When your “welcoming” community is preparing to open its arms to refugees for the first time, remember it is required by federal law that your local government is responsible for the cost of educating the kids (don’t forget the ESL budget), and for providing interpreters for medical services (refugees come with HIV/AIDS and TB, need costly meds) and for any court proceedings (how much did that recent refugee murder trial cost Utah or the Colorado rape trial cost?).
One huge problem that happened near where I live is that fire and rescue had an emergency involving a refugee they were not aware of, and due to a language barrier an unnecessarily expensive and frightening ‘rescue’ occurred because they thought the woman had Ebola (a disease first discovered in the Congo)!
Here is some useful data for your consideration. Local governments! Better get your translators lined up!
Top ten languages spoken by recent refugees! (from WRAPSnet) Note Arabic is number one!
Ray Abou-Arab charged with murder in Toledo last week.
Update February 8th: Prosecutors seek the death penalty for Abou-Arab, here, (hat tip: Diane).
Update: Bond set at $5 million for Abou-Arab, here. Judge must be afraid he will skip the country.
Let me start by telling you about the tragic tale involving the alleged murder of two fire fighters in Toledo a week ago.
Ray Abou-Arab, an immigrant ‘businessman,’ has been arrested and charged with intentionally starting a fire which took the lives of two young firefighters. The gist of the story is here at The Blade (hat tip: ‘pungentpeppers’)
Less than a week after two Toledo firefighters died battling a North Toledo apartment fire, the property’s owner was charged with and arrested on two counts each of aggravated murder and aggravated arson.
Ray Abou-Arab, 61, of 1311 Sierra Dr., Oregon was held in the Lucas County jail Friday night pending arraignment Monday morning in Toledo Municipal Court.
Fire Pvts. Stephen Machcinski and James Dickman were pronounced dead Sunday afternoon at Mercy St. Vincent Medical Center after being rescued from inside the two-story apartment building at 528 Magnolia St., where they had become trapped.
Abou-Arab has been around Toledo for awhile and some say he has been involved with questionable arson fires involving property he owned in the past.
When you watch the lengthy TV news account, here, you will see shots of Abou-Arab just hanging around and not looking too troubled. Toward the end there is some mention of an illegal substance being sold from a convenience store in the same building he is accused of igniting that resulted in the deaths of the firefighters.
Screen shot from the announcement that Toledo will take Iraqi refugees. Arabic writing on the flag: Allahu Akbar!
So, Toledo (Lucus County) is having such success with its immigrant entrepreneurs that they announced in December that they will “welcome” 30 Iraqis through the US State Department’s refugee program!
Beginning around the first of the year, Toledo will become an immigrant resettlement city. It’s a story we first told you about back in July but now the pieces are in place to make the program a success.
The United States government is looking for communities that can welcome about 30-Iraqi families. Toledo has a long history of welcoming immigrants [like Ray Abou-Arab?–ed] and now it has a social structure that can help.
These communities like Toledo think they are going to make money off refugee resettlement! The reason that the State Department has ‘chosen’ Toledo is that other cities are full-up with economy-robbing refugees. Don’t you think that if refugees brought economic benefits that the cities that were already (supposedly) ‘booming’ as a result would be begging for more?
“New folks, new friends, new families that added value to our community.”
Lucas County Commissioner. Pete Gerken (D) says other immigrants want to build a future here, as well.
The State Department is looking for communities to welcome new refugees from Iraq, in 2014 and Gerken says they should come to Toledo.
He says, “What we found is they come here from other places, bring talent with them, bring family values with them, bring a work ethic with them.”
And, in some cases, they bring a life savings with them.
The Toledo Lucas County Land Bank is now part of this refugee resettlement program and will link immigrants with properties to help them build a life.
[…..]
….buy abandoned commercial sites, build a business, create jobs and contribute to the community. [Just like Ray Abou-Arab did?—-ed]
What studies??? It’s amazing—they just say this sort of thing and the locals lap it up!
Anneliese Grytafey (Toledo Community Foundation) says studies indicate a financial gain. “For every dollar that was invested to bring refugees into the community they saw a $10 dollar gain to their local economy,” Grytafey told 13abc.
The local economy gains for awhile as federal dollars flow in, but as the refugees don’t find work (Iraqis are not finding employment elsewhere, why would Toledo be any different?) and rely more and more on welfare, the local economy takes the hit.
[Flag of Iraq (1991-2004) after Saddam Hussein decreed to include “Allahu Akbar” between the stars in his own handwriting, in an attempt to garner support from the Islamic world.]About the flag! Whoever made up the graphic in the ABC news clip took Saddam Hussein’s ‘God is Great’ (Allahu Akbar) off the old Iraqi flag and superimposed it on to the American flag’s stripes, here.
Maybe this is code from the US State Department—only Muslims will be resettled in Toledo!
Or the Middle East, or Southeast Asia, or Detroit etc. except those who live there.
Daniel Greenfield at his blog Sultan Knish wades into a thorny minefield to question western aid to Africa (and elsewhere) and how it might make a few do-gooders feel good about themselves, but in fact is just a bottomless money-pit where your money ends up feeding ‘government’ corruption and providing fat salaries for NGO employees in a never-ending cycle.
Remember in 2008when Irish writer Kevin Myers penned a column on the topic, and you-know-what hit the fan and his job was threatened at the Irish Independent for daring to say this:
The wide-eyed boy-child we saved, 20 years or so ago, is now a priapic, Kalashnikov-bearing hearty, siring children whenever the whim takes him.
And, once you’ve read it, a never-to-be-forgotten dark novel about the African aid racket is Paul Theroux’s ‘The Lower River’, based on the author’s own experience with aid agencies in Africa.
Greenfield continues the theme today at Sultan Knish(hat tip: Ed). Emphasis is mine:
Every lofty aid goal begins with a big number and bleeds down to the prosaic reality that the goal will never be met, but that everyone involved will be told to feel good about themselves for trying. The bigger the goal, the bigger the administrative overhead, the corruption and the inefficiency. Instead of scaling up results by scaling up funds, more money and more people lead to fewer individual results.
The aid economy of the underprivileged is the smaller half of the overall aid economy. The biggest piece of the aid economy is in the hands of the aid organizations that profit from an unsolvable problem that, all their fundraising brochures to the contrary, they have no interest in solving because it would remove their reason for existing.Africa’s misery is their wealth. The worse Africa becomes, the more incentive the easily empathetic and the guilty of the West will have to pour money into their latest cause to buy everyone in Africa a goat, a laptop or a sandwich.
It’s the old Soviet problem. The producers have no interest in producing anything. The aid recipients, distributors and providers have achieved a dysfunctional equilibrium. The system is broken, but everyone has learned their roles within the broken system. If the system changes, they will all have to get jobs. It was that inertia which kept the USSR going long after its leaders stopped caring about the ravings of Marx, Lenin and Stalin. It took the energy of a younger generation that had yet to become invested in the system to topple it and it is the older generation that is most likely to march with portraits of Communist leaders and kiss them for the cameras.
You can buy a homeless man a sandwich, but you can’t buy them all sandwiches because once you do that, you are no longer engaging in a personal interaction, but building an organization and the organization perpetuates itself. You don’t need a homeless man to exist so that you can buy him a sandwich, but once an agency exists that is tasked with buying homeless men sandwiches, it needs the homeless men to exist as ‘clients’ so that it can buy them sandwiches and buy itself steak dinners. [Sound familiar! This is what perpetuates the entire refugee contractor industry!—ed]
In aid economies, the scale of the problem grows slightly faster than the amount of aid and activists hold out the tempting promise that by increasing spending to stay ahead of the problem, it can be solved completely. All it would take is for everyone to become engaged and care. That isn’t a plan, it’s a pat on the back for the people who do care and an incentive to show their moral superiority by continuing to throw good money after bad into the aid economy.
Update: Ft. Wayne, IN Burmese worried they won’t be able to get their extended family in, here.
The US State Department is moving on to other ethnic groups, like the Congolese, or perhaps the Syrians, having brought 73,000 Burmese to the US since 2005. We hope that the closing of the program from Myanmar/Burma means that the Burmese Rohingya Muslims need not apply!
State Department spokesman, Jen Psaki: Reaching “natural conclusion,” Burmese need to get applications in fast!
Washington — The United States is winding down a program which has helped to resettle 73,000 refugees from Myanmar over almost a decade, a US official confirmed Thursday.
After being introduced in 2005 primarily to help Karen and Hmong minorities that have been displaced in Myanmar, also known as Burma, “we’re reaching the natural conclusion” of the program, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said.
“With our robust resettlement program, the number of eligible Burmese refugees has been reduced significantly, and not all Burmese who are eligible for resettlement consideration are interested in permanent resettlement,” she said.
Refugees from Myanmar who are still interested in resettling in the US should get their applications in quick, Psaki added.
“If those who are eligible are interested, they should apply now, and we will see the process through for all those who apply.”
A politically incorrect observation!
I often wonder if theresettlement contractorsjust get sick of certain ethnic groups and urge the State Department to bring them a new variety of refugee to add to their diverse collection. It is horrible to suggest, but sometimes I think they are like animal hoarders who have a mental disorder and want only to add to their collection while it is beyond their means to do so—animal hoarders want to possess the animals even if they cannot afford to care for them in a humane fashion.
Christian Aid Mission, a Protestant organization based in Virginia, is reporting that thousands of Syrian refugees are converting to Christianity in Turkey, Lebanon, and Iraq.
“Literally thousands of Syrians from traditional Muslim backgrounds are turning to Jesus Christ,” the organization stated. “It’s not an inflating of the numbers, nor is it an optimistic estimate.”
And, here is the full story at Christian Aid Mission, let’s hope their conversion is legitimate. Christian groups like this one—doing the hard work around the world rather than advocating for the third world to come to America—are to be encouraged in my view.
For new readers, those advocating (lobbying!) to bring the third world here are the federal refugee contractorsrepresenting some mainstream churches in America.
Here is the report I saw first at