First Congolese settle in Lancaster Co. PA

On-going conflicts in DR Congo is the US’s problem now—excuse for tens of thousands of “refugees” to be resettled in America.

This is your typical ‘formulaic’ story about a new refugee arriving in small town America.  I’m posting it here just to remind you that we are expected to take 50,000 refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo over the next few years.

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.

From Lancaster Online (emphasis is mine):

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 contractors resettling 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.

Click here for previous posts on Lancaster.

France caves to pressure, agrees to take 500 Syrians

French President to Guterres: O.K. O.K. we’ll take 500!

No word on whether some of that number will be the Calais occupiers.

From France 24:

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.

Photo is here.

S. 744 provision: “Statelessness” would be one more reason to enter US illegally; receive asylum

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 the Center 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.

Read it all.

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.

Photo is from the Wilson Center, here.

New Hampshire: Arrest made in 2011 case of anti-refugee graffiti

Arrested: Raymond Stevens

Update October 20th:  Stevens charged with hate crime, here.

Here is the story yesterday at the Concord Monitor.  There may be more updates today, but I haven’t seen them yet.  Here is what we said about this case back in 2011.

A Pembroke tattoo artist was arrested this morning for his alleged role in a 2011 graffiti incident in which three refugee homes in South Concord were defaced with racist, xenophobic messages, an event that sparked widespread outrage.

Raymond “Raynard” Stevens, 42, was apprehended around 9 a.m. at his home in Pembroke, Concord Police Chief John Duval said. Stevens has been charged with one Class B felony for criminal mischief, an offense that can bring a prison sentence of between one and seven years but could bring more in this case because of a state hate crime statute.

[…..]

The messages Stevens stands accused of composing were discovered on Sept. 18, 2011. Etched in black marker across the clapboard facades of the Perley and Downing street homes, they declared that the city had been sullied by the refugees’ arrivals from Rwanda, Somalia and the Congo.

According to the Monitor, Stevens was a regular on facebook describing himself as an animal-lover, an environmentalist and a proud Aryan man.  Here is an excerpt of one of his facebook posts:

Stevens does not appear to have made any postings on or near the date of the vandalism, or if he did they have since been removed. In a Facebook post on Feb. 2, 2012, though, he shared some of his views on race: “I hate the argument that we cant help what race we were born into, and therefor you should not be proud of your race (unless your a minority). you are allowed to be proud of your race when you can look at your self and say . i am born in to a fine line of men and women that did stupendously miraculous things with the world around them.”

“if your culture produced many advances before you, it will be likely passed down into you,” he continued later in the post. “when your born into a third world nation, you wouldn’t understand that. being that you look at the people of your kind that came before you and see they built nearly nothing in the same time span of other more successful races.”

Authorities obviously put a lot of energy into capturing this writer with dangerous ideas.  He should have just stuck to writing on his facebook page and not on peoples’ homes.

…..the arrest the result of a “multi-agency effort with vital assistance provided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the United States Attorney’s Office, the Merrimack County Attorney’s Office, the Nashua Police Department, and the Pembroke Police Department.”

Malta: Questions swirl about whether Libyan milita-men shot at refugee-loaded boat causing it to sink

We mentioned the second Mediterranean boat-sinking in just over a week, here.  Now there are allegations that the boat was fired-on by Libyans.

Survivors (looks like mostly young men) arrive in Valletta on Maltese patrol boat.
Photo: (AFP/Matthew Mirabelli)

The UN is asking for an explanation and at least Malta’s Prime Minister is trying to get some negotiations underway with Libyan Prime Minister,  Ali Zidan.

But, this is what I don’t get, why doesn’t the world community, with the UN leading the way, demand that the Libyan government stop these boat launchings on their side of the Mediterranean in the first place?

The UN could then use its state-of-the-art refugee camp in Jordan, Al Azraq, by safely transporting these would-be mariners to it.

From the Minneapolis Star Tribune (emphasis mine):

VALLETTA, Malta — Syrian survivors of the latest shipwreck involving migrants in the Mediterranean Sea claim Libya’s coast guard fired on their boat after reaching it a couple of hours out of port, the U.N. refugee agency said Monday.

The survivors of last Friday’s shipwreck have told UNHCR that the Libyans opened fire after ordering the boat to stop, damaging the hull and wounding four people, the U.N. agency’s spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said from Geneva.

“The boat took on water, and people started coming up from below, which could have contributed to the capsizing, according to witness testimony,” Fleming said. She added that the four wounded were treated by doctors among the refugees on board.

UNHCR has asked Libya for an explanation based on the survivor accounts and the fact that people with bullet wounds have been among the more than 200 people rescued and taken to Malta and Italy.

The bodies of 34 people have been recovered, but survivors have told the U.N. that 400 to 500 people were on board, meaning more than 200 could still be missing.

Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zidan denied the allegations in a press conference Sunday during a visit by Malta Prime Minister Joseph Muscat to discuss the wave of refugees arriving by boat from Libya in Malta and Italy. He pledged an investigation.

UNHCR has expressed concern that Syrians escaping civil war are facing a perilous sea journey to reach safety in Europe.

In a related story, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah expressed his sorrow at the large number of Palestinians who were also on the doomed ship.