Category: Europe

Somali family reunification halted in Scandinavia

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Here is a short piece from YLE News in Finland.  (emphasis mine)

Just a reminder that the US cut off most family reunification (called the P-3 program) from Africa in 2008 after discovering the widespread fraud involved and supposedly has not restarted it.   I say supposedly because Somalis have bragged here that it is open and their “families” are getting in.

Family reunification policy has been under discussion in Finland for some time. The Somali community in Finland is now worried that Finnish policy could be influenced by changes in nearby countries.

YLE reported yesterday that family reunifications in Sweden had effectively ended. Swedish authorities now demand identity documents that are very difficult for Somalis to obtain in Somalia given the country’s lack of a functioning government.

”Immigration is quite young in Finland, so we wonder why the Finnish policy often follows those in Sweden and Denmark,” says the vice-chair of the Somali League in Finland, Abdiaziz Godah.

Finnish policy is also expected to tighten yet further after additional restrictions were introduced in the last parliament. Travel expenses are now only be reimbursed for quota refugees accepted by Finland, and DNA testing to ensure family members are related will continue.

”If the goal is to have a coherent policy, then the reference point will be the other Nordic countries,” said Heikki Taskinen, head of the Finnish Immigration Service. “Presumably, further tightening could still happen.”

Much depends on the programme of the next government, after immigration became a key issue for some successful candidates in campaigning ahead of the last parliamentary election.

Another refugee security breach revealed

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Busy day with dangerous “refugees” slipping through security screening.  See Iraqis arrested in Kentucky, here.  Then head over to Lawrenceville, Georgia for a guilty plea in the case of a Serbian war criminal who got into the US as a refugee.

From the Lilburn-Mountain Park Patch:

They simply took his word for it!

A 48-year-old Lawrenceville man who served in the Serbian paramilitary police during the 1992-95 Bosnian War pleaded guilty Tuesday to lying to immigration officials about his background, the U.S. Justice Department said in a news release.

Zeljko Zekic had filed paperwork saying that he was unemployed and living in the Serbian Republic, disguising his true role in the conflict under accused war ciminal Ratko Mladic, according to the release.

U.S. Attorney Sally Quillian Yates charged that Zekic and his family applied for refugee status in the United States in 2002 and eventually were allowed to move here based on the false information. Zekic later received a green card and is now a permanent resident alien, according to the release.

Later research by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Unit determined Zekic had lied about his background. According to the release, Zekic was a master sergeant with a police force inside a Serbian-controlled Bosnian town during the entire conflict.

Because of war crimes committed during the conflict, all adult male Serbs who had lived in Bosnia during that time and sought U.S. refugee status were checked for any connection to Republic of Serbia Army units. Zekic’s false statements prevented a proper background investigation at the time he applied for refugee status, the Justice Department said.

Unbelievable.  How did his lies prevent a thorough security check?

Here is the FBI press release on the case.  I had hoped they would tell us what tipped them off to do the security check now that should have been done BEFORE he was resettled, but I don’t see it.

Turkey making plans to keep out possible Syrian refugee flood

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

They talk about creating a “safe area” within Syria for fleeing Syrian refugees, but it’s really all about keeping them out of Turkey (yet another Muslim country that doesn’t “welcome” its fellow Muslims).

Here is the most telling line in this whole story from Today’s Zaman (sometimes this article loads slowly, keep trying):

Turkey shares an 880-kilometer border with Syria, most of it heavily mined.  

LOL!  And, the US is criticized for a few fences and a few border guards!

Here is more on how Turkey is making plans to send troops into Syria to carve out a “safe” place for refugees within Syria.

Turkish officials have neither denied nor confirmed a report suggesting that the Turkish military has drawn up an operation that would send several battalions of Turkish troops into Syria to carve out a “safe area” for Syrian refugees.

“Watching the hundreds of refugees pouring from Syria across the northern border of Lebanon, the Turkish government is now so fearful of a repeat of the great mass Iraqi Kurdish refugee tide that overwhelmed their border in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War that it has drawn up its own secret plans to prevent the Kurds of Syria moving in their thousands into the Kurdish areas of south-eastern Turkey. Turkish generals have thus prepared an operation that would send several battalions of Turkish troops into Syria itself to carve out a ‘safe area’ for Syrian refugees inside Assad’s caliphate,” veteran journalist Robert Fisk wrote in an article published in the UK daily The Independent on Monday.

In the article titled “Who cares in the Middle East what Obama says?” Fisk also said that Turkey has been prepared to advance well beyond the Syrian border town of Al Qamishli — perhaps half way to Deir el-Zour — to provide a “safe haven” for those fleeing the slaughter in Syria’s cities.

[…..]

At the moment, there is no sign of a huge exodus of refugees from Syria to Turkey. Yet, there is certainly a lot of mental preparation, that is to say talking and planning, just to get ready for such a situation. We don’t have any intention of being caught unaware by anything,” the same diplomat, speaking under the customary condition of anonymity, told Today’s Zaman.

Ethnic nationalism is alive and well in Turkey.  Last year we reported that they don’t like Somalis either, here.

Migrants escaping “Arab Spring” in Africa piling up at Calais….

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

…..hoping to sneak into the UK across the English Channel!   But, hey, I thought the Arab Spring was only bringing democracy and freedom to North Africa?   And where are Wade Rathke and his community organizer buddies when you need them!

From the UK Telegraph:

In a filthy squat two miles from the entrance to the Channel Tunnel, Mohammed Yosif and his friends are hoping for a new life in Britain.

The 21-year-old is one of at least 40,000 to have fled to Europe as a result of the Arab Spring that has seen political unrest sweep north Africa.

Many are migrant workers from sub-Saharan Africa who now believe their lives are at risk, especially in Libya where the regime used black mercenaries to attack rebel forces.

A growing number have now arrived in France and are sleeping rough near ports in a bid to sneak into the UK or at the Gare du Nord Eurostar station in Paris.

“It is very difficult to get on the train, but I dream of England,” said Mohammed, who arrived in Calais on Tuesday after fleeing the war in Libya, where he was a migrant worker from Chad.

“Maybe I will hide, but I hope to find a way to get there somehow. England is a great country where I can have my human rights.”  [Wait! I thought that is what all the revolution in North Africa was about—freedom, democracy, and human rights—ed]

Until he can sneak onto a lorry heading for Britain, he is living with up to 400 other migrants in a squalid, chaotic encampment nicknamed ‘Africa House.’

Read it all—poor Europe, poor England.

Somalis on the move out of South Africa—to Europe or the US

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I had two stories last week which I never got around to writing about the Rainbow Nation—that would be South Africa—and Somalis.  You never hear about South Africa much in the mainstream media these days and that is (I think) because it didn’t turn out to be such a multicultural dream—a “rainbow” Nation after all.   Like most of the world’s countries if you aren’t a “native” you aren’t so welcome (it is called ethnic nationalism).  And folks, it isn’t the white South Africans (they are pretty much hiding out) it’s the black South Africans attacking the outsider Somalis and other Africans.

This story then at Times Live caught my eye.  Writer Jonny Steinberg is apparently hanging out with some Somalis in a Mitchell’s Plain, South Africa flop-house as he writes this:

Somalis glued to the news—looking for the next move:

Each room had four or five mattresses strewn across the floor; a traveller, I was told, paid R30 a night to sleep on one, his roommates invariably strangers. Everyone in the establishment – the owner, the people who cleaned the rooms and cooked, as well as the guests – was Somali.

The lodge’s little restaurant was packed, each customer’s attention fixed on the television screen on the wall. Standing with remote control in hand, the proprietor switched from Al Jazeera to Sky to CNN: any channel covering Libya earned the lodge’s attention.

With the attack on Libya and the disarray in that country they see an opening to get to the Mediterranean and Europe.

My interest in the coverage was somewhat abstract. I wanted Gaddafi to go lest he slaughter people I had never met. The conversation among the travellers around me, translated into English courtesy of my Somali companion, was considerably more practical. Were civil war to break out in Libya, someone asked, would Gaddafi’s forces be too busy fighting to worry about border control? Would it be possible to walk right through the country to the Mediterranean and get a boat to Europe? And what if Gaddafi were overthrown, another person asked. It would take a new regime a long time to settle. Now would be a good time to get to Europe through Libya.

I was being educated in a whole new way of watching television. These people, I realised, imbibed large quantities of international news each day of their lives. All corners of the planet were of interest to them. They combined what they learned on television with the hearsay of travellers; with e-mails and Facebook postings from long-lost relatives; with rumours. They were always calculating, as habitually as they ate and drank, the question forever in their minds: where to go next?

Hey, or another option is the US Southern border!

….. My companion had been told that if you walked across the Mexican border into the US, you would be caught and jailed. But the authorities would not deport you to Somalia’s civil war. After a year or two in prison, they would give you American papers, and you could call for your family to join you.

“How do you know this?” I asked. “Stories,” he replied. “Just stories.”

That’s the thing. CNN, Al Jazeera, the word of a passing traveller: these are hardly reliable sources of news. To be homeless is to be a gambler. You gather the information you can, you calculate, but ultimately you take a leap of faith into the unknown.

Our author suggests the news from passing travelers might not be reliable, but guess what, they have the US asylum and family reunification process pegged.

Heck, today if you can say you have family somewhere in the US, you might not even get detention when caught at the border.    Here is what happens:  Somali crosses the border and asks for asylum from those bad old terrorist Al-shabaabers in Somalia, gets US immigration lawyer, maybe detained, maybe not, lawyer (at taxpayer expense) gets the asylum seeker through the legal loopholes, asylum is granted and asylee gets welfare benefits/job training and then is taught how to get his “family” to America.

By the way, according to the most recent annual report from the Office of Refugee Resettlement, 22,852 asylum cases were approved in 2008.  This is a must-read report!