Category: Immigration fraud

Santorum soars on immigration!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Readers: this is cross posted from Potomac Tea Party Report (my other blog).   You may want to check out other posts there over the last few days as they are related to immigration issues.  Keep in mind the post is written for an audience which may not be as savvy as RRW readers on Legal immigration problems and programs.

Yesterday I wrote a post based on a Washington Times story from Thursday that said that the immigration control crowd was forming behind Mitt Romney.  But, all that appears to have changed when Rick Santorum gave a speech on Friday in South Carolina that will change the playing field for many.  Michael Savage, for one, should be pleased that one of the candidates has finally come out forcefully on immigration.

In a press release late last night, NumbersUSA announced that the former Pennsylvania Senator had soared to the top of their Presidential scorecard primarily because he didn’t just stick to the usual talking point—illegal immigration is bad, legal is good—he told people that the numbers are too high.  He took on, without prompting, the Diversity Visa Lottery and chain migration (that is when you get your foot in the door, you can bring a whole host of relatives in with you).

Somalis are a case in point

Not to get too deep into the weeds, but on this business of chain migration, the US State Department in 2008 halted “family reunification” for Somalis (and a few other African groups) when they discovered through some random DNA testing that the would-be family members weren’t family at all.   It is believed that as many as 36,000 Somalis got into the US illegally by claiming family connections.

Diversity visa is insane

Also, I haven’t mentioned it here much (here is one post this past July), but the Diversity Visa Lottery (yes, a real lottery) allows 50,000 immigrants from countries—Nigeria, Egypt, Kenya, Bangladesh etc.—that we don’t (supposedly) have enough people from to apply for a lottery to get into the US to increase our diversity.  NumbersUSA has been working with certain members of Congress in recent years to kill the program.

So, here then is what NumbersUSA is saying about Rick Santorum:

Former Sen. Rick Santorum zoomed from the back of the GOP pack on immigration issues to way out FRONT at a C-SPAN televised event in South Carolina on Friday. For the first time in many years,  we have a Presidential candidate who says LEGAL immigration numbers are too high!

[…..]

Congratulations to all of you Santorum supporters who have been pushing him to greatly improve his immigration platform.  You succeeded beyond most of our wildest dreams.

Now, the rest of you who are supporting other GOP and Democratic candidates need to increase your pressure on them to catch up to Santorum.

Roy Beck explains what happened—Santorum from a D- to an A literally overnight:

We have long said that candidates don’t need a long speech or a huge position paper to make it clear to the American public that they think American workers should get the next U.S. jobs, that illegal aliens should not be rewarded with U.S. jobs and that legal immigration categories should be cut if they don’t serve the national interest.

When Santorum began moving up in the public opinion polls late November and December, we devoted blogs and webcasts to his poor record on immigration that worked out to a D-minus.

But we always said that his bad grade was mainly based on bad decisions in the 1990s and on a lack of statements on various categories during the campaign.  We said that it would be easy for him to improve his platform and grade very quickly with a set of new statements and promises.

Here is the clincher.  Santorum went beyond the usual—I oppose illegal immigration—and took it one step further.

But for the first time in the year-long Presidential campaign thus far, we have a candidate who has brought up the Visa Lottery and Chain Migration.

Go to NumbersUSA to see what Santorum said.

I guess we will now be testing the Michael Savage thesis!

Al Gore is responsible for the Kosovar refugees in the US

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

….he was importing Democrat voters!  I’m jesting, it is actually much more disgusting then that.

I guess by now you’ve seen the news about the Kosovo-born Muslim immigrant who planned to ‘off’ a few infidels in Tampa, FL.  He wanted to bring terror to his “victim’s hearts.”    If you haven’t heard the news from yesterday then check out Gates of Vienna, here.  Limits to Growth, here and Creeping Sharia, here.

I’m guessing that the arrested terror-plotter is one of the thousands of refugees admitted to the US in the wake of Bill Clinton’s Bosnian war, or is a relative of one of those who came in 12 years ago.   Our perp would have been a child if he had been part of the infamous airlift (but so was one of the Fort Dix jihad plotters, remember them) when he arrived with the largest group of Kosovars we admitted.

Here is the simple version.  In 1999, we brought 15,000 Kosovars to the US and later that year we flew about 10,000 back.   You see they didn’t really want to be here in the first place. I reported on this incredible situation here in 2009.

But, it wasn’t until March 2010 that I learned what really happened when I found this declassified report from the National War College.  The paper written by David Robinson (still involved with the State Department refugee program I believe) basically said that the federal refugee contractors were crying that they didn’t have enough bodies to resettle in the US (and therefore not enough money in their coffers since they are paid by the head to resettle refugees) and the administration wanted a humanitarian excuse for the whole damn war!  So in April 1999 Al Gore sprung a surprise on the professionals in the State Department with the announcement that the photo op of “refugees” arriving in NJ was coming their way whether they liked it or not.

This is what I said in that 2010 post:

I just came across this report from the National War College about how the volags (supposedly voluntary agencies but really federal contractors*) were basically in need of warm bodies to resettle (for $$$) in the US in 1999 so they pushed Gore and the National Security Council to go against professionals in the State Department and even against the wishes of the UN and airlifted tens of thousands of Kosovar “refugees” to the US during Bill Clinton’s phony baloney Bosnian War.

The Clinton administration got its photo op.  The NGOs got their contract money (emergency money too from Congress) and then later that year (surely at taxpayer expense), about ten thousand unhappy “refugees” were returned to Kosovo.    A few thousand stayed in the US.  Again, I don’t know if the Tampa terrorist was in this group, but if he is a naturalized US citizen he got into the US through some legal program.

This is how Robinson begins the 2000 report:

Why did the United States offer permanent resettlement to Kosovar refugees during
Operation Allied Force? Neither the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR) nor the Government of Macedonia (GOM) requested U.S. resettlement
assistance. Even the three federal agencies with principal responsibility for refugee
admissions–State, Justice, and Health and Human Services–balked at the idea. Most
importantly, the refugees themselves strongly resisted being moved from the close
proximity to home of the camps in Macedonia to safer, more pleasant quarters elsewhere.

Nevertheless, during a speech at Ellis Island on April 21, 1999, Vice President Gore
announced that the United States would immediately begin processing for American
residency up to 20,000 ethnic Albanians who had fled Serb persecution in Kosovo. His
decision caught the bureaucracy off-guard. The U.S. Coordinator for Refugees, Assistant
Secretary of State Julia Taft, learned of it only an hour before the speech was carried live
on national news.

The next day, an interagency team, led by the State Department’s Bureau of
Population, Refugees and Migration and including representatives from the
Immigration and Naturalization Service, the International Organization for Migration,
and the International Rescue Committee, flew to Skopje. Its mission was twofold: first,
to convince the UNHCR, the GOM, and the refugees that U.S. resettlement was a
preferred option; and second, to build an in-country processing program from scratch.
The team succeeded, but the question remains. Why did the White House insist on this
particular course of action?

LOL!  Maybe Bill just needed more cheap laborers for his friends at Tyson Foods (IBP)—remember it was Clinton who brought Bosnians to Iowa for meat packing jobs.  Lavinia Limon who heads one of the federal contractors now was Clinton’s head honcho in the Office of Refugee Resettlement, so she would know!

But, here is one reason Robinson gives us (and it should make you all weep):

But public support for committing American airmen to combat rested on the refugee issue. The White House could not simply turn its back on the Kosovars while in their name it rained high explosives on Serbia. It desperately needed another gesture, even if only symbolic, to keep the humanitarian rationale for military action credible.

Readers, if any of you see news on how the Tampa Islamic terror plotter got into the US in the first place, send it my way.

Oh, and then send your thanks to Al Gore and good ol’ Bill.

German arsonist denied refugee status in Canada before getting into US

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The “German” arsonist arrested in the recent Los Angeles crime spree had previously been denied refugee status in Canada.  Here is the story from the Montreal Gazette:

The mother of a former Vancouver man facing charges in the U.S. for a multi-million-dollar arson spree at one time pleaded to Canadian immigration officials to allow her and her son to stay in this country.

Harry Burkhart, 24, was charged Wednesday with 37 counts of arson for deliberately setting at least 50 fires, torching cars, garages and homes in Los Angeles and reportedly causing about $3 million in damages.

Burkhart was arrested during a routine traffic stop while driving a minivan with British Columbia licence plates.

The story of how Dorothee Burkhart and her son ended up in L.A. begins with their arrival in Canada in September 2007.

According to Federal Court documents obtained by Postmedia News, the two fled Germany and applied for refugee status in Canada, claiming they feared they would be imprisoned, tortured and killed if they were sent back to their home country.

[….]

During the hearing, the minister of citizenship and immigration intervened. The minister requested Dorothee Burkhart be barred from refugee protection as she had committed a serious crime in Germany.

The refugee claim was denied in late 2009 and, upon review of the application in May 2010, the Federal Court agreed.

Then the question becomes—how the h*** did they get into the US?

Surely with a legal decision against them in Canada as recently as 2010, they should have been easily detected by ICE.

Blogger Debbie Schlussel asks the same question and then tells us more, here, about the Chechen-born Burkhart and his mama.

The mother of Harry Burkhart, the man who set several dozen arson fires in Hollywood last week, is exactly the kind of person who doesn’t belong in America and should be deported. And, after you read about both mother and son, you’ll wonder how either of them were able to get into the U.S. Well, we know how the son got on: a lax visa system, in which Customs and Border Protection and State Department employees use little scrutiny or time, before rushing through the rubber stamping of the golden ticket into the U.S., as I’ve been writing about for years, and as internal Homeland Security documents confirmed, earlier this week. Oh, and by the way, Burkhart was born in Muslim Chechnya. Hmmm . . . (Don’t worry, though. In the Hollywood movie, he’ll be a Christian from Texas.)

Read it all.

Where is the love in Lewiston?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

No more “layabouts and deadbeats” in Lewiston, says mayor-elect Bob Macdonald!   And, needless to say the Somalis took offense.

After years of the mainstream media and Maine (and Washington, DC)  liberals trying to tell us that everything was lovey-dovey in Lewiston, the election of another mayor signals that all is not going smoothly between the locals and the large (and growing) Somali population.

Readers may recall that the city was embroiled in controversy ten years ago when Somalis (mostly from Georgia where they were originally resettled by the US State Department) scouted out the welfare haven of Maine for a mass migration.  New readers may wish to read this post—Somali migration to Maine: it’s the welfare magnet, stupid— to catch up on the story.

In 2002, then Mayor Raymond did the politically-incorrect thing and sent an open letter (scroll down wiki page) to Somalis begging them not to send more of their people to the overloaded city. (google this because there was lots of news coverage of his “racist” letter).

The next mayor, Laurent Gilbert,* pandered to the Somali population and even went to Washington at the behest of none-other than Soros-favorite John Podesta (Center for American Progress) to proclaim how lovely everything was in Maine where diversity was now its strength (Here is our coverage of that trip in December 2010).

This after Newsweek trumpeted a 2009 piece, with the improbable title, The refugees who saved Lewiston where the reporter paints a picture of a veritable love fest in Lewiston now that the folks (the Mainers and the Africans) have gotten to know each other better, here.   (This is how propaganda works—I have seen this Newsweek piece mentioned repeatedly).

Rumblings out of Lewiston since then (from individual contacts) confirmed that the love affair might have been a Leftwing media fantasy.  Now, with the election of Bob Macdonald as Mayor just a couple of weeks ago, it looks like the citizens there might be signaling with their vote that they have had it with the drain on the welfare system in Lewiston.

While running for office MacDonald reportedly referred to the section of town where Somalis live as a “fourth-world country” (quite a contrast to how it was characterized in Newsweek!):

During his campaign, Macdonald made a number of remarks that some people characterized as racist, while others said they were merely ignorant and insensitive. He referred to downtown Lewiston, where many Somali immigrants live, as a “fourth-world country.”

Then Mayor-elect Macdonald seems to have  really stepped in it on his victorious election-night (in a strange turn of events his “moderate” opponent in the race died a couple of days before the election!) when he made his remarks about “layabouts and deadbeats.”   Hat tip:  Friends of Refugees

From the Bangor Daily News:

LEWISTON, Maine — Mayor-elect Bob Macdonald apologized to the city Thursday for his election-night comments — but his apology wasn’t enough for some members of the city’s immigrant community.

Abdifatah Ahmed, a local landlord and pharmacist, said Macdonald ought to apologize for his tone throughout the mayoral campaign, not just his election-night comments.

During his campaign, Macdonald said he wanted to make the city less attractive to layabouts and deadbeats, many of whom didn’t speak English.

“Enough is enough,” Ahmed said. “Very few people in our community get assistance, but when we get selected and called names, enough is enough.”

Macdonald must stop such talk and explain himself, to go forward with healing, Ahmed said.

“There was a lot said, and a lot of it was on camera,” Ahmed said. “You said people like me are great. But there are old people and children, and you’ve said to them that you have a problem with their fathers. As the mayor, how can you be a role model to those young children?”

Macdonald said his target was not immigrants but welfare recipients.

“If you are working here, I was not talking about you,” Macdonald said. “I was talking about the people that take money, money, money — and they come in all colors.”

Afterward, Ahmed said he and other members of Lewiston’s immigrant community believe they still deserve a more thorough apology from Macdonald.

The apology was not enough for the Somali activists (I wonder what constitutes a “more thorough apology”?).  Watch this Youtube clip and see for yourself.  It is very enlightening.  When I watched it, it had only 37 views so please send it around far and wide.  Pay attention to the beginning when the person doing the filming pans the ‘massive (not!)’ audience.

For more on Lewiston, just type the word into our search function.  It has been a favorite topic here at RRW.

* By the way, out-going Mayor Laurent (sometimes Larry) Gilbert said in August that he was going to Somalia in December to deliver needed humanitarian supplies, does anyone know if that ever happened?

An afterthought:  I should have mentioned that Lynn, Mass is having similar problems with refugee overload.  I wrote about it here the other day.

Arab activists ask for Temporary Protected Status for Syrians!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Here we go again.   A couple of decades ago we granted Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to Salvadorans, Hondurans and Liberians.  More recently it was granted to Haitians, but as Mark Krikorian at the Center for Immigration Studies famously said in 1999—there is nothing quite so permanent as temporary protected status.

Readers this is one more back channel way for foreign nationals to stay in the US beyond the limits of the visas that got them here in the first place.  A “crisis” happens at home and the US government says, oh, poor thing, we can’t send you back to a country in crisis.  So the alien stays and stays and stays (with a right to work) and eventually buys a home or a business and then the politicians say, we must extend TPS because heck they are all settled in!

The only thing these immigrants can’t do is vote (but you can bet they are figuring out how to do that too!).

Now we have James Zogby of the Arab American Institute (AAI) petitioning Obama to give TPS status to Syrians.   Well, using his logic Egyptians should stay, and Libyans, and Iranians, and Yeminis, and the list goes on.

Here is what AAI is reporting at its website:

Yesterday, the Arab American Institute, in a formal request to the Obama administration, asked for Temporary Protected Status privileges to be extended to Syrian citizens currently residing in the United States. Temporary Protected Status (TPS) is a procedure by which the Secretary of Homeland Security may provide temporary asylum to individuals who are in America and who cannot safely return to their home countries.

As the Syrian uprising nears its 10th month, the situation on the ground has grown increasingly dangerous for average Syrian citizens. Questions continue about the safety of Syrian nationals upon their return home from visits to the U.S. As a result, many Syrians currently in the U.S. are deeply concerned for their personal safety and the safety of their families if they return home.

If granted, TPS will allow Syrian citizens who are currently here – mostly as students and tourists – to stay in the U.S. until they can safely return home. It does not contribute to granting an immigrant permanent residence, and reverts the beneficiary to his or her previous immigration status as soon as the temporary protection ends.   [But, ahhhhhhh! it never ends!–ed]

Those original nearly 200,000 Salvadorans that live in the DC, Maryland and Virginia area have been here for two decades (growing their population) and are now looking for an extension of TPS AGAIN this March—a topic which I’ve extensively covered at Potomac Tea Party Report (here is one recent post).  Oh, and by the way, during their TPS they can figure out just how to make permanent asylum claims (or find a US citizen to marry!).