Category: Iraqi refugees

Bertha Avila speaks out: why Iraqi refugees to US?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know Bertha Avila of Marysville, CA.   I just came across her letter to the editor because the List Project blog takes her to task for asking why we are bringing Iraqis to the US.   Good question Bertha, we have asked the same thing now that Iraq is beginning to get back on its feet.  And, Bertha, you have a right to ask that question without having your character impugned by a bunch of New York City lawyers.

She must be ignorant and hate-filled they say.

Here is Bertha’s letter:  

 

The Department of Homeland Security has recently allowed refugees from Iraq to settle in our country through a program called U.S. Refugee Admission Program, and as of June 4, 6,480 Iraqis have been admitted into the USA and an additional 27,940 Iraqis referred to DHS for interviews, with approvals growing each day.

Iraq was considered a global terrorist threat. We go to war to prevent terrorism and then we turn around and welcome their displaced citizens into this country giving them special visas and loans to travel and all the benefits such as welfare, food and medical services while our own government is facing a recession?

I am puzzled and can’t understand the fairness of this country. One day U.S. sons and daughters fighting in this bloody war will come home to be neighbors with the sons and daughters of the of the enemy enjoying the benefits they will only hope for.

Go to www.USCIS.gov and read all about this program.

 

Here is what the List Project blog says about a woman who is probably just your average citizen asking a good question.  You go girl!

It is really sad to see an American think of an Iraqi refugee as an enemy. This is either ignorance or simple hatred or maybe both.

…there is this American woman named Bertha Avila from Marysville who is shocked to see Iraqis, whose lives were destroyed because of her [what, not your country List Project lawyers] country, being resettled and compensated for what they lost in Iraq.

What Bertha doesn’t seem to understand or maybe doesn’t seem to want to understand is that once upon a time those Iraqis had a relatively normal life compared to their destroyed life after her [what, not your country too, List Project lawyers] country invaded theirs.

So who is sounding hate-filled now?    What the lawyers at the List Project aren’t telling you is that 365 would-be Iraqi refugees have been found to have terrorist ties and have been turned down for resettlement in the US, see our previous story here.  They want you to believe everyone of the millions they claim were displaced by us (not by insurgents, not by Al-Queda, not by Saddam) are just poor struggling good folks.  Some are and some aren’t.

365 suspected Iraqi terrorists applied to the US as refugees

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Buried deep in the Washington Post article today about a post 9/11 dragnet that has revealed a shocking number of terrorists caught on the battlefield in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia have already been in the US, is this little gem of information.   Homeland Security has turned down 365 suspected terrorists who have applied to come to the United States as refugees, and we have been led to believe they have all been our good little helpers in Iraq.    Matthew Lee (AP reporter), you missed this story!

Investigators are working on ever more sophisticated ways to evaluate the data. Analysts at the Army’s National Ground Intelligence Center in Charlottesville, for instance, use software to scrutinize intelligence reports from sources such as electronic surveillance and informants. They then link the information to a person’s biographic and biometric data, and look for relationships that might detect terrorists and plots.

For example, a roadside bomb may explode and a patrol may fingerprint bystanders because insurgents have been known to remain at the scene to observe the results of their work. Prints also can be lifted off tiny fragments of exploded bombs, said military officials and contractors involved in the work.

Analysts are not just trying to identify the prints on the bomb. They want to find out who the bomb-carrier associates with. Who he calls. Who calls him. That could lead to the higher-level operatives who planned and financed attacks.

Already, fingerprints lifted off a bomb fragment have been linked to people trying to enter the United States, they said.

In a separate data-sharing program, 365 Iraqis who have applied to the Department of Homeland Security for refugee status have been denied because their fingerprints turned up in the Defense Department‘s database of known or suspected terrorists, Richardson said.

There was something to laugh (or cry) about in this deadly serious story.     Demonstrating our absolutely abysmal level of understanding of Islam, a high level FBI official said this about many of those terrorists who had already been in the US:

Many of those with U.S. arrest records had come to the United States to study, said former Criminal Justice Information Services head Michael Kirkpatrick, who led the FBI effort to use biometrics in counterterrorism after Sept. 11. “It suggests there was some familiarity with Western culture, the United States specifically, and for whatever reason they did not agree with that culture,” he said. “Either they became disaffected or put up with it, and then they went overseas.”

For whatever reason, oh my God!

A bucket of cold water on the International Rescue Committee

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

March 27th, 2013:  Now I know why everyone is here at this old post on the IRC—it’s because the IRC just hired former UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband.  See my post today on the “dream job” which will allow Miliband to muck around in world affairs and collect a huge salary at the IRC—really a quasi-government agency, fueled with buckets of taxpayer dollars!  Type ‘International Rescue Committee’ (that once touted George Soros on its BOD) into our search function for more.

For everyone arriving here and looking for George Rupp’s salary, this is the latest I have:

The IRC is a $431 million dollar organization which gets $247 million from YOU, the US taxpayer (page 9 of their most recent Form 990, here).  And, guess where you have to go to find out the salaries being paid at the IRC?  Page 254 of their 299-page Form 990.  George Rupp, their head honcho makes a cool $447,432 in salary and benefits which beats Obama’s $400,000 salary!

March 26th, 2013:  For all of the readers arriving at this post today (for whatever reason) should know that Anne Richard cited below as the IRC’s Veep (a federal refugee contractor) has now revolved back into the government revolving door and heads the whole shebang as Asst. Secretary of State for Population Refugees and Migration.  Cool how that works (not!).

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) is one of the top ten volags resettling refugees in the US.   Yesterday the Mercury News published the usual puff piece on an IRC fundraising intiative they held recently in San Jose.

Then here comes Chris Coen of Friends of Refugees with a comment to throw some ice cold water on the warm and fuzzy piece:

Readers should know that the International Rescue Committee (IRC) has been mired for years with chronic problems in its refugee resettlement program in California and throughout the U.S.

At the IRC office in San Jose U.S. State Department inspectors found a refugee family living in a two-bedroom apartment with another family of three. Neither of the parents had received English lessons or job training and neither one of them had submitted a single job application. The family was barely scrapping by, and the father said that he was just waiting for IRC to find him a job and send him to English lessons. The government inspectors also met with two other IRC refugee client families – they reported that they had not received any furniture (basic household furniture is supposedly a “minimum requirement” of IRC’s refugee contracts with the government).

An inspection of the IRC office in San Francisco showed that early refugee employment outcomes to be a low 50% after one year – that is, only 50% of the refugees were employed after one year in the US, even though the US refugee program supposedly stresses early self-sufficiency for the refugees. Case files also contained a form which refugees were required to sign stating that they would accept “any job offered” (refugee resettlement agencies such as IRC receive public funds to refer refugees to jobs that will allow them to become economically self-sufficient, jobs which are sustainable – not simply to take any job offered). Home visits to the IRC San Francisco office’s refugee clients revealed one refugee family that reported that IRC had not given them any furniture. The parents were also not taking any English classes. Yet another refugee client reported that he had been placed in an apartment nearly bereft of furniture (with only a mattress and box springs, a small card table, and one folding metal chair).

The IRC needs to get its house in order.

Lest you think the IRC is a struggling outfit, here is what I wrote about them last October.  I was writing about how the volags create a kind of drumbeat by getting articles published about needy refugees.  Anne Richard (IRC vice president) had written such a piece about Iraqis that prompted my post.

… Anne Richard is a former employee of the US State Department having worked for Madeleine Albright (the revolving door in action). She makes a salary of between $100,000 and $200,000 (based on the salaries of other VP’s at IRC). But that is ’chump change’ compared to the IRC CEO’s salary. Dr. George Rupp, former Pres. of Columbia University, brings in a cool $357,657 a year salary according to the organization’s 2005 Form 990. Thats more than the Vice President of the United States, the Speaker of the House, or the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court receive (no wonder public service is so unpopular).

The IRC is a $200 million plus a year organization that recieves close to half of its income from you, the taxpayer. Actually it was $88 million from government grants in 2005. The immigration industry is big business and in order to stay in business it needs to find “refugees” to move around the world.

See my post of June 23rd about a radio program from California and check out the ‘needy’ Iraqi refugees the IRC is bringing to a city near you.

Canada rejects Christian Iraqi refugees

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

While Canada is busy taking Muslim refugees with no links to Canada like the Rohingya, it is also busy rejecting applications from Christian Iraqis with extended family living there according to this article in the Toronto Star:

Azad Sarkissian’s Armenian great-grandparents settled in Iraq more than a century ago, and none of their descendants has stepped on Armenian soil since.

His sister and her family fled the violence in Iraq and are living precariously as United Nations-recognized refugees in Jordan. Sarkissian, in Toronto, has tried and failed three times over the past six years to bring them to Canada through a refugee resettlement application sponsored by the Assyrian Methodist Church of Canada.

But they were startled and angered by the latest response by a Canadian visa officer in Damascus, who said the family should go to Armenia instead.

 Since when do refugee officials tell people to go back to where their ancestors came from?