Category: Iraqi refugees

State Dept. Press release: big bucks to the UN and others

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

In a press release from the US State Department today we learned that we have dramatically increased aid payments to the United Nations and other “humanitarian” groups to help Iraqi displaced persons.

The U.S. Government has increased humanitarian assistance for displaced Iraqis from $43 million in 2006 to almost $200 million in the first half of 2008.

But, way at the bottom of the press release, the State Department tells us the number of interpreters that have been admitted to the US so far and how many are in the pipeline.   As the situation on the ground improves in Iraq, I don’t get why this many interpreters are so fearful.  Wouldn’t you think they would want to stay and help rebuild Iraq?  I’ll wager that somewhere down the line we find out that some of those fluent in English have nefarious motives for wanting to be in the US, just as those Judy reported on in Denmark not that long ago.

In FY 2007, 988 special immigrant visas were issued through the special admissions program for Iraqi translators and interpreters who assisted the United States. This number includes 526 principal applicants and 462 family members.

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So far in FY 2008, through January 31, 2008, 507 special immigrant visas were issued through the special admissions program for Iraqi translators and interpreters who assisted the United States. This number includes 247 principal applicants and 260 family members.

The last lines in the press release refer to the Kennedy bill which recently became law.

New legislation will permit up to 5,000 Iraqi principal applicants working under Chief of Mission authority who are in immediate danger, to apply for special immigrant visas. Procedures for processing those applications are currently in interagency development.

Muslim Iraqis to Albany, where are the Christians?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Here is another of those refugee template stories, this time from the Albany Times-Union.   The difference between the Iraqi refugee stories and the refugees-in-camps stories is that the reporter always puts in a little extra effort to say how dangerous Iraq is thanks to us. 

To set the scene, the reporter begins his heartwarming story by describing a nice little family gathering where widowed mother serves her sons a meal of Baghdad style pita wraps as they chat in Arabic in the safety of their nice little apartment in the capital of the great state of NY–Albany.    What is wrong with this picture?

Jenan Salman had prepared a favorite dish for her sons, Bakr Najm, 27, Omar Najm, 22, and Othman Najm, 17. They were sharing it with 35-year-old Yaser Almahdawi, also an Iraqi refugee, one who lives nearby and has become like one of the family.

Here is what I want to know?  Why are we bringing fighting aged young Muslim men to America?  Why are our men of the same age fighting and dying for freedom in Iraq while their men gobble down taxpayer funded pitas in the nice little apartment in upstate New York?

Here comes Lavinia Limon of the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (the mothership to the CT volag I’ve been writing about) to explain the terrible circumstances these young men left behind.

“We are seeing in Iraqi refugees a heightened level of trauma compared to other refugees,” said USCRI president Lavinia Limon. “Most refugees come here from some war situation, but in the case of Iraq their young people have seen things that will never leave them. Some have seen family, neighbors blown apart.

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“There are still millions of Iraqis over there in dire circumstances, many living under direct death threats and it’s getting progressively worse.”

It’s getting progressively worse!  Where is she getting that information?  Or, is that just what the mainstream reporters want to hear? 

Then Almahdawi jumps in because he speaks perfect English (he was an interpreter) to tell us more.

Almahdawi said neither he nor Salman and her sons did anything that would mark them for death by the Iraq government, but all of them said they would not feel safe if they returned to Baghdad.

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“It is dangerous there, too many gangs in the streets,” said Almahdawi, the interpreter, who left behind four brothers and three sisters.

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The violence is steeped in centuries of unrest between Shiite and Sunni Muslims. Salman and her family are Sunnis, and Almahdawi said he isn’t affiliated with either.

Yeh, well so do our young fighting men and women feel “unsafe” there too.   These refugees have already said they are not targets.  Fearful of gangs?  Well, I hate to break it to you but you will find those in Albany as well.

So, we have learned that the Salman family are Sunni’s who weren’t personally in any danger, were not personally persecuted.  The interpreter doesn’t say he was a target and won’t even say whether he is Sunni or Shia, or what he is.  

How come every story I see these days about the Iraqi refugees never has any truly persecuted Christian refugees in them?  Where are the Christians?

And, by the way, here is Lavinia Limon’s testimony to the Congressional Human Rights Caucus at the end of last year, not a word about persecuted Christians, or any other persecuted minority either.

State Dept. Press Briefing, Part IV, so what happened to the Christians?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I hope this is my last post on the State Dept. Press briefing of February 4th.    You can see Parts I to III here.  

We had been told all along that one major purpose of the original Kennedy bill on Iraqi Refugees was to assure that religious minorities and others would have a way to escape persecution by the majority Muslim population particularly those who want to see Iraq run according to Sharia law.   (To be completely honest this isn’t how Kennedy would describe it.)

The original bill spelled out those who needed protection and resettlement to the West: Chaldo-Assyrian Christians, Jews, Sabean Mandeans, Yazidis, Bahais and others.  It also made special mention of gay and lesbian Iraqis.   All that is gone now and in the February 4th press briefing there was not one mention of the Christians or other specifically persecuted refugees.   I contacted Senator Lieberman’s office (he was a chief sponsor of the Kennedy bill) to see what happened to the minority reference and was told they didn’t know and I would have to go to Kennedy to find out.  Yeh, right. 

Previously we reported that a fact finding mission to Jordan heard evidence that Iraqi Christians were actually being turned away by Muslim employees of the United Nations.  See Judy’s post here and go back to read the entire article by Ken Timmerman.   I’m not going to be cagey.  The Islamist agenda is to get more Muslims into the United States and other western countries.

So, lest you think that somehow the Kennedy “Refugee Crisis in Iraq” Act could help solve the problem of specific minority persecution, this exchange at the press briefing sets the record straight on who determines who comes to America—-the United Nations.

QUESTION: And what was the other thing I asked? About how you become a refugee. Like, how do you qualify to be a refugee?

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MS. SCIALABBA [Homeland Security]: You have to have a well-founded fear of persecution based on one of the five grounds: race, nationality, membership in a particular social group, religion, political opinion [this is the description of refugee generally and not specific to the Kennedy bill]. Any number of stories can fit that definition. I mean, if you lost your house because of your political opinion and you can’t find anyplace else to live, you don’t have anywhere else you can go, you could be a refugee based on that.

Then this is actually amusing if it weren’t so serious.  Terry Rusch the head of refugee admissions at Population, Refugees and Migration quickly sets the record straight.  You just can’t show up at the US Overseas Processing Entity (OPE).   You must go through the UN. 

MS. RUSCH: But even in – if I may, given access to the program, it’s not that somebody who’s lost their house can just show up at our OPE and say, “here I am.” Given the size of the world’s refugee population, we want to focus the resources that are available on those that are the most vulnerable. Most of the refugees that come into the United States, and indeed in most other resettlement countries, have been referred by UNHCR, who has the mandate of the international community to look out for the needs of refugees worldwide. They determine when, in their dealings with individual cases, who are most in need of this particular durable solution, resettlement in a third country.

So, we are back to square one,  the Muslim United Nations employees can choose who they want to resettle in America.

State Dept. Briefing on Iraqi Refugees, Part III, “How much is this?”

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

 Your tax dollars:

This is the third in a  series of posts on the State Department Iraqi Refugee Briefing of February 4, see Part II yesterday.  

The exchange that follows occured in the briefing right after the question about exactly how many Iraqi displaced persons are coming in this fiscal year that ends September 30th.   We heard it was 12,000 plus maybe(?) an additional 5000 mandated by the newly signed “Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act.” 

QUESTION: Speaking of Peter, Paul and payment, how much is this – how much money is being expended on this program currently?

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AMBASSADOR FOLEY: Which program?

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QUESTION: The – well, on bringing Iraqi refugees in?

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MS. RUSCH [Director Office of Admissions, PRM]: It’s hard to specify. It’s on average somewhere between $4,000 and $4,500 per refugee, of any nationality. That’s the cost to the State Department. That doesn’t include DHS costs, and it certainly doesn’t cost – take into account the actually larger contribution from Health and Human Services for refugees once they get here.

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QUESTION: So does anybody have a figure of how much the U.S. taxpayer is spending to bring refugees in – bring Iraqi refugees in?

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AMBASSADOR FOLEY: We can get that for you, Charlie. We’ll multiply, based on the assumption that we’ll bring in 12,000 this fiscal year.

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QUESTION: I don’t know about the rest of us, but you’ve lost a – you lost me in some of the numbers. So it would be good to know if there is a number that we’re spending to try and bring Iraq refugees.

[next question]

Hey, Charlie, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for an answer to the question of how much this costs the taxpayer, but if you find out let us and the taxpayers know!

In addition to the number cited above, there are huge costs buried in Department of Health and Human Services for grants to the volags (voluntary agencies), not to mention the cost of the welfare itself.  Then there are the costs to the Dept. of Homeland Security to screen the refugees, then we give millions to the United Nations for them to pick refugees for us.  There are taxpayer dollars flowing out of the Department of Labor for refugee training and job placement and who knows what else spread throughout the government at federal and state level.  Imagine all the goverment workers’ salaries running this program!

Just a little side note if you have been following Parts I and II of my series:   Ambassador Foley says they will multiply this magic number when they get it by 12,000, so I guess he is saying they aren’t bringing 12,000 Iraqis plus the Congressionally mandated 5000 afterall.

State Dept. Briefing on Iraqi Refugees, Part II, how many exactly?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is Part II in a series on the February 4th State Dept. briefing on the Iraqi displaced persons issue.  See Part I here.   We are bringing these additional points to you because the coverage we saw in the mainstream media missed a few nuggets!

When the President signed into law the “Refugee Crisis in Iraqi Act” at the end of January, those of us following this issue wondered if the new law which specified 5000 Iraqis would be brought each year for the next five years meant the 5000 was on top of the 12,000 the Bush Administration aims for this fiscal year.  By the way, the Presidential Determination for FY 08 for all refugees sets a ceiling of 70,000 refugees from all parts of the world. 

A reporter getting lost in the numbers asked this:

Wait a minute – this 12,000 does not include this 5,000? The 12,000 will go up?

Ambassador Foley set the record straight and added an interesting bit of information.

Well, Congress specifically wrote into the law that it will not count as part of our global admissions goals, including the 12,000 for Iraqi refugees. However, the law does mandate that recipients of Special Immigrant Visas receive full refugee resettlement benefits, so – and unfortunately did not provide funding for that. So it is at this stage, in any case, what you could call an unfunded mandate. And the practical impact is that ultimately we’ll have to take – we’ll have to account for these SIV recipients, for their resettlement needs, out of the budget that goes towards the global number. So it could come at the expense of not necessarily Iraqi refugees but our global admissions numbers. Remember, the 12,000 is part of our global goal of 70,000, that in cooperation with Homeland Security we’re trying to process, adjudicate, approve and have enter the U.S. this fiscal year. And resources are finite and in this case, we will face robbing Peter to pay Paul, unless the appropriation is forthcoming to pay for the resettlement benefits that will go to Special Immigrant Visa recipients under this law.

When someone is designated a refugee it’s like hitting the lottery, you get to come to America and be taken care of—airfare, apartment subsidy, food stamps, case worker etc.    As for the unfunded mandates mentioned by the Ambassodor,  Congress passes a bill, the President signs it into law but they forget one measly point—they don’t appropriate money for it!  That leaves the agency struggling with how to stretch the dollars, and later when they are unable to do so, interest groups clamor, members of Congress respond by calling for hearings and drag some poor agency schmuck up to the Hill for a tongue lashing. 

Based on what Ambassador Foley said above, it looks like Refugees International and the Associated Press will be squawking again as the year progresses and the magic numbers (5000 plus 12,000) are not reached.