Over 110,000 Iraqis have entered the US since the end of the Bush Administration

02/04/2015 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been in Washington all day (regarding the refugee program) and am too tired to post much, but ‘Pungentpeppers’ found this news last night and I decided to at least post this today. From Epoch Times where the reporter reminds us of how the Bush Administration was really concerned about security issues with the Iraqis and had been only letting in a trickle of Iraqi refugees until sometime in 2007.

This news story picks up at the end of the Bush Administration, but here are the Iraqi numbers prior to the Obama years which are now numbering close to 20,000 a year.

Back then, every month (as the numbers were released) for probably a year, a reporter for AP—Matthew Lee—beat on the Bush Administration with a chorus of NGO ‘humanitarian’ groups sniping from the wings.

Once the Iraqi numbers took off, they really took off, as you can see in the graph and below.

Interesting to me is that there is virtual silence from this same bunch of reporters who shill for the Open Borders Left about Obama’s foot-dragging on Syrian refugees.

The UK, which is also foot-dragging on admitting Syrians, is being harassed in the media by the usual Leftist suspects, but they are silent about the US and Obama—what gives?

By the way, this reporter at Epoch Times estimates that 2/3 rds of the Iraqis are Muslims, my numbers indicate it is closer to 3/4th (at least in the post-2007 era).

From Epoch Times:

It has been seven years since the United States opened its borders to tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees. And they keep coming. Last year, over 20,000 crossed the border—a record number. More than 1,500 more have come so far in 2015, as of Jan. 31, foretelling another high year. So where are they settling?

[….]

Since then over 110,000 have come to the United States.

[….]

The largest chunk, over 23,000 settled in California. Close to 18,000 ended up in Michigan and another almost 11,000 in Texas.

[….]

California is the biggest host state for refugees. Out of some 600,000 refugees that have come to the country in the past decade, more than 65,000 went to California—over two thirds of them were from Iraq and Iran.

Cities and towns with the highest incoming Iraqi refugee population in the past 10 years:

El Cajon California 9,568

Southfield Michigan 4,417

San Diego California 3,742

Phoenix Arizona 3,723

Houston Texas 3,532

Sterling Heights Michigan 3,505

Chicago Illinois 3,104
Source: U.S. Department of State, Jan .31, 2015

Go to the article, here, to see how many your state received. LOL! I see ol’ Joe Biden’s Delaware got a grand total of 8 Iraqis (Biden was one of the original sponsors of the Refugee Act of 1980).

We have 646 posts in our Iraqi refugee category in case anyone wants to write a book—we’ve done your research! You will find posts there about reporter Matthew Lee’s monthly squawks about Bush!

WND: More news on Syrian refugees headed to the US; and where are the Christians?

01/28/2015 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Leo Hohmann writing at World Net Daily today reports on the locations where Syrian (mostly Muslim) refugees will be resettling in America. Some of his news might not be new to regular readers of RRW (he quotes us), but he includes a long section on the plight of the Syrian Christians which I did not know much about.

Here is his introduction to the report entitled, Secret planting of up to 75,000 Syrian Muslims begins in U.S.:

“Up to 10,000 Syrian refugees, most of them Muslims, will be resettled in cities throughout the U.S. in 2015, with that figure expected to surge to near 75,000 over the next five years.

While some of the planned destinations for these refugees are starting to leak out, the big question is: where will they be going?

The U.S. State Department does not announce where it plans to send foreign refugees for resettlement within the United States, although the locations do eventually show up in a government database some weeks after they arrive in their host cities. Word of their anticipated arrivals will sometimes surface earlier in local media reports.

And that’s already happening in North Dakota, Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio and Washington.”

I urge you to read it all. WND is one of the only national news outlets that tells the public who the federal resettlement contractors are that operate in 180 cities across America. See our archive, here, of other reports from WND.

See also our December 30, 2014 post about Syrian Christians in Turkey.

Toronto Catholic leader: We won’t request Christian Syrians for resettlement first to Canada

01/11/2015 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

….. we support taking “vulnerable” Muslims!

As Canadian readers know, your government recently came under fire by the UN and the elements of the worldwide ‘humanitarian industrial complex’ for saying Canada would prioritize Syrian resettlement by selecting Christians and other persecuted minorities as a first priority.

Consumed by political correctness?

The “furious” Martin Mark, Executive Director of the Archdiocese of Toronto would never ask the Canadian government to protect Christians first! Photo: http://www.thestar.com/news/atkinsonseries/2014/09/22/delay_delay_delay.html

In all the years we have followed the refugee program in the US, we have never seen any of the so-called ‘religious’ charities which are also resettlement contractors*** ever say they were concerned first for the Christians of the Middle East.

Now comes a very definitive statement by the Executive Director of the Archdiocese of Toronto confirming that the Roman Catholic Church indeed does not place Christians first in their concerns. They call it refugee “discrimination!”

From the Western Catholic Reporter:

Religion should never be used to prioritize Syrian refugees for resettlement, said Catholic agencies amid reports that the Canadian government intends to give preferential treatment to religious minorities.

The CBC and Post Media both reported that the government intends to accept into Canada only Syrian refugees who face religious persecution.

Quoting sources inside a United Nations High Commission for Refugees pledging conference in Geneva, the media outlets claimed Canada clashed with the UNHCR over the government’s intended policy.

Neither the Canadian churches that privately sponsor refugees nor Syrian Christians themselves have asked the government to give special treatment to religious minorities.

In question period Dec. 12, Costas Menegakis, parliamentary secretary to Immigration Minister Chris Alexander, refused to say if the government intended to limit the resettlement program based on religion.

“We will prioritize persecuted ethnic and religious minorities, those at demonstrated risk, and we will make no apologies for that,” said Menegakis.

Speaking to The Catholic Register from a massive refugee camp in Jordan, the executive director of the Archdiocese of Toronto’s Office for Refugees said he would never ask the government to restrict refugee sponsorship to Christians or other religious minorities. [The UN camp from which Mark speaks is almost exclusively housing Sunni Muslims. Why isn’t he in Turkey talking to the Christians?—ed]

“It would be a big mistake to say we have to check the religion on the refugee. No. We have to check the reason why somebody has become a refugee,” said Martin Mark.

[….]

Need, vulnerability and the immediate risk to individuals and families are the only proper criteria to determine which refugees should be resettled, said Father Nawras Sammour, Jesuit Refugee Service country director for Syria.

I’ll bet a buck that there are 10,000 (the number Canada now says it will take) very vulnerable Christians and other minorities in “immediate risk” they could readily take rather than the mostly Sunni Muslims which are housed in UN camps.

By the way, as we debate this Muslim vs. Christian resettlement issue, don’t lose sight of the fact that resettling any refugee is enormously expensive to the taxpayers of the receiving country and that there are many considerations, other than religion, that should limit the numbers to be taken anywhere in the first world.

I would like to know more about the refugee responsibility split in Canada where supposedly 60% of refugees are supported privately and 40% by the government. Of course in the US it is 100% government supported as the feds funnel taxpayer money through so-called ‘religious’ charities. If we in the US went back to complete private support of refugees entering the US we would learn very quickly who is, and who isn’t, interested in true Christian charity. You know that old maxim! Put your own personal money where your mouth is!

There is nothing that lights my fuse more than the wealthy Catholic Church virtually stealing money from struggling taxpayers so that they can play humanitarian big shots! The USCCB (below) migration program is 98% funded by the US taxpayer.

See our entire category on Canada by clicking here.

*** US resettlement contractors:

Syrian Christian refugees headed to Turkey

12/30/2014 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Rarely do we see news about the persecuted Christians of Syria. What we have seen indicated many were still in Syria and protected by the Assad government. For new readers, when you see news of the hundreds of thousands of Syrians flooding into UN camps in Lebanon and Jordan, those are mostly Sunni Muslims (thus if we take refugees coming from those UN camps, we will get mostly Muslims in our upcoming batch of 10,000 or so).

This article at National Geographic is pretty interesting. The only problem with going to Turkey is that they are persecuted for their ethnicity and their religion as they return to their ancient (pre-Islam!) homeland.

The fifth-century Mor Barsaumo church in Midyat, Turkey, draws Syriac Christians in what was once the faith’s heartland, as well as refugees fleeing violence in Syria and Iraq. Photograph by Monique Jaques, National Geographic

Many are waiting in Midyat for their applications for asylum in Germany and elsewhere in Europe to be approved.

National Geographic:

MIDYAT, Turkey—On most afternoons, Mor Barsaumo, a honey-colored, fifth-century stone church nestled in a warren of slanted streets, draws a crowd. In the narrow courtyard, old men smoke cigarettes and drink coffee, while children kick a soccer ball across the stone floor. In a darkened classroom, empty except for a few desks, a teacher gives private lessons in Syriac, derived from Aramaic, the language of Christ.

And now, the refugees also come.

Advised by relatives or other refugees, newcomers to Midyat often make the steps of the church their first stop. Midyat and its environs—known in Syriac as Tur Abdin, “mountain of the servants of God”—are the historical heartland of the Middle East’s widely dispersed Syriac Orthodox Christian community. Now the region has become a haven as the fighting in Syria and Iraq has forced Christians to flee their homes.

“All Syriac Christians come here. Most of the aid is delivered from here,” says Ayhan Gürkan, a deacon at Mor Barsaumo and a member of the Tur Abdin Syriac Christians Committee, set up to look after Midyat’s Christian refugees.

But, even their refuge in Turkey is temporary:

For the four monks at Mor Gabriel Monastery, one of the oldest monasteries in the world, the flight of so many refugees to Europe is a painful reminder of how little is left of their world. A few refugees stay intermittently at the monastery, where they receive free room and board as well as money for doing odd jobs, but many head to Europe.

Here, Isa Gulten, an archdeacon at the monastery, conducts sporadic lessons in Syriac. This time, it’s for an audience of one: a German of Syriac descent studying to become a priest when he returns to Berlin. “You are listening to the original language of Christ,” Gulten says, reading a passage from St. Paul’s epistles.

“As Christians, we suffer doubly in the Middle East,” he says, pointing to the difference with Turkey’s Kurds, most of whom are Sunni Muslims. “The Kurds here are persecuted just for their ethnicity. But we are persecuted for both our ethnicity and our faith.”

Read it all.

As far as we know, only Canada has said specifically it will take Syrian Christians as a first priority, and as you can imagine the ‘humanitarian industrial complex’ is not pleased!

Has anyone heard anything out of the contractors, including the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, specifically about these Syrian Christians?

Swedes fearful their welfare system won’t survive the Middle East migrant onslaught

12/06/2014 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Middle Easterners make up 30,000 of Sodertalje’s population of 90,000!

The story is being reported at one of America’s left-leaning news outlets—National Public Radio. In this case, we are told that the “refugees” flooding into Sodertalje are mostly Syrian and Iraqi Christians—very needy ones. The unemployment rate is high for the immigrants who must first learn to speak Swedish and there is a desperate shortage of housing.

Sweden’s migration board projects that 95,000 people, many of them refugees from Syria, are expected to arrive in 2015. That would be a record in this country of 10 million people, which already has taken in more refugees, relative to its population, than any other country in Europe.

But the arrival of so many refugees is testing the country’s famously tolerant identity.

Swedes voted out centrist Prime Minister Frederik Reinfeldt this September after he gave a speech asking people to “open their hearts” to those fleeing war.

Instead, an anti-immigrant party, the Sweden Democrats, won seats in parliament and helped bring down the center-left government of Prime Minister Stefan Lofven earlier this week.

One member of the Sweden Democrats, Linus Byland, told reporters they would fight any government proposal that would increase funding for immigration.

“There was a sense that our government didn’t have a clear plan for how to manage immigration,” says Boel Godner, the mayor of Sodertalje. “And the question that has come up lately, is, can the welfare system bear us all? What’s going to happen to everyone who comes here? No one has given the answer to that yet.”

Sweden’s cradle to grave welfare system can’t possibly bear them all, so I guess we all sit back and learn an important lesson about what happens when a country runs out of other peoples’ money.

See our complete ‘invasion of Europe’ archive by clicking here. And, see all of our posts on Sweden, here.