Month: April 2013

Kentucky furniture manufacturer going out of business; immigrants lose jobs

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Hurry!!!  Tell Senator Rand Paul we need to bring in more foreign workers to add to the unemployed refugee workers  in Bowling Green!

Longtime readers of RRW know that Bowling Green is a preferred resettlement site for refugees and has been in the news many times for problems there with the federal refugee contractors, with crime and with its dubious distinction as the home of two Iraqi refugee terrorists (now convicted and in the slammer).

Doors close at Eagle Industries

…by immigrant laborers!

This is the bad news from the Bowling Green Daily News (hat tip: Robin):

Bosnian, Burmese, Spanish, Vietnamese and English were among the languages spoken Wednesday by the more than 150 former Eagle Industries employees who sought help from the Rapid Response Team.

The Bowling Green furniture maker shut down last month with the intention of reopening with new owners. Instead, the company was forced into receivership and 286 people are without a job. So while employees quickly filed for unemployment benefits, they did not fill out all the paperwork needed for continued unemployment benefits, according to A.J. Tutko of the state’s Office of Employment and Career Services.

“You all thought you were going to be called back,” Tutko said, followed by interpreters in different languages.

Workers need to register for job focus career services, a web-based program that matches a person’s skill set with available jobs.

One man asked Tutko if he knew anything about the fate of Eagle. “No, I don’t,” he said.

Tutko was brought in for the meeting by the Rapid Response Team, which is overseen by the Barren River Area Development District. The team helps workers displaced in massive layoffs or closures. The team had two sessions at the BRADD office Wednesday and was scheduled to have two more today. It wasn’t clear how many workers would show up.

Workers in need of health care are desperate!

Jill Lewis, response team coordinator, started talking to workers about COBRA health insurance and how they could find out about those benefits. But workers, through an interpreter, said Eagle had stopped their health insurance benefits three years ago.

“Then they wouldn’t be eligible for this,” Lewis said.

She suggested that people look toward Fairview Health Center for help and suggested they sign up their children under 19 for Kentucky Children’s Health Insurance Program. It was clear that workers were unaware of that program. Many of the Hispanic women quickly shuffled through their papers looking for information on the program.

Read it all.  There were a few other employers at the event looking for a few workers (maybe!).

For more on the mess the US Office of Refugee Resettlement and the US State Department have made of Bowling Green, type ‘Bowling Green’ into our search function and you will find posts spanning nearly 6 years.

After you let Senator Paul know (his staff person responsible for immigration is Brian Darling, 202-224-4343, Brian_Darling@paul.senate.gov), let Senator McConnell know too!

I have a sneaking suspicion that these employers looking for cheap immigrant labor have been enabling McConnell (and vice versa!) for decades.  Bowling Green would not have become a federal preferred resettlement community without McConnell’s blessing!

Weekly Standard has major expose’ of Southern Poverty Law Center

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment
Morris Dees from the cover of The Weekly Standard

King of fearmongers!

I was on Capitol Hill this week visiting offices and spotted the April 15th issue of the Weekly Standard (in office waiting areas) with it frontpage story on the “poverty palace” and its founder Morris Dees.  Entitled ‘King of Fearmongers: Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center, scaring donors since 1971,’ by author Charlotte Allen, is a must-read!

Check it out here, a fascinating (and disgusting) story about a con artist.

ORR kills national consultation due to budget cuts

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment
Eskinder Negash (Director of ORR): We can’t afford the DC party this year.

Your tax dollars!

This is no great loss to any of you who have concerns about refugee resettlement and the ability of your city or state to afford more refugees on public assistance, because you don’t get invited to the big annual party anyway.  You are NOT a stakeholder!

Eskinder Negash, formerly a Vice President of federal contractor US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, now head of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (which hands out grants), has sent a letter to “stakeholders” (stakeholders do not include you!) telling them that (boo-hoo) no “consultation” this year.

Here is Negash yesterday:

To all ORR Stakeholders:

One of the key priorities of the Office of Refugee Resettlement has been to increase ORR’s communications and outreach to refugees, service providers, partners and other stakeholders.  Only by creating a platform for refugee voices to be heard can we ensure that we support refugees’ best interests, and meet the needs of those we welcome to the United States under this exemplary humanitarian program.

The ORR National Consultation is one way in which this office has traditionally sponsored such discussions [Read:  US taxpayers sponsored the feel-good event–ed].  This annual event, however, does not come without cost; therefore, given the current challenges we are facing with regard to budget, coupled with our commitment to maintaining current programs as a top priority, we have made the decision not to hold a National Consultation this year.

Read it all here, if you feel like it.

Waste of money anyway!

Christopher Coen writing at Friends of Refugees, here, in 2010 tells us that the annual event is nothing more than a huge lobbying project where contractors bring in their best examples of successful happy refugees (you pay their travel expenses!) and parade them around the Hill to ask Congress for more ‘moolah’ for the contractors.   Refugees critical of the contractors’ care of refugees are persona non grata!

Here is Coen in 2010:

Is this the type of conference marking the 30th anniversary of the refugee resettlement program that will really benefit the refugees, the average citizen, and the nation? Or is this whole thing a set up to help the refugee resettlement contractors and their revolving door friends in government?

For new readers:  See my Sequestration savings suggestions for ORR, here.

Media silence on the murder trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell includes silence on death of refugee at his hands

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment
Bhutanese refugee Karnamaya Mongar and her husband.
Photo: AP

Fox News (Bret Bair) is reporting tonight on the increasingly obvious avoidance by the mainstream media of the “mass murder” trial of the Philadelphia abortion doctor.  Here is just one report from Newsbusters pointing out the media silence (warning: photos are graphic).

I still want to know why the additional silence about the  married Bhutanese refugee woman, Karnamaya Mongar, who also died at his hands.

A refugee, who had reportedly only been in the country for 4 months, didn’t speak English and lived in Virginia, did not ‘find her way’ to Gosnell’s Philadelphia office without the help of her resettlement contractor—who was it?  And, who helped the mother of three decide she needed an abortion in the first place?

See my most recent stories on the case here and here.

Are other refugees being taken for abortions?

Here is another account of Mongar’s death from the trial.

Not called climate refugees anymore! Get ready for the newest refugees!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

OMG!  Can you believe it!  The UN is pushing a new refugee meme that allows them to get around much of the criticism of the hokey idea of climate refugees!    The newest refugees will be:

Coming to a town near you?  Photo is from the Diplo story

Victims-of-disaster-induced-cross-border-displacement

When we wrote some time ago about the climate refugee propaganda campaign we noted that many of the traditional refugee groups (the NGOs), who have long been shuffling people around the globe for reasons of protecting them from an ever-growing list of persecutions, didn’t like the idea of watering-down (he! he!) the long-held definition of a humanitarian refugee by adding the word ‘climate’ in front of it.

Now comes word from Petru Dumitriu writing at Diplo that the climate refugee thesis is coming alive with a new name!

“A new seed has been planted in the fertile soil of the United Nations…”

I [Petru Dumitriu] mentioned en passant [to a group of students] the emergence of a new concept in the humanitarian area: climate change refugees. One of the participants asked me whether the legal status of those forcibly displaced due to climate change was not highly questionable. She was right. But so was I!

At the end of 2011, I noticed that high officials of both the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies invoked, on a few occasions, the existence of a new category of refugees: climate (change) refugees or environmental refugees.

Was that just a figure of speech or a rhetorical expression? Can this turn into a legal term one day?

Well, admittedly, ‘no man is a prophet in his own land’, but I cannot refrain from observing that many political and legal concepts that are now currently used in the United Nations system have been at the beginning just simple enunciations or associations of existing independent terms. Sustainable development, human development, human security, or responsibility to protect  [Samantha Power—ed] were just intellectual constructs trying to marry into a single expression notions that have not been associated as such before.

Enter the Nansen Initiative!

It seems that climate refugees falls into the same category of novel ideas, fragile and vulnerable to criticism about their meaning, be they legal, political or operational. But many of these ideas have the bad habit of making their own way and adapting and developing the same way as the surviving species in Darwin’s theory.

This is obviously happening with the concept of climate refugees. One year after I had heard about it in official meetings, Norway and Switzerland launched the so-called Nansen Initiative. The naked terminology of climate refugees put on new and sophisticated attire. The stage name of the improved version of climate refugees under the chapeau of the Nansen Initiative is A Protection Agenda for Disaster-induced Cross-border Displacement.

Read it all for more of the juicy details about the Nansen Initiative!    Mr. Dumitriu concludes with this:

A new seed has been planted in the fertile soil of the United Nations. Mark my words! We will hear more about the victims-of-disaster-induced-cross-border-displacement, or climate refugees.

For more be sure to see our Climate Refugee category which I began a while ago (end of 2008), but then let languish because I thought the notion so far-fetched.  I guess I better pay more attention now that we know about the Nansen Initiative.