Category: Africa

Malta Update: New US ambassador plans to follow ‘tea party Molly’s’ lead

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Longtime readers will recall that ‘tea party Molly’ (I called her that before ‘tea party’ took on a whole new meaning!)  is the former ambassador to Malta who set in motion a new policy for refugee resettlement that could set a precedent and have far-reaching implications.  The tiny island nation of Malta in the Mediterranean Sea is continually besieged by boat loads of Africans originating in places like Libya (with the help of human traffickers) and landing on Malta’s shores.   Some of the Africans, including a large number of Somalis, are then transformed into “refugees” bound for the US.

Use our search function for Malta to review the issue which we have been covering for a couple of years.  

In an interview reported at Malta Today, the new Ambassador to Malta, Douglas Kmiec, appears ready to continue the same plan—sending some of Malta’s illegal aliens (surely a large number are economic migrants who wanted in to Europe) to the US as “refugees.”  See this post about how Frontex (EU border control agency) has warned Malta and the US that this—a free trip to America—is a “pull factor” for illegal immigrants.

Here is a portion of the Kmiec interview:

For the past years, the US has been one of the few nations to share Malta’s burden on immigration through resettlement programmes.

But haven’t US policies in Somalia, which included support for warlords and tacit support for an invasion by Ethiopia, contributed to the exodus of Somalis from the country, which directly affects Malta?

Kmiec is willing to admit that “some of our policies have increased the instability in the region… We introduced a level of instability which caused a portion of the population to migrate and that is not a good thing. We have to recognise that.”

But the problem of migration is larger than that. “People in Africa, whether from Somalia, Nigeria, Sudan or Eritrea, are seeking a better life for their families and an economic opportunity, a life where they are not threatened by violence and warlords…”

They are no different from Kmiec’s own grandfather, who migrated from Poland, and his wife’s Irish parents. “When these people come to our home and sit down telling us their story we may as well be listening to the stories of an American grandparent.”

[No, they are not your grandparents! Your grandparents got in a line to come legally, your grandparents were not potential jihadists and your grandparents did not come to the welfare state we have today.  They had to make it on their own with no ‘public assistance!”-ed]

African immigrants to the US often ask him what being an American means. “It starts with being yourself and sharing that self [what?]. I tell them when you go Minnesota, Arizona, Georgia and all the places where we resettled migrant families, do not hesitate to interact with the rest of the population.”

According to Kmiec, the primary motivation for re-settlement of migrants from Malta to the US is that of showing appreciation to Malta’s efforts to maintain the safety of migrants in the sea.

“One of the ways through which the USA has said thank you to Malta for this effort in behalf of the world, is to take some of these people.”

So, let me get this straight, the US was mucking around in Africa so we caused the “instability” in places like Somalia, and besides we (the US) want to thank Malta for rescuing these poor people from the sea?  Oh brother!

Please read Douglas Kmiec’s wikipedia page!  Wouldn’t you think that for all he did for Obama (Republicans for Obama and more!) he would have gotten a bigger country than Malta!  Although maybe the Obama Administration needed just this sort of guy to continue this policy of scooping up illegal immigrants bound for Europe and providing them with all the perks associated with Refugee Resettlement!

Comment worth noting: Reader says many Somalis are economic migrants not true refugees

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Last night we had a comment from Ibrahim Omar commenting on the post from a few days ago where we reported that up to possibly 13,000 additional Somali “refugees” were in the pipeline to come to the US this year.  Here is what Mr. Omar said:

most Somalis in the list of us resettlement are not genuine asylum seekers but are economical refugees why do i say that, well half of them are Kenyan citizen taking advantage of the screening officers ignorance of differentiating Somalis and Kenyan Somali if need be i can. pin point for those who are among them thank you

Readers should know that “economic migrants” are NOT “refugees” according to the United Nations (and the US) which defines refugees (and asylum seekers) as those fearing persecution in their homeland.   In light of the fraud uncovered in 2008 regarding Somali family reunification, the only responsible thing for the State Department to do is to follow-up on Mr. Omar’s charge.

State Department, e-mail me at Ann@vigilantfreedom.com and I’ll put you in touch with Mr. Omar who has offered his services to help you sort it out.

Grand Island, NE police chief: “It is chaotic anarchy” here among all the ethnic groups

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The Los Angeles Times has finally caught on to problems created when many diverse immigrant groups arrive in small midwestern towns lured there by the big national and international meatpackers.  Here is a story thanks to Baron at Gates of Vienna that summarizes much of what we have already said about Grand Island, NE and its multicultural woes.  (See our category Greeley/Swift/Somali controversy where we have filed all of our Grand Island posts for a couple of years)

There isn’t much new in this article that we haven’t previously reported, but coming on the heels of the Maine Center for the Prevention of Hate Violence announcement that it would use Somali-saturated Lewiston, ME as an example of how town folks can get along with their immigrants, I’m thinking what the heck are they going to Frederick, MD  for?   Let them go to someplace like Grand Island, NE that will be a real challenge when they have to tell the Hispanics, Somalis, Sudanese and now Cubans that they need to just get along with each other!  Maybe its just a matter of reminding them about our magical melting pot!

This really makes me steam!  They (the hate violence gang) don’t want to sort out the ethnic conflicts between people of color, they just want to claim white people are racists and need government-funded behavior modification! 

Back to the LA Times (rant concluded) here is how the lengthy article begins:

Grand Island, Neb., has long been a revolving door of immigrants, from Vietnamese and Bosnians to Latinos and Sudanese. But with Somali Muslims came a whole new set of conflicts.

The reporter gives the reader a little history about the Hispanics who have been in the town for a long time and then tells us about the raids by ICE.  After those raids other ‘legal’ immigrants came to town.   One townsperson summed it up well!

“There has been more bigotry,” Fulton said, “because there has just been more and more and more of them.”

Then the Somalis came looking for the meatpacking jobs:

The emotions unleashed by the raid would soon find a new target — Sudanese and Somalis attracted by the promise of work at the meatpacking plant.

The new immigrants, who had been granted refugee status because of strife in their homelands, posed new challenges to the status quo in Grand Island.

They were black, and some were Muslim.

At first the Muslims didn’t make too many demands but then in 2008 they stirred up anger among other ethnic workers (we have all this in our posts from that time period).

That changed in 2008, during Ramadan, when virtually all the Muslim workers began leaving the assembly line en masse to pray. Even Muslims who are not particularly religious often make an effort to pray during the holy month.

Co-workers complained that they had to pick up the slack. Management told the Somalis they couldn’t pray because the plant, one of the largest in the country, couldn’t afford to stop the machines. Five hundred Muslim workers, infuriated, walked off the job.

Most came back after Swift & Co. agreed to accommodate them by changing break times.

But other workers protested that the Muslims had gotten preferential treatment, an idea fueled by a story published in a local Spanish-language newspaper that falsely claimed the Somalis had gotten a pay raise. Fights broke out in the lunch room. Hundreds of Latinos — joined by the Sudanese, who are mostly Christian — walked off the job.

The plant settled down because the meatpacker made accommodations to the Muslims and as we learn later in the article many of the nomadic Somalis moved on to another Nebraska town.   However, the LA Times tells us that crime in Grand Island is now out of control!

Major conflict at the plant let up when Ramadan ended. But tensions in town mounted like never before.

At the Autumn Woods apartments on the southeast side of town, police were called several times a day to respond to stabbings, shootings and disputes.

A war was building between the Somalis, who lived on one side of the complex, and the Sudanese, who lived on the other side.

“It’s chaotic anarchy,” Police Chief Steve Lamken said recently.

In late August 2009, a Sudanese man was shot in the head at the apartment complex. Police arrested three Somalis in connection with the killing.Officer Robert Winton blamed the fighting on the Africans’ violent homelands. “They’re at war in their countries and they bring it here,” he said.

Violent crimes in Grand Island have risen in the last two years and the community, surrounded by cornfields, now faces a gang problem.

To top it off the LA Times wraps up by mentioning that 700 Cubans have come to town this year.

I won’t go into it here because this is getting way too long, but the LA Times article also discusses Grand Island’s mayor and the problems she had with the Somalis.  I recommend you go back to my 2008 post on how the Somalis demanded that the mayor resign.  Also, note in previous posts that the Somalis brought CAIR to town and here.

So, hey Center for the Prevention of Hate Violence, how about tackling the ethnic strife and multicultural hate violence going on in places like Grand Island, NE and leave the good people of Frederick, MD alone.

For new readers:

The US State Department has admitted over 80,000 Somali refugees to the US (this linked post continues to be one of the most widely read posts we have ever written) in the last 25 years and then last year had to suspend family reunification because widespread immigration fraud was revealed through DNA testing.  That specific program has not yet been reopened (that we know of), but will be soon. 

Nevertheless, thousands of Somali Muslims continue to be resettled as I write this. We recently learned that we will be taking 6000 Somalis this year from one camp in Uganda and as many as 11,000-13,000 total from around the world.

Diversity is strength alert! Manchester Somalis one big happy family (Not!)

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Manchester, NH has been struggling with a huge overload of refugees for some time now.  Today I see it isn’t just tension between New Hampshire residents and the newcomers, it’s one Somali group in conflict with another.   Seems one group is claiming that the other is teaching Islam with your tax dollars.

From the Union Leader:

MANCHESTER – A federally funded weekend education program for Somali refugee children has been put on hold after allegations it was teaching Muslim doctrine.

Police Chief David Mara, Mayor Ted Gatsas and Superintendant of Schools Tom Brennan recently received a letter saying the Somali Bantu Community Association is teaching from the Quran during its weekend youth program.

Mukhtar Idhow, director of the group, said the program is not a religious school, but is a tutoring program for Somali children. The program is run through Southern New Hampshire Services and is housed at the city’s Multicultural Center on Maple Street.

The goal, Idhow said, is to raise graduation rates in the Somali community. The program will not meet this weekend and will be on hold until after the group speaks with city officials and decides whether to continue, he said.

Idhow and other local officials say the letter is part of an ongoing feud between the leaders of the Somali Bantu organization and the Somali Development Center, another nonprofit group that provides aid to local Somali refugees.

“There’s been a lot of rumors about bad blood between the different factions, said Dan Calegari of Southern New Hampshire Services. “I work with these people daily. There’s never even been any hint of religious activity. … It really comes down to animosity between different segments of the Somali population.”

Mara said he also heard the letter was part of a feud and is working with the groups to address the rift within the Somali community.

Read the rest of the story and don’t skip the comments!

For new readers:

The US State Department has admitted over 80,000 Somali refugees to the US (this linked post continues to be one of the most widely read posts we have ever written) in the last 25 years and then last year had to suspend family reunification because widespread immigration fraud was revealed through DNA testing.  That specific program has not yet been reopened (that we know of), but will be soon. 

Nevertheless, thousands of Somali Muslims continue to be resettled as I write this. We recently learned that we will be taking 6000 Somalis this year from one camp in Uganda and as many as 11,000-13,000 total from around the world.

Update:  Another blogger takes on this Manchester Somali story here and a commenter (Jake Jacobsen) had this hilarious thing to say:

Somehow the modern Liberal world has become a Monty Python episode. I’m imagining two cross dressing old ladies sitting on a park bench debating the merits of diversity as Bantu and Somali immigrants fight to the death and burn the town down behind them!

I need to put the blog View from the Right in our blogroll.

Another update:  Check out the comments to this post and note I discuss one of Thomas’s comments in a Comment worth noting, here.

Are you sitting down! UN sending 6000 more Somalis to US this year

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update January 28th:  Rumor has it that we are in fact bringing well in excess of the 10,000-11,000 Somalis that we brought in 2004, 2005 and 2006 this year. They will come from all over the world. 

Can you believe it?  We are in the worst recession since the Great Depression; refugee agencies are scrambling everywhere to take care of the refugees they have.  Just yesterday the Department of State released the news that they are doubling the per head payment (from taxpayers) for each refugee entering the US. 

On top of that, in many cities around the world, the Somali diaspora is producing jihadist fighters.  And, we are going to take 6000 Somalis from one refugee camp in Uganda?    Hat tip:  Janet.

Why this particular group?  They aren’t getting along with others in the camp!  But, don’t worry they are being screened for Al-Qaeda connections.

The story from New Vision a Uganda web publication is entitled, “USA takes in 6000 Somali from Uganda” is as follows:

THE American government is to resettle 5,800 refugees from Nakivale refugee camp in Isingiro district to the United States, Prosy Katura, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) protection officer, has revealed.

Katura said a team has already been sent to Nakivale to scrutinise the refugees to ensure they have no links with al-Qaeda, an extremist group. The American taskforce at the camp will also study files of individual refugees since they arrived in Uganda.

During a meeting with the Germany ambassador to Uganda, Reinhard Buchholz, who visited the camp on Friday, Katura said the exercise under the “expedited Somali resettlement programme” should be completed by September. “We have so far scrutinised about 2,000 Somalis out of 5,800 who are living in Nakivale.”

Explaining the reason of resettling Somalis to the US, Katura said Somali refugees have failed to integrate with other refugee groups living in Nakivale and with the local communities because of their unique language and culture.  [This is insane, they can’t get along with other African people but they are going to jump into the mythical American melting pot and come out as just good old regular Americans!]

She added that the group cannot go back to Somalia since the country is still unstable and they fear to be killed and persecuted. Nakivale has about 470,000 refugees from Somalia, Rwanda, Sudan, Congo, Burundi, Kenya and Eritrea. There are other refugees in Uganda, in camps of Kyangwari, Orukinga and Kyaka.

During Buchholz’s visit, Burundian refugees also demanded to be resettled to a third country, arguing that they, too, have stayed in the camp for a long time and cannot be repatriated.The United States resettles refugees largely according to country of origin as well as the urgency of the situation.

Even though the US remains the world’s largest country of resettlement, its refugee admissions have been steadily declining over the last decade, particularly since the September 11 terrorist attacks. The number of refugees admitted went down from 132,000 in 1992 to about 28,000 in 2003.*

Resettlement patterns in American states are generally dominated by certain ethnic communities. Many Somali and Ethiopian refugees have been resettled in Minnesota.

The UNHCR is a partner in the US refugee resettlement programme and identifies those refugees most in need of urgent resettlement.

The agency has identified three “durable solutions” to refugee concerns: voluntary return to the country of origin, local integration in the host community, or resettlement to a third country.

Resettlement is most often promoted by UNHCR “when individual refugees are at risk, or when there are other reasons to help them leave the region.”

* These numbers are very deceptive. Yes, right after 9/11 our refugee numbers dropped precipitously (gee, do you think someone was scared we might be letting in Islamic extremists?) but they have steadily risen ever since.   In FY2009 we admitted 74,642.  The Obama Administration’s goal for FY2010 is 80,000!

Now, check out the numbers for Somalis since 9/11 here.  In each year 2004, 2005 and 2006 we brought in excess of 10,000 Somalis to the US.   The numbers only slowed when the State Department realized how deep the fraud was in the family reunification program that was closed in 2008 for Somalis and has yet to be reopened.

By the way, these numbers don’t reflect Somalis who have come across our borders illegally, some of whom have been granted asylum.

What should you do if you have a problem with this?   Write to Asst. Secretary of State, Eric Schwartz, let him know how you feel and be sure to copy your US Senators and Congressman.  And, come to think of it, you should send your letters to the Dept. of Homeland Security as well:

Secretary Janet Napolitano
Department of Homeland Security
U.S. Department of Homeland Security
Washington, DC 20528

Endnote:  I just last night wrote this update on the Somali murder in Ft. Morgan, CO, but use our search function for ‘Somali crime’ or ‘Somali murder’ or ‘Somali gangs’ for lots more information on how the Somalis are melting into American society.  Here is just one post about Somali refugees turned into jihadist fighters in the US.  Canada, Sweden, Denmark and the UK have all reported similar terrorist recruitment within the Somali diaspora.