It’s a good thing the USS San Antonio doesn’t carry immigration lawyers on board or asylum requests might have been filed!
Update October 18th: Not Somalis at all! Instead a mishmash of African economic migrants who turned violent when put in detention in Malta—read all about it here!
VALLETTA, Malta (AP) — The American warship where an al-Qaida suspect was interrogated after being snatched from Libya by U.S. special forces has come to the rescue of 120 Somali migrants.
A statement Thursday from the Maltese army says it asked the USS San Antonio to intervene Wednesday because it was close to the migrants’ dinghy.The Somalis were having trouble in rough seas and high winds some 75 miles (120 kilometers) south of Malta and were taken to the Mediterranean island.
Libyan terror suspect Abu Anas al-Libi, whose real name is Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, was captured during a military raid in Libya on Oct. 5 and questioned for a week aboard the San Antonio before being transferred to the U.S. He is due to stand trial on terror charges in New York City.
The ship is very similar to the one that came to the rescue in the newly released Somali pirate movie, “Captain Phillips,” which I had not particularly wanted to see after I read reports that some of the crew of the Maersk Alabama thought the film was inaccurate. After seeing it, I do recommend the movie for a whole host of reasons I won’t go into here. But, if you read Greenfield’s ‘Hyena Cure’yesterday (and see the movie) you may see that Greenfield is on to something.
Regular readers know that boats are launching daily carrying illegal migrants from Africa hoping to reach the promised land—Europe. Some make it, some don’t.
Why? I don’t know, some fuzzy notion that Belgium and the West messed up West/Central Africa and now we are obligated to take in their people displaced by warring factions.
Terry K. Mulumba decided to leave behind his haunting past.
“Thinking about it would be wrong and would take me down,” he said.
Mulumba, a 22-year-old studying for the math and science portions of the GED test, is one of the first refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to have been resettled in Lancaster County.
Lutheran Refugee Services and Church World Service each expect to resettle 50 more Congolese here in the coming year.To put that into perspective, Lutheran Refugee Services settles an average of 200 refugees of varying nationalities in Lancaster County each year.
Like Mulumba, who came here in 2012, many Congolese are escaping the eastern and southeastern regions of the country because of political and ethnic tensions that were fostered through years of Belgian colonial rule and a Western-backed dictatorship.
Just for your information, Lancaster (the city) at the heart of Amish country, has had refugee overload for some time and so the resettlement agencies are now spreading refugees to surrounding small towns in the county, like this one (Akron, PA) in this story.
For new readers, Lutheran Refugee Services (subcontractor of LIRS) and Church World Service are two of nine US State Department contractorsresettling refugees with your tax dollars in the US. Also, for new readers one of our top (most-clicked on) items here at RRW is our fact sheet, here.
France has agreed to take in 500 Syrian refugees at the request of the United Nations following talks in Paris between French President François Hollande and UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres, the UN agency said Wednesday.
Even the Socialist Hollande knows what Muslim immigrants have done to France! Maybe they will insist on Christians only.
With no end to the conflict in sight, the UN agency has urged EU nations to offer asylum to some 10,000 Syrians this year and another 30,000 in 2014.
[…..]
Some 50,000 Syrians have so far applied for asylum in the EU, mostly in Sweden and Germany.
Speaking of Sweden, they are hastening their country’s decline with a record number of asylum seekers—mostly Syrians and Eritreans—tweeted by Fjordman, here.
Esther Olavarria: Shhhh! Let’s keep it under the radar!
As so-called “Immigration reform” surely now returns to the front burner in Congress, Don Barnett, writing at theCenter for Immigration Studies, alerts us to yet another reason the Senate-passed S.744 will be a nightmare for America. Barnett says being “stateless” in the US could be reason enough to allow the illegal entrant to stay and be granted asylum.
Longtime readers here know that we have covered the advancement of the media meme of “statelessness” extensively in our coverage of the Burmese Rohingya (whole archive here) and to a lesser degree the attachment of that label to Palestinians. The label could be applied to Somalis as well.
Here is Barnett (emphasis mine):
White House Director of Immigration Reform Esther Olavarria reportedly told an audience at the September 19 Congressional Black Caucus annual conference that S.744 (the Schumer-Rubio amnesty bill) has a number of “important provisions that have stayed under the radar, and we’d actually like to keep them under the radar … because we want to be able to maintain them as we go through the legislative process.”
The elite media, indeed the entire commentariat, is seemingly anxious to keep the whole bill “under the radar”.
Chalk up one more provision of the bill not quite ready for prime time news hour discussion: Section 3405 of S.744 creates a new category of individual eligible for conditional and then permanent residency as a result of being identified as a “stateless person present in the United States”. There is no need for the individual to establish that he or she fears persecution; it is sufficient to merely declare oneself “stateless”.
Asylum has always been available to stateless individuals who manage to get to the U.S. as long as they establish a “well-founded fear” of persecution on the grounds of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a “particular social group”.
[…..]
The U.N. estimates there are some 12 million stateless persons in the world today. This group includes former Soviet and Yugoslav citizens still in limbo in successor states as well as certain Palestinians, Somalis, Syrians, Royhinga from Burma, and others.
Here is some information from wikipedia on Olavarria. The page is outdated in that it doesn’t include her role in the Obama White House:
Ms. Olavarria has spent years representing immigrants and working on the issue of immigration. Between 1986 and 1998 she was a staff attorney for the Haitian Refugee Center, co-founder and managing attorney of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, and on staff with Legal Services of Greater Miami as directing attorney with the American Immigration Lawyer Pro Bono Project. From 1998-2007 she was counsel to Sen. Edward Kennedy and the United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security, and Refugees and from 2007-8 Senior Advisor for Government and External Relations to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. From August 2008 until her appointment to the Department of Homeland Security in February 2009 she was Senior Fellow and Director of Immigration Policy at the Center for American Progress.
Guess that tells you all you need to know! For readers visiting here for the first time, Kennedy was the chief architect of the Refugee Act of 1980 that was responsible for our present-day refugee program. And, of course the Center for American Progress is a George Soros creation.
