Month: June 2013

State Department Refugee Program head honcho made some news last month

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

50,000 Congolese refugees coming soon; more refugees generally than previous years; and a warmer welcome (more funding) for all, especially more funding for contractors!

At about the same time that citizens from across the country were sending in testimony to the US State Department telling them they don’t want tens of thousands of refugees admitted to the US in 2014, Assistant Secretary of State for Population Refugees and Migration was making the rounds of refugee contractor meetings and making some news.  And, no surprise, it’s all about how resettlement is getting bigger and better (in their view).

Anne C. Richard, Asst. Sec. of State for PRM and formerly a Veep at the International Rescue Committee, a federal contractor.

Here is a portion only of Richard’s speech which I am breaking-up with explanatory sub-headings of my own.  Emphasis is mine too.

Your community is “enriched by these newcomers!” says Richard.

Richard:

Let’s now turn our attention back to our own country, the United States. As all of you here today know, the United States is also the world’s leading resettlement country, admitting more refugees each year than all other resettlement countries combined – more than three million since 1975. And we all know that our own communities have been as enriched by these newcomers as they have been by the opportunities this country has provided them. Our overall resettlement policy remains the same: we will continue to strive to achieve the President’s refugee admissions ceiling, focusing on the most vulnerable who cannot go home or be integrated in their country of first asylum.

We get into dangerous places and bring out refugees.  In Africa we moved Somalis from a camp that was too dangerous for our Department of Homeland Security to get into, to a less dangerous camp so as to process the twenty-year camp dwellers to your town.

Richard:

The PRM Bureau has gone to extraordinary lengths in the past year to reach refugees in need of resettlement who were previously inaccessible because of dangerous conditions in the places where they had sought asylum.

In Kenya, UNHCR has referred thousands of Somalis in the Dadaab camp for U.S. resettlement. Unfortunately, the Department of Homeland Security was unable to interview them because it was determined to be too risky to send DHS officers to Dadaab. Last year, we provided additional funding to build a transit center in Kakuma camp, where conditions are safer, and have moved close to 1,600 individuals from Dadaab to Kakuma to continue the process for U.S. resettlement. These refugees, many of whom have been living in Dadaab for more than 20 years, will start arriving in the United States this month.

We are working on bringing you Syrians as soon as we can to add to your city’s diversity.

Richard:

In Syria, thousands of Iraqi refugees who have been referred for U.S. resettlement are similarly inaccessible and we are taking several steps to get them to safety.

And, listen up!  Here is some big news!  The UN has announced that 50,000 Congolese will be resettled and THE US WILL TAKE MOST OF THEM!

Richard:

Many of you know by now that UNHCR has announced its intention to refer up to 50,000 Congolese for resettlement over the next five years. Most will likely come to the United States. Given the level of trauma and need among this population, we want to work together with all of you to do this right. That’s why we’ve formed a working group to bring together partners from all across the spectrum – overseas and domestic, government, International Organizations, and NGOs – to see how we can better prepare the refugees and communities for successful resettlement.

We will be getting into Chad so as to bring you some Darfurians too!

Richard:

We were pleased (and a bit surprised) when the Government of Chad reached out to UNHCR late last year to say it had changed its mind on resettlement of Darfuri refugees from Eastern Chad and would now allow UNHCR to refer individual cases (but not P-2 group processing).

PRM traveled to Chad in February to survey the landscape and discuss the resumption of resettlement with partners. We are cautiously optimistic but proceeding slowly in terms of dedicating resources (human and financial) to the effort, given the fits and starts we’ve faced on this program over the years.

Family reunification from Africa is now up and running after being closed for years due to the widespread fraud we uncovered in 2008.  But, we didn’t do anything about those 30,000 plus Somalis who entered fraudulently prior to 2008.

Richard:

Working closely with the Department of Homeland Security, we re-instated the priority three or “P-3” family reunion program this year with a new DNA requirement to ensure that the program is fulfilling its purpose of reuniting relatives.

More refugees coming this year than last, 20% more!  And coming faster!

Richard:

I’m pleased to report that we are on track to admit the number of refugees in the Presidential Determination this year. That is 70,000 refugees– a more than 20% increase over last year’s number. You should also know that we’ve been able to admit these refugees in a much more even pace than in recent years. Just under 50% of the refugees we expect this year were admitted in the first half of the fiscal year.

We know that there are shrinking local budgets, refugees are struggling, but we are going to bring them anyway!  And, we will make sure the contractors get more federal tax dollars.

Richard:

We recognize that this increase comes at a time of shrinking state and local budgets, cuts in social services, and the challenges of raising private contributions. As you know, PRM has helped deal with economic challenges to the program by doubling the amount of funding provided on a per capita basis to receive and place refugees in 2010. We have provided modest increases since then.

We also are providing “floor funding” to our resettlement agency partners, essentially guaranteeing sufficient funding for services to 60,000 refugees so that program managers can plan and hire staff with the assurance that the funding will be there. Despite all these improvements, we know that many refugees are still struggling in the early weeks and months of their arrival in the States.

Not concerned with how communities can cope or finance all of this, just about how to make sure the refugees’ needs are met.

Richard:

This leads me to ask: How can our domestic programs best address the needs of refugees? What more can we do to help refugees effectively integrate into new communities?  [Notice the word ‘integrate.’  They shun that out-of-fashion idea of ‘assimilation.’—ed]

Given the overall budget situation in Washington, we all acknowledge the need to widen the circle of domestic “stakeholders” in the refugee resettlement program. We need to ensure a warm reception for the refugees we resettle. We need to find creative ways to expand participation in the program at the local level and support for the program by community leaders.

There is more, read it all here.

Learn more about Anne Richard, the globalist—this is one of several posts on the revolving door (government employee/contractor).  Richard has revolved several times in her career.

Taking a stand in Tennessee: free speech rally was beyond wildest expectations

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Some estimated the crowd at nearly 2000, but we do know that hundreds never even made it into the conference room!

Pamela Geller sends a message to speakers!

For readers who have arrived here for the first time, you might wish to visit our post here last week about the audacity of the Obama Justice Department and the FBI to participate in a meeting that was essentially organized to send a message to Americans that their negative speech about Islam could be considered a crime.   The announcement caused a firestorm of media attention.

In response to the news about the event, and within days, Pamela Geller (Atlas Shrugs) and others organized an impromptu Rally for Free Speech. 

Here is what Geller said at her blog just after midnight last night:

All eyes are on Tennessee tonight, as the fight for the very soul of America comes to a very small town: Manchester, Tennessee, a town no bigger than 60,000 people. (Almost 2,000 people were there — that’s three percent of the local population.) This was the perhaps unlikely venue for a seminar led by a U.S. attorney and an FBI special agent on how “inflammatory” speech against Muslims violated civil rights laws. Nowhere was it ever explained how there could be honest examination of Islam’s teachings of jihad that wouldn’t be “inflammatory” — and that was just the point.

There were close to 800 people filling the small room to way beyond capacity. The lines were three deep along the wall, with folks spilling out into the hallways — plus many hundreds more outside. Those outside weren’t missing much — unless they were in the mood to be admonished and hectored as xenophobes, bigots and racists by an Islamic supremacist spokesman and two Obama officials who steadfastly refused to address the elephant in the room: the reality of jihad terror and Islamic supremacism, no matter how many times the boisterous crowd called them on their nonsense.

U.S. Attorney Bill Killian gave a power point presentation on hate crimes and hate speech. From beginning to end it was full of condescension, smears, charges that the crowd was racist, and thinly-veiled threats that truthful speech about Islam could be prosecuted.

Visit Atlas Shrugs for more (and to see more photos).

No punishment permitted for speech that is “hostile to a religion.”

Incidentally, the news of the upcoming event made it to Politico a few ago and a report by Josh Gerstein quotes First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams:

While threats directed at individuals or small groups can lead to punishment, First Amendment experts expressed doubt that the government has any power to stop offensive material about Islam from circulating.

Referring to Thomas Perez’s man US Attorney Bill Killian:

“He’s just wrong,” said Floyd Abrams, one of the country’s most respected First Amendment attorneys. “The government may, indeed, play a useful and entirely constitutional role in urging people not to engage in speech that amounts to religious discrimination. But it may not, under the First Amendment, prevent or punish speech even if it may be viewed as hostile to a religion.”

“And what it most clearly may not do is to stifle political or social debate, however rambunctious or offensive some may think it is,” Abrams said.

Why is this happening in Tennessee?  If you are a long time reader of RRW you know that Tennessee is a target  of al-Hijra—Islamic conquest via migration.  It is also one of the handful of states in the Nation making any attempt to regain its Constitutional rights under the Tenth Amendment and is seriously questioning whether the federal government has any right to import refugees with the expectation that the taxpayers of Tennessee will pay for them.

And, why is taking a stand for free speech so important to our work—because the reason that the UK and Sweden and other European countries are now in the predicament they are in is that their citizens do not have the same free speech rights we do (in fact their governments support Sharia blasphemy laws), and so their demographic death spiral is, in my view, unstoppable.

I’ll update this post as more news comes in from Tennessee….

See the Times Free Press, here.

Here is the view from The Blaze.

How the Tullahoma News saw the story, here.

Janet Levy at American Thinker, had this to report.

Killian’s supposed remarks at US Justice Department website, here.

Killian getting backlash, at World Net Daily, here.

Minneapolis council race reveals anti-gay tensions in Somali refugee ‘community’

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

From Minneapolis Public Radio:

 MINNEAPOLIS — The political awakening of Minnesota’s Somali community poses a conundrum for the DFL party. While Somali-Americans overwhelmingly vote Democratic, many appear to disagree with the party when it comes to gay rights.

That tension was on display Sunday, as the party considered a dispute between a Somali city council candidate and the openly gay incumbent he’s running against.

At the meeting, the party’s Constitution, Bylaws and Rules Committee upheld the party’s endorsement of Abdi Warsame, who’s running for a seat on the Minneapolis City Council.

That seat is currently held by Robert Lilligren, who’s been on the council nearly a dozen years. But Lilligren lost the DFL endorsement this year to Warsame after hundreds of Somali-Americans turned out at precinct caucuses in April, and came back to the party’s convention, giving Warsame overwhelming support.  [We told you about the convention here.—-ed]

[….]

All 13 City Council wards in Minneapolis were redrawn last year as part of the post-census redistricting, and Lilligren’s ward changed substantially. Somali activists, led by Warsame, lobbied to have the borders moved so that as many East African voters as possible could be concentrated there.

Sacramento Iraqis have mental problems; no psychiatric treatment readily available

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is not the first time that we have written about Iraqi refugee mental health problems (and I suspect it won’t be the last).

So far, this fiscal year (2013) we have “welcomed” 11,066 Iraqis.  If the Sacramento percentages of suffering delicate Iraqis is representative then we have just admitted:

6,528 cases of insomnia

4,869 depressed people

4,537 people with headaches

4,205 fearful people

…all in need of mental health professionals to help them cope, so that they can find jobs.

LOL!  I bet the percentages of Americans reading this post who are experiencing sleeplessness, depression, headaches and fear are at about the same percentage as the Iraqis as we contemplate what the US State Department and the resettlement contractors are doing to America and how the heck we are going to pay for all of this!

Here is the story from California Health Line:

Many of the 2,700 Iraqi refugees living in the Sacramento area have experienced symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder but struggle to obtain mental health care services, according to a report by the UC-Davis Health System Clinical and Translational Science Center, the Sacramento Bee reports.

The report was conducted with the help of Opening Doors,* a refugee resettlement agency, and the Mesopotamia Organization, an Iraqi self-help agency.

Report Findings

The report analyzed the number of Iraqi refugees experiencing PTSD symptoms and found that:

59% of refugees reported experiencing insomnia;
44% of refugees reported experiencing depression;
41% of refugees reported experiencing headaches; and
38% of refugees reported experiencing fear (Magagnini, Sacramento Bee, 6/3).

Obamacare to the rescue?  Don’t count on it!

According to the report:

65% of refugees reported experiencing long waits for treatment of symptoms;
74% of refugees said needed services were not covered by their health insurance; and
82% of refugees said that the U.S. health care system moved too slowly (UC-Davis report, May 2013).

The Iraqi unemployment rate in the US is at about 67%.   Who knew it was because they have so many mental health problems.

He ( Sarmed Ibrahim) added that the lack of medical treatment is affecting Iraqi refugees’ ability to obtain jobs.

Just a reminder, California takes the most refugees of any state, so its only going to get worse for Medi-Cal.

* Opening Doors is a Sacramento refugee resettlement agency.  Its most recent Form 990 is here.  Out of a revenue stream of $636,186, government grants (taxpayer dollars) supplied $595,700 of their income.

Mostly Christian refugees to be repatriated to Burma; US to end program for them

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This story has been languishing in my posting queue for weeks, so I thought I better get it posted so as to keep our archives up to date.

Thailand’s Mae La Refugee Camp

After taking tens of thousands of Burmese refugees to the US, and turning cities such as Ft. Wayne, Indiana into the Burmese capital of America we are now saying, it’s o.k. for the rest of you to go back home.    Truth be told, I think we’re bored with the Burmese Christians and are planning to make room for Burmese Rohingya Muslims to diversify our refugee collection (after all that is only “fair”, right?).  We have already taken some Muslims from Burma.

This is the AP story from early last month:

Since the day she was born, 20-year-old Naw Lawnadoo has known almost nothing of the world beyond the fence and guard posts that hem her in with 45,000 others — ethnic minorities from Myanmar and those like her who were born and raised in the Mae La refugee camp in neighboring Thailand.

School, family, friends, shopping and churchgoing — many of the refugees are Christian — have all been confined to a valley of densely packed bamboo-and-thatch huts huddled under soaring limestone cliffs.

Now, she and other camp residents face a future that will dramatically change their constricted but secure, sometimes happy lives. With the end of 50 years of military rule in Myanmar, aid groups are beginning to prepare for the eventual return of one of the world’s largest refugee populations — some 1 million people in camps and hideouts spread across five countries.

The US took-in about 92,000 Burmese refugees in recent years.

Some may melt into Thailand, joining the 2.5 million migrant workers from Myanmar. A few may be resettled in third countries, though the United States is ending a program under which it has taken 80 percent of the 105,000 settled so far. With shrinking options, most will likely have no choice but to return.

While camp life is hardly cosmopolitan, some of the young can meet foreigners, have access to the Internet and occasionally slip out to a nearby town, or even the shopping malls and bright lights of Bangkok, Thailand’s capital. For them, the prospect of planting rice in isolated villages to which they would probably go holds little attraction.

I guess it wouldn’t.

Just goes to show the fickle nature of the US State Department’s refugee admissions program.