Category: Iraqi refugees

Iraqis to Columbus, Ohio

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Columbus, Ohio has received its first family of Iraqi refugees according to the Columbus Dispatch today.   Sameer, a 37-year-old Sunni Muslim doctor has brought his entire family including his wife, kids, two brothers-in-law in their 20’s and an elderly father-in-law.   The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, one of the top ten volags, played a major role in resettling this family through their local affiliate Us Together (could find no information on this non-profit group).

Read the whole article here.   I bet the mainstream media won’t be reporting the final line in the story.

If the Americans pull out [of Iraq] now, Sameer said, “there will be a slaughter.”

The 2005 Office of Refugee Resettlement report to Congress says this of Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society:

HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, is the national and worldwide arm of the organized American Jewish community for the rescue, relocation and resettlement of refugees and migrants.

Appendix A of the same report says that Ohio has been the destination for 31,409 refugees between 1983 and 2005.

Iraq refugees, no leadership from Bush Administration

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

If you watch or listen to Glen Beck, a kind of crazy but right-on-the-mark talk show host, he often says this issue or that issue “will make blood shoot from your eyes.”    Well, this is one of those issues for me.   Every day (all day!) there are stories from every corner about Iraqi refugees.  Stories are generated by the United Nations, the volags (voluntary agencies), Washington DC think tanks, Senators such as Ted Kennedy, concerned Christian groups,  DC conservative pro-Muslim insiders(yes!) and of course, the mainstream media.   Most of them say we are very bad for not bringing a million or so here now.  Other stories give bits and pieces of “facts” that make anyone trying to follow this want to tear one’s hair out (while blood is shooting from one’s eyes).

Just yesterday the Washington Post featured yet another frontpage story entitled “Iraqis with ties to US cross borders into despair” which laments that 100,000 Iraqis who worked for the US government (or anyone obliquely connected to the US) at one time or another are trying to get into the US and describes the pace of resettlement as “glacial”.   The article focuses on well-educated, once prosperous Iraqis.   But, just a week ago the Post reported on the first Iraqis arriving in cities like Phoenix, Arizona indicating that those educated Iraqis are not too happy.

Before they arrived here, the refugees said they were told by U.N. representatives that they could get jobs based on their professional qualifications. But they said they have now been told that they should work as hotel housekeepers, an occupation many of them have refused because they deem it degrading.

Then we have the Associated Press reporting that in the month of October 46,000 Iraqis returned home as the violence subsides in their homeland.    One of my questions is, are we going to bring thousands and thousands of the best and brightest Iraqis to America to clean motels when it might be better for them and Iraq to be taken care of  (by us if necessary) where they are until they return to rebuild Iraq?

I cite the above to illustrate the confusion generated by an apparent lack of government policy on this very critical issue.

Bottomline,  we have no leadership in the Bush Administration on this, which allows all these special interests with their own sets of facts to wage a monstrous public relations battle in search of public consensus.  No, I take that back,  it won’t be public consensus, in this leadership vacuum the winner of the debate will be the biggest and loudest bully on the subject.    The Bush Administration should send a balanced fact-finding mission to look for the truth on the ground in the Middle East and convene a conferance on the Iraqi Refugee situation by bringing the best and brightest (without an agenda)  together in a public forum to craft a coherant strategy.

If you have the fortitude, read through our entire Iraqi refugee coverage here and you will understand why this is a “blood shooting from the eyes” subject.

UN driving the debate with the truth? Not!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We’ve said this before, but every day there are stories after stories after stories about the “Iraqi Refugee Crisis.”     This is being driven by leftists, like those at the United Nations, for two reasons.  The first is to bash Bush; the second is to convince the public to bring tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands, if they could) of Iraqi refugees here this minute.   But, they are not giving you all the facts.

Here is a report of a press conference at the United Nations two days ago.   And, here are a few sentences that particularly caught my eye to demonstrate how the facts are conviently twisted to promote the UN agenda.

Of particular concern were the serious difficulties of women, who made up a large portion of the refugee population, including many women heads of households, single women, women with children and women without male support, she went on. There had been a resurgence of problems, such as “weekend marriages”, in which young girls in a family were made available for traditional marriage ceremonies for a weekend to men willing to pay for such a ceremony. A divorce was then arranged at the end of the weekend. Such an arrangement was not labelled as prostitution, but as marriage, although in reality it was “survival sex”. That protection issue also needed to be addressed.

First,  as we reported previously the majority of refugees (73%) in Syria are men between the ages of 18 and 50.   Gee, now why do you think men in that age range dashed over to Syria in large numbers in late 2006.  Could it have anything to do with the surge? Did they leave their wives home in dangerous Iraq?

And, then the UN won’t tell you that this Muslim (mostly Shiite) practice called Muta, or “weekend marriages,” is a centuries old practice supposedly sanctioned by Mohammed himself so that widows could make a little extra money.    Deplorable for any reason, still the UN wants you to think this has sprung up as a direct outgrowth of the war in Iraq and the supposed dire circumstances in which the refugees live.  The spinners at the UN just can’t bring themselves to mention cultural practices in Islam that might be seen as undesireable in western eyes.  

Instead it’s always America’s fault.   Everything fits this little template:   America/Bush bad, Middle East/Muslims good.

Utah plans new state refugee office–Iraqis coming

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The Governor and Salt Lake County Mayor laud the creation of a new state department to handle the increased needs of a growing refugee community in Utah.   They also need better coordination for dispensing federal funds.   The article today in the Salt Lake Tribune suggests this new office is coming at a critical time to handle the anticipated flow of Iraqi refugees.

Catholic Community Services just resettled its first Iraqi family, said Vladimir Klaich, refugee resettlement program manager.

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“This is just the beginning,” he said. “We expect to have many more, but we don’t know exactly when or how many will be coming.”

I’ve put some information about Utah in the “your state” page above to help you get started on research.  However, now that I have found the handy little database at the Office of Refugee Resettlement here are a few nuggets about Utah.    In 2006, Utah handled 766 cases and received $3,883,038 in federal grants.  Those figures indicate that each case cost the taxpayer $5069.    However keep in mind that this is only a portion of what it costs to resettle refugees.   The volags are paid by the head by the US State Department then the refugees are on some form of welfare.   82% of the cases in 2006 were receiving  medical benefits.   That is no surprise because the average hourly wage was $7.35 for those who were working.

Utah ranks pretty low on the Bobby Byrd Scale.  West Virginia had one case in 2006 and received $100,522 in federal grant money!

Syria has opened door to US Homeland Security

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

AP is reporting this afternoon that Syria will give visas to officials from US Homeland Security in order to screen some of the 12,000 Iraqi refugees the UN has selected for resettlement to America this fiscal year.

Syria has agreed to allow U.S. interviewers into the country to screen Iraqi refugees for admission to the United States, clearing a major obstacle to the Bush administration’s resettlement program.

See our previous posts here and here on who the Iraqis are in Syria.  And, our post on the UN’s role in selecting refugees in Jordan.