Day: July 13, 2016

Which resettlement contractors are screwing up in Michigan?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Have a look at this article from Arab American News from last week.

Welcome_To_Dearborn
Not enough housing in Dearborn where all the refugees want to live to be with their own kind of people reports the Arab American News.

It starts out with the usual heartwarming stories about refugees finding new lives in Michigan (the state getting the most Syrian Muslims) but then read down 11 paragraphs where we hear about the trouble the new arrivals are having after basically being left in the lurch by resettlement contractors and in one case NO agency is helping them.
Readers this is very common, we’ve heard it repeatedly over the years and instead of taking fewer refugees that could be taken care of properly, the federal contractors are overloaded (there are never enough volunteers backing up the paid staff!) and the refugees complain.  And, you can’t blame them, they have been sold a bill of goods about life in America and their expectations are very high.
Get this….how is it that a whole family is basically wandering around loose in Michigan with no one responsible for them but another refugee.

The Kabati family now enjoys a new, seemingly peaceful life, but anticipated the challenges that lay ahead as soon as they arrived at the airport.

Kabati said while other refugees were greeted at the airport by representatives of refugee aid groups and taken to their homes, they were greeted by a friend, who offered to provide any further assistance the family needed. Kabati added because they had no family in Michigan, the IOM inadvertently held his friend, also a recent Syrian immigrant, fully responsible for their aid.

The family friend gave them shelter for two days, until he secured them an apartment.

As of Saturday, Kabati and his family have not received paperwork and needed assistance to initiate their resettlement, like Social Security numbers, insurance and food stamps.

Kabati said he and his family are eager to start learning English, so they are able to get around and communicate with others. A tough language barrier prevents them from integrating into American society.

So far, no aid group has offered to place them in ESL courses, unlike the cases with other refugees.

Yikes! How many other Syrians have simply been flown in to a city and dropped?  You might not have a lot of sympathy for them, but you should. The refugees are just pawns. Again, we see evidence that this program is being run with incompetent leadership and is not about caring for the the world’s downtrodden as its first priority.
This is an example of gross incompetence on the part of the US State Department and some contractor which dropped the ball in Michigan!
Why? Because instead of slowing the flow to a level that could be accommodated and assimilated, the UN and the US State Department are sending them into communities at unsustainable levels hurting both the refugees and the citizens of the town or city unlucky enough to be a target site.
Continue reading the story for the litany of other complaints the new Michigan Americans have.
The primary contractors operating in the state are the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LSS Michigan), the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and get this, in Dearborn, it is USCRI—the same agency that isn’t doing a very good job in Lowell, Mass.

Minnesota 'sharia law' billboard causing a stir

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I suppose the question it asks could easily be answered in Minnesota!
That roving gang of Somali refugee youths in an upscale suburb of Minnesota two weeks ago told a homeowner that they could kidnap and rape her because Sharia law said they could.  Why aren’t we believing the believers?

“Do you know Shariah law?” one of the older men in robes yelled at Penskey.

[…]

“We can kidnap you and rape you!” the men shouted back at her.

Here is the billboad, see the story, here at Alpha News.
 
Minn billboard
 
It is a billboard contracted through the month of July by the Center for Security Policy.
I love these alternative ways of reaching people when the national media isn’t telling the public the truth!
Heck, have you seen any of these three recent stories on the national news—Idaho rape, Somali roving gangs, and now the Massachusetts Syrian alleged perv?
By the way, some people prefer spelling ‘sharia’ with an ‘h’ at the end, I don’t know if there is a correct spelling or whether you can spell it either way and be correct.

Massachusetts: Alleged assault by Syrian refugee exposes secretive nature of refugee program

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The lack of transparency that surrounds the resettlement of third world refugees through the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program is likely the single-most important factor in why I have been writing about it for nine years.  Almost nothing makes me so angry as the arrogant treatment of citizens in towns across the country as refugees are placed in communities with no advance warning in most cases and certainly no thoughtful discussion and planning.

Lavinia Limon smirking
Lavinia Limon is the woman making the decisions about which refugees go to Lowell. USCRI is also in charge of Twin Falls, Idaho and is opening new offices in Rutland, VT and Reno, NV. Go to our extensive archive on Limon (formerly Bill Clinton’s director of the ORR) to learn more: https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/?s=Lavinia+Limon

For decades the only way citizens learned of the program was when it was already up and running and problems had occurred and here we learn from the Lowell, Massachusetts city manager that they have had the same experience.
BTW, controversies like the one on-going in Rutland, VT actually started the same way—a mayor secretively worked with the federal government to ‘welcome’ Syrians to town, and when the residents found out all hell broke loose directed mostly at the mayor for acting secretively.
Here is the latest news from Leo Hohmann at World Net Daily who tells us about some excellent reporting from the Lowell Sun on that case from last week where a Syrian man was arrested for allegedly making advances at a 13-year-old at a public swimming pool.

The secrecy of the federal refugee-resettlement program has once again been highlighted by a local official who has seen the dark side of the program play out in living color.

In Lowell, Massachusetts, a 13-year-old girl was twice groped at a public pool last week by a 22-year-old man freshly imported into the community from Syria as a “refugee.”

The city manager of Lowell told his local newspaper Tuesday that he was not even notified by the U.S. State Department or its resettlement contractor that Syrians were being delivered to his community.

Emad Hasso, 22, of Syria pleaded not guilty Friday to inappropriately touching the girl at the state-run Raymond Lord Memorial Pool in Lowell, according to the Lowell Sun.

This marks the second high-profile sexual assault on an American girl in the past month by a refugee. On June 2, a 5-year-old girl in Twin Falls, Idaho, was reportedly raped by an Iraqi refugee boy while an older refugee from Sudan filmed and coached him during the assault.

Hasso is one of 18 Syrians, all of them most likely Sunni Muslims, who have been secretly planted in the Lowell community since May, according to the State Department’s Refugee Processing Center online database.

City Manager Kevin Murphy said he’d like to receive regular numbers from the federal contractor that resettles refugees in the city. The International Institute subcontracts with the main federal contractor, U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, or USCRI, to deliver refugees to Lowell.

The city does not know when or from where refugees come to Lowell, Murphy said, and is only made aware of them in instances like this one where a refugee gets arrested or otherwise singled out for bad behavior.

“I think we’ll reach out to the International Institute to see if they could cooperate with us in the future by letting us know when they relocate individuals to Lowell,” Murphy said.

Good luck with that!
There is much more here, including a list of the cities where large numbers of Syrian Muslims (yes, they are 99% Muslim and mostly Sunnis) have been placed this year, continue here.
By the way USCRI is the primary federal contractor and the International Institute is a sub-contractor.  Be sure to see this older post when USCRI’s office was ultimately closed in Waterbury, CT (they weren’t caring properly for the refugees they had placed).  See why I referred to Limon for years as ‘whoop-de-do.’
One more thing that will interest you folks in Idaho.  Click here to view a copyrighted photo of Lavinia Limon with the CEO of Chobani Yogurt at the Clinton Global Initiative last September.  They are all in this together—MONEY!