Month: November 2013

Tampa: Could you make 6 acres productive if you had an $85,000 gift?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment
Diversity wheelbarrows! Do you think the Tampa refugees will get these through their federal grant?

Maybe, maybe not!  I know a little about farming and I’m not sure even with an $85,000 grant from the US government, refugees in Tampa will be able to support and maintain much food production on 6 acres of land.

This is yet another feel-good story about refugees with no work “finding” satisfaction and “community” by growing foods they are familiar with back home inspired by none other than Michelle Obama’s pronouncement on refugee gardens—“It’s a model for the nation, for the world.” 

Go here for the Refugee Agricultural Partnership Program and see if your city is getting gardening grants. The Tampa project is first on the list.

From the Tampa Bay Times:

Pastors Joseph Germain and Berhanu Bekele started the garden 3 1/2 years ago. Germain led a congregation filled with refugees and noticed that many were leaving the state because they couldn’t find a livelihood.

He wanted to find a way to help them settle and find community, something often missing in resettled immigrant populations.

A little helpful background for new readers on what refugees in Tampa receive from the feds:

About 9,000 refugees live in Tampa, said Janet Blair, Community Liaison for the SunCoast Region Refugee Services Program offered through the Department of Children and Families. They come from countries including Burma, Iraq, Somalia and Sudan.

Refugees must prove to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that they are unable or unwilling to return to their home country because of fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in social groups. They come to Tampa with legal status and a small set of benefits — cash assistance, Medicaid and food assistance for eight months — provided by DCF.

The goal is to enable refugees to find employment within the first eight months, Blair said. After a year, they become eligible to apply for citizenship.

At first there was admirable private Christian charity!

Nearly four years ago, Pastor Germain attended a meeting of people who work with refugees. He mentioned what he had seen in his congregation. Bekele, pastor of St. Mary’s Ethiopian Orthodox Church in Tampa, said he had 6 acres of land.

Most of the people from his congregation came from agricultural backgrounds, Germain said. It was a perfect marriage of resources. The refugees could tend a garden and plant any crops they chose, including plants from their native lands if the soil was right for it. Refugees could do what they wished with the crops, even selling them on the side if they had extra.

Bekele and Germain received $10,000 from the Allegany Franciscan Ministries, enough to buy plants, tools, chickens, sheep and goats. But foxes got to the chickens, and the grant ran out. The pastors had been essentially sustaining the garden on their own.

Who needs private charity when here come the feds!

Now the group has received almost $85,000 from the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services, which has stepped up funding of community gardens across the country.

If any of you live in the Tampa area, or any other community garden getting federal grants (here), keep an eye on this project and let us know how it’s going.  BTW, I wonder if this counts when immigrant advocates claim refugees are more entrepreneurial than Americans? (The latest hot open-borders talking point!)

The photo is from a post back in May where we learned that similar refugee gardens had gone bust in Ft. Wayne, Indiana.  No one wanted to work!

San Diego Somalis want new trial, judge says NO!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We’ve told you about this case before, it has gone on since at least 2010.  Four Somali refugee men were found guilty of supporting the terror group al-Shabab (sometimes al-Shabaab) in Somalia, but now they claim their constitutional rights were trampled by the NSA.

Masjid Al-Ansar where one of the guilty men led prayers for years. Photo: Amita Sharma (KPBS)

From KPBS Radio News:

A San Diego federal judge Thursday rejected a new trial bid by four Somali immigrants convicted of terrorism-related charges earlier this year.

Judge Jeffrey Miller disputed the men’s claims that the controversial National Security Agency surveillance dragnet violated their rights.

The case against the men was initiated after the NSA found a San Diego phone number in 2007 linked to the terrorist group al-Shabab. The number was traced to San Diego cab driver Basaaly Moalin. A jury found Moalin and three other local men guilty in February of sending money to al-Shabab. The men contended that the NSA phone records program trampled on their constitutional rights against illegal searches.

[….]

Three of the four men are scheduled to be sentenced Monday.

So now we get to take care of them in prison.  How about deportation?

Visit KPBS for links to the background.

Study: Refugees in Tennessee contribute more than they consume (maybe)

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Except for the “maybe,” that is the title of the story in The Tennessean yesterday, but one only needs to read down a few paragraphs to learn that is not the conclusion that should have been drawn from the news—it is The Tennessean editor’s wishful thinking.

Researchers were not able to “tease out” the information sought by lawmakers—do refugees use welfare to a greater extent then the American-born population?  And, no one keeps track of the taxes they pay either.

Mohamed-Shukri Hassan: We’re not looking for welfare, we want the jobs!

The Tennessean (emphasis mine):

A new study of foreign-born refugees who live in Tennessee has found they contributed almost twice as much in tax revenues as they consumed in state-funded services in the past two decades.

But limitations of the study — an unprecedented research effort by the state — left the state lawmakers who asked for it with questions on Tuesday.

A committee of House and Senate lawmakers requested the study last summer to try to understand the impact of refugee services on the state budget. They were especially interested in whether there has been a shift in how those costs are covered by state and federal funds.  [Here is our earlier report, from August, about the initiative by TN lawmakers—ed]

[….]

Making “conservative estimates,” researchers said that since 1990, the state has spent $753 million on services for refugees — including for schooling and health care — and received almost twice as much, $1.3 billion, in tax revenues from them.

But, but, but!

Researchers couched their analysis with caveats about the data collected, prompting lawmaker questions on Tuesday.

The researchers said both in the study and in answers to questions that they struggled to get some federal data and found most state agencies don’t track whether the people they serve are refugees.

There was no mechanism for tracking which services refugees used, said Krista Lee, senior fiscal analyst, requiring researchers to make certain assumptions. For example, they had to assume that refugees enroll in public schools, government assistance programs and TennCare, the state’s Medicaid program, with the same frequency as the general population.

“From the information we could find, there wasn’t anything substantial stating they wouldn’t be in a similar standing as current citizens,” Lee said.

That assumption left some lawmakers skeptical about the study’s findings. Rep. John Ragan, R-Oak Ridge, said a major impetus for the study was to tease out whether refugees are more likely to rely on government assistance.

Somali:  We aren’t looking for welfare, we want the jobs!

“We’re not here for the government programs or any welfare; we’re here for the jobs,” said Mohamed-Shukri Hassan, 27, a Somali naturalized in 2009.

What!  Are there no Tennesseans looking for work?

Read it all!

For ambitious readers, we have an entire category on Nashville here.

Update!  Reader tomasrose gives us more information on the study:

The way this study was structured, any group that moves to Tennessee – be it, for sake of illustration, the entire graduating class from the London school of economics or the entire population of Bangladesh – will make the same incredibly high per capita net positive impact on Tennessee’s finances. The study assumes that all new arrivals will pay the same taxes and use the same amount of social services as the average Tennessean. According to this study, Tennessee would become a very wealthy state if it took all the refugees that come to America. That is more than absurd of course.

Next big health issue for refugees—drug-resistant Malaria

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment
Refugees being treated on the Thai border. Photo: Mae Tao Clinic

Burma and the Mekong River area of Southeast Asia is the breeding ground.

From The Irrawaddy (emphasis mine):

WASHINGTON — US experts are raising the alarm over the spread of drug-resistant malaria in Burma and several Southeast Asian countries, endangering major global gains in fighting the mosquito-borne disease that kills more than 600,000 people annually.

While the communicable disease wreaks its heaviest toll in Africa, it’s in nations along the Mekong River where the most serious threat to treating it has emerged.

[….]

The report warns that could be a health catastrophe in the making, as no alternative anti-malarial drug is on the horizon. The UN World Health Organization (WHO) is warning that what seems to be a localized threat could easily get out of control and have serious implications for global health.

“Absent elimination of the malaria parasite in the Mekong, it is only a matter of time before artemisinin resistance becomes the global norm, reversing the recent gains,” writes Dr. Christopher Daniel, former commander of the US Naval Medical Research Center, in the report for a conference at the Washington think tank Tuesday.

[….]

Nowhere are the challenges in countering the threat to drug-resistance greater than in Burma. Some 70 percent of its 55 million people live in malaria-endemic areas, and as a nation, it accounts for about three-quarters of malaria infections and deaths in the Mekong region, the report says.

[….]

It’s an issue of regional concern as Burma has large transient populations in its border regions, including ethnic minorities displaced by fighting and migrant workers who cross borders.

There is more, read it all.

The US resettled 16,299 Burmese refugees to your towns and cities in fiscal year 2013 alone (second only to the number of Iraqis which topped 19,000), click here.  Were they all tested?

Update:  Superbugs could erase a century of medical advances, here.

Lampedusa: Women raped and tortured on refugee boat

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment
Coffins of some of the 300 plus who died attempting to get to Italy.

A Somali ringleader has been arrested.

The story is a few days old, but every time I see a story like this one I am reminded of now UN Ambassador Samantha Power who played a huge role with Hillary and Susan Rice in pushing the US into our ‘adventures’ in Libya supposedly under the belief that it was ‘our responsibility to protect’ the people of Libya from Gaddafi who was able at times to keep a lid on the human traffickers attempting to move through Libya. Now the Libyan coast is lawless.

From the Standart:

Italian police have arrested a Somali man accused of raping and torturing asylum seekers fleeing Libya on a boat which sank off the island of Lampedusa last month killing more than 365 migrants.

Mouhamud Elmi Muhidin, 34, faces charges of kidnapping, sexual assault, people trafficking and criminal association with the goal of aiding illegal immigration after he was identified by survivors.

Some 130 migrants from Eritrea told police they were held for ransom at a detention centre in the Libyan desert by people traffickers from Somalia, Libya and Sudan.

The migrants were forced to pay up to USD 3,500 for their freedom and their onward journey to the Libyan coast and a boat that due to take them to Italy.

Italian authorities have vowed to crack down on the people trafficking rings that have been behind the influx of more than 35,000 asylum seekers so far this year to the country’s coasts.

[….]

According to migrants’ testimony, the 20 women in the group were repeatedly raped and offered to Libyan visitors “as if they were a cup of tea”.

Photo is from this story in which the Eritrean government blames the US for the deaths.