Maybe refugees are involved in food stamp fraud after all

07/30/2008 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been posting on Food Stamp Fraud ever since a convenience store in our county was raided due to allegations of fraud. I always put a disclaimer on those posts saying that as far as I knew refugees weren’t involved, just other immigrants who happened to also be members of the religion of peace.

Today this post was on one of my google alerts. It’s from something called the Ohio Attorney Lawyer. You can go here and see it. It’s so garbled and the English is so horrible I wondered how anything called Attorney Lawyer would get any business with such awful writing skills. So, I searched around with some words in that garbled post and came up with a story about Somalis being arrested a few years back for food stamp fraud.

This is from the article, 6 years old now, that began with the same story that the garbled post reported today. Read the whole article about how Somali asylees (just refugees who got here on their own steam and asked for asylum) have scammed the taxpayer. But here is an even more serious part of the scam:

Food stamp fraud has taken on more sinister dimensions within the last year and a half. Last autumn, the FBI determined that the Somali asylee community in Seattle, set with food stamps and other forms of public assistance, was targeted by the Al-Barakaat Wire Transfer company, a wire transfer and hawala banking outfit with known connections to Al Qaeda. Al-Barakaat set up a storefront in Seattle and immediately went to work selling Qat, a mild narcotic popular with Somalis, and converting food stamps to money for Somalis to send back to their relatives in Somalia. The FBI believes Al-Barakaat skimmed tens of millions of dollars off of the proceeds of these two activities, and funneled it directly to Al Qaeda.

Do you think the immigration lawyers who help these people get asylum ever feel guilty later when they learn their clients are crooks and possibly terrorists?

Then here is another Somali food stamp scam bust, in Ohio no less, and more recent (January of this year):

Eight men who ran four area food markets are accused of abusing federal food programs for the needy at a cost to taxpayers of more than $1.5 million, newly unsealed charges allege.

Federal officials announced the indictments and arrests yesterday, though six of the eight men were indicted on Jan. 10 and arrested Friday.

The indictments say that the owners and managers of two stores on the North Side and two on the West Side allowed their customers to use food stamps and WIC vouchers illegally. They permitted, authorities say, the exchange of the stamps and vouchers for cash and allowed people to use them to buy prepaid international phone cards and to pay off personal loans.

In some cases, the money also was laundered through U.S. bank accounts and wasn’t disclosed on tax returns, said IRS spokesman Craig Casserly.

All eight of the men indicted are Somali immigrants who were in the country legally but are not U.S. citizens.

I wonder where those eight are now. Prison? Deported? or loose in a city near you?

Muslim refugees in Norway causing conflicts, pushing Sharia

07/26/2008 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Judy posted on this story yesterday here. However, this morning the International Herald Tribune has a more detailed article about what caused the Muslim on Muslim crime in a refugee center in Norway this week.

On Friday morning, the police arrested five Chechen men, aged 23 to 43, on suspicion of taking part in the 15-minute attack, but Fremstad said it was not clear all the attackers were of the same nationality. Online media reports said the dispute may have grown out of a complaint that a Kurdish boy had bothered two Chechen women inside the center. “Whatever the original cause,” said Superintendent Fremstad, “it was trivial until somebody’s honor got offended.” [Ed: yup, Muslim honor is all important under sharia]

The center in Vaaler houses some 250 asylum seekers from Russia, Iraq, Iran, Somalia and Eritrea, among other nations, and is one of 70 such facilities in Norway.

Norway is being flooded by refugees from primarily Muslim countries seeking asylum.

Agnar Kaarboe, communications director of the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration, said a meeting would be held Friday night at the Vaaler center to try to calm tempers.

Kaarboe said the number of asylum seekers assigned to Vaaler was “defensible,” but he acknowledged systematic overcrowding at centers nationwide following a doubling in the number of asylum applications in the past year.

“The entire asylum reception system is under pressure,” he said. More than 8,000 refugees are now living in centers while their applications are under review. Nearly 60 percent face deportation under current policies. Immigration authorities are seeking to build many additional reception centers, often in the face of local opposition, and have resorted at times to erecting tents to house young male refugees.

Judy asked yesterday, where were the Vikings of old? Note the one mention above about “local opposition”. The Vikings must still be around, it’s just that reporters like this one from the International Herald Tribune aren’t telling you much about them. The mainstream media does not want you to know there is opposition to refugee resettlement.

Finally, the sentence that jumped out at me was this one:

At the Vaaler asylum center in 2005, the police responded to repeated altercations stemming from a demand by several Chechen residents for the imposition of strict Muslim law, or Sharia, at the facility.

This is what this kind of immigration is all about. Muslims have figured out how to spread themselves around the world playing on the sympathies of western do-gooders by claiming to be poor refugees in order to plant and spread Sharia law to the civilized West.

Are these Cuban immigrants refugees?

07/22/2008 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I bet you were under the impression that the era of Cuban refugees streaming to the US had pretty much ended. A reader sent this article about a Cuban family being resettled in Texas by the International Rescue Committee and commented about this line in the article:

The family said they sought asylum in the U.S. three years ago for economic reasons.

The legal definition of a refugee is:

REFUGEE – Any person who is outside any country of such person’s nationality or, in the case of a person having no nationality, is outside any country in which such person last habitually resided, and who is unable or unwilling to return to, and is unable or unwilling to avail himself or herself of the protection of, that country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.

So, we don’t just take people, even families like this one who sound like nice people, into the refugee program who are economic migrants as they appear to be. They need to be persecuted or fear persecution.

What is the big deal? Well, refugees are entitled to taxpayer subsidized airfare loans, subsidized housing, a case worker provided through the volag and funded by you, food stamps and other forms of welfare. Other immigrants are on their own.

One bit of information I discovered is that the Cubans don’t even have to be outside of the country to seek asylum, we now process them in Cuba. See this information.

East Africans breaking into Europe, some dying on the way

07/14/2008 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I came across this story just as I finished my previous post last night about East Africans entering the US illegally. What struck me right away in this latest article is that those trying to enter Europe (Spain in this case) illegally are so-called “refugees” from Somalia and Eritrea (two of the 4 countries sending illegals to the US).

A series of tragedies involving migrants off the coast of Spain have raised fears that the summer could see a record-breaking death toll in the region, as refugees embark on increasingly perilous routes in smaller boats to avoid detection.

According to human rights agencies, there has been a sharp increase in the numbers of people attempting to make the sea crossing from North Africa to southern Europe, many of them from sub-Saharan conflict zones such as Eritrea and Somalia.

After a week of disasters and rescues at sea that has shocked Spaniards, authorities have identified the coastal port of Almería as the new favoured destination for human traffickers attempting to avoid increased police patrols and surveillance. A total of 51 migrant deaths at sea has been reported this year, but the actual mortality rate is certain to be far higher, since the bodies of many refugees are never recovered. The Red Cross estimates between 2,000 and 3,000 people die trying to reach Spain every year.

I’m making a new category called ‘Africa’, because we have posted so many times on issues relating to the continent and it looks like there will be no let-up.

East Africans easily entering US illegally

07/13/2008 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This story is in keeping with the African theme I’ve been stuck on for the last few days. But here is what I’m wondering: why do these East Africans have to sneak across the border when our immigration programs, like refugee resettlement, will just bring them over, pay the airfare and set them up in an apartment? And, lest we forget, take care of any HIV problems they might have.

Concern about a terrorist threat to the United States is growing among American intelligence officials due to a recent upsurge in the number of East Africans who have been caught trying to enter the US illegally.

Citing an “internal government assessment” that it had obtained, the Associated Press reported last week that the US is focusing new attention on networks that smuggle people from Djibouti, Eritrea, Somalia and Sudan.

These four countries are among 35 confidentially listed by the US Department of Homeland Security as being of “special interest” due to the alleged presence of terrorists in their territories.

A total of 159 citizens of the four East African countries have been captured in the past several months as they tried to enter the US without permission. That compares to 125 for all of last year and a total of 22 in 2003.

Read the rest of this sobbering article here. I bet these illegals can blend right into the African immigrant neighborhoods developing in cities large and small across the country. Where’s the fence?