Category: Asylum seekers

France puts checkpoints on Italian border to keep out migrants from North Africa

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

It’s amazing how quickly European Union—we are all one big happy borderless Europe—mumbo jumbo is forgotten when serious threats to a country’s sovereignty arise.

From the Wall Street Journal:

VENTIMIGLIA, Italy—The migration wave unleashed by North African unrest has prompted France to resurrect its border with Italy—a barrier that was supposedly consigned to history’s dustbin with Europe’s unified economy.

A couple of miles from the beach town of Ventimiglia, nestled along the Italian Riviera, French police have restaffed a formerly abandoned checkpoint along the country’s Mediterranean border with Italy.

In the nearby French town of Menton, French police in riot gear board trains crossing into France, grilling passengers while other police forces are monitoring roads and foot trails that lead into French territory from Italy.

Fences sure do make good neighbors.

To read the rest of the story, you will have to log-in at the Wall Street Journal.

Australian: All immigrants are not the same (duh!)

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is an overly long piece by Greg Sheridan, foreign affairs correspondent for The Australian explaining how the realization has dawned on him that Australian multiculturalism is failing for one primary reason—Muslim immigrants.

I found myself annoyed as if I was reading the confessions of a liberal who got mugged.  However, it seems Sheridan isn’t liberal in the George Soros sort of way.    I was further annoyed by his assumption (that he gets from the mainstream media) that America is successfully assimilating its immigrants—Not!

Anyway, here is a bit of Sheridan’s ‘How I lost faith in multiculturalism‘ from The Australian:

IN 1993, my family and I moved into Belmore in southwest Sydney. It is the next suburb to Lakemba. When I first moved there I loved it.

We bought a house just behind Belmore Sports Ground, in those days the home of my beloved Bulldogs rugby league team. Transport was great, 20 minutes to the city in the train, 20 minutes to the airport.

On the other side of Belmore, away from Lakemba, there were lots of Chinese, plenty of Koreans, growing numbers of Indians, and on the Lakemba side lots of Lebanese and other Arabs.

That was an attraction, too. I like Middle Eastern food. I like Middle Eastern people. The suburb still had the remnants of its once big Greek community and a commanding Greek Orthodox church.

But in the nearly 15 years we lived there the suburb changed, and much for the worse.

Three dynamics interacted in a noxious fashion: the growth of a macho, misogynist culture among young men that often found expression in extremely violent crime; a pervasive atmosphere of anti-social behaviour in the streets; and the simultaneous growth of Islamist extremism and jihadi culture.

This is my story, our story and the story of a failed policy.

Gee, I realized after spending time in Europe that the problem wasn’t European multiculturalism that went awry (or never existed in the first place) but it was the large Muslim population most of whom are not like us and have no interest in assimilating.

So this must, logically, lead to one extremely inconvenient, politically incorrect and desperately fraught question. Could it be that the main difference between Europe, with its seething immigration problems, and the US, Canada and Australia, with their success, is not actually a difference based on some footling interpretation of multiculturalism?

There is one other variable that is consistent with the results. The US, Canada and Australia have far smaller Muslim migrant communities as a percentage of their total populations than do most of the troubled nations of Europe. Could this be the explanation?

All immigrants are not the same:

No one in Europe, 25 years ago, thought they would be in the mess they’re in today.

Australia has been a successful immigration country. But the truth is not all immigrants are the same. And it may be much easier than people think to turn success into failure.

So, now what the hell will Australia, or Canada, or for that matter the US, do to stop the inevitable?   After all, the writing is on the wall and it’s unfortunate that those who might have led us—‘intellectuals’ of all stripes—can’t see it (or, like Sheridan, are seeing it too late).

Gates of Vienna: The Rhine is freezing…

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Last night I was discussing my post about Malta and about the invasion of Italian islands by hundreds, thousands, of immigrants flooding out of North Africa with my friend Richard at Blue Ridge Forum.  I wondered aloud if the Romans knew the empire was falling before it finally did.   Did they see it coming?

I see, thanks to Richard, that others are thinking the same horrible thoughts—two days ago from Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna:

The fall of the Roman Empire was not a sudden event.

The imperial power wielded by Rome decreased gradually over the course of centuries, during which time a steady deterioration was punctuated by repeated barbarian incursions and the sacking of cities. The reach of the empire shrank by fits and starts until it was overthrown entirely and replaced by kingdoms ruled by the Germanic invaders.

In his address to the Magna Carta Foundation in Rome on Friday night, Geert Wilders referred to a significant event during the course of the fall of Rome: the freezing of the Rhine on December 31st, 406. This allowed thousands of Germanic invaders to cross the frozen river and overrun Gaul, after which they were well-positioned to invade the Italian peninsula and sack Rome itself just a few years later.

Mr. Wilders finds a parallel to these events in the current decline of Western Civilization. He notes that modern-day barbarians — immigrants from the Islamic world — are anticipating the equivalent of the freezing of the Rhine, after which they will be able to overrun and sack the copious riches of an all-but-moribund Europe.

[….]

This has been the winter of Arab discontent, and as a result of the recent upheavals in North Africa and the Middle East, the metaphorical Rhine may finally have frozen over. Instead of a river, the barbarian invaders are crossing the Mediterranean Sea. Instead of walking, they are cramming themselves into rickety boats and crossing over into Italian territory.

Please read Baron’s whole treatise, and then this from the concluding paragraphs:

The Rhine is beginning to freeze.

The PC-MC impulse is widespread and deeply embedded in Europe. It will take catastrophic circumstances to dislodge it, but a great slow-motion catastrophe is even now unfolding.

Is America far behind?

Somali smuggling, what did asylum lawyers know and when did they know it?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is a story, hat tip: Paul, from the Investigative Project on Terrorism about a Somali who will soon be sentenced for illegally smuggling Somalis, who may have terrorist connections, into the US.

From the Investigative Project:

A lucrative and active human smuggling ring brought an undetermined number of potential Somali jihadists into the United States through Brazil, federal prosecutors say in court papers.

Those prosecutors are asking a federal judge in San Antonio to give the maximum sentence to a Somali man who pleaded guilty in November to two counts of making false statements on a 2008 asylum application. Ahmed Muhammed Dhakane failed to report his connections to Al-Ittihad Al-Islami (AIAI) and al-Barakat, both specially designated terrorist organizations.

When he is sentenced April 28, prosecutors want U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez to factor in a series of related and disturbing actions spelled out in this memorandum, including the human smuggling of potential terrorists. They intend to call several law enforcement witnesses and three people Dhakane smuggled into the country.

The smuggling was run through Brazil, aided by bribes paid to immigration authorities there, from June 2006 through March 2008. Dhakane instructed those he smuggled on how to make false asylum claims.

The sentencing memo was first reported by Patrick Poole.

[…..]

Dhakane smuggled in people he knew were violent jihadists “with the full knowledge that if the decision was made by the [terrorist group], for which he was associated with in the past, to commit terrorist acts in the United States, these jihadists would commit violent acts in and against the United States,” they [prosecutors] added.

Read it all, Dhakane may also be charged in a rape case.

Gosh, it was just yesterday we reported that asylum lawyers were putting their heads together on how to flood the system with asylum claims from Mexico, here.

And then, here, back in January, I speculated that some of the Somalis making their way across the world are somehow in contact with asylum lawyers or non-profit agencies awaiting their arrival on the southern border.   I wonder did this case involve any advance planning with Mr.Dhakane from this side of the border? That is what I would like to know!

Plan to overload the asylum system at southern border

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The Center for Immigration Studies noted in a recent posting by David North that open borders groups and immigration lawyers are teaming up to increase the number of asylum seekers coming across the Mexican border.  We have written before, here, about Somalis coming across the border with the help of NGOs and lawyers, but this plan involves Mexicans who would be presumably seeking asylum from the crime (persecution?) in their home country.   Hat tip: Paul

At the moment the cloud at the southern border is no larger than a man’s hand, but it has prospects for seriously complicating the nation’s immigration control programs.

Observers have long known that if there were a massive number of asylum applications by Mexican nationals, legal and illegal, the entire immigration apparatus would be seriously challenged, if not totally swamped.

At the moment the approval rate for Mexicans applying for asylum, despite the ferocious gang activity on the other side of the border, is only a little over 2 percent, but it is not the approval rate that worries but the application rate. Should that soar we would be in big trouble.

And it might. Jason Dzubow, a skilled asylum lawyer here in Washington, has written in both the Asylumist and Immigration Daily that some Mexican asylum seekers and their advocates “have formed a coalition to support each other in their cases.”

He writes that “immigration attorneys and immigrant-rights groups in … El Paso said that they have formed a coalition aimed at providing greater support for asylum seekers facing a hurdle-ridden application process.”

[….]

If these organizers are at all successful, it could put a serious strain on the system, even if the approval rate stays as low as it is, and the relentless violence on the other side of the border can only work to increase both applications and approvals.

Putting a strain on the system (any government system) seems to be what the far Left is all about these days.  They all must be getting their training in the Cloward-Piven strategy on the war of the ‘have-nots’ against the ‘haves.’

We learned this week that the Hispanic population in the US has reached 50 million, so what is the end-game for Jason Dzubow and his buddies?  Overload America with an impoverished population that couldn’t govern itself in the countries they came from?  Then what?