Category: Asylum seekers

Comment worth noting: Brits to stop “insensitive” DNA testing of African asylum claimants

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

From time to time we receive comments that merit attention on page one and this is one such comment.

Received from the “Opinionator” to this post from yesterday about how Somalis and others cheat their way into the UK.

It’s bad enough the people of the UK (and particularly England) are being trampled by incoming “refugees” and “asylees” and illegal and legal immigrants – now their traitorous government has decided that they – once again- cannot cull the cheats and liars (and we all know there are many) from the rest of the herd on non-British looking to avail themselves of the (heavily taxed) taxpayer benefits. This is particularly egregious considering the publicized Somali re-unification fraud in the USA (and covered at RRW):

UK Drops DNA test for Refugees and Asylum Seekers*

Tests are “unreliable” – Really? As unreliable as the “word” of thousands (if not more) fraudsters?

“Refugee Council chief executive Donna Covey said she welcomed the decision to scrap the DNA tests.She said the tests highlighted the insensitive attitudes of the U.K. Border Agency to refugees and asylum seekers.”

But what about the “insensitivity” shown to the immigrant beleaguered British citizens and taxpayers? Once again they are given short shrift.

Opinionator!  What are you thinking!  Only immigrants have feelings!  Everyone knows that Westerners are not entitled to sensitivity.  After all, we are history’s exploiters; it’s payback time and we dare not speak up.

* What the test sought to determine was whether the person seeking asylum was really from a country that is in turmoil because many, from places like Kenya, shouldn’t even be seeking asylum when their government is stable.

Somali ‘how-to’ guide on cheating one’s way into the UK; unrelated (?) London hotel bomb plot?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Reporter Kassim Mohammed writing at the Nairobi Star gives us a peek into how a Somali who wishes to get to the UK and ask for asylum (because it’s supposedly easier there to be granted asylum than, in say, the Netherlands) can buy a fake passport and be in London in a flash.

Readers should know that when seeking asylum, the asylum seeker is supposed to request asylum in the first country in which he or she arrives.

So, for instance those Somalis who travel across the world with many stops (including Cuba, South American and Central American countries and Mexico) and arrive on our US border and ask for asylum are really not eligible for asylum.  But, some cheating American asylum lawyer is waiting to help them get into the US anyway!  See one of many posts I’ve written on Somalis and the US borders, here.

This article from the Nairobi Star explains that for Somalis or other Muslim illegal aliens who pass through the Netherlands they do not want to request asylum there and thus cheat the system and buy a phony passport to move on to England.

From the Nairobi Star (published at AllAfrica.com)

The UN says you must keep your Somalis! No sending them back to Africa!

Somalia is mired in a seemingly unending armed conflict between the Transitional Federal Government and Al Shabaab fighters. Mortar and rocket fire that the two warring factions exchange lead to casualties and the common man bears the brunt.

Taking note of this grim reality, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) has issued guidelines requesting host countries not to return any Somali seeking asylum to Southern and Central Somalia.

[….]

Under the European Union’s Dublin II regulations, the country where a person first entered the EU is generally held responsible for examining that person’s asylum claim.

This it appears is great on paper. Some of the Somali refugees who hear of the fate of their countrymen living on the streets opt out of the asylum process.

So instead of asking for asylum in the Netherlands, here is how they move on to London!

Ali Mohamed, 25, came to Rotterdam, The Netherlands, from Italy in April and decided not identify himself to authorities but use unorthodox means to get his way to the United Kingdom. “I heard that the Netherlands is not a good place to seek asylum. I don’t want to live on the streets. I will try my luck in London,” Ali said.

Ali was informed of Dutch passports for sale in Den Haag (The Hague). In the presence of the Star reporter, Ali was told by an Ethiopian man in the Dutch administrative capital to bring a passport size photograph to identify a passport that resembles him. Within five days, Ali managed to pocket a Dutch passport for 1,000 Euros (Sh126,000).

“I called several of my relatives in Canada and Norway who each sent me some money and I managed to raise the amount. I know it’s a bad thing but I am not planning to harm anyone, I just want a better life since my home country is uninhabitable,” Ali remarks while keenly looking at the photo attached to the passport.

Ali will now have to send back the passport after his arrival in his final destination- London. He went through Callais, France, and crossed the border into the United Kingdom. Immigration officials on both sides of the border didn’t notice any abnormally.

Keeping his promise to inform the Star on his progress of seeking asylum, Ali called after 17 days. “I am so happy. I have been accepted as a refugee here in the UK and all is well. I have also managed to send back the passport to the person who sold it to me. I hope it reaches him safely.”

Read it all.

Changing the subject—sort of!

Today we learned that there is a Somali terror plot to create a Mumbai-style attack on a London hotel.

Just today we learned that the now dead mastermind of the embassy bombing in Kenya, killed in Somalia a few days ago, had on him a plan to create a Mumbai-style attack on a London hotel.

From Fox News:

Federal authorities are warning hotels in major U.S. cities to be vigilant after intelligence recently obtained in Somalia shows Al Qaeda was planning to launch a “Mumbai-style” attack on an upscale hotel in London, England, Fox News has learned exclusively.

The intelligence came from computer accessories and other materials gathered at the checkpoint in Mogadishu where Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, the Al Qaeda operative who masterminded the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa, was killed Saturday, according to sources.

Al Qaeda was working on what one senior U.S. intelligence official described as an “aspirational” – but possibly operational – plot to target the Ritz Carlton hotel in London. As part of the plot, operatives would stay in strategically chosen rooms on the first floor of the hotel, and then they would set their rooms ablaze in hopes of trapping guests on the floors above.

But you can’t send them back—the UN says so!

Canada: Arrests made in Sri Lankan human smuggling case

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is an update of the smuggling case we first reported here in 2009.  (Visit that post for background on Tamil Tigers)

From The Province:

Mounties arrested four men in the Toronto area on Tuesday in connection with the MV Ocean Lady, the freighter that brought 76 illegal migrants to Canada’s West Coast more than a year-and-a-half ago.

The arrests are the first stemming from RCMP investigations into humansmuggling networks in Southeast Asia that have sent hundreds of Sri Lankan refugee claimants to Canada aboard two freighters.

Public Safety Minister Vic Toews said his government welcomes the news of the arrests.

Canada is working on even tougher laws, but this sounds pretty tough to me!

Anyone convicted of helping more than 10 undocumented migrants enter Canada faces up to life imprisonment and a $1-million fine under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. The Conservatives have drafted a bill that would toughen Canada’s antihuman-smuggling policies but it has not yet been made into law.

This reminds me, whatever happened to the Church World Service connected human smuggler reported in the New York Times here in 2007?  She was taking more than ten Haitians at a time across the border into Canada.  See our previous posts on that story here and here.

I just wrote about Church World Service spending your tax dollars in Pakistan here yesterday.  You might want to use our search function for ‘Church World Service’—they are busy little taxpayer-funded social justice advocates at 475 Riverside Dr., New York, NY.

Sorry Canadian readers, I kind of drifted off track from human smuggling to an American NGO (or maybe it isn’t so far off track)….

YES students say NO to going home to Muslim countries; seek asylum in Canada

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

How many of you have ever heard of this program—Youth Exchange and Study?   I hadn’t until I saw this story from the The Star (Toronto) yesterday about Muslim high school students invited to the US to help bring about “improved understanding” between cultures and instead many just hopped on over to Canada and asked for asylum—so much for taking their new found understanding back to their Muslim homelands!  And, so much for the US sending our brave soldiers to Afghanistan to secure THEIR country.

Indeed, so many students left for Canada that the US State Department has suspended the program.

Before I get into the story from St. Catherine’s that brought my attention to YES, check out the description of the  Kennedy-Lugar YES program* for students from Muslim countries.

And for more, have a look at this US State Department AFS-USA Cluster Coordinator Manual (I kid you not that is the title of some d*** bureaucrat manual—no wonder we are sick of too much government!).  Here is what the USDOS AFS-USA CCM tells us about YES (September 11th made them do it!):

The September 11th terrorist attacks of 2001 and the apparent negative view of Americans held in some regions, as well as the anti-Islamic or anti-Arab sentiment that gripped some places in the United States, brought renewed focus to the need for improved understanding across our cultures. Having long known that the benefits of high school exchange programs extend beyond the student into the community at large, the international education community responded to this call with an initiative to increase exchanges between the United States and countries with significant Muslim populations. 2003-2004 marked the inaugural year of the Youth Exchange Study (YES) Program. [emphasis is mine—ed]

Great huh!

Now here is the reality of what they created.  From The Star (Last stop on the Afghan railway?):

ST. CATHARINES, ONT.—While everyone around him opted for Indian films, Ali Javan, a young Afghan from Mazar-e-Sharif, fell in love with Hollywood.

In the fall of 2009 he arrived in the United States for the year-long Youth Exchange and Study (YES) program, an exclusive State Department initiative. Despite his fascination with American movies, the 15-year-old had every intention of returning to Afghanistan.

He felt that way even as more than a dozen of his fellow exchange students vanished that year, reappearing on the other side of the Peace Bridge as refugee claimants in Canada.

But Javan’s is not a Hollywood story. Too complicated for the big screen, his odyssey took him from Mazar-e-Sharif at the age of 15 to a school in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he made few friends and never really settled.

Despite his longing to return to Afghanistan, he gave in to the pressure of his family to seek a better life and snuck into Canada like so many of the Afghan exchange students before him.

The defections since 2004 of scores of Afghans in the U.S. exchange program have now prompted the State Department to suspend the opportunity for a year.

The article goes on to tell us how Javan’s father in Afghanistan advised him to make a run for it and get to Canada.  He follows his father’s advice, and then we are treated to a discussion about how hard his life is in Canada trying to make ends meet while sharing an apartment with another asylum seeker all paid for with Canadian welfare.  Meanwhile, some young American is risking his or her life fighting for freedom for the Afghan people—maybe Ali Javan could go home and do the fighting himself!

Javan’s American sponsor is so disillusioned he has given up hosting the kids.

But before fleeing to Canada, Javan sat down to write a letter of explanation and thanks to his American host over the previous nine months, Terry Dougherty.

Dougherty, an IT administrator at Purdue University, had a soft spot for Afghanistan from the three years spent there in the 1970s as a Peace Corps volunteer. Dougherty also had a soft spot for Javan, who he remembered as “extremely talented artistically and very bright.”

But Javan was the third Afghan exchange student in two years to leave Fort Wayne for an asylum bid in Canada. Dougherty had helped place the first two, who fled in 2009, with local host families. Their disappearance, he said, “kind of took the wind out of my sails.”

Javan’s decision to flee ended Dougherty’s participation in the YES program.

Glad to see someone wised up in this sorry mess.

Read it all.

* Kennedy is dead but Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana is still kicking around the US Senate.  I plan to write to him and tell him it’s time to kill YES, keep Afghan young men in Afghanistan and save millions of tax payer dollars to boot.

Story about Indians coming across southern border adds more evidence to my theory about asylum seeker fraud

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Before I tell you about the story which I should have posted a couple of days ago (hat tip Gary), briefly this is what I think is happening:

*Open borders advocates are using our asylum system to get more immigrants into the country.

*Businesses looking for cheap labor may be teamed up with non-profit “humanitarian” groups to facilitate the scam, and possibly even linked to the traffickers.  There likely are some terrorist networks using the system as well.

*Most asylum seekers are economic migrants, not really persecuted people (thus my use of the word “scam”).

*Refugee advocates know that the number of refugees is going to go down as our economic situation continues to be unable to handle the numbers on welfare and more and more people are questioning the program, thus their focus is shifting to asylees.

*Immigration lawyers have set up extensive businesses in border states and are somehow tipped off to the arrival of the newest asylum seekers.

Admittedly I don’t have all the pieces to the puzzle, but my first inkling of this new focus of the Open Borders crowd came when I saw this story about illiterate and obviously not well-off Somalis paying as much as $10,000 each, then getting across the world to our southern border and knowing to ask for asylum—it all sounded fishy to me.

So, now to this news article at KRGV News that is written in such a confusing way that I’ve had to search through it, excerpt sections and rearrange a few of them in the hopes that it will be understandable for readers.

Not sure here whether the writer is implying the Indians might be terrorists or that if the Indians get in so easily, terrorists will too.

HARLINGEN – A terrorist could be crossing the border right now.

Intelligence agents are focusing on that line between the U.S. and Mexico.

They are watching the people who come from India through the Valley.

The Indians say they’re trying to escape persecution in their home country.

How many are coming?

CHANNEL 5 NEWS asked for the numbers of Indian illegals detained in the last year from the U.S. Border Patrol.

During October and April of 2010, 730 Indians were caught. During the same time this year, more than 1100 have been captured. Nearly a 50 percent increase.

The Indians are briefly detained then released?

After being caught in the U.S. and taken to the detention center they are released many are taken to the Harlingen Bus Station.

CHANNEL 5 NEWS staked out the bus station to see, one night we saw a group of five Indian nationals, another night we saw a group of three, then a group of four.  [Maybe an investigative journalist should get on the bus and see where they are going!–ed]

Immigration lawyer helps them get released?

Border Patrol agents caught Rakesh Kumar coming into the country with a group of illegals from Central America.

CHANNEL 5 NEWS talked to him at the Hidalgo County Jail.

He’s facing pornography charges for bringing porn on a memory card. He’s a Sikh from Punjab.

Prosecutors dropped all the charges against him.

Burhan Nomani represents illegals. He’s an immigration lawyer in Houston.

[….]

Nomani meets the Indians after they end up in a federal detention center. He’s represented more than 100 so far.

A business man, a taxi driver, lawyers and “hotel people” tell them how to get here?

A CBP spokesman wouldn’t tell us how the Indians are getting here. But the Indians would.

“The hotel people told us who to talk to to bring me here,” says Sandeep.

Rakesh tells CHANNEL 5 NEWS a Guatemalan Taxi driver told him how to find a smuggler.

They got Visas at New Delhi Airport in India to get int Guatemala, smugglers drove and walked them into Mexico and then the United States.

Once in the U.S. they sometimes have friends come to pick them up. Others have to get outside help.

One businessman CHANNEL 5 NEWS spoke with says he picks up Indians from the bus depot almost every night after their lawyers or family call him.

He says he sees about 20 people a week, he helps them book trips out of the Valley and their immigration cases go with them.

Maybe there are terrorists among them, maybe not?

Burhan Nomani says the government believes terrorists could easily walk among the legitimate asylum seekers. They won’t be caught until they create chaos.

But, you can rest assured that some poor schlub from the slums of Calcutta is checked out very very carefully as immigration agents go over their backgrounds very very carefully before dropping them at the bus station and sending them on to your town!

Despite that, the vast majority of Indians coming into the Valley are not terrorists. In fact, Immigration agents check backgrounds and connections of every detained person before they are released.

Give me a break!  A border agent just puts in a call to the chief of police of Calcutta and receives a background report?  We don’t even know their real names or where on earth they have been living, but just run them on over to the bus station and move-em out!  They are someone else’s problem now!

By the way, according to the most recent annual report from the Office of Refugee Resettlement, 22,852 asylum cases were approved in 2008.

Update:  Thanks to Gary for sending some film clips about the situation on the border,here is Greta Van Susteren interviewing a ranch owner, Dr. Michael Vickers and here is a fascinating story (video account) from KRGV-TV about how the Texas Border Volunteers work to protect private ranches from illegal aliens crossing their land.