Second refugee shot, killed in St. Louis in ten days; a Bhutanese man this time

Readers I was in Lancaster, PA yesterday for a refugee meeting and I am still trying to figure out what I want to say about it.  Lancaster is world famous for its picturesque Amish farming population, but the city is having its trouble too with the multi-cultural enrichment brought to the city through refugee resettlement where federal contractors often put refugees in the less-than-desirable parts of town mixing them in with illegal immigrants and your usual city thugs.

Mon Rai (standing) was shot in the back while working at a St. Louis 7-Eleven

One thing I noticed at the refugee confab yesterday is that there is little to no mention of the horror stories (like the one I’m about to post, or the one I just wrote about) involving refugees.  Any problems addressed at the gathering while I was there centered around you American boobs who don’t understand or don’t have sympathy for the diversity you are being given.

This story from St. Louis reminds us of the dangers refugees experience when people who lived sheltered lives in UN run camps among their own kind of people are dropped into American inner city neighborhoods.

Do you know who really doesn’t like diversity?  The criminal thugs who run cities like St. Louis and Lancaster and your city.  Frankly, they think refugees are getting stuff they aren’t.

For new readers the Bhutanese are here (nearly 70,000) of them in the last five years thanks to the Bush State Department that agreed, with, or at the behest of the UN, that the camps in Nepal must be closed.  It is still a mystery to me why we didn’t use our immense economic pressure to persuade Nepal to repatriate their ethnic kinfolk.   The people we call Bhutanese are really Nepalese and for readers who wonder, they are not Muslims.

The International Institute of St. Louis, which had resettled the murdered refugee, is a US Committee for Refugees and Immigrant (USCRI) subcontractor.  USCRI is one of the nine major federal contractors.  We mentioned them here recently—hire a refugee rather than an American they said!

New readers might want to visit our archives on ‘Bhutanese murdered’ for more tragic stories involving the Bhutanese, that no one in the ‘human rights industrial complex’ ever seems to mention.

Suspect in the murder of Mon Rai

Here is the sad story from the St. Louis Post Dispatch:

Mon Rai told friends, customers — anyone who would listen — that he was going to be the father of a baby girl. He told his manager at the 7-Eleven where he worked in south St. Louis that his overnight Monday shift would be his last for a while so he could spend time with his wife, who is expected to give birth any day.

About 12:30 a.m. Monday, a gunman walked into the store at Gravois Avenue and Bates Street and fatally shot Rai, a Bhutanese refugee who moved to St. Louis nine months ago.

Customers found him in an aisle, shot in the back. Police said nothing was apparently taken from the store, including money from the register, but employees are taking inventory.

For years, Rai had dreamed of coming to the U.S. He lived 19 of his 29 years in a refugee camp in Nepal, where there was a perpetual shortage of food, no toilets and poor medical care. He, like thousands of people from Bhutan, were forced to flee the country over cultural and religious differences and live in refugee camps throughout Nepal.

Rai came to St. Louis with his wife, Susila, 25, and their son, Sujal, 7, on Sept. 5, 2012. Six months earlier, his parents, brother and sister arrived here.

“I hoped it would be a better life than in the refugee camp in Nepal,” Rai wrote in an essay for a Thanksgiving program at the International Institute last year, two months after his arrival.

“When I came to St. Louis … my heart was full of hopes and dreams.”

The International Institute is the region’s primary agency for resettling refugees. It’s where Rai was taking English classes and helping serve as interpreter for other Nepalese refugees.

Bosnian refugee killed in a convenience store a mile away and just ten days earlier:

Duke said he could not understand the violence, especially two convenience store shootings in St. Louis less than two weeks apart. In both cases, a refugee was fatally shot.

“Our neighborhood’s better than this,” Duke said.

Duke also knew Haris Gogic, 19, the Bosnian man killed in a robbery at his family’s Quick Stop convenience store at Chippewa Street and Alfred Avenue on May 31.

[…..]

The two stores are about a mile apart on foot. Police said there was no reason to suspect the shootings were related.

Police have released the surveillance video from the 7-Eleven, and shortly I’ll post on the capture of the alleged shooter in the second case.

Lawyers for Uzbek refugee arrested in terror case want out

Not enough funding from the feds for what will surely be a long and complicated trial they say.  Sequestration to blame?  Or, could there be a little fear too?  Just wondering.

This is an update of the story we reported here last month.

Fazliddin Kurbanov needs a “free” lawyer

From AP via the San Francisco Chronicle (hat tip: Joanne):

BOISE, Idaho (AP) — Lawyers for an Uzbek national facing federal terrorism-related charges in Idaho and Utah want a judge to let them withdraw from the case, saying federal budget cuts have left their office with limited resources.

Fazliddin Kurbanov, 30, of Boise, has pleaded not guilty to charges that authorities say involve teaching people to build bombs to target public transportation.

In a motion late Monday, court-appointed attorneys Richard Rubin and Thomas Monaghan of Federal Defenders Services of Idaho sought the immediate appointment of a substitute counsel.

Rubin told The Associated Press on Tuesday that federal budget cuts known as sequestration have reduced the budget of his office by 10 percent for the current fiscal year, and as much as an additional 14 percent next year.

“It would be more detrimental to the client to have us continue on to a certain point, totally run out of resources, and then come into the court saying we just can’t go any further, ” Rubin said.

In all, the federal court system, including public defenders, must absorb about $350 million in cuts through the end of the fiscal year in September.

U.S. judiciary administrators last month asked for supplemental funding of $41 million for defenders services, to help avert what they called an unprecedented crisis.

Representing Kurbanov, who was arrested May 17, in the potentially long and costly case would sap funding necessary to defend other clients, Rubin said.

Just wait until amnesty passes and the courts are filled with all sorts of needy people wanting lawyers…  in addition to the lines at the unemployment and welfare offices!

Gang of Eight bill moves to next stage in the Senate; refugees will face more job competition

I was away yesterday at a Refugee meeting in Lancaster, PA which I’ll tell you about shortly, and when I heard the news during my long drive home that Amnesty for 11-20 million illegal aliens might be on the horizon I wondered to myself what that will do to refugee resettlement.

Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, a leading opponent of “comprehensive” immigration reform.

The contractors, here are the top nine, who bring (some say drop-off) refugees in your towns and cities are struggling to find work for legal refugees (half are not finding any work!), and decent apartments (not in slums!), and to get them enrolled in welfare programs, and if the monster S.744 passes there will be a slush fund so these very same contractors will get federal money to process even more immigrants through a failing system.

Other than more money coming their way, I can’t for the life of me understand why those nine major contractors and their hundreds of subcontractors are lobbying for amnesty and the inevitable job competition for the legal refugees they can’t properly manage now!

I also predict an even greater public backlash against refugees if amnesty comes to pass because the general public will feel that immigrants are being shoved down their throats and taking their jobs. The average American citizen does not understand the difference between the federal programs and the people they permit to enter the US.

Here is what Roy Beck at NumbersUSA reported about the vote yesterday.  If you are not on Numbers’ e-mail alert list, go to their website and please sign up.

DEAR FRIENDS,

We have a ton of work ahead of us, but you have done an amazing job thus far with your phone calls and faxes and personal appearances.

The Senate a couple of minutes ago passed the Motion to Proceed to bring S. 744 to the floor for debate.

Two hours ago, 82 Senators voted YES to stop a filibuster. That vote allowed the Motion to Proceed.

But don’t be alarmed by that number, even though it is far above the 60 votes needed on the all-important final filibuster vote later this month.

A number of the Senators who voted to proceed have announced over the last few days that they will eventually vote against the b ill unless it is significantly changed on the floor. And the changes they are demanding are being called unacceptable on the floor right now by Chief Amnestymeister Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).

We have no doubt that your tens of thousands of calls the last two days planted very powerful seeds among many of the YES voters today that makes them realize that they are going to have a very hard time voting YES at the end when the question is not debate but passage.

The 15 Senators who today said that this bill is so hopelessly out of touch with the needs of America that it shouldn’t even be debated included four Senators who a couple of weeks ago were being touted in the media as prime swing voters who would push the final vote over 60:

Kirk of Illinois

Crapo of Idaho

Risch of Idaho

Barrasso of Wyoming

Congratulations to all of you from those three states who have done such a remarkable job of helping those Senators understand both where the voters are in your state and also the moral and practical imperative of stopping this bill.

Back in 2007, we also lost big on this procedural first vote to bring that amnesty bill to the floor. But we built on the solid opposition of a strong bloc of Senators to kill the amnesty on the final vote later.

HERE ARE TODAY’S CHAMPIONS WHO TRIED TO STOP THE AMNESTY BILL IN ITS TRACKS

ALABAMA: Sessions & Shelby

ARKANSAS: Boozman

IDAHO: Crapo & Risch

ILLINOIS: Kirk

IOWA: Grassley

KANSAS: Roberts

LOUISIANA: Vitter

OKLAHOMA: Inhofe

SOUTH CAROLINA: Scot

TEXAS: Cruz

UTAH: Lee

WYOMING: Barrasso & Enzi

Everybody else voted YES, except for three who didn’t vote:

ALASKA: Murkowski

ARIZONA: McCain

OKLAHOMA: Coburn

I have no idea at this time why they didn’t vote. Murkowski and Coburn have both made strong nods toward voting for the bill recently but have been hammered by the voters.

Senator Jeff Session a champion for common sense!  The numbers are just too high!

Sen. Sessions (R-Ala.) did a magnificent job in his speech on the floor today, speaking up not only for the 20 million unemployed but for the millions more Americans whose real wages have been driven downward by 30 yea rs of high immigration.

He painted the picture very clearly that this is a bill about helping those affluent Americans who happen also to be greedy at the expense of the most struggling members of our society, and at the expense of the taxpayers.

If you haven’t gotten in gear yet to oppose S.744, the next couple of weeks are critical.  The Senate will proceed now to floor debate, so contact your US Senators.  The House will be crafting a bill, so contact your Member of the House—NOW!  Tell them to stop the bipartisan Obama/Schumer/Rubio destruction of America.

By the way, at RRW we believe at minimum all refugee and asylum changes should be stripped from the bill because the program is in dire need of Congressional review on its own—especially in light of the Boston Marathon bombing by a political refugee.

Addendum: If you’ve never watched Roy Beck’s video—Immigration by the Numbers—take a few minutes and watch it now.