Category: Iraqi refugees

Another story about Iraqis trying to adjust to America

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update 1/31/08:   A refugee advocate from Arizona wrote a critical letter to the editor at Time.  See her letter here.

Time magazine this week has a story about Iraqi refugees trying to adjust to America — the country where they thought every car was new and everyone was rich.   Instead they find roach infested apartments and menial work.   We reported on a similar article in the Washington Post a couple of months ago.  Here is how the Time article begins:

There are moments when Faeza Jaber wants to pick up Khattab, her 7-year-old son, and flee back to Baghdad. Life in Phoenix is proving harder than she had expected. She needs a job that will pay her rent–not easy for a 48 year-old single mother with basic English and little local experience. Then there are a number of smaller challenges that, taken together, can seem insurmountable for a woman who has never previously lived away from her homeland–where to find day care for Khattab, how to decipher utility bills, what to do about her car that’s been towed away. Just the thought of more logistics is daunting. “My head is tired,” she says, her voice shaking. “All these papers. In America, a woman must be a man.” So sometimes she dreams of going back to Baghdad, where she knows the language and the streets and has friends and family–and where the men do the paperwork.

Read it, its just another in a long line of stories about refugees whose expectations of America have not been realized.   Makes you wonder who is preparing them for the culture shock.

So why the silence on the Saudis?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday the Washington Post Outlook section ran an opinion piece by our buddy Ken Bacon at Refugees International—the lobbying organization hollering the loudest for us to open our gates to Iraqi refugees.  Come to think of it, Ken Bacon was also the guy testifying to Congress this past year about saving those poor Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, you know those refugees who will turn into terrorists if we don’t get them over here and on welfare ASAP.   Mr. Bacon is everywhere these days including feting the former Asst. Secretary of State;  could he be angling for something big in a possible Clinton Administration?   Maybe we should have a blog called Kenneth Bacon Watch!

Sorry,  I was getting off track.  There is nothing new in this blast at the Bush Administration, which I am sorry to say I can’t link because I can’t find it on line at the Post (very strange).  You will have to trust me that he said,  “The Administration isn’t doing its part to resettle Iraqis, either—not even former translators for the U.S. Military whose lives are at risk.”      See Judy’s post to see why it is so amusing (shocking really) that they are still using the Iraqi translator sob story, don’t they know that some translators have been found to be spies. 

What interested me in his Post opinion were the graphics that accompanied it, maps, graphs, charts, that showed who is, and by omission, who is not helping with Iraqi refugees in some way.  All of the humanitarian aid comes from the U.S., Europe and Japan.  All the countries bordering Iraq have displaced Iraqis, however, glaringly absent and apparently doing NOTHING is Saudi Arabia, Iraq’s oil RICH neighbor.  We hear so much about how the Koran calls for Muslims to be charitable (to fellow Muslims) so where is Saudi Arabia?  And where is the criticism from groups like Mr. Bacon’s? 

UN wants $261 million from US in 2008 for Iraqi refugees

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Your tax dollars: 

I guess Will can call me an evil and stingy person, but we send our men and women to fight and die for Iraq’s freedom, and their people run and hide in surrounding countries and then we pay for that too.   Except for the truly persecuted Christians, the rest should just go home and tell the insurgents to get out.   As a matter of fact, I wonder how many would flee if it weren’t for the United Nations holding out to them the alluring possibility of life in the West through resettlement.

GENEVA, January 8 (UNHCR) – The UN refugee agency on Tuesday launched an appeal for US$261 million to fund its operations this year on behalf of hundreds of thousands of those uprooted by the conflict in Iraq.

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Chief UNHCR spokesman Ron Redmond told journalists in Geneva that the Iraq Situation Supplementary Appeal covered programmes for many of the 2.2 million Iraqis displaced within Iraq, as well as the 2 million who have fled to other countries in the region, including Syria, Jordan, Iran, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey and several of the Gulf States. The agency also cares for some 41,000 non-Iraqi refugees in Iraq, including Palestinians, Iranians, Turks and others.

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Redmond also noted that UNHCR, which is funded primarily through voluntary contributions from governments, now has nearly 350 staff directly engaged in operations for Iraq and the surrounding region.

350 UN employees!  I wonder how much gravy is sloshing around in those salaries?    And then there are the Palestinians:

The appeal also makes special mention of the dire situation facing some 13,000 Palestinian refugees in Iraq, many of whom have been targeted by armed groups and who have been unable to find sanctuary in other countries. “UNHCR will continue to seek solutions for the Palestinians, including the possibility of resettlement for the most vulnerable,” Redmond stressed.

Back in October I posted on a Brookings Institution Study that said the Palestinians were in Iraq because they were favored by Saddam Hussein.  Could their association with Saddam be the reason they are targeted?  If you go back to that October report you will see there is a lot more to the story than poor suffering Iraqis running from violence.  Some of those Iraqis in Syria have been there for years, long before our arrival in Iraq, others are men who got out of Iraq when the surge began.

Iraqi refugee admissions down again

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Last week when the AP reported (and every news outlet in the world picked it up) that the Iraqi refugee admissions were down for the third straight month we didn’t  report on it.    Frankly, the news was ho-hum.  However, for readers at American Renaissance the news prompted some provacative comments.  Here is a sampling from three differant people (bracketed comments are mine!):

what a clever way to get your jihadi’s into america. have them pose as refugees. buy conveience stores [Hagerstown?]. send money back home and bring in family. i wonder how many white south africans we allow. [last I checked they aren’t among the refugees allowed in the U.S. Don’t you know white Christians are the persecutors not the persecuted.]

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The Iraqi refugees are arriving in Detroit, thanks to the U.N., the State Department and the Lutheran Church (refugee contracts get big taxpayers money, and the refugees get to bring over thousands of their distant relatives. The newspaper article states some Iraqi’s brought two wives. [those would not be the Christians]

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Lastly I do oppose relocating Iraqis in The USA because there are probably suicide bombers among those arriving. They should stay in their own country and rebuild it instead of coming here. [Thats what I’ve been saying all along]. If they come to The USA it’s just a matter of time before they bomb malls or burn synagogues. It only takes one idiot to destroy things.

I get the distinct impression that this issue is catching on.    Check out our Iraqi refugee category here, we have posted 72 times on this!

Refugees or displaced persons?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Here is an article today from the Houston Chronicle; another article about Iraqi refugees—this time in Egypt.  The article jumps back and forth between Iraqis who are happy to learn they are going home to Iraq, happy that Saddam is gone, unhappy with the Americans for not keeping them safe and unhappy because they can’t get to America or Australia this minute.  Frankly, it’s a bit hard to follow.   However, this line caught my attention and made me think about something Judy said the other day.

They do not look like typical refugees found in camps throughout the world. They are clean, well groomed and not starving.

That’s right they don’t look like typical refugees,  but those advocates in the refugee industry (and the liberal press) want you to have that image in your mind—the starving camp image.   These are displaced persons as Judy (and Derbyshire) said in this post yesterday.

Derbyshire notes that many of the people called refugees would have been called displaced persons in earlier years. I am struck by this, because the two terms have different connotations and sometimes call for different solutions. Ann and I have always advocated more emphasis on resettling refugees in their countries of origin or neighboring countries that have offered to take them in (and sometimes been refused by the UN agency). In the past, displaced persons were seen as a group that needed to be resettled in an ethnically similar place. For example, the ethnic Germans who lost their homes in other countries as a result of World War II were taken in by Germany. Nobody suggested that we should take in small groups of Germans and scatter them around our small towns. I’d like to bring back the term “displaced persons.”

But you see, the term ‘displaced person’, doesn’t illicit the same emotional response that ‘refugee’ does.  And, besides, the ‘refugee’ label is important because it entitles the immigrant to a grab bag of American welfare goodies when they get here.