The number of mostly economic migrants trying to reach Europe has gone through the roof since this time last year! Most are seeking asylum (of course) and most will not be granted ‘refugee’ status.
Note that of the 1,123 rescued, 1,000 are young men.
Italy’s navy has rescued 1,123 people from inflatable boats in the space of 24 hours, as clandestine migration from North Africa reaches record levels.
The latest migrants were found in eight boats and a barge about 120 miles (222km) south-east of Lampedusa.
They included 47 women, four of them pregnant, and 50 children, all probably from sub-Saharan Africa, the navy said.
[….]
Some 2,000 migrants landed on Italian shores last month, nearly 10 times the number recorded in January 2013.
[….]
According to the government, last year saw an “incessant and massive influx of migrants” with a total of 42,925 arrivals by sea, or more than three times as many as in 2012.
[….]
Once in Italy, the migrants will be assessed to see if they have legitimate grounds for claiming asylum.
They have to satisfy the authorities that they are fleeing persecution and would face harm or even death if sent back to their country of origin.
Nearly three out of four asylum applications in EU states were rejected in 2012. [But, are those rejected sent back to Africa or left to wander Europe?—ed]
Read it all. Also, check out the BBC’s Mediterranean migration route map we posted here. Note that Turkey (Istanbul) is a main hub for the illegal migrants.
Addendum: Arab Newssays ‘go after the people smugglers’ to stop the flow.
CIS Director of Policy Studies, Jessica Vaughn: this is how we end up with families like the Tsarnaevs.
Another case where Obama used his pen? (or his minions did!)
We told you yesterday that Obama, bowing to international pressure and lobbying from refugee resettlement contractors anxious to bring in thousands of Syrians this year, has relaxed a security screening law put in place after 9/11, here.
Former State Department official and current director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies Jessica Vaughan questioned the administration’s right to unilaterally change the law.
“[T]here is a very legitimate question as to whether the administration actually has the authority to change the law in this way,” Vaughan wrote in an email. “It seems to me that they are announcing that they will be disregarding yet another law written by Congress that they don’t like and are replacing it with their own guidelines, which in this case appear to be extremely broad and vague, and which are sure to be exploited by those seeking to game our generous refugee admissions program.”
While Vaughan admitted that there are a number of immigrants seeking protection who have been denied due to unintentional contact with terrorists, she sees the exemptions as likely another opportunity for people to bypass the system.
“If the recent past is any guide, those evaluating these cases will be ordered to ignore red flags in the applications, especially if the applicant is supported by one of the many advocacy groups that have the ear of senior DHS staff,” she explained.
“The administration already approves of the admission of gang members as asylees and criminals in the DACA program and grants of prosecutorial discretion, so I don’t expect them to be troubled by the admission of terrorists and garden variety fraudsters in our refugee program. This is how we end up with families like the Tsarnaev brothers [the Boston marathon bombers], who were originally admitted for political asylum.”
Just a reminder it was the federal refugee contractors complaining to a Senate hearing in January, here, that refugees were being held up for admission because they gave a “sandwich to a terrorist” (one of the US’s favored terrorists in Syria), that got this done! One group testifying was the US Conference of Catholic Bishops which said that it wants 15,000 Syrians admitted ASAP!
Saudi Arabia deports hundreds of Ethiopian asylum seekers daily. http://ethiopianewsforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=67724
Holy cow! Did you know that! Did you know that some “humanitarian workers” believe that the drawbacks to resettlement outweigh the advantages? That is what “Relief Web” says in this stunning admission.
And, shock of shocks they criticize Saudi Arabia for ‘welcoming’ NO refugees.
Relief Web (skipping down through the section which says how it helps refugees, gets them out of danger, etc). Emphasis is mine:
And yet resettlement is a controversial issue amongst humanitarian workers, a significant proportion of whom consider that its drawbacks equal or outweigh its advantages. The resettlement process, they argue, is labor intensive, expensive, and increasingly slowed by the extensive security checks undertaken by resettlement countries. [US relaxed security checks this week!—ed]
Furthermore, because the demand for resettlement places is so much higher than the supply, bribery and corruption can easily arise in the refugee selection process. It is often suggested that those refugees chosen are not the most vulnerable, but rather the most entrepreneurial and assiduous in navigating the procedure. [Like the Chacha family!—ed] And even those people often find that the going is tough when they arrive at their destination, unfamiliar with its language and culture.
Finally, critics of resettlement point to the fact that so few countries are prepared to make this solution available to the world’s refugees. In the Syrian context, for example, countries such as the U.S. and UK are under mounting pressure to resettle refugees from politicians, advocacy groups and the media.
We, at RRW, suggest resettlement in Saudi Arabia and rich Gulf states all the time!
Yet few people have even raised the possibility of resettling Syrian refugees in nearby Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. As Amnesty International recently pointed out, members of the Gulf Cooperation Council “have not offered a single resettlement to refugees from Syria.”Indeed, far from welcoming refugees, Saudi Arabia recently expelled a massive number of foreigners, including 200,000 from Yemen and 150,000 from Ethiopia, two countries which are poorly placed to absorb such an influx.
Coincidentally? Our second most visited post this week is this one from earlier in January about Saudi Arabia deporting their fellow Muslims—Somalis. Our most-read post this week was on Wyoming considering opening its doorsto Muslims from Africa and the Middle East (among others). Wyoming thinks it will control who comes to Wyoming—no it won’t, the US State Department and its contractors decide.
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson: Let ’em in!
It was just a matter of time before the Obama Administration bowed to international pressure and lobbying from taxpayer-funded resettlement contractors and “human rights” groups to relax security requirements that have here-to-fore made it difficult for them to open our doors to Syrian ‘refugees.’
(Reuters) – President Barack Obama’s administration announced on Wednesday that it had eased some immigration rules to allow more of the millions of Syrians forced from their homes during the country’s three-year civil war to come to the United States.
Only 31 Syrian refugees – out of an estimated 2.3 million – were admitted in the fiscal year that ended in October, prompting demands for change from rights advocates and many lawmakers.
Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been taken in by neighboring countries such as Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey.
The rules changes granted exemptions on a case by case basis to the “material support” bar in U.S. immigration law, according to an announcement in the Federal Register signed by Secretary of State John Kerry and Jeh Johnson, the Secretary of Homeland Security.
That bar had made it impossible for anyone who had provided any support to armed rebel groups to come to the United States, even if the groups themselves receive aid from Washington.
[…..]
“These exemptions will help address the plight of Syrian refugees who are caught up in the worst humanitarian crisis in a generation,” Illinois Senator Richard Durbin, chairman of the U.S. Senate subcommittee on human rights, said in a statement.
It was not immediately clear how many Syrians would be affected by the rules change.
Let me guess! It will be 2,000 to start with and if the contractors have their way it will be 12,000 or so in this fiscal year!
But, heck they will have some new fresh territory in which to place them—Toledo, OH and Wyoming!
Judy Rabinovitz, the men’s ACLU attorney, is concerned for the US taxpayer! Sure she is!
This story makes my blood boil, but not in the way the New York Times hopes it will. Five Tamils (Sri Lankans, are they Tamil Tigers?) paid smugglers $55,000 each to get them to the US where they planned to apply for asylum. Instead they were caught, placed in detention where they languish supposedly because we have a screwed- up asylum system.
First question of course is where did poor struggling ‘refugee’ fishermen get $55,000 each? And, since we learned they traveled through Dubai, Moscow, Cuba and Haiti why didn’t they ask for asylum at their first stop, second stop, third stop? Legitimate asylum seekers are to ask for asylum in the first safe country in which they land! (Amazing that the reporter seems not at all interested in answers to these two important questions!)
Readers, this is not the first time we have read about the Moscow to Cuba route for illegal alien smugglers to get people to America! And, it is just assumed in every report I have read that it is aok just to work one’s way across the world with the US as the target destination. Some of them go from Cuba to Mexico and then across our land border.
Here is some of the story, but read all of it! From the New York Times via NDTV (hat tip: ‘pungentpeppers’):
New York: Five Sri Lankan men left hometowns reeling from the remnants of a ruthless civil war and embarked on a months-long human-smuggling journey that spanned seven countries.
They each paid $55,000 for a ride by air and sea to a fresh chance in the Americas.They were captured within hours of their arrival in South Florida and served as witnesses for the FBI in the investigation of their smugglers, cooperation that the men were led to believe would work in their favour as their cases made their way through immigration courts.
Three years later, they are still waiting for their cases to be resolved.
Captured in Florida:
The fisherman said that in Sri Lanka he was being extorted for money, received telephone death threats and was forced to quit his job with an opposition party. After contacting a wealthy smuggler known as Mohan, he left his wife and toddler and fled on a five-leg flight: Sri Lanka to Dubai to Moscow to Cuba to Haiti.
In Haiti, he met Mohan, and the other Tamil immigrants who would become his companions in a years-long court battle. They left Haiti for the Bahamas, then embarked for Florida on Dec. 5, 2010.
They were brought to a safe house, another Sri Lankan in the group, whose first initial is R., said in an interview at the Krome Service Processing Center, an immigration jail in Miami at the edge of the Everglades. He said they were given a warm meal, a hot bath, and an extortion demand for an additional $6,000 from each of them.
A few hours later, the FBI woke the men from their slumber.
Boo hoo! They got the wrong immigration judge:
The men applied for political asylum, each with a personal story of the persecution they suffered as Tamils. [likely a made-up story prepared before leaving home—ed]
Had their cases been heard one county south, said Ferreyra, the former federal prosecutor, their asylum claims would more likely have been accepted.
Are US immigration lawyers at the ACLU keeping them here for their own selfish reasons—as poster boys for their media/political goals?
“This just all shows how irrational and unjust the correctional immigration system is,” said Judy Rabinovitz, a lawyer for the men and the deputy director of the ACLU’s immigrant rights project. “How much have U.S. taxpayers paid to keep these people locked up?”
The men are torn between their lawyers’ insistence on fighting for asylum and their desire to go home, even if to a dangerous and uncertain future.
I agree with Rabinovitz on one thing—don’t keep them locked up at taxpayer expense! Deport them sooner than later!
In the past we have written a good bit about Sri Lankans breaking into Canada, check out some of those posts here.
