Category: Africa

Maine election-year battle over welfare for asylum seekers on-going

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We have reported on the problem in Maine for months (years!).  The gist of it is that Maine has had a wonderland of welfare for immigrants (that is what brought the first Somalis to Lewiston years ago) and now the LePage Administration is trying to cut back social services to asylum seekers.  (The federal government does not give welfare to asylum seekers until they have become legitimate legal refugees.)

Apparently the word got out throughout Africa and elsewhere—get to Maine and you can get social services while you wait for your asylum application to be processed.  So they came.

For new readers, asylum seekers get into the US on their own (visa overstays etc.) and then apply for asylum (claiming to be persecuted at home).  If granted asylum they become “refugees” in the full sense of the word and get federal taxpayer goodies and help from a federal resettlement contractor.   But, thanks to the border crashers an already over full asylum court can’t get to cases for years.

Here is a bit of the story at CentralMaine.com, but you should read the whole thing (of course it starts out with a sympathetic ‘star’ of the story, Journalism 101?).  They are all “vulnerable” you know! (but aren’t there Americans who are vulnerable as well?).

Once vulnerable in their homelands, Maine’s asylum seekers, in growing numbers, are left waiting – for permission to work, for their status to change and, now, to see if looming welfare reforms will make them vulnerable all over again.

[….]

Thousands of people from war-torn or politically troubled nations in sub-Saharan Africa have arrived in Maine in recent years on their own with visas that allow them to visit, work or study on a temporary basis, only to seek asylum so they can stay permanently. Asylum applicants wait in a fuzzy legal status in which they are considered to be undocumented but protected from deportation. And at the same time they are prohibited by federal law from working for at least six months – and sometimes much longer.

Meanwhile, the wait for asylum can take years, with a nationwide backlog of applications that is expected to grow because of the surge of unaccompanied minors crossing the southern U.S. border in recent months.

Read it all.

Moral of the story—if your state gives generous welfare benefits to asylum seekers, they will come.

See our entire Maine archive, here.  Or narrow your search and put ‘Lewiston Maine’ or ‘Portland Maine’ into our search window.

Denmark: Muslim immigrants getting most of the welfare (so what else is new?)

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The ‘Invasion of Europe’ continues….

Opposition party leader, Inger Støjberg, calls for tougher rules on Muslim immigration. http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/07/30/Danish-politician-calls-for-tougher-rules-on-Muslim-immigration

From Breitbart:

Danish current-affairs magazine MandagMorgen has published a report on welfare and benefits which reveals that while the cost of supporting immigrants and their descendents has exploded, the cost of keeping native Danes is falling.

The magazine, which is a publication of one of Scandinavia’s leading think-tanks differentiates between “immigrants and descendants from non-Western countries” and ethnic Danes in its report. The revelation that the cost of welfare for the immigrants has increased by two billion kronor (over £200 million) since 2010 has prompted a bout of soul-searching amongst the leaders of Denmark’s Social Liberal pro-immigration party, who are presently part of the ruling coalition.

Denmark has experienced a sudden rush of immigration from these non-Western groups in past decades, and over one-in-ten Danes is now an immigrant or the descendant of one. Two thirds of immigrants, some 400,000, are non-Western, with Somalis, Turks, and Iraqis forming large, visible groups.

The arrival of large groups of immigrants from cultures unlike Denmark has caused friction within the country. An opposition politician was reported saying in July: “It is primarily Muslim immigrants who do not value democracy and freedom. In certain environments, they directly oppose it. Too many non-Western immigrants with Muslim backgrounds do not want our freedom-orientated society model.

 See our ‘Invasion of Europe’ archive by clicking here.

Report from Malta: Most of the hundreds who drowned trying to reach Europe last week were Palestinians

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

They were pretending to be Syrians. 

And, of course their deaths will be blamed on Israel.  We wrote about this sinking incident here yesterday.

Sure looks like US taxpayers helped fund their voyage. The US is the top donor of UNRWA (the special UN agency just for Palestinians).

Just one of many maps showing migration routes to Europe. http://www.stratint.nl/2013/08/migration-routes-europe.html

 

Many paragraphs in to this article from the EU Observer we learn this:

The Palestinian men told the IOM [International Organization for Migration] they paid a “travel office” in Gaza $2,000 each using money from grants to rebuild their homes.

Haaretz reports, citing an anonymous trafficker, that some pay up to $4,000. They enter Egypt through tunnels under the Rafah crossing point, where buses drive them through the Sinai desert to safe houses.

The sea voyage to Europe can take a week because they are forced to keep changing boats.

The smugglers bribe Egyptian officials. They also have agents in south Europe who help migrants get out of detention facilities. Some tell the Palestinians to claim they are Syrians escaping the civil war.

The survivors told IOM their boat was deliberately rammed by traffickers in waters south of Malta on 11 September when the migrants refused to board a smaller vessel.

“After they hit our boat they waited to make sure that it had sunk completely before leaving. They were laughing”, one survivor said.

The traffickers had their money, and like most Middle Eastern Muslims they must see the Palestinians as pawns in their more important war with Israel.

See our ‘invasion of Europe’ series here.

There goes the hellhole myth for El Salvador and Guatemala; so why the flood of migrants?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Could it be that Obama Administration pals in the No Borders movement (including the Catholic Church) used the “children” as pawns and started the stampede northward?  I think so, and hope one day we will all have the truth.

In the meantime, here comes a worldwide study that puts El Salvador and Guatemala in the top ten countries where people are most satisfied with their lives, while the US is number 12!

From the Daily Mail  (hat tip: ‘pungentpeppers’).  A picture is worth a thousand words:

 

Latin America is the place to feel happy: Seven of the top 10 countries in the well-being poll hailed from the Americas, with Canada rounding out the top 10. Six of the 10 worst were from Africa

 

Here is how the article begins (Respondents were asked to rate their well-being over five categories: purpose, social, financial, community and physical):

People in Panama feel happiest about their lives, according to a new global well-being poll in which the U.S. finished 12th and the United Kingdom 26th.

There were six Latin American countries in the top 10 in the poll, which asked people to measure their well-being across five key areas.

Panamanians were well above the world average for feeling positive about their lives – 61 per cent were found to be ‘thriving’ in at least three of the five facets – compared with just 17 per cent internationally.

Read it all.

See all of our posts on ‘Unaccompanied minors’ by clicking here.  The archive goes back several years.

As invasion of Europe continues, Swiss village raises taxes to support one large African family

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I’m feeling pretty done with Europe, there seems to be no fight left in any of them (if there ever was any fight in the Swiss).  See previous post this morning.

Residents of Swiss village outraged! So what are they going to do about it?

Check this out from the Daily Mail (hat tip: ‘pungentpeppers’):

A village of just 1,000 residents in Switzerland has been forced to raise taxes because an African refugee and her seven children cost the local authority £40,000 in benefits every month.

Hagenbuch, in the Swiss canton of Zurich, is understood to be spending close to a third of its total annual budget on the family after they arrived from Eritrea in East Africa three years ago.

The massive benefits bill covers day-to-day living expenses such as groceries and cleaning costs, as well as paying for four of the woman’s children to be housed in an orphanage and even bills for general entertainment – such as guided tours of local attractions and entry fees for the zoo.

Read the rest of this outrageous story.

And, go here for our complete ‘invasion of Europe’ series.   Posts on Switzerland are here.

Will it all end in civil war?