Month: January 2012

Out the door….

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Readers, sorry I’ll be away for a few days without internet.  If I don’t answer your e-mails and post your comments you know why.

If you want to read about some immigration issues, about Santorum getting an A grade from NumbersUSA, about Gingrich and CAIR, about Michelle Obama, about Ken Timmerman running for Congress and about a workshop in Maryland to learn how to become an investigative journalist, visit my other blog Potomac Tea Party Report where I have been busy posting these last few days.

To the reader who sent me a film recently!  I lost the e-mail, if you are seeing this, please send it again!

Christian advocacy group blasts Israel for new bill to stem illegal immigration

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I guess one man’s illegal immigrant is another man’s refugee. 

I’m posting this article about Christian Solidarity Worldwide blasting the Israeli government over a bill passed recently that would restrict access to Israel of many immigrants streaming through the Sinai because for me it poses a problem—how do you separate illegal alien economic migrants from legitimate refugees?  And, what happens to a country that says—borders are open, come one and all!

Interestingly the bill goes one step further and includes punishment for any Israeli helping illegal immigrants/refugees get into Israel.  (Something to consider here in the US!)

I don’t know this group—Christian Solidarity Worldwide— but when the words “solidarity” and “justice” are mentioned I immediately think religious Left political activists are involved.  Perhaps I’m jumping to conclusions about that, but if you know anything about them, please comment.

Here is the story:

Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW), a UK-based human rights group, says that it is concerned that the desperate plight of refugees and asylum seekers in the Sinai will be exacerbated by the passage of the Illegal Migrants Bill in the Knesset last week, which allows for the arrest and imprisonment of any crossing into Israel.

[….]

The majority of those who would fall foul of the proposed Israeli legislation are from sub Saharan Africa and are fleeing brutal regimes, such as those in Eritrea and Sudan.”

[….]

According to the terms of the Illegal Migrants Bill, refugees can be imprisoned without trial for up to three years, or deported back to their country of origin or a third country. Not only does the bill effectively criminalize genuine refugees, it also carries a prison sentence of between five and 15 years for Israelis who assist them in any way. Prior to the passage of the bill, refugees were subjected either to a “Hot Return” border policy or imprisonment on arrival and subsequent legal limbo, due to the absence of a system of refugee status determination (RSD) in Israel that meets international standards. The Illegal Migrants Bill will further curtail the limited protection and assistance available to them from the state or from concerned individuals and humanitarian NGOs.

Shouldn’t the UN just run a camp on the border, gather all the migrants and sort them out?

In defense of Israel, at what point does a country literally die when its population is completely impoverished trying to care for the massive flow out of Africa.  With no cultural or historic glue to hold all these people together, what happens to Israel?  Indeed, what will happen to the US eventually?

“New Americans” prominent in Al-Shabaab

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Jerry Gordon brings our attention today to yet another news story about immigrants we welcomed to America turning their backs on the good life to join a Jihadist group in the Horn of Africa.

Gordon at New English Review:

Americans have risen to the fore in the Somali al-Shabaab terrorist leadership. That doesn’t surprise us. We have written extensively about Somali naturalized citizens recruited through fundamentalist Mosques in major émigré centers like Minneapolis, Columbus and Nashville. Then there are Kurdish immigrant naturalized citizens like Jehad Mostafa from San Diego, California and Omar Hammami, a son of an American Baptist mother and Syrian immigrant father from Daphne, an upscale community on Mobile Bay, Alabama’s Eastern shore.

[….]

What has always concerned us has been that many of these American Jihadis fighting for Al Shabaab were welcomed to the US as humanitarian refugees under the Refugee Act of 1980.  This multi-billion dollar program administered by the State Department Bureau of Population, Migration and Refugees and the Office of Refugee Resettlement of the Department of Health and Human Services has been fraught with massive immigration fraud.

Read on!

Santorum soars on immigration!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Readers: this is cross posted from Potomac Tea Party Report (my other blog).   You may want to check out other posts there over the last few days as they are related to immigration issues.  Keep in mind the post is written for an audience which may not be as savvy as RRW readers on Legal immigration problems and programs.

Yesterday I wrote a post based on a Washington Times story from Thursday that said that the immigration control crowd was forming behind Mitt Romney.  But, all that appears to have changed when Rick Santorum gave a speech on Friday in South Carolina that will change the playing field for many.  Michael Savage, for one, should be pleased that one of the candidates has finally come out forcefully on immigration.

In a press release late last night, NumbersUSA announced that the former Pennsylvania Senator had soared to the top of their Presidential scorecard primarily because he didn’t just stick to the usual talking point—illegal immigration is bad, legal is good—he told people that the numbers are too high.  He took on, without prompting, the Diversity Visa Lottery and chain migration (that is when you get your foot in the door, you can bring a whole host of relatives in with you).

Somalis are a case in point

Not to get too deep into the weeds, but on this business of chain migration, the US State Department in 2008 halted “family reunification” for Somalis (and a few other African groups) when they discovered through some random DNA testing that the would-be family members weren’t family at all.   It is believed that as many as 36,000 Somalis got into the US illegally by claiming family connections.

Diversity visa is insane

Also, I haven’t mentioned it here much (here is one post this past July), but the Diversity Visa Lottery (yes, a real lottery) allows 50,000 immigrants from countries—Nigeria, Egypt, Kenya, Bangladesh etc.—that we don’t (supposedly) have enough people from to apply for a lottery to get into the US to increase our diversity.  NumbersUSA has been working with certain members of Congress in recent years to kill the program.

So, here then is what NumbersUSA is saying about Rick Santorum:

Former Sen. Rick Santorum zoomed from the back of the GOP pack on immigration issues to way out FRONT at a C-SPAN televised event in South Carolina on Friday. For the first time in many years,  we have a Presidential candidate who says LEGAL immigration numbers are too high!

[…..]

Congratulations to all of you Santorum supporters who have been pushing him to greatly improve his immigration platform.  You succeeded beyond most of our wildest dreams.

Now, the rest of you who are supporting other GOP and Democratic candidates need to increase your pressure on them to catch up to Santorum.

Roy Beck explains what happened—Santorum from a D- to an A literally overnight:

We have long said that candidates don’t need a long speech or a huge position paper to make it clear to the American public that they think American workers should get the next U.S. jobs, that illegal aliens should not be rewarded with U.S. jobs and that legal immigration categories should be cut if they don’t serve the national interest.

When Santorum began moving up in the public opinion polls late November and December, we devoted blogs and webcasts to his poor record on immigration that worked out to a D-minus.

But we always said that his bad grade was mainly based on bad decisions in the 1990s and on a lack of statements on various categories during the campaign.  We said that it would be easy for him to improve his platform and grade very quickly with a set of new statements and promises.

Here is the clincher.  Santorum went beyond the usual—I oppose illegal immigration—and took it one step further.

But for the first time in the year-long Presidential campaign thus far, we have a candidate who has brought up the Visa Lottery and Chain Migration.

Go to NumbersUSA to see what Santorum said.

I guess we will now be testing the Michael Savage thesis!

Don Barnett speaks at New York’s Penn Club on refugees; reports on Tennessee law

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Center for Immigration Studies fellow, Don Barnett of Nashville, TN, recently traveled to New York to make a presentation on the Refugee Resettlement Program and tell the audience about the Tennessee initiative enacted into law last year that attempts to get some local control over the program.  Up until now the US State Department and non-governmental organizations are able to drop refugees off in communities against the wishes of many local residents.  Tennessee lawmakers want to see that changed.

Here is a report from the website American Rattlesnake:

One of the most harmful aspects of our nation’s current immigration policy is its manifold refugee resettlement programs, the disastrous consequences of which have been amply documented on this website. That’s why the speech Don Barnett, currently a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies and expert on refugee resettlement in the United States, delivered to the Penn Club on Tuesday night is so crucial to understanding the scale of the problem faced by small towns and communities throughout America. A former employee of the United States Information Agency within the U.S. State Department, he spent an extensive part of his career working in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, which produced most of the refugees brought to the United States during the Cold War Era.

Today we have a much different approach to refugee resettlement that, as Barnett pointed out repeatedly during the course of his speech, is completely untethered to any concrete American foreign policy goal, and which is divorced from any traditional definition of the term itself. Even as President Obama promises to end the signature law that allowed hundreds of thousands of refuseniks and political and religious dissidents to emigrate from Russia and the former USSR, the amount of refugees being sent to America from the third world increases exponentially. As Barnett noted in his talk, and as even open borders advocates readily concede, the United States accepts more than four times as many refugees as every other industrialized nation combined.

Read it all!