This story is all over the news, so other than for me to acknowledge the latest case of refugees thumbing their noses at the good life in America (paid for by you, the taxpayer) and still wanting to join the Jihad, here is one version of the story from ABC. If you see more detailed stories, send the link as a comment.
If you type ‘Somali missing youths’ into our search window, you will get upwards of 100 posts (going back as far as 2008) on this same topic—Somali refugees off to learn the Jihad trade.
New Hampshire readers (others too!) need to send yesterday’s World Net Daily story to Nashua’s mayor!
Titled, ‘Another US city protests influx of refugees,’ the article (a must-read) is a broad overview of cities across America where mayors are asking questions and demanding the flow stop (or in the case of Athens, GA not even begin). Once an agency gets a foothold, they won’t stop at 150!
This article in the Nashua Telegraph requires a subscription. Here is a bit of it from a reader who is a subscriber.
And, LOL!, check it out, Lutheran Social Services of New England has changed its name. By the way, this is a prime example of how these resettlement contractors (whatever they re-name themselves) overload certain cities then spread out from there. They are running out of “welcoming” places to drop-off refugees!
Nashua Mayor Donnalee Lozeau needs to talk to other mayors before she jumps into the frying pan. Or is it too late? Contact the mayor here: http://www.gonashua.com/CityGovernment/MayorsOffice/MayorsBiography/tabid/66/Default.aspx
NASHUA – As many as 150 refugees from Southeast Asia will arrive in Nashua soon as part of the sometimes controversial process of resettling refugees and their families within New Hampshire communities.
Three years ago, the mayor of Manchester asked officials to stop resettling families in the state’s largest city.
And just last year, Nashua’s mayor urged caution when about 50 refugees were set to come here, saying the city needed to make sure the appropriate services were in place.
“I want to make sure that the refugees that are resettled in Nashua are successful,” Lozeau said last year.
“We’ve got to make sure the school they may be going to will be prepared to assist them, that they have safe and affordable housing in a location that’s appropriate.”
Resettlement has been a coordinated effort among city services, volunteer groups and the School District, said Amy Marchildon, program director of the New Hampshire arm of refugee placement agency Ascentria Services for New Americans, formerly Lutheran Social Services of New England.
The organization works with people seeking asylum and secondary migrants, placing them primarily in Laconia, Concord and Nashua.
“There is a real network of support in social services and volunteer support … and a lot of support from the city,” Marchildon said.
Historically, Nashua has received few refugees compared with other New Hampshire communities.
Manchester has received more than 4,400 refugees since 1998, while Concord took in more than 1,600 and Laconia received nearly 500.
But the state’s second largest city took in only 218 refugees during that time, according to resettlement figures from the state Department of Health and Human Services.
Lozeau said city agencies have come together to meet the impending influx of refugees.
There is more to the news, but you may have to subscribe to get it.
See our very extensive archive on New Hampshire by clicking here. See also this June 2013 post where the Office of Refugee Resettlement already said that New Hampshire had “pockets of resistance.” I wonder, did ORR send “Welcoming America” to Nashua?
Just a quick story in our favorite “welcoming” state of Vermont. Clearly a former refugee herself, it’s alleged that Ms. Mbayu stole from other refugees.
If convicted Mbayu could get ten years in the slammer.
A former caseworker at the Association of Africans Living in Vermont is facing a charge of embezzlement for pocketing $34,000 in tax refunds of two of her clients in recent years, Burlington Police said Friday.
Francine Mbayu, 43, of Burlington is due in Vermont Superior Court on Oct. 30 for arraignment on the felony embezzlement count, police said.
Detective Cpl. Michael Hemond said Mbayu diverted the tax refunds of the two victims between 2011 and 2014 into her bank account and illegally retained all or a portion of each refund.
I would love to dig into the financials for the Association of Africans Living in Vermont, but no time today. If you are a Vermonter reading this, remember it’s important to research the refugee organizations and operatives in your state (a message for readers in every state!).
See some of our recent postson Vermont (the green card state!) which touts itself as a state welcoming diversity, but surprise! gets very few refugees.
Michelle Obama on refugee gardening: “It’s a model for the nation, for the world”
Michelle O. visits refugee garden project in 2010. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/16/michelle-obama-visits-san_n_540440.html
A reporter once asked me how on earth could these refugee resettlement contractors and their spin-off groups make much money out of resettling refugees by the head when they receive a one time flat fee for each refugee planted in your town. I explained that most of the income for the contractors and subcontractors come through the myriad grants they receive through the Office of Refugee Resettlement for administering everything under the sun—job training programs, English classes,refugee savings accounts, micro-enterprise loan programs, healthy marriage trainingprograms, and even refugee veggie growing projects like those described in an article at TakePart.
Knowing a bit about agriculture and how hard it is to make a profit (unless you are a corporate farm with millions invested in land and equipment) these feel-good gardening projects taxpayers pay for—you pay for!—can only survive with large infusions of federal cash.
There are now agricultural programs across the country—many of which have been bolstered by federal Refugee Agricultural Partnership Program grants—aimed at transitioning people into their new lives in the States by focusing on the agrarian background shared by many refugees. But these garden plots are also meeting the demand for niche produce, such as bitter melon, providing a local market for vegetables that are staples in a refugee’s country of origin but are harder to find in the U.S. and are often sold for a premium.
After a discussion about Cleveland, reporter Sarah McColl takes us to one of our favorite locations for refugee resettlement—Nashville, Tennessee where we learn about an $85,000 grant that the Center for Refugees and Immigrants of Tennessee received from the federal government for FY14-FY16.
So how many veggies can you grow with $85,000 in federal funding!
Somali Community Center becomes Center for Refugees and Immigrants of Tennessee
Some longtime readers may remember that the Center was originally the Somali Community Center in Nashville. Let’s take a minute and go down memory lane. Here is what we said about the name change back in 2009:
So they conveniently dropped the name, Somali Community Center, eh? Could it be they want to shed their bad image with federal granting agencies? We have heard of this before, some agency or volag gets into grant trouble and pretty soon they are going by another name, I suppose hoping that new federal or state grantors (or the public!) won’t link them to the former bad acts.
A reminder to readers, the Somali Community Center got into hot water with the federal government over misuse of grants and with a possible connection to terrorist activities back in 2007. Check out this important and shocking story from Nashville’s Channel 4 news at the time.
The link to the shocking story is gone, but visit our post where we had, thank goodness, preserved the original text.
Back to the gardening grant where you can be sure the Center gets to keep a certain amount of your money for administrative purposes.
Snake gourds trellised up a willow tree? (and you paid for it!)
Lauren Bailey: We grow crops without spending a lot of money. $85,000 is a lot of money!
It’s much the same in Nashville: There are plenty of international grocery stores, explained Lauren Bailey, director of agricultural programs at the Center for Refugees and Immigrants of Tennessee. Access isn’t the problem.
“It’s less that they’re not able to find it and more that it’s expensive,” Bailey said. “But the crops that we’ve grown this year, they’ve been able to grow prolifically without spending a lot of money.” One enterprising gardener told Bailey he’d earned $25 from his mustard greens haul, though most take what they grow home to their own kitchen. “I sense that they’re excited to be growing, but also excited to be providing for their families,” she said.
In its first year after receiving a 2014 federal Refugee Agricultural Partnership Program grant, the Nashville program now includes a community garden, ESL instruction, and a training garden that hosts an 18-week market gardening course that’s regularly attended by refugees from Burma and Bhutan. It’s not a simple matter of the students learning from the teachers, however. “At one training garden they were growing a snake gourd, and they trellised it up a willow tree, and I’ve never seen anything like it before,” Bailey said.
Supplemental income, language practice, fresh veggies, and marketable skills are all important aspects of resettlement that are easier to quantify than some of the other benefits Bailey and Fitzpatrick have observed in the garden.
“It’s not just that it might provide income,” Bailey said, “but that it might bring health or improve their quality of life. For a lot of our gardeners, it’s a sense of ownership and pride—the work that they’re doing, and what they’re able to accomplish.”
Again, check out the whole list of grants for refugee gardens. By the way, I see that the now defunct Indiana gardens that American volunteers had to try to save (when refugees tired of the work) are no longer on the list.
Someone needs to take one of these grants, get the original grant requirement and track the federal money and figure out how much it costs to produce the veggies and what the return on your investment is, photograph the gardens on a regular basis and see how many refugees are actually gardening. I suspect there is lots and lots of room for fraud in managing one of these federal warm and fuzzy give-away programs.
For our regular readers there is not much new here except that we get some details about one particular smuggling route out of Egypt and it makes me wonder why the hell all of the European powers and American pressure on Egypt too, couldn’t get the Egyptian government to stop this lucrative smuggling route.
Europe! Here we (single men) come! Photo: Reuters http://www.mirrornewsgy.com/mirrornewsgy/index.php/component/k2/item/1540-mediterranean-boat-people-numbers-soar-to-near-100000-this-year
Instead of really clamping down on Egypt, one policy consideration for the Europeans is to increase LEGAL immigration as a way of stopping the smuggling business. Sheesh!
The ‘stars’ of this New York Timesarticle are Palestinian brothers who survived a boat wreck and are now in Malta hankering to move on to a first world country. Emphasis is mine:
Today, the business of smuggling refugees and migrants across the Mediterranean into Europe has become a hugely profitable, if deadly, enterprise, with more than 3,000 people believed to have died so far this year. One United Nations official estimated that in 2014 smugglers on those routes would gross more than $1 billion, with sophisticated operations that sometimes overlap with criminal gangs who traffic in arms and drugs.
For Europe, the enormous influx of migrants and refugees has stirred both sympathy and resentment, while presenting a policy conundrum — the humanitarian imperative of rescuing the desperate at sea versus the economic and political burden of absorbing them.
With illegal migration very likely to keep growing, one question is whether to expand legal migration.
[….]
By some estimates, as many as one million migrants are hiding on the North African coast, from Libya to Egypt, during the peak summer months, waiting for boats.In Egypt, smuggling in Alexandria and nearby ports has risen sharply since the Syrian exodus began in 2013, when five to seven boats left every week. Now five to seven boats leave every day.
The Palestinian survivors, looking for sympathy, want your help to get into some sweet country:
Today, the three survivors are living in a migrant center and trapped in bureaucratic limbo in Malta. They want to reach a country that will provide them asylum, perhaps Sweden or Canada or Australia. But on Wednesday, they must submit fingerprints and be processed in Malta.
“We need support,” said Mamoun Doghmosh. “We need help.”
Read it all. Note that there are many places along this smuggling pipeline where the migrant flow could be stopped.
Please don’t anyone tell them that the US State Department is packing up illegal aliens in Malta and bringing them to America. We will be taking another 500 this fiscal year!
