Pennsylvania Refugee Conference was informative on so many levels

06/13/2013 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update June 15th: Pockets of resistance have developed, here is Part II of my report on Lancaster.

As I mentioned a couple of times yesterday, on Tuesday I traveled to Lancaster, PA (a “welcoming” resettlement city) for the 2013 Pennsylvania Consultation, a joint meeting between the “Commonwealth’s” refugee program and its workers, the national refugee contractors and the federal government.

The Atrium dining area at the lavish Doubletree/Hilton Hotel in Lancaster, PA where “stakeholders” met (at taxpayers’ expense) to learn more about how to help refugees sign up for social services. What is wrong with this picture?

Representatives from the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement (Health and Human Services) and the State Department’s Office of Population, Refugees and Migration were there to fill in the Pennsylvania “stakeholders” about the latest trends in nationalities they would be resettling, refugee and asylee rights including rights to welfare goodies, the shortage of money for the contractors and the program generally (they had money to give attendees promotional ink pens!) and how to push-back against what they called “pockets of resistance against new arrivals.” (That last is so good it will require a second post!).

Readers, I know this type of meeting can be boring and so might my reports on it, or at least this one might be boring, but it’s very important to see the kinds of people involved in refugee resettlement, listen to them and to basically become informed about the minutia of this or any government program you might have concerns about.

Your state (except Wyoming) has a Refugee Office (or an assigned state employee/private contractor) somewhere and I recommend that you visit them or their website often or get on a mailing list to receive information about upcoming meetings like this one. We were told from the podium that Pennsylvania had no pockets of resistance, perhaps no organized pockets, but I learned of a couple of people who have problems with refugee resettlement in Lancaster who didn’t know this meeting was occurring at their grand Doubletree/Hilton Hotel.

By the way, I had several occasions to help put on conferences (not taxpayer funded) at a Doubletree Hotel in Maryland, not as grand a hotel as this one, and I know that use of their facility/meeting rooms and food couldn’t be done for less than $50 a head for a boxed lunch. Based on the amenities at the Lancaster “consultation” where attendance was ‘free,’ this spread must have cost (state and/or federal taxpayers) about $100 a person. Fortunately there was no line dancing that I saw.

Here are some nuggets I learned (in no particular order):

* PA resettled 3,022 in 2011-2012. 1,194 have arrived in 2013 so far.

* The largest percentage of PA’s refugees are the Bhutanese (Nepalese), Iraqis and a smattering of Somalis. There will be Congolese coming to PA to add to their diversity.

* The refugee hot spots in PA are Pittsburgh, Lancaster/Harrisburg, Allentown, Philadelphia (the largest right now) and Erie.

* Major PA contractors are Catholic Charities, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and Church World Service.

* ORR was represented at the meeting by former Ethiopian refugee, Mitiku Ashebir. That is interesting because the present Director of ORR is Eskinder Negash, also from Ethiopia, who revolved into his government job from his perch as VP at one of the top nine major federal contractors—USCRI. Ashebir entered the government door through his former positions with contractors US Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Ethiopian Community Development Council. There really should be a law against the cozy contractor/government employee revolving door.

* There were lots of little nuggets about welfare that I noted. One statistic of interest was that 2,550 refugees in PA are receiving SSI (Supplemental Security Income). After all, the US State Department is admitting elderly and disabled refugees who have to live on something—right!

* There was discussion on possible reductions in TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families) on the horizon. And, eeek! drug testing too.

* There was this bit of good employment news (NOT!)—refugee employment increased by 3% over 2011! It went from 50% to 53%.

* Also considered good news is that 67% of refugees in PA are self-sufficient at 120 days, and 75% at 180 days. That does not mean they don’t get any welfare benefits—they still get food stamps for sure and likely Section 8 housing. And, so 25% are in need of all services after 180 days—doesn’t sound so good to me!

* The anticipated national caseload for FY2013 breaks down like this: 70,000 refugees, 28,800 asylees, 21,000 Cubans and Haitians, 600 human trafficking cases, and 4,000 Special Immigrant Visa holders (those are the Iraqis and Afghanis who we are admitting for “helping” America). The total is 124,400 and as we were told ALL of them are entitled to all the benefits—welfare, housing, food stamps, education, health care etc.

* On top of the 124,400 is an expected jump in unaccompanied minors that ORR is responsible for. In 2012, 14,700 kids arrived in the US without parents and in 2013 the number is expected to be 20,000. Prior to 2012 the numbers were dramatically lower. Sounds like an incredible scam on America as probably parents from south of the border are abandoning their children to the government in advance of the amnesty legislation.

* Then here is something I found very interesting and helps answer a question I get often from readers. How do they decide to resettle refugees to a given town? The contractors and federal government have to continually look for fresh territory in which to resettle refugees and apparently in light of failed attempts to get new seed communities established, the feds are having ORR-PRM joint quarterly placement meetings. The next one will be in July. Before any new site is opened (usually because some contractor thinks it would be a good place), ORR-PRM will visit the site together and decide if it will be “welcoming.”

A note of caution: they will bring in a small number of refugees and see if there is going to be some resistance. If there is none, then they will proceed with the assumption that yours is a “welcoming” community. I call this the squawk factor. I think this is one of several reasons why the contractors resettle refugees in city slums—there will be no organized community resistance from people who don’t know their neighbors anyway and are just trying to survive day to day.

One final thing. I bet if attendees at the conference were asked to raise their hands if they were there simply as volunteers and not receiving a salary or travel expenses, the number of hands raised would be less than ten, maybe less than five of the approximately 130-150 attendees. (I’m guessing on the number in attendance).

Lancaster gave birth to RRW!

To learn the role Lancaster played in the birth of this blog, visit this post from 2012—So what is going on in Lancaster, PA?

More later…..”Welcoming America” combating pockets of resistance!

Columbus, Ohio Somalis are going home to Somalia to rebuild their country….

06/13/2013 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

…..while we continue to bring more in to the US.

It’s only 54 leaving, so far, but its a step in the right direction. Here is the story from NPR News:

Work ahead in the homeland! Mogadishu was destroyed by Al-Shabaab Islamists. 2012 photo from Wodu Media

Thousands of Somalis came to Columbus during the past 20 years to escape civil war. Columbus soon had the second largest Somali community in the United States. The immigrants set up businesses, enrolled in schools and made new lives for themselves.

But now some are returning home. A small group of Somalis are going back with hopes of rebuilding the devastated African nation.

[…..]

Before the war, Mogadishu was a city of two and half million people with glistening beaches on the east Coast of Africa. Twenty two years of civil war has destroyed many of the city’s buildings and left others pock-marked by bullets. The beaches are polluted and have been used as launch points for Somali pirates.

Despite the trouble, 34-year-old Ahmed Adan moved back to Mogadishu from Columbus in January. He works with the new government. During a telephone conversation from Mogadishu he says while sporadic fighting still occurs, the time of civil war is over. On most days, he says, “life goes normal.”

“There is a lot of people coming back and I have been actually actively talking to people in Columbus, in Minnesota and other parts of the United States to people that I know,” Adan says.

Adan says he returned to Somalia because he wants to help his homeland out of a crisis. He says Mogadishu is changing from something that was almost a “ghost town” to someplace that is actually livable.

[…..]

The head of the Somali Community Association on Cleveland Avenue says 54 people from Columbus have returned to Mogadishu. At the Franklin County Council on Aging, caseworker Loodar Dafur, sees a slight drop in demand recently for elderly services among Somalis.

[…..]

Basra Mohamed is a Somali language radio host for a community station in Columbus. Her weekly programs are heard not only here but in other U.S. cities with large Somali populations. She says the pull toward Somalia is felt wherever refugees have fled.

“Not just Columbus, but people are going from Minneapolis, going from Portland, Maine, going from all the other, not just one place, even in Europe, people are going back to Somalia.” We lost a lot, we lost so much and going back means gaining some normality and getting sense of normality and finding yourself, I think,” Says Mohamed.

What’s wrong with this picture?

So tell me why the US State Department has admitted 4,921 Somalis to the US in the first 8 months of this fiscal year! American tax payers are paying a “church” contractor to resettle those “refugees” in your town and we will pay for food, housing, medical care and education for the kids while earlier “refugees” return to their homeland!

It would be cheaper and less disruptive (remember the housing riot in Columbus in December?) to give the supposed new batch of “refugees” a stipend and send them to Mogadishu!

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

06/12/2013 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

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.

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

06/12/2013 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

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

06/12/2013 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

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.

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.