN to find issues that tend to do two things.  One is to increase the institutional UN’s governance responsibilities, authority, legitimacy, and power.  The other is to increase the amount of money that runs through UN mechanisms from rich countries to poor countries, with an administrative cut to the UN itself.

He goes on to point out that environmentalists and others who are pleased when the UN takes up their cause are not aware of these motives, and don’t understand that UN officials don’t give a fig about their particular cause. When the current one has run out of steam, they just move on to another one. Now they’re trying to prolong the climate refugee cause by postponing the date of the apocalypse.

Presidential “call to arms” on immigration

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Hey, wait a minute, what happened to the new civility—call to arms (a summons to engage in active hostilities)?

Two days ago the White House held a meeting of 70 pro- immigration activists (no, that is wrong, they called them “stakeholders”), including Al Sharpton (huh?), former Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the AFL-CIO’s Trumka to say it wasn’t going to be easy to get immigration reform and that everyone is going to have to work together.   So, why now, why a hastily called meeting when he had two years with a Democratically controlled House and Senate to get the job done for them?

Pro-immigration forces say Obama screwed up in his first two years and now is in desperation-mode to keep his immigrant base happy.

This is from Southern California Public Radio.   In a quick search, I couldn’t find a larger publication that might have written about the story (emphasis mine):

In what was described as a “last-minute meeting,” President Obama met at the White House on Tuesday with 70 labor, law enforcement and political leaders, including former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the current president of the Los Angeles City Council. The topic – immigration – hasn’t placed high on the list of Congressional priorities.

[…..]

LA City Council President Eric Garcetti said the president issued a “good call to arms” for shared effort on immigration reform. Garcetti said the president admitted it was “not going to be easy,” but he wouldn’t abandon the topic.

“(The president) said, ‘this is not going to be easy, but I am not going to abandon this. I’m going to be alongside you, but I can’t do this by myself. And that we have to change the conversation. We have to get back to a place where we humanize and recognize the contributions of immigrants,'” said Garcetti.

Last year, the US Senate [thankfully–ed] failed to pass the Dream Act. It would have created a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who attend college or serve in the military. Garcetti said the president didn’t want that legislation to be Washington’s last word on immigration reform.

Immigration activists plan a protest Thursday night outside Sony Studios in Culver City where Obama is hosting a political fundraiser.

Maybe that last line gives us a hint as to why the meeting was a “last minute meeting.”  Obama has learned that his immigrant/Hispanic base is going off the reservation.

Immigration lawyer: Most actively anti-immigration White House in a long time!

You think the open borders gang is pretty unhappy about our dear leader?  You got that right!  Check out a couple of posts at Immigration Daily to see just how angry they are!

This is Greg Siskind not exactly holding back in his criticism of the big talker (Obama):

Absent the speeches and the meetings, strictly judging by the ACTIONS of this Administration, this is arguably the most anti-immigrant White House we’ve seen in quite some time. Whether Latino voters and another pro-immigration constituencies support the President in 2012 fearing that the GOP candidate would be even worse is still an open question.

Read it all.

Or, how about this from immigration lawyer Matthew Kolken (emphasis mine):

Obama gathered a bunch of people together yesterday to talk about immigration. Among the invitees was the person who oversaw the deportation of more immigrants over a two-year span than at any other time in the history of the United States, the richest man in New York, an aging movie star, the police, the COO of Facebook (“Like”), and Al Sharpton.

You know who Obama didn’t invite: an experienced immigration lawyer, a seasoned immigration judge, or members of Congress who ultimately vote on immigration reform legislation. The conspicuous absence of any individual who has in-the-trenches experience with the implementation of the immigration law from an immigrant’s perspective, or the lawmakers who can actually do something to fix the problem is very telling.

What it reveals is that this President is more interested in creating a photo-op to garner votes for his reelection than figuring out a way to craft bi-partisan legislation that will infuse some equity into our beyond broken immigration laws. Or better yet, putting an end to his own administration’s draconian deportation quotas.

This President has been giving lip-service to immigration reform for over two years now. His do nothing and blame the Republicans strategy isn’t fooling anyone.

You can’t say he is a completely do nothing President, heck he is over in Libya helping create more poor refugees with his war effort.

Read the rest of Kolken and Siskind’s blasts and note that Kolken lists the invitees to the photo-op and includes a film clip of Rep. Luis Gutierrez, Congress’ greatest Open Borders advocate, saying he might not support Obama in 2012 (yeh, well, who else would he support?).

Just a reminder, I told you about a similar White House meeting to push immigration reform in the summer of 2009 here.    Check Kolken’s White House list and then the one from 2009 and note how many advocacy groups are missing.   These guys (Kolken and Siskind) have a point, Obama wanted a ‘friendly’ group for a White House photo opportunity, plain and simple.

The latest from Lewiston, ME: diversity is strength, right?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Ah, the joys of multiculturalism.  We’ve reported many times on Lewiston, ME the town “lucky” enough to be chosen by Somalis and other Africans as their new home in America and the new home for a diversity of frauds as well.  In Maine we’ve reported on immigrant food stamp fraud and medicare fraud and grant fraud and now comes word of marriage fraud.  Hat tip: Tootywink.

From the Portland Press Herald:

PORTLAND — A Massachusetts man faces charges of conspiring to defraud the federal government by arranging numerous sham weddings between Mainers and people from Africa seeking to become legal residents of the United States.

Rashid Kakande, 37, appeared Monday in U.S. District Court in Portland for the opening of his trial before a federal jury. He is charged with arranging payments of up to $5,000 for women and men willing to marry people from Uganda and other African countries who were here on expiring tourist or student visas.

The ultimate goal of the marriages, according to the government, was to get permanent legal status and, eventually, citizenship. Most of the weddings were held in apartments in Lewiston.

The marriages themselves were worth $1,500, followed by additional payments as the U.S. recruits filled out paperwork to support the charade and met with immigration officials to convince them that the marriages were legitimate, according to court papers filed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Gail Fisk Malone, the prosecutor in the case.

Some recruits got cold feet after the wedding and backed out of the scheme when told by immigration officials that pretending to get married for immigration purposes is a federal crime.

After his arrest in July, Kakande told an officer for federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement that on certain occasions he had been paid $1,500 to arrange the weddings, court papers said.

He allegedly has used the money to buy land in his native Uganda.

There is a lot more, it reads like a soap opera!  Read it all!  Come to think of it, why doesn’t someone make a TV movie about one of these fraud schemes?

And, here is what the intrepid federal investigators uncover in my movie plot—there is a crime syndicate in Africa and the Middle East that actually teaches people like this guy Kakande how to set up schemes to rip off the gullible do-gooder Americans and our government.  They send the money back to Africa (not to buy land!) where the international terrorists are waiting for their cut.  Some of the money goes into seed money to send more scammers back to America—-you know, like those E-2 treaty investors who buy convenience stores and set up food stamp scams.   If, here and there, one gets caught and sent to prison, oh well, there are many more on the way.   So, what do you think—movie plot?

You know why it would never sell to Hollywood, because everyone knows immigrants are just hard working schlubs who want nothing more than a better life in America, right?  And, besides they add such colorful diversity to boring old places like Lewiston, ME.

If you want to learn more about lively Lewiston, just type ‘Lewiston’ into our search function and I’ll bet you will find a couple dozen posts on the town.

Could this jeopardize the case against Somali sex traffickers?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

While I’m on the subject of Somalis this morning, see earlier post here, this is a story coming out of Tennessee about the case against the nearly 30 Somalis arrested for sex-trafficking of a minor and other offenses first reported here in November of last year.

It’s long and quite a legal tangle, so you will need to read the whole story.  The first thing I thought of was:  I sure hope this doesn’t cause the case to be thrown out of court!

From The City Paper:

What do you get when you put some 30 lawyers in a room together and ask them to agree on something? Those masochistic enough to attend an upcoming federal court hearing could find out, but the punch line won’t be as funny as the setup might promise.

Two weeks ago, District Judge William J. Haynes set an April 26 hearing date to hash out several concerns surrounding a bundle of inmates’ recorded phone calls from jail, including attorney-client conversations, which some believe are privileged despite warnings by detention facilities that they’re being recorded.

What’s more, some of the recorded calls are between attorneys and clients who aren’t even involved in the case at hand.

The issue arose after federal prosecutors distributed the government’s discovery to the defendants in U.S.A. v. Adan et al, the case in which a federal indictment charged 29 individuals (two have since been dropped from the case because they aren’t yet in custody), many of whom are Somali and alleged by the government to be members or associates of Somali gangs.

Defendants in the case face charges of sex-trafficking juvenile girls, perjury, auto theft and credit card fraud. A large part of the government’s voluminous discovery for the case is contained on 142 discs of recorded inmate phone calls from a Davidson County jail and other detention facilities housing the federal inmates in the Adan case.

But one attorney determined that some of the calls on the discs turned over by the government to all of the defense attorneys in the case were unrelated. That sparked a debate over when attorney-client calls are privileged and what the attorneys should do with the discs to which currently, based on an stay by Haynes, they aren’t supposed to be listening.

What a mess!  Read on.

Pennsylvania letter writer got wide distribution (subject Libya refugees)

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Here is a letter I came across through google alerts (his/her Congressman appears to have released the letter) from someone (letter is unsigned) in Pennsylvania who took the initiative to write to Washington to express his/her concern for the possible airlift of Libyan refugees to the US.   I’m posting it to give others of you an example of someone taking action.

Refugees from Libya, Egypt, Iraq, etc.- just say no

To:
President Barack Obama
Sen. Bob Casey
Sen. Patrick Toomey
Rep. Tim Murphy

April 14, 2011

Many of these “rebels” in Egypt and Libya and other middle eastern states are members of the Muslim Brotherhood. They have already assumed power in Egypt and The Ivory Coast, and are slaughtering Christians.

DO NOT OPEN THE USA TO THE PEOPLE. By allowing the State Department to waive background checks on people from these places you are opening up the front door to terrorists and inviting them in.

Islam will not tolerated anyone who is not Muslim and they should therefor not be tolerated here. We need to take a clear anti Muslim Brotherhood stance and just say no!

No Refugees from Libya, or anywhere else.

Monroeville , PA

You too should take a few minutes and write to your elected officials about this subject—the refugee pressure is building in Europe and so you need to make it very clear—No Libyan refugees from Obama’s war in Africa.