Day: April 23, 2014

Obama Administration immigration policy responsible for little girl’s death

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

That, of course, is not the message the New York Times was trying to send (or maybe it was! I should give them come credit), but that is exactly why 12-year old Noemi Álvarez Quillay, an Ecuadoran “unaccompanied minor,” is dead.

Here is how the sad story from Saturday begins, thanks to ‘pungentpeppers’ for passing it along:

12-year-old Noemi hanged herself in a Mexican shelter for minors. She wanted to stay with her grandparents in Ecuador.

Noemi Álvarez Quillay took the first steps of the 6,500-mile journey to New York City from the southern highlands of Ecuador on Tuesday, Feb. 4, after darkness fell.

A bashful, studious girl, Noemi walked 10 minutes across dirt roads that cut through corn and potato fields, reaching the highway to Quito. She carried a small suitcase. Her grandfather Cipriano Quillay flagged down a bus and watched her board. She was 12.

From that moment, and through the remaining five weeks of her life, Noemi was in the company of strangers, including coyotes — human smugglers, hired by her parents in the Bronx to bring her to them. Her parents had come to the United States illegally and settled in New York when Noemi was a toddler.

Noemi was part of a human flood tide that has swelled since 2011: The United States resettlement agency expects to care for nine times as many unaccompanied migrant children in 2014 as it did three years ago. [Expected to be 60,000 this year!—ed]

Readers, we have written a lot lately about the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s program for ‘unaccompanied minors’ which serves as an enticement for families to attempt to send their children across our borders alone, or with the help of smugglers.  The US Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services are both beneficiaries of government grants to help take care of the ‘kids’ once they get across the border.

Nomei’s parents left her with her grandparents when she was 3-years-old and the parents illegally went to the US as economic migrants, not refugees.  They recently got money together to hire a smuggler and insisted she join them in New York.  Read the article, she didn’t want to go!

A counselor interviewed by the NYT said this:

“Now we are seeing that the migrants are small children or teenagers whose parents are sending for them, running the risk of putting them in the hands of the coyotes to whom they pay 15, 20, 25 thousand dollars,” said Ms. Choglio, the guidance counselor.

Here, in my view, is the lesson from the whole sad story.  Nomei was not abused or subjected to violence, she was happy with her grandparents (they had raised her!):

The minors coming from Central America and Mexico are “propelled by violence, insecurity and abuse,” the United Nations high commissioner for refugees said in a report issued the day after Noemi’s death. The prospect of immigration reform in the United States is also enticing, Mr. Lopez said, because of the belief that anyone already in the country illegally will be allowed to stay.

That is why Nomei is dead.

Lebanese blogger says NGO’s benefit from Syrian refugee crisis, calls them NGO-imperialists

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Describing herself as a Lebanese academic and resistance fighter, Amal Saad, writing at ‘ASG’s counter-hegemony unit,‘ has a few choice words for the “humanitarian aid and development community” (those with what she calls a “white savior complex”).

Amal Saad: Every refugee represents a career opportunity.

Amal Saad (emphasis is mine):

Geostrategic and political considerations aside, crude economic motives drive the imperialist campaign to prolong the war on Syria. In parallel with the mega-profits reaped by the corporate media and its army of information warlords, and the “War on Terror” military industry which thrives on the expansion of the al-Qaeda franchise, is another kind of war profiteering.

In the true spirit of capitalism, the humanitarian aid and development— a.k.a. “White Saviour Complex”— community has turned crisis into opportunity.

State and corporate funded NGOs have found in Syria’s 2.5 refugees and 6.5 million internally displaced, a veritable goldmine of collective misfortune. Every refugee represents a career opportunity for procuring project funds and extracting exorbitant fees for consultancies, training, workshops etc. And despite the colossal proportions of the refugee crisis, most aid work is driven by donors’ agendas and bureaucratic imperatives, rather than the immediate needs of the displaced and deprived.

Just as Big Business tries to whitewash its public health and environmental crimes with “Corporate Social Responsibility” schemes, western governments think they can arm and support the rebels, while sugarcoating the innumerable crimes they have committed against the Syrian people with their humanitarian interventions.

NGO-imperialism is just another way the Empire “kills the victim and walks in his funeral procession”, as goes the Arabic saying. Only in this case, he makes a profit out of the funeral as well.

I don’t agree at all with Saad’s political point of view, but I think she makes some good points here worth pondering.

However, I don’t see how Capitalism can be blamed when governments are funding the NGO’s, sounds more like Socialism to me, but that aside, there is no question that non-profits are using the Syrian “refugee crisis” to their financial advantage.  Adding insult to injury, they also then get to put on their “savior” hats and the media eats it up.

Austria to take 1,000 Syrians

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

That number seems rather high to me and I sure hope they aren’t passing through Austria to the US as some Muslim refugees have done this past year.    See our earlier post on Austria, here.

A reader explained to me privately at that time that we were using Austria as a conduit for “refugees” on the way to America.

‘Asylum seekers’ protesting in Vienna in 2012. They were demanding better living conditions.

From novinite.com:   But, check this out, the Austrians actually have the courage to say they are focusing their attention on persecuted Christians!

Austria will receive an extra 1000 Syrian refugees in addition to the quota of 500 announced in August 2013, according to Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner.

In a Sunday interview for Austrian newspaper Kurier, she explained that the country would receive an additional 1000 refugees apart from the initially announced quota of 500, adding that priority treatment would be granted to women, children and persecuted Christians. She said that the number of asylum applicants had not been taken into account in the measure.

Austria has been swamped by Muslim asylum seekers, see our earlier posts on a country that repelled the invaders at the Gates of Vienna in 1683.