Month: May 2012

So what is going on in Lancaster, PA? More refugees than the city can handle?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update May 20th:  Church World Service—thousands upon thousands resettled to Lancaster, here!

You know Lancaster—the home of the Amish.  Not!

I’m going to tell you about one of my favorite testimonies sent to the US State Department two weeks ago for the May 1 scoping meeting to hear from “stakeholders” (that is government talk for contractors) on how many refugees and which ones to bring to the US in FY 2013.  Obama will make a “determination” and send it to Congress in September where Congress will rubber stamp it just in time for the October 1st opening of fiscal year 2013.

But… before I tell you more about the testimony, a little background:  In 2007, we in Washington Country Maryland were just minding our own business when several incidents occurred with new immigrants that got the attention of the authorities and finally the newspaper.  We learned that the Virginia Council of Churches (Virginia! mind you) was resettling third worlders in Hagerstown (our county seat).  Some of us just wanted to better understand how this was happening—WHAT WAS THE GOVERNMENTAL PROCESS that allowed a supposed non-profit from Virginia to drop off people in Hagerstown.  Where would they work?  Who was paying for this?  Who was responsible for their health, their housing, their education?

To make a long story short, we had a public meeting for all those involved which included the primary federal contractor Church World Service (they subcontract to Virginia Council of Churches), our state refugee coordinator, and some representatives of the US State Department.  The public asked a lot of questions—many were answered in let’s just say a not straightforward fashion.  We were lectured about how we are a ‘nation of immigrants’ and probably not even two weeks later the program was closed in Hagerstown and we were labeled “unwelcoming” —I suppose because we asked too many questions.   This is how this blog was born—out of annoyance with government officials who keep information from the public!  (For anyone interested in more on what happened in Hagerstown we have a category, unused lately, here, in which we told our story in the early years.)

So how does Lancaster fit in?

We were told in 2007 that the majority of refugees we were getting were Meshketians (Russian Sunni Muslim Turks) who were originally destined for Lancaster, PA about 100 miles away.  However, somehow there was a glitch in the plan for Lancaster (we heard a crime problem had cropped up) and that Church World Service (one of nine federal contractors who monopolize the program) had to quickly find a place to take the next batch of Meshketians.  I think they just looked at a map and picked Hagerstown—fresh territory for refugee resettlement and close enough to Lancaster so the Meshketians could visit back and forth.

And, by the way, we heard that some Meshketians had homes to sell in Russia and were able to buy homes here—so were they even real refugees?  Or, were we using this program (again!) for some foreign policy political reason involving Russia and Turkey?

Here is what Church World Service (CWS) told the State Department on May 1 (Oh, and by the way, CWS is the “crop walk” group, some of you may know them from participating in their fundraising project.—ed):

In the United States, communities, schools, religious congregations, and employers welcome refugees and help them integrate in their new homes.  In turn, refugees bring their innovative skills, diverse cultures, dedicated work, and other positive contributions to their new communities, enhancing the quality of life for all parties. Refugee resettlement showcases the best virtues of the United States—community, opportunity, hard work, diversity, caring for one another, and courage to start a new life.

Now, here is what a citizen of Lancaster, PA says of Church World Service (I won’t publish the woman’s name, but apparently she has been trying to help refugees who are struggling in her community—in other words she is not a bigot and xenophobe like we are here at RRW!).  This is not the first time we have heard of refugee volunteers trying to do the best for refugees and running into problems with arrogant resettlement contractors.   For the record, I don’t know this woman.  [Emphasis below is mine—ed]

From a refugee volunteer in Lancaster, PA:

Why do organizations like Church World Service make unilateral decisions on how many refugees get settled into an area?

CWS and Lutheran Social Services have settled at least 2500 refugees (that’s probably a low guess as they refuse to give out totals, but only list how many of one nationality that they have settled in a past year) in Lancaster in the past 3 years without any approval process required from our mayor, our city council or without any consultation with our school board. The city of Lancaster population is approximately 56,000. In the past 2 1/2 years, these two organizations, who have no accountability to voters… have made the population approximately 4% refugee. I help refugees here in Lancaster and I am aware that in the short term, they are a very heavy financial burden on the city. Surely it is reasonable and right for our elected officials to have some say in how many refugees are settled into the city within a certain time period?

I work with families, I see the neglect:

I work with three refugee families in an informal support system through the Unitarian Social Justice committee here in Lancaster. I work with refugees who are hard working, serious people. They will eventually be a great asset to the city. But in the short term, they are a great financial burden on the city.

Every member of these three refugee families arrived with health issues. Many continue to have serious health issues and use the free clinics for health care, for surgery, for extensive testing, for dental work.

Each family has one or more grandparents who are permanently disabled in some way and need financial aid and city services.   [Elderly refugees may receive SSI even if they never paid into the system—ed]

Because of language and educational difficulties, earning power is low. In spite of their very low income, there are cultural issues, which lead the young women to marry early and start families right away and stay home with their babies. They do not work outside the home. I know this because… within a year… my three families, including newly married older daughters and married cousins who share the same buildings… had four new babies… and another baby is due this month. They are good families and the Nepali refugees are wonderful parents. But, each low income family needs government services and financial aid to insure that there is good food and good medical care for the moms and babies. It’s a significant cost to the community.

There are other cultural difficulties that present challenges and sometimes dangers for the refugees and for the city, which are not addressed by the two Lancaster settlement agencies.

CWS officially works with the families for 3 months but their orientations are neglectfully inadequate.

I could quickly list 10 very serious incidences of neglect by CWS, but to save time here, I will tell only one story and a few bullet points. Please contact me if you would like more information. I could write many pages based on my notes of the past 2 years.

The testimony goes on to report problems with the orientation of refugees, safety issues and bed bugs.

“CWS is dumping refugees on to the city”

Many Lancaster people that I talk with…who also try to help refugees here… use the word “dumping”… CWS is dumping refugees on to the city… taking a payment to settle the refugees and moving on to the next group of refugees who will bring in more money to pay for CWS salaries, office space and fund raising events. This is the impression of many compassionate, frustrated people here in Lancaster, who are then accused of being part of a racist or anti-immigration backlash. We are not anti-immigration. We are expending our own personal time and money and pressuring our churches to spend time and money, picking up the pieces that CWS drops into our community. We now want a say in how many refugees can be settle here.

[New readers, see this 2010 story from Greensboro, NC and see the same problem—local church volunteers crying out to stop the flow of refugees at least for awhile!]

The commenter then goes on to make recommendations and mentions the State of Tennessee’s efforts to get some local control into the program.   How much do you want to bet the State Department won’t follow-up and ask her for her proposals.  Nor is the State Department making any of this testimony available to the public.   She needs to send her testimony to her Congressman and US Senators and ask that they publish it in the Congressional Record!  The buck stops with Congress!

The real Palestinian refugee problem

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Clifford D. May writes at National Review Online today on The Real Palestinian Refugee Problem. He shows the idiocy of UN (and world) policies toward the Palestinians.

After World War II, the British left Palestine, which was to be partitioned into two independent nations. One would have a Jewish majority, the other a Muslim majority. About 750,000 Muslims left the territories that became Israel. A similar number of Jews left Arab/Muslim lands. Today, not one of the Jews remains a refugee. But there are still Palestinian refugees — indeed, their number has mushroomed to almost 5 million. How is that possible? Through two mechanisms. First of all, a refugee, by definition, lives on foreign soil, but for Palestinians the definition has been changed, so that a displaced Palestinian on Palestinian soil also receives refugee status. Second, the international organization responsible for resettling refugees, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), was cut out from the start. A new organization was set up exclusively for Palestinians: the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

So there are more and more Palestinian “refugees” all the time, and we continue to fund them, even though they are not refugees by any normal definition of the word. Now, possibly for the first time, there may be something sensible done about this absurd and costly situation.

A few members of Congress have figured out what’s going on and plan to do something about it. Senator Mark Kirk (R., Ill.) is working on an amendment to the Fiscal Year 2013 State-Foreign Operations Appropriations bill that, for the first time, would establish as U.S. policy that only a Palestinian refugee can be classified as a Palestinian refugee — not a son, grandson, or great-grandson, and not someone who has resettled and taken citizenship in another country. The Kirk amendment would require the secretary of state to report to Congress on how many Palestinians serviced by UNRWA fit the traditional definition of a refugee.

It’s a good start. Let’s hope it gets somewhere.

Minnesota: Iraqi Muslim gets 3 years for ripping off food stamp program for $3 million

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Does that sound about right to you?  Three years in jail for $3 million worth of fraud!   And, then the OBAMA Justice Department has to throw in a lesson on the phony economics of the redistribution of wealth!

This is one of the largest food stamp rip-offs I’ve reported so far in my extra-curricular hobby of reporting on immigrant fraud schemes.   I wonder if maybe we could persuade that Minnesota Humphrey School that is so interested in how much immigrants benefit the economy of Minnesota to track the criminal fraud schemes too?

Note to readers:  I started writing this post last night and used this article from the Minneapolis Star Tribune, but this a.m. most of the text is gone (here is what I had last night from the story):

The former owner of a corner market in St. Paul argued before his sentencing on a massive food stamp fraud that his illegal behavior “was the product of stress and psychological instability” attributed to his ex-wife dying in the collapse of the I-35W bridge in 2007.

Khaffak S. Ansari, 46, of Arden Hills, was sentenced Tuesday in federal court in St. Paul to three years and five months in prison for making illegal redemptions for cash and ineligible merchandise at the Stryker Avenue Market.

The government contended that Ansari trafficked more than $3 million in food stamp benefits from January 2006 — well before the bridge collapse — through October 2010.

Ansari argued that the figure was closer to $1.5 million. Sentencing calls for him to pay $2.4 million in restitution. [How much do you want to bet that money is already out of the country!—ed]

According to a law enforcement affidavit filed in the case, the average food stamp redemption for a similarly sized store in Minnesota between 2004 and 2009 was slightly more than $320,000. Over that same period, Stryker’s redemptions were nearly 10 times that.  [So, someone was ripping-off the taxpayer as early as 2004—ed]

In presentencing court filings, the government argued for a four-year prison term for Ansari. The defendant sought as little as three years, pointing out that his ex-wife, Julia Blackhawk, was killed in the bridge collapse three months after their divorce.

Stress made him do it!

“The nature and circumstance of the offense . . . was a product of stress and psychological instability after the death of Mr. Ansari’s [former wife] in the Highway 35W bridge collapse,” his attorney argued in a presentencing document.

This morning I see there is a much more interesting article on Ansari at the Chicago Tribune written by reporter David Hanners* of the St. Paul Pioneer Press.  And, by the way, I am sure it didn’t escape your notice that Ansari had divorced his wife prior to her death on the bridge and that he had been trafficking and scamming the US taxpayer as early as 2006 (possibly earlier) and she died in 2007.

So Ansari is a refugee from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq!

His father, a doctor! made a plea to the judge to keep his sentence to as few years as possible with this sob story:

Ansari’s father, Dr. Tawfiq Ansari, a physician in North Carolina, wrote Magnuson, asking him to show “leniency and mercy to a man who was not himself for the past five years, and who loves his new adopted country so much.”  [Way to show your love of America by ripping us off! Is it justified because we are only infidels?—ed]

He said that his son, a Shi’a Muslim, had been tortured under Saddam Hussein’s Sunni regime in Iraq and that his son’s wounds “were not healed just hidden very deep inside.”

The father told the judge that after his son settled in Minnesota and opened the market, he seemed to be doing better. He married Julia Anne Kreider in September 2005, and the couple had a son.

In June 2006, Ansari filed for divorce. [He filed for divorce!—ed] It was granted in May 2007, and the couple “maintained a civil relationship for the sake of their son,” the father wrote.

But on Aug. 1, 2007, Julia Blackhawk, as she was then known, was one of 13 people killed in the collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis.

“That left Khaffak in extreme shock and confusion,” Tawfiq Ansari told the judge. “The death of Julia turned to be a turning point in Khaffak’s life, he drifted into depression and self guilt. He started to have mood swings and an uncaring attitude towards life and his business.”

He said his son told him several times “that Julia’s death was his fault and he had to be punished for it.”

O.K. so let’s punish the guy!

Obama’s Justice Department doesn’t miss an opportunity to promote their economic redistribution theories even in a press release about a fraud case!  

LOL!  Not a mention in the release about the Muslim refugee sob story though.

Justice Department: Food stamps fuel the economy through trickle-down welfare!  Huh?  Couldn’t you also say that if the dollars were left in the hands of those who earned them (rather than the government taking them through taxes) that would also fuel the economy and do it more fairly!

From those brilliant economists at the Justice Department:

According to a 2010 USDA report, when properly functioning, SNAP benefits move into
the local economies quickly. This is important for the families that receive the benefits and the communities where the benefits are spent because SNAP has an economic multiplier effect. When SNAP operates as designed, every $5 spent in benefits generates $9 in economic activity. This benefit is supposed to accrue not only to the eligible families but also to the grocery stores where the food was purchased, the distributors who delivered the food, and ultimately the farmers who produced it. According to recent estimates, every $1 of spending on SNAP increases GDP by as much as $1.79 — a significant multiplier effect, and an increase of $1 billion in SNAP spending generates as many as 17,900 total full-time jobs.  [1, 7 and 9 must be the favorite numbers of the ‘economists’—ed]

* Way to go Mr. Hanners!  Thanks for your more extensive reporting!  This is an example of the massive food stamp fraud going on in these ‘mom & pop’ stores across America—it is a huge story in need of some real investigative reporting!

Fear of being called “racists” kept UK authorities silent for years on sex trafficking ring

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update:  Here is a lengthy story at the Daily Mail with lots more facts about the verdict and about (by our standards) the very short sentences some of the perverts received.

And, frankly, even this story is exhibiting that same political correctness it criticizes—in the UK they can’t seem to get the word “Muslim” to come out of their mouths, so they call all the Muslim immigrants from places like Pakistan “Asians!”

Here is the dreadful story.  Reminds me of the Somali sex trafficking ring on trial in Nashville right now.

From the Sydney Morning Herald (check out the mugshots of these creeps!):

Police and social workers in England have been accused of failing to investigate a South Asian paedophile gang for fear of being perceived as racist, leaving the men free to prey on up to 50 white girls.

Nine men from Rochdale, Greater Manchester, were convicted of abusing five vulnerable teenagers after plying them with alcohol and small sums of money.

The true number of victims who were “passed around” by the gang was likely to have been nearer 50, police said.

Greater Manchester Police and the Crown Prosecution Service apologised after they failed to bring the case of the first victim, known as Girl A, to trial following her initial cry for help in August 2008.

One 13-year-old victim became pregnant and had the child aborted while another was raped by 20 men in one night, Liverpool Crown Court heard. Complaints to social workers and the police were ignored because they were “petrified of being called racist”, Ann Cryer, the former Labour MP for Keighley, said.

Mrs Cryer, who has campaigned to bring the issue of Asian sex gangs to light, said the girls had been “betrayed” and condemned to “untold misery” by the police and social services.

“This is an absolute scandal. They were petrified of being called racist and so reverted to the default of political correctness,” she said. “They had a greater fear of being perceived in that light than in dealing with the issues in front of them.”

New website compiles data on huge increase in number of refugees and immigrants in the Midwest

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

It isn’t just happening in Western New York state!

From the Minneapolis Star Tribune (hat tip: Joanne):

A new online database from the University of Minnesota Humphrey School of Public Affairs* offers some revealing information about immigrant and refugee populations in Minnesota and across the Midwest.

The interactive site (immigrationtaskforce.hhh.umn.edu), will be unveiled Wednesday before the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.**

It pulls together data from the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Office of Refugee Resettlement and from published reports from research organizations such as the Pew Center and the Brookings Institution.

The information was compiled this semester by University of Minnesota Professor Kathy Fennelly and graduate students from her Immigration and Public Policy class.

Their report highlights immigration trends across 12 states: Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Ohio and Wisconsin.

“There’s a lot of interest in having current data,” Fennelly said. “Sometimes we have all sorts of opinions about immigration that aren’t based on data. There are groups that are hungry for data. We have created this website for exactly that purpose.”

Check out the study it’s very interesting—and I think you will be shocked at the high numbers!

Just a reminder we have a category entitled, “where to find information,” and this post with links is filed there.  This is also posted in our category “legal immigration and jobs!”

* Former Asst. Sec. of State for PRM, Eric Schwartz (a Soros protege), left the State Department recently to take a job at the Humphrey School, here.  Obama then appointed another globalist, Anne Richard, to the job.

** Michelle Obama is on the Board of this global organization, here (take a gander at all the big corporations represented on the board).  Tamar Jacoby (remember in 2009 when NumbersUSA called Jacoby and Grover Norquist Republican “traitors” ?) is also involved, here.