Day: December 29, 2012

Watching the collapse of Europe: Italian asylum problems a harbinger of what is to come?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

So what the hell is Italy supposed to do?  Here is an article from the hoiyty-toiyty at the New York Times chastising the Italian government for how it is handling the huge populations of immigrants flowing toward Europe.  Italy, and to a lesser extent Malta, are the first bits of land illegal aliens reach as they in ever-increasing numbers run from Africa and the glorious Arab Spring on-going there.   Here is just one of our recent posts on the topic.

According to this story in the NYT, Italy allows too many asylum seekers to stay and then doesn’t take care of them.  With the European economy teetering, how the heck can they take care of all these destitute people (America pay attention!)?   And, if they said they were going to deport more, the international ‘humanitarians’ would scream bloody murder over that!  It is a no-win situation for Italy.  The NYT calls it a “paradox:”

ROME — The abandoned university building on the outskirts of Rome, colloquially known as Salaam Palace, was once a sparsely populated makeshift shelter where new arrivals from Africa — fleeing war, persecution and economic turmoil — squatted to create their own refuge.

Over the years, scattered mattresses were joined by sloppily plastered plywood walls, slapdash doors and scavenged furniture. Today, an irregular warren of tiny rooms includes a small restaurant and a common room. On a recent cold afternoon, a hammer clinked as a bathroom was added to a one-room apartment where an oven door had been left open for heat.

More than 800 refugees now inhabit Salaam Palace, and its dilapidation and seeming permanence have become a vivid reminder of what its residents and others say is Italy’s failure to assist and integrate those who have qualified for asylum under its laws.

Salaam Palace and an expanding population in shantytowns elsewhere are the result of what refugee agencies say is an Italian paradox surrounding asylum seekers.

“Italy is quite good when in the asylum procedure, recognizing 40 percent, even up to 50 percent of applicants in some years,” said Laura Boldrini, the spokeswoman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Italy. “What is critical is what comes after.”

She and others involved in aiding refugees say that neglect and absence of resources add unnecessary hardship to already tattered lives and are creating a potential tinderbox for social unrest.

One of the reasons the European Union came to be was so that all of the countries would share in trying to solve problems that in this case only stem from the geographic location of Italy.  But, Italians now see that they are, for the most part, alone in coping with the migrant problems from Africa.

Because of its geography, Italy is more exposed to migration from Africa, and it has called on other European Union countries to help bear the burden. Even so, the country has lagged in its own response, refugee agencies say.

“It has never invested in a system that’s structural,” said Ms. Boldrini, of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. “Every year is treated as if it’s any emergency.”

Under European Union rules, asylum seekers must stay in the country in which they entered Europe, and can be sent back if they go elsewhere. Many residents of Salaam Palace say they sought something better, in France, Britain or Germany, but found themselves back in Rome.

Read it all!

So, when are we in the US going to start taking Italy’s illegal aliens as we do Malta’s?  Our lengthy ‘Malta’ archive is here.

Time to read The Camp of the Saints?   Change the locale to Italy rather than France, and the origin of the onslaught Africa rather than India.

Here is what one reviewer at Amazon says about the nearly 40-year-old DARK novel:

This book is so politically incorrect that I admire Amazon.com for actually carrying it. Written in the early 1970s, this book looks beyond the cold war to a North-South confrontation in which European civilization is unilaterally morally disarmed. The thesis is simple: suppose a million starving people from the Ganges actually took Western rhetoric of compassion, explotiation, etc., to heart, and comandeered, en masse, shipping, with the intention of moving to the shores of France? (Raspail, of course, is French.) Would anyone stop them? The imagery employed is interesting. The title comes from Revelation, Chapter 20, and refers to the forces of evil laying seige to the camp of the saints, here meant to be the nations of the West…..

Food Stamp fraud getting the attention of mainstream media!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update December 30th:  The New York Post has a story on food stamp fraud, but they are dancing around it.  Good quote in here though by Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, so the whole smarmy issue is percolating up to the surface.

I am so excited to report that a writer (Isaac Wolf) for Scripps Howard News Service has spent months investigating cases of food stamp fraud where the fraudster had a previous criminal record and should never have been permitted to participate in the program.

Long time readers here at RRW know that this topic—food stamp fraud—became a side hobby of mine when I noticed the disproportionate number of immigrant-run stores participating in trafficking fraud (that means purchasing stamps for cash from customers at a reduced rate but then being reimbursed by the taxpayer for the full value of the benefit).  LOL! Just look at it as a form of the redistribution by the government of your wealth!

Here is the story by Isaac Wolf at ABC News:

Within the ranks of merchants accepting food stamps are convicted criminals who have previously been caught stealing cars, committing armed assault and selling drugs.

Although strict, long-standing federal rules are supposed to prevent known thieves and cheats from participating as retailers in the food-stamp program, the U.S. Department of Agriculture rarely banishes them from the lucrative market, an eight-month Scripps Howard News Service investigation has found.

State and local law enforcement officials who have built cases against the rogue retailers — who often also trade in black-market cigarettes and sell stolen items such as baby formula or razor blades — are frustrated that taxpayers’ money continues to line the merchants’ pockets.

“The people doing this are criminals,” said Bill Chandler, who retired in 2009 as the director of the North Carolina Department of Public Safety’s alcohol-enforcement division, and is now an agent with the Sanford, N.C., police department. “They will do anything they can to make a dollar.”

Scripps reporters documented in early 2012 how the USDA has allowed storeowners previously caught engaging in food-stamp fraud to slip unnoticed back into the federal program. In response, the USDA promised to institute stronger oversight, opened a criminal investigation on a case identified by Scripps, and booted another seven stores identified by Scripps from the rolls.

Since then, Scripps has unearthed records showing 19 businesses — including ones in Arizona, California, Florida, Michigan, New York and Ohio — owned by individuals whose criminal records should, under federal regulations, trigger expulsion from the $80 billion-a-year food-stamp trade, formally called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

Scripps also identified eight individuals who are under active criminal investigation for food-stamp fraud and other crimes but whose stores remain in business, and another 27 stores whose owners have been caught violating the spirit of federal anti-fraud rules — by, for example selling black-market cigarettes and liquor, or obstructing investigations.

When Scripps presented a sampling of the criminal histories to the USDA in July, the agency said it would investigate.

There is more, please read it all!

Then get this, the names of three crooks identified in this story by reporter Wolf are:

Ghassan Abdelkarim

Karanjit Singh

Francisco Perez  (identified in the story as an illegal alien)

Do you see a pattern here?

Since I foolishly never set up a category for food stamp fraud when I first began writing about it nearly 5 years ago, to learn more, type ‘food stamp fraud’ into our search function for dozens and dozens of posts on the topic.