Month: April 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.

Hawaii-bound teen stowaway wanted to get back to Somalia

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update May 8:  Kid to be interviewed by police, Mom on the way? here.

Update May 5:  Teen released into care of California family service agency, here.

Update May 1: The latest episode of the Somali stowaway family soap opera, here.

Update April 29:  The story is turning into a soap opera!  CAIR involved too! Click here.  Voice of America story contradicts CAIR, here.

Update April 26:  Mom found in Ethiopia, wants to come to US, here.

Update April 23:  Father: Allah protected son.  Still no word on why father never called authorities about his missing son, here.

Of course you’ve seen the news.  Authorities are stunned that a teenage boy who stowed himself away in the wheel well of a plane that crossed the Pacific Ocean to Maui actually survived the ordeal.

He does not want to go back to California; he wants to go home to Somalia

CNN is now reporting that the boy is from Somalia and wanted to get home to his biological mother in Africa.  It reminds us (rather dramatically) that not all refugees are happy to be in America.

From CNN:

(CNN) — A 15-year-old boy who survived a flight from California to Hawaii by hitching a ride in the plane’s wheel well said he was trying to get to Somalia to see his mother, a law enforcement official told CNN on Tuesday.

The teen, who has not yet been identified, spent more than six hours on the ground before the Maui-bound jet took off, another government official says.

The boy jumped an airport fence in San Jose, California, shortly after 1 a.m. on Sunday, hours before Hawaiian Airlines Flight 45 took off at 7:55 a.m., the official said.

The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, didn’t know when the teen climbed into the wheel well, but said the plane already was at the airport at 1 a.m.

Investigators say they don’t think the teen knew where the plane was heading and just went to the nearest aircraft.

There are a bunch of reports on the case, thanks to ‘pungentpeppers’ for sending them.

The general consensus of the stories is that the teen was unhappy living under crowded conditions in a house with his biological father, a stepmother and a huge batch of siblings.  He had also recently been in some trouble in school.   The reports vary on how long he has been in the US.

Here are a few:  UK Daily Mail,  NBC Bay Area, and NBC News.   ***Update***  More stories:  Sky News, ABC San Francisco, and more from CNN.

Why not cut the kid a break and have the humanitarians at the State Department find his biological mother and send him home to Somalia?

US State Department should provide airfare to unhappy refugees!

Which reminds me of a reform that is critically needed—any refugee who comes to America, is unhappy and wishes to return to his or her home country or to a camp should be given airfare to go home.  We don’t hear of the cases often (they are hushed up!), but some unhappy refugees do scrape together the needed airfare and do return to Africa or the Middle East.  We have heard from Iraqis from time to time looking to go back to Iraq.

Maybe take the airfare funds from the resettlement contractor’s cash.

Is the Governor of Wyoming calling RRW racist?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I don’t think so.  He is a Republican (right?) and that is something out of the Democrats’ play-book!  Any time someone disagrees with them on the issue of immigration, and they want to shut up the critics, out comes the “r” word.  It happens so often, it has become a joke!

Matt Mead and wife
Governor Matt Mead with wife sworn into office in 2011.

If he, or anyone on his staff, had followed our work over the last almost seven years, he would know that, first and foremost, we inform the public about a federal program that in our opinion has gotten way out of control and acts, to a great degree, in secrecy, while spending your tax dollars!

Our driving motivation is to inform you of the details of the US State Department’s refugee program so that you and your community may have a thorough discussion about what it is that the federal agencies (including ORR in Health and Human Services) in conjunction with a private contractor (Lutheran Family Services Rocky Mountains, in this case) have in mind for your town or city.

The most important thing the governor said in the Casper Star-Tribune interview over the weekend is this:

At this point, Mead is working with volunteers to gain more information about establishing a refugee program in the state. Wyomingites will get to comment on a program as it’s developed, he said.

Please!  Anyone with concerns should ask to be involved as one of the “volunteers” he is working with and then Wyomingites should insist, at the very least, that hearings or public meetings be held in the Wyoming cities which are being targeted for refugee placement.

Here is more of what the Casper Star-Tribune reports from an interview with the governor:

CHEYENNE — Some of the opinions on the Internet about refugee resettlement in Wyoming are inaccurate and racist, Gov. Matt Mead said.

[….]

For instance, a blog called Refugee Resettlement Watch has a picture of a Gillette man and his family with the headline “The man who started the Wyoming refugee controversy.”

Refugee Resettlement Watch, run by a Maryland resident, also lists crimes committed by refugees throughout the United States, and in one place the site asks, “Are you ready for this in Wyoming?”

“In terms of the comments, I’ve seen some of those, too, in particular, the racist comments,” Mead said. “I don’t think that represents Wyoming. But it is hard to see and hard to read. And some of them, frankly, I will not read.”

Refugee resettlement in Wyoming is a worthy debate, Mead said.

“Let’s not have the debate in terms none of us would be proud of,” he said.

[….]

Ann Corcoran, who runs Refugee Resettlement Watch, did not respond to an email from the Casper Star-Tribune.

I’m so sorry to have missed that e-mail.  As regular readers know, I’m pretty awful about getting to all of my e-mail (what I wouldn’t give for a secretary or an intern!).  I apologize and going forward I should have more time to be more responsive to readers. I will e-mail the reporter today.

Then near the end of the article we learn this:

Mead’s spokesman, Renny MacKay, said Friday that the discussion of a program is in its preliminary stages. The governor’s office is looking at federal laws to understand the program. Mead doesn’t want to spend state money on it. Wyoming would work with the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement.

Just a reminder in case you (new readers) are confused:  The US State Department (in conjunction with the United Nations) chooses and admits the refugees.  Working with their major contractors***, the US State Department (Barbara Day) plays the significant role in deciding where the refugees will initially be placed.  They are running out of “welcoming” communities and they need Wyoming!

The Office of Refugee Resettlement in the US Department of Health and Human Services doles out grants to contractors (rarely to state or local governments) to care for refugees for a short time.  Because the program responsibility is divided by two major agencies of the federal government, it makes it more difficult for the average citizen or even state and local government officials to understand.

The program will cost the state of Wyoming money, but how much is always the ‘$64 thousand dollar question.’  Some states are attempting to figure out exactly what refugees do cost their state and local taxpayers (schools, healthcare, housing, crime etc.),  but the feds make getting that information very difficult.

Our coverage of the Wyoming controversy is here.  See for yourself if it’s “racist.”  And, don’t miss the opinion piece by Don Barnett that the Casper Star Tribune published last month.

The Casper Star Tribune has very early on editorialized in favor of refugee resettlement for Wyoming, here.

If the governor really wants to know how the program works, he might visit our fact sheet, here.  And, if he and his staff are ambitious, then they should check out our over 200 posts in a category we call ‘where to find information.’

***Nine major federal contractors, all others subcontract to the nine. In most cases these contractors (below) operate on 90 plus% federal funding.  No longer may they be considered private charitable enterprises.  They are also not financially audited, so between the major contractors and the 300 or so subcontractors it makes it hard to follow the (your!) money: