Category: Christian refugees

A quick question: If Iraq is safe enough to give refuge to Syrians….

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

….why are we still bringing Iraqis to the US?

The New York Times had an article yesterday about the UNHCR warning of dire consequences if the Syrian refugee tide continues to rise.  I’ll be watching for the first sign that Obama wants to help his buds in Turkey by bringing Syrians to the US.  Using the refugee program for other political purposes is one of the worst flaws in the flawed system.

In Turkey, 183,000 registered Syrians live in camps, and an estimated 100,000 unregistered Syrians live in urban areas. Iraq is now home to more than 100,000 Syrians, and Mr. Guterres said 37,000 Syrians had been registered in North Africa.

Holy cow!  We have brought 6,030 Iraqis to the US in the first 4 months of this fiscal year (began Oct.1), here.  I can assure you that most are not Christians!    For readers concerned about the Iraqi Christians, although the State Department knows what percentage of Christians are in this group they do not tell the public, so we can only make assumptions.

And, by the way, the Iraqis arriving here aren’t finding work and are largely on welfare, here.

Huge Christian refugee problem is coming

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I’m watching C-SPAN’s Book TV this Sunday morning. An author, Lela Gilbert, is discussing her book, Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel Through the Eyes of a Christian Sojourner. She was talking about the hundreds of thousands of Jews in Arab lands who had to flee after the founding of Israel. That went on from 1948 until the 1970s, but it’s only now being taken note of. Then she talked about what is going on with Christians in the Middle East. The Iraqi Christians didn’t see it coming, she said. They are still being attacked, and their numbers are a fraction of what they were. (We’ve written about this.) But Iraqi Christians have fled to Syria, and now they are in danger there. Egypt has millions of Christians, and the ones who have enough money to get out are getting out. The others will leave any way they can, lots of them.

There will be no Christians in the Middle East in a few years, except, ironically, in Israel. Lela Gilbert said the Christians’ plight is desperate. “Christians have no Israel,” nowhere to go where they will be automatically accepted. And Christians in the west do not take much interest in these beleaguered people. Their ancient liturgies and ways of worship are strange to most American Christians. Evangelicals consider them Catholic (which they are) and want to “convert” them. Christians usually don’t think of themselves as one people, the way Jews do, and that’s a sad thing. It wasn’t always that way.

I don’t see any solution. We unleashed “change” in the Middle East, and the change turned out to be all in the direction of Islamists taking power. The Jews found there was no room for them decades ago, and now the Christians are finding the same thing.

No jobs, mental illness plague Iraqi refugees in Dearborn, MI

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Since we are on the subject of immigrants with untreated mental illness (see yesterday’s horrifying story from the Boston Globe), this story from Newsweek about Iraqi refugees struggling in Michigan fits right in.

Although Iraq is now governed by a democratically elected government that we gave them at a very high cost to America in blood and treasure, we are still pouring Iraqi refugees into the US for myriad reasons, but like the first sad tale this article tells, some are hankering for the good old days when Saddam Hussein ran the place.

Here is Mohasen wishing she could return to the days of being a ballet instructor in Iraq.  She says she can’t find a ballet job here in the US and must work menial jobs to make ends meet.  But, the reality is that there isn’t ballet in Iraq now either since the Islamists are running the show (no little girls in skimpy costumes).  Mohasen lamenting the loss of her good life in Iraq:

Mohasen flips through an album full of photographs and looks at pictures of young children in delicate yellow ballerina costumes, leaping around a stage. She recites all 20 of their names—students from years ago—calling them her “butterflies,” which was also the name of their ballet troupe. The pictures are reminders of Mohasen’s former life in Baghdad—a life that she knows she will never have again, so long as she is a refugee in the United States.

Newsweek then tells us that 59,000 Iraqis have arrived in the US since 2007. Actually that is wrong, if you go to WRAPS they have a special category just for Iraqis and Iraqi SIVs.  The numbers are 77,534 refugees plus an additional 8,119 SIVs.

Michigan got 12,000 plus Iraqis since 2007, second only to California with over 19,000 between Iraqi refugees and SIVs in the same time period.  How many of those do you think are on some type of welfare?  I bet it’s nearly 100%.

No jobs, mental problems and prejudice.  Prejudice from fellow Arabs (Newsweek doesn’t say it, but it’s Muslim v. Chaldean Christian prejudice most likely)!    How can that be, only white Americans are supposed to be prejudiced?  Right?

When the last envoy of U.S. troops crossed the border into Kuwait, it marked the end of America’s war in Iraq. Billions of dollars had been spent and thousands of lives lost. But while the U.S. celebrated and welcomed its troops home, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were left with a far different reality—redefining their lives as refugees in unfamiliar countries. Now they’re facing a battle of a different sort: assimilating into mainstream America. The challenges range from job woes and the prejudice of earlier immigrants to serious psychological wounds sustained in war.

“Unwelcoming ” Dearborn makes finding a job harder.  Really?  I thought it was the US job market and Michigan’s job market, mental health problems, and lack of English, etc.   Readers we haven’t had so many stories lately, but for awhile we had almost weekly reports of Iraqi refugees somewhere in the US being unhappy with their new lives in America, some even returned to the Middle East in disgust.  LOL! Type ‘Iraqi refugees unhappy‘ into our search function and see what I mean.   Also, click on our Iraqi Refugee category for literally hundreds of posts (551 to be exact!) on problems with Iraqi refugees.  Somebody should write a book!

Many of the refugees headed to Dearborn, Michigan, home to the largest concentration of Arabs, as well as Iraqi expats, in the U.S. According to Hassam Abdulkhaleq, program manager of the psychosocial rehabilitation center at the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services (ACCESS)—one of the largest Arab activist organizations in the country—the first wave of Iraqis arrived in Michigan during the first Gulf War, with a second influx coming at the start of the occupation of Iraq in 2003. Many of the second-wave refugees are Chaldean Christians, who were persecuted along with other religious minorities after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

With the beginning of the war in 2003, resources for the Detroit-area refugee population focused on Iraqis who were particularly vulnerable because of their religious beliefs. Refugees who had settled in the area in years past were not always so welcoming. “There is a blending-in problem,” says Manuel Tancer, a professor of psychiatry at Wayne State University. “And I think it’s a problem with any immigrant.” Tancer counsels victims of torture in the Detroit metropolitan area. “This is an issue when you have people coming to a particular area because they have relatives there. [They are] not always accepted happily and gladly by the people that have been there for a while.”

The unwelcoming environment only made it more difficult for Iraqis to integrate into their new homes. They were seeking acceptance not only from Americans but from the established refugee community as well. The lack of support they received made it that much more difficult for them to find quality work—even if they’d had prosperous careers back in Iraq.

Untreated mental illness is prevalent:

 Like many other Iraqi refugees in the U.S., Mohasen and Fatima’s struggles are exacerbated by past traumas. For most, the war they fled is an ever-present reality. Muntaha Fleful left Iraq after being attacked by a Baghdad militia in 2004. She was resettled in the U.S. in 2008, after being treated for her injuries in Jordan. Now, she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and receives treatment from ACCESS’s psychosocial rehab center.

According to Abdulkhaleq, the center’s program manager, PTSD tends to cause nightmares, poor concentration, and extreme anger. He thinks that thousands of refugees are suffering from mental illnesses associated with war, but that only a small percentage receive treatment due to limited resources in the area.

Oh, geez, will Syrians be coming next?   Dearborn residents worry that the diversity-is-beautiful gang in the State Department will soon throw Syrians into the Michigan melting pot!  (that is not how Newsweek says it!):

The Iraqi population in Dearborn has been the focal point for refugee aid over the past 10 years. But now that the Iraq War has ended, that focus seems to be dropping off in favor of newer conflicts, such as the one in Syria. Although the civil war there continues to spiral, the U.S. has yet to aid Syrian refugees. But officials in Dearborn think it is only a matter of time before they see an influx of Syrians in the area, and worry that the spike may overwhelm already strained resources.

Read it all.

Note:  We have already taken the first step in that direction and Obama has granted Temporary Protected Status to Syrians, here.  That means any Syrians who are in the US already for whatever reason (even illegally) are temporary refugees and are given permission to stay and work indefinitely.  (It is supposed to be temporary, but never is!)

Will Egypt’s Coptic Christians become the new wave of refugees to the US?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

There is no doubt that the hardline Islamic supremacists are making Christians’ lives miserable in Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood-governed Egypt, but because Obama and Hillary have so much invested in the glorious Arab Spring, a wholesale movement of Copts to the US would put a lie to their entire Middle East/Africa foreign policy gamble.  (Just as the murder of four Americans in Benghazi puts a lie to Obama’s Libya “democracy” experiment).

Here is the story from The Commentator (Get ready for Coptic Christian refugees):

 There is a refugee crisis taking place inside Egypt. This became apparent on October 5th, when Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi met with a group of Coptic Christians who had been driven from their homes by Muslim extremists in Rafah, a city located on Egypt’s border with the Gaza Strip.

Morsi met with the families in El Arish, a town approximately 30 miles from Rafah in an attempt to reassure them that the threats and violence they endured before fleeing their homes would never happen to them again.

“What happened is an individual case which represents neither Egypt nor its children, Muslim or Christian,” he said. “It’s a crime for which the perpetrators must be held responsible.”

Morsi intimated to his Coptic audience that he would work to find new homes and livelihoods for them elsewhere in Egypt. This prompted an angry response from the Coptic families who complained that they had already established their lives in Rafah – the city where they had just been driven from and where Christians had been living for close to two millennia.

It’s interesting to note that Morsi did not meet with the Copts in Rafah itself, but in a town approximately 30 miles away.

The city of Rafah, from which weapons are being smuggled through tunnels into the Gaza Strip on a regular basis, has been effectively overrun by Jihadists who are even more extreme than the Muslim Brotherhood. If Morsi, Egypt’s president, can’t set foot in Rafah, there is simply no way he can help Coptic Christians to move back into the city.

The ethnic cleansing of Coptic Christians from Rafah is of great consequence. Rafah is the place where, according to tradition, Jesus Christ crossed into ancient Egypt soon after his birth to avoid his detection and murder by King Herod in Bethlehem in a story told in the Gospel of Matthew.

By acquiescing to the cleansing of Christians from Rafah – where one church (out of three in the city) has been recently destroyed – Morsi is cooperating with the Islamist project of separating Christianity from its historical and geographical roots in the Middle East.

So what happens next?

Eventually, the refugee crisis inside Egypt will spill over its borders and become an international problem.

How will Western leaders and intellectuals respond?

One commenter to the story suggests that Israel might take them.   But ‘Raymond in DC’ said this (I have no idea if this is true!):

Won’t happen. Egypt’s Cops number some 8 million, while Israel’s total population is roughly 7.5 million. Besides, when Jews did live in Egypt they weren’t especially well treated by Cops, and many are, as you suggest, as anti-Semitic as their Muslim brethren.

Christian homeschool family denied asylum in New Zealand

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Editor:  This is cross-posted from Potomac Tea Party Report.

Not politically correct!   Therefore no asylum!

The German education gestapo still might get its hooks into this Christian family.  The homeschooling  family left Germany in 2008 and sought asylum from persecution in New Zealand which has now denied their request.  If deported to Germany their children might be removed from their home.

Thank goodness we haven’t reached this stage in America (yet!).  But, Bill Ayers and his comrades are working on it, here.

From Radio New Zealand:

Gerno and Andrea Schöneich claimed that the teaching of their four children about Darwinism, neo-Marxist critical theory and sex education in school was in conflict with their Christian beliefs.

The children have been homeschooled since arriving in New Zealand in 2008 and since applying for asylum Mr Schöneich has gained a work visa to teach at a Christian school.

The Immigration and Protection Tribunal said there is no international right to homeschooling and the family was not being persecuted.

It said education includes the elimination of ignorance and the improvement of access to scientific and technical knowledge.

The tribunal said there is no international right to homeschooling and the prosecution the family faced for keeping their children away from school did not amount to persecution.

Home Education Foundation national director Barbara Smith says the family could be deported if Mr Schöneich’s work visa is not renewed, and they would then be under threat in Germany of being fined, jailed or having their children removed.

We’ve learned from long experience elsewhere that whites trying to get out of South Africa or Christians seeking protection for their beliefs don’t get the same treatment as “refugees” of the politically-correct sort do.