Category: Africa

St. Cloud, MN: Somali population grows rapidly since 2009, Lutherans help make it happen

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update February 20th:  Just thought you might be interested in a comment this post received on Facebook, edit of F-word is mine:

Liban Abdullahi Well done, more muslims must go to united states we will invade back as you invaded our muslim countries, killing innocent and torturing guantanamo bay and you are sayind democratic.. F*** Off Democracy.. F*** Off United Nation..

A Somali blogger from St. Cloud says in his giddy report, here, that the population has expanded rapidly in last 5 years and is changing the face of St. Cloud.  Emphasis below is mine:

In 2010, St. Cloud students protest “systemic racism!” Professor and community organizer Luke Tripp said, the same “conservative white” mind-set led to the election of U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Stillwater.
http://wardheernews.com/News_10/Jan/23_Somali_students_protest_against_systemic_racism.html

The number of Somalia living in St. Cloud, MN, is growing. There is no official number of how many Somalis are living in the city now, but the unofficial estimate could be as high as 25,000 Somalis living in St. Cloud and the surrounding cities, like Waite Park, St. Joseph, Sartell and Sauk Rapids.

First Somalis moved to St Cloud in 2000, but about 50 percent of Somalis moved to the city in the recent years, from 2009 to 2013.  [Lutheran Family Services opened its satellite resettlement office there!—ed]

In the streets of St. Cloud, Somalis are visible and can be easily seen, especially Somali women with their colorful traditional clothing.

[….]

Many Somalis work in assembly line jobs [meatpacking—ed], but a great number of Somalis got educated and they work in white collar jobs. Others opened their own businesses: medical transportation companies, homecare companies and daycare centers.  [Home health and medical transport are companies rife with healthcare fraud as we have reported on many occasions—ed]

About 15 percent of the local school district are Somali, and a huge segment of Somalis are in the pipeline of the education process: in high schools, in colleges and in universities.

The biggest challenge facing Somalis in St. Cloud is housing, especially for families whose size is more than eight: there are families who consist of about 10 or 12 family members, there is no housing structures in the city designed for this kind of family sizes.

We have a huge archive, going back to at least 2008, on St. Cloud Somalis, here.

In 2010, Lutheran Social Services began resettling Somalis in St. Cloud directly from camps in Africa, here.

And, then I found this (below) at Friends of Refugees from 2010 (the St. Cloud Times link has disappeared, but blogger Chris Coen quoted the story):

Lutheran Social Services:  Let’s put the Muslims together in St. Cloud!

Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota has worked with refugees in St. Cloud since 2002, when it opened a refugee employment office. [I’ve told you these supposedly religious groups are headhunters for big business in need of cheap immigrant laborers!—ed] This year, the agency ratcheted up its efforts by establishing a refugee resettlement office in St. Cloud.

The office has contracted to resettle 100 refugees — mostly Somalis and a few Iraqis — in the St. Cloud area this year and in each of the next two years.

Jennifer Jimenez-Wheatley heads the new office, helping refugees find places to live, work, shop and worship. She helps them learn to speak and write English. She coordinates the resettlement process with local school, government and nonprofit agencies.

Iraqis too!  One big happy Muslim melting pot!

Somalis have established a presence in St. Cloud, but the handful of Iraqis she’s helping settle here won’t be joining such a large community from their home country. Jimenez-Wheatley says St. Cloud’s refugee advisory committee — composed of city, school district and nonprofit officials — decided resettling Iraqis here made sense in part because they share the Muslim faith with the Somali community.

For fun, be sure to check out how rich the leaders of Lutheran Social Services of Minnesota become while bringing the joys of diversity to your cities and towns!

Hey, Wyoming, isn’t it the Lutherans who want to bring change to Casper and Gillette?

Saudi Arabia deported 12,000 Somalis since the first of the year, says Human Rights Watch!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment
Farhia, deported from Saudi Arabia last month, says she was a domestic worker there for ten years.

I gotta hand it to ‘Human Rights Watch’ which seems to be the only private or public sector organization with the nerve to call-out Saudi Arabia.

The UN (where S.A. sits on the Human Rights Council) has been silent while it has been busy blasting Israel for its supposed mistreatment (“warehousing”) of Africans.   Israel is not deporting thousands weekly and detention in Israel is in a new cushy facility where the would-be asylum seekers can leave for a portion of the day.

Saudi Arabia is clearing out its ethnic diversity!  I guess they aren’t buying that multiculturalism is beautiful PR, or that they need to be charitable to their Muslim coreligionists.

Saudi Arabia for Saudis!

From Human Rights Watch:

(Nairobi) – Saudi authorities have deported more than 12,000 people to Somalia since January 1, 2014, including hundreds of women and children, without allowing any to make refugee claims. Saudi Arabia should end the summary deportations, which risk violating its international obligations not to return anyone to a place where their life or freedom is threatened or where they face other serious harm.

Seven Somalis recently deported from Saudi Arabia told Human Rights Watch researchers in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, that the Saudi authorities had detained them for weeks in appalling conditions and some said Saudi security personnel beat them. None had been allowed to speak with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to discuss possible refugee claims before being deported. UNHCR said in mid-January that “south central Somalia is a very dangerous place.” UNHCR also said the Saudi authorities have denied its staff access to detained Somalis in the country.

They don’t want those undocumented foreign workers!  Are there jobs Saudis won’t do?  Maybe not!

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) says the Somali Interior Ministry expects Saudi Arabia to deport another 30,000 in the coming weeks. The deportations are part of a Saudi campaign to remove undocumented foreign workers.

We will be anxiously waiting for the Obama Administration and the UN to blast those racist unwelcoming Saudis!

Saudi Arabia has not ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention and does not have an asylum system.

[….]

Major donors to UNHCR, including the European Union and the United States, should press Saudi Arabia to end its deportations of Somalis.

Meanwhile, another boat load of Somalis was rescued at sea this week and taken to Italy where you know all hell would break loose and the UN would blast those Mediterranean countries if they dared deport even one of the Somali illegal aliens.

Bulgaria update: African migrants and police clash in Sofia

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The African migrants flooding into Israel want to stay there, but Africans overwhelming Bulgaria are there attempting to get through the tiny country and into more prosperous German, French and British cities.   The European Union, however, requires that they register at their first stop in Europe (in this case Bulgaria where the Turkish government must have let them move through Turkey!).   The policy thus sets up the very thing that happened here last month.

Standoff between police and African migrants in Sofia.

Most mainstream media accounts want to promote the idea that poor persecuted Syrians are being abused by Bulgaria, but why so little attention to the thousands of Africans getting all the way to Bulgaria?  As a reader, I would like to know how they are traveling to that country and where they get the money to do it.

From France24:

A series of videos surreptitiously filmed from the window of a refugee centre in Bulgaria’s capital Sofia last month shows a standoff between police and dozens of African migrants, who had been kicked out of the centre for staying there without permission. The men chant “racists, racists” at the police before being taken into custody. The scene captures how tensions are now regularly boiling over in a country grappling with a surge in asylum seekers.  [Economic migrants!—ed]

[…..]

From 2011 to 2013, asylum requests have multiplied by eight-fold in Bulgaria, with over 7,000 people filing requests in the last year, according to the State Agency for Refugees. About 3,800 of them are accommodated in Bulgaria’s refugee centres; more than three-quarters of these are Syrian nationals. Another 3,700 registered asylum seekers are not accommodated at the centres. The registration process can take months, so there are also an untold number of migrants living in Bulgaria who are not accounted for in these numbers.

In the past few years, immigration both from Syria and from African countries has soared. Many are from regions that have been wracked by conflict, notably the Democratic Republic of Congo and Mali. Diana Daskalova, the founder of the Centre for Legal Aid, a nonprofit that helps migrants with legal issues in Bulgaria, says that about 80 percent of those who come to seek their advice are from African countries: “They have a lot more problems navigating the asylum-seeking process than Syrians, for whom it is more streamlined, and who have an easier time obtaining asylum status.” She says that in the past year, out of all the cases of Africans her organisation has worked on, only one person was granted asylum: “And it was a special case – she was a woman with serious health problems, which was a decisive factor.”

[…..]

Lately, protests at Bulgarian refugee centres have become frequent, both over dire living conditions and the slow pace of the asylum process. In November, Bulgarian police quelled a protest by Algerian migrants at a centre in the town of Lyubimets. That same month, Syrian refugees threatened to go on a hunger strike at a centre in Harmanli, in south-eastern Bulgaria.

The United Nation’s refugee agency recently urged European countries to hold off on returning any asylum seekers to Bulgaria – which they have the right to do if it is the first country they entered in the European Union – citing problems with registration delays as well as access to food and health care.

We hear Turkey has some beautiful refugee camps—-send them there!  Add a little diversity! It will bring strength to those camps!

We have been following the plight of poor Bulgaria for months (click here for our complete archive).

Gov. Sam Brownback: Don’t bring those Somalis to Kansas!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment
Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, friend of Norquist, we love refugees, just not Somalis in Kansas!

A few days ago, likely spearheaded by Grover Norquist and his sidekick Suhail Kahn***, a group of Republican open borders enthusiasts made a public appeal to bring in more refugees and remove barriers (what? those terrorism bars) preventing them from entering the country. Said the ten:

Our policies toward refugees are at the heart of our American values.

One of those signing the letter, here, asking for more refugees, was none other than former Senator Sam Brownback, now Kansas governor, who, even as he sat on a key immigration subcommittee in the US Senate, said of the Somali Bantus whose resettlement he was advocating for some other communities in America—DON’T SEND ‘EM TO KANSAS!

You can read more about this Republican’s hypocrisy here at VDARE in 2003.   The New York Times obliquely referred to Brownback’s backpedaling here.

***Don’t miss the damning report on Norquist and Kahn just released by the Center for Security Policy—Islamists’ assault on the right, enabling the Muslim Brotherhood in America!

So, much for those American values—-just not in Brownback’s backyard!

Illinois: Sudanese refugee could get another trial in brutal murder

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment
Convicted murderer Gareng Deng, now 22, could get a new trial.
Illinois Department of Corrections / February 7, 2014

Update February 14th:  Go to ‘Limits to Growth’ and check out the photo of the murderer and his victim blogger Brenda Walker found!

He is serving a 35-year sentence (or so I think) for the murder of a 47-year old substance abuse counselor.  He  took her to a bike path and shot her in the head.  The refugee, Garang Deng, was 14 at the time.

Now due to some legal wrangling over the length of his sentence, he may be retried.

From the Chicago Tribune:

When Garang Deng pleaded guilty to murder more than four years ago, it seemed like the final act of a tale that stretched from war-torn Sudan to a peaceful Kane County bike path.

After breaking into the home of Marilyn Bethell of Aurora in October 2005, Deng took her to the Illinois Prairie Path and shot her once in the head, Kane County prosecutors said.

Almost immediately after his guilty plea in 2009, Deng regretted it and began the legal process to withdraw the plea. An appeals court ruled in his favor in June.

Deng is scheduled to return to Kane County on Tuesday in his first court appearance in legal proceedings that eventually could lead to a new trial.

“We’re preparing as if we’re going to trial,” State’s Attorney Joe McMahon said.

Deng, who was 14 at the time of the slaying, was a Sudanese refugee whose family had left the African nation when he was a young boy to seek a more peaceful life. But Deng accumulated a history of juvenile offenses in DuPage County beginning at age 11, authorities said.

No mention of whether he knew his victim or picked her at random.

There is more, read it all.

Remember! “Welcoming” communities are responsible for the legal costs of immigrant criminals!

It’s too bad, as I’ve said before, that the US State Department isn’t financially responsible when one of their refugees is tried in criminal court and sentenced to prison.  Although it is still the taxpayer’s money, it would send a message to Washington if Washington had to pay for expensive court proceedings and prisons!