Day: October 21, 2015

Lutheran lobbyist says 100,000 Syrians is a responsible number for FY2016

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

…..State Department representative says it isn’t possible.

But, get this!  We learn that the United Nations has 22,000 Syrians picked out for us already!

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Brittney Nystrom, chief lobbyist for Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. Since LIRS is almost 100% funded by US taxpayers, you are paying for most of her salary! Photo here:  http://blog.lirs.org/brittney-nystrom/

By the way, one of the arguments Lutheran lobbyist Brittany Nystrom makes is that Lebanon has taken in tens of thousands of Syrians so far and so the much larger US should take in 100 million by comparison.  It is a ludicrous comparison that they love to make.  Remember that the Syrians going to Lebanon are there temporarily, in camps, and they will NOT become citizens of Lebanon.
Refugees who are resettled in America become permanent residents and citizens in a few short years—THEY WILL NEVER GO HOME EVEN IF THE SYRIAN CIVIL WAR ENDED TOMORROW.
You need only look to the Somali resettlement (now three decades old!) we mentioned in our previous post to know that the flow, once begun, will never end.
You know what the problem is with events like this?  Reporters and others in the audience don’t know enough about refugee resettlement so they accept the propaganda that Ms. Nystrom is only too happy to promote.
Please also be assured that Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (97% funded by your tax dollars) is a sponsor of the big New York pow-wow we wrote about this morning (probably sponsoring with your $$$).  The gathering is to get their marching orders for the 2016 Presidential election campaign.
Here is how the report from CNS News.com begins (emphasis is mine):

(CNSNews.com) – Of the world’s 16 million refugees, 4.1 million have emerged from the Syrian conflict alone, a United Nations refugee resettlement officer told a gathering at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington on Monday.

And as Europe deals with a refugee crisis of historic proportions, “We’d certainly like U.S. to do more,” said Larry Yunck.

For the fiscal year beginning in October, the United States has promised to take in 10,000 Syrian refugees. That number is “woefully inadequate,” Brittney Nystrom of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Center told the gathering.

Kelly Gauger representing the US State Department told the gathering that we simply don’t have enough money for 100,000 Syrians in one year, but Nystrom is quick to spread more propaganda—that refugees are self-sufficient in 8 months and are taxpaying members of society at that point.  That is simply ludicrous (why would we be seeing stories like the one from Erie, PA yesterday about “impoverished” refugees then?).
Remember readers!  The federal government defines self-sufficiency as being OFF OF CASH ASSISTANCE. Refugees can still get (and do get!) food stamps, subsidized housing, Medicaid, and education for the children paid for by you—the taxpayers—long after 8 months.
CNS News continues:

She (Kelly Gauger) said it’s one thing for refugee advocates such as Nystrom to be calling for 100,000 Syrians to come here in FY 2016, but “we need significantly more money than we’re getting now, and I’m not sure that many of us have confidence that we’re going to get that money from this Congress.”

Nystrom said she didn’t want to leave the audience with the perception that refugees are “just sucking up resources.”  [LOL! Of course not!—-ed]

“That’s not the case,” she said. “Most of the refugees that we help resettle become self-suffienct very, very quickly…

“And we know that communities are made richer who resettle refugees,” Nystrom added. “They gain in resources from refugees who open businesses, who contribute to the economy of their community — and the amount of time that refugees are eligible for public assistance is very limited.

“There’s an 8-month window where a refugee receives cash assistance. After that period of time, they’re expected to become completely self-sufficient. So there is an outlay of resources at the beginning of the resettlement process, but the country as a whole benefits from resettling refugees.”

Again, apparently those in audience like this one don’t know enough to ask about ALL OF THE OTHER SOCIAL SERVICES REFUGEES RECEIVE FOR YEARS AND YEARS, or, how much LIRS is paid (out of the federal treasury) to resettle refugees.
Gauger reported that the UN High Commissioner for Refugees has referred 22,000 Syrians to the US for resettlement.  97% of the Syrians admitted in FY2015 are Muslims from UN camps, so I guess we can conclude that the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service is not concerned about saving Syrian Christians as a first priority.

DNA testing required in wake of widespread Somali family reunification fraud

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

In an otherwise whining piece about how the feds are too slow to admit family members of refugees, at least this Frontline ‘news’ story admits that thousands of Somalis entered the US fraudulently resulting in a 4-year closure (in 2008) of the so-called P-3 family reunification program of the US State Department.

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Somali refugees in Dadaab, a massive UN camp in Kenya. Truth be told, there is no way to thoroughly screen the refugees we accept from the UN any better here, than those we are accepting from UN camps in the Middle East. Photo: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/sep/12/somalia-kenya-murder

You should read the whole long article, but here (below) is the segment on Somali fraud (btw, none of those who got in here by lying were ever deported).
For our thousands of new readers:  We covered the discovery and aftermath extensively, here.  The fraud was originally reported at the Wall Street Journal in August of 2008.
The nine major federal resettlement contractors fought tooth and nail to keep the State Department from requiring DNA testing.
Frontline on DNA testing:

Even if those restrictions are loosened, refugees applying for family reunification will face another hurdle to clear: DNA testing.

The inspiration for this requirement was born in East Africa, where more than 1 million Somalians have been displaced from their country by civil war and famine. In the mid-2000s, the U.S. was providing refuge to about 10,000 Somalians a year*** — many of whom went on to apply to the family reunification program to bring over relatives.

Immigration officials suspected that some were inventing “ghost children,” and filling out applications for children not related to them. There had even been some reports of brokers who sold the ghost children’s slots for profit, according to a U.S. Department of State official who spoke to FRONTLINE but asked not to be named.

So in early 2008, the State Department launched a pilot program to determine the extent of fraud by testing relationships using DNA.

In the initial pilot of 476 applicants in Nairobi, Kenya, only 16 percent were genetically related to every person they said was in their family. Another 39 percent tested false for at least one family member. In the remaining 45 percent of cases, applicants either refused to participate or didn’t show up for the test.

Officials interpreted these results as proof of widespread fraud. The P-3 program was suspended, and did not reopen for more than four years.

This stunned refugees around the world, many of whom had spent years waiting for P-3 applications to be approved. Most were told to apply for an alternate visa, but it was even more restrictive than P-3 and soon had a multi-year waiting list.

There is much more, read on.
*** We admitted 8,858 this past fiscal year, (9,000 the year before that!):

As the UNHCR is sending Somalis back to Somalia from its Kenyan camps we admitted 8,858 Somalis to the US in FY2015, here (many from the Kenyan camps!).  Somalis are the third largest ethnic group admitted to the US this past year.

Go here to see how many Somalis entered the US through the Refugee Admissions Program since its inception.  Notice some of the biggest years are in the George W. Bush Administration.

Why are we still admitting Somali refugees after three decades?

More on the big pow-wow in New York: How do we shape the narrative on immigration moving into the 2016 Presidential elections?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We told you about the planned December gathering of the NO Borders movement here the other day.  Please read it!
Besides a session on us—the backlash movement, they have a session on how to shape the media narrative for the 2016 Presidential Election season entitled: ‘Words Matter: Speaking Out Through Media’.

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One of the leaders of the pow-wow, and working to shape the media, is Suzette Brooks Masters of the JM Kaplan Fund. The fund provided the money to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society to write a report suggesting that RRW be investigated by the Southern Poverty Law Center (an example of the sort of media these people seek). https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2014/07/05/hebrew-immigrant-aid-society-wants-local-anti-refugee-leaders-investigated-by-splc/

Here is how they describe what the attendees will learn (you might want to subtitle it—-how to train the media to carry OUR No borders message/make opponents look like racists):

This panel convenes key reporters and media makers who are covering immigration on the national and local level – from mainstream media to ethnic media to blogging and social media. This panel aims to give conference attendees a sense of how to pitch stories and get their message across to a variety of media covering immigration. What makes campaigns relevant to reporters? How should we pitch them? How do you build relationships? When do you rely on established media and when do you create your own? How do we shape the narrative on immigration moving into the 2016 Presidential elections?

In addition, looking beyond English language media, this panel considered the landscape of ethnic media, and how to identify emerging audiences and media markets that the immigrant rights movement should be looking at, reaching out to and engaging immigrant communities.

This session will also speak towards the creative ways in which media organizations have partnered with advocacy groups in order to tell immigrant stories through reporting, entertainment, and more.

ROFLMHO!
Our earlier post this morning on Think Progress is an example of how their media machine is going to work—they are worried!
Be sure to see Leo Hohmann’s latest at WND in which he mentions the pow-wow in ‘Pushback growing’, here.
Here is a list of the wealthy sponsors of the pow-wow intent on changing small town America:

32BJ SEIU
Building Skills Partnership
CAPACES Leadership Institute
Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York
Catholic Legal Immigration Network
Citi
Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center
Four Freedoms Fund
International Rescue Committee
JM Kaplan Fund
Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services
Make the Road New York
Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition
Migration Policy Institute
National Association for Latino Community Asset Builders
National Council of La Raza
National Partnership for New Americans
New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito
New York Immigration Coalition
New York State Office of New Americans
Partnership for a New American Economy
Partnership for New York City
The Program for Environmental and Regional Equity at the University of Southern California
United Food and Commercial Workers International Union
Unbound Philanthropy
Welcoming America
Western Union

Although we have written about many of these groups on many occasions, Unbound Philanthropy is a sleeper.  We wrote about them here in 2011 because they were involved in that propaganda film on Shelbyville, TN, but I recently heard a rumor that they might have been behind providing protesters at a Trump campaign event.  (LOL! shaping the media are they?).

Think Progress has Rep. Brian Babin in its crosshairs….

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

…..not happy that Rep. Babin (R-TX) told Laura Ingraham we should only take Syrian Christian refugees.
No surprise that Think Progress should faint at the thought that someone might actually say ‘let’s prioritize persecuted Christians’ in our Syrian refugee stream.

Photos of Laura Ingraham in her studio after the Laura Ingraham Show, as she talks with her producers who are off camera. (Photo by Rich Lipski/The Washington Post/Getty Images)
In 2013, talk radio host and Fox News contributor Laura Ingraham called for a moratorium on Muslim immigration.

Think Progress is the media arm of John Podesta’s Center for America Progress, one of Washington’s hardest left (if not THE hardest left agitation groups) and a great friend of both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.  Here is one post we wrote on Podesta in 2009.
The article is a bit muddled indicating that the writer doesn’t understand the Refugee Admissions Program, but I’m posting this to show that the Left hates this argument—if we are going to bring in Syrians, why not Syrian Christians who we know are being persecuted and whose screening would be much simpler since they don’t have a reputation for terrorism.
Here is Think Progress writer, Emily Atkin, apparently gasping in outrage that someone should say such a discriminatory thing—America should prioritize Middle East Christians.

A Texas Congressman is calling for an immediate halt to the Obama administration’s plan to take in 10,000 Syrian refugees, saying the plan is a threat to national security and that more should be done to ensure Christian refugees are getting help.

Rep. Brian Babin (R-TX) appeared on the Laura Ingraham show on Monday to tout his latest bill, which calls for an immediate suspension of the Refugee Resettlement Program pending a “thorough examination” of the program’s costs and national security risks. The program allows the U.S. government to admit refugees when it is justified by humanitarian concerns.

But according to Babin, the program is a conduit for terrorist groups like ISIS to “set up bases of operations” in the United States, and should be suspended. At the same time, though, he said the U.S. should be doing more to accept Christian refugees.

[….]

….the vast majority of refugees to Europe are coming from Syria — and among those, the vast majority are Sunni Muslims, according to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. And advocates say biases about which religious groups should be prioritized for resettlement could leave many affected Muslims in the dust.

By the way, one of the top posts of all time here at RRW is this one—Laura Ingraham calls for a moratorium on Muslim immigration to America.
See posts on Rep. Babin, here.
Just a reminder readers, that the number of refugees matters too—the US cannot take in the whole world or our economy will surely collapse.

Be sure to see Leo Hohmann’s latest at WND (from last night) on how the Left is reacting to the resettlement pushback going on in many states, here.