Category: Iraqi refugees

ARMY Times reprints AP story and I’m reminded of something

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Just now I noticed that the ARMY Times has reprinted that AP story I complained about the other day—the same old story,here.  Check it out.    This is what I was reminded of:  

A reader advised me the other day to be sure especially military people wishing to help Iraqis resettle should know that the resettlement agencies have federal contracts which require certain minimum things and that those who wish to help interpreters and other Iraqis who helped the military should not do those things but give help in other ways.

Resettlement agencies are supposed to help new refugees by picking them up at the airport, providing first meals, making sure they have beds/bedding and certain furniture items, kitchen utensils and so forth.  In other words, if military people (and others) wish to help, give the Iraqi refugees items the agencies likely won’t provide.

Those items might include:  TV’s, computers, irons, microwaves, telephones, and dictionaries.

Associated Press does yet another ‘same old story’ about Iraqi refugees struggling in the US

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

If you are interested, go here and read the story.  But, I assure you it’s the same story we have been writing about for more than a year in our Iraqi refugee category (with 425 posts!).

These are the basic points the reports always include:

*Iraqis suffered because of the US invasion of Iraq, so we owe them bigtime.

*US was slow to help Iraqi refugees.

*Iraqi refugees are arriving in larger numbers in the US now and have been told their lives will be wonderful.

*But, now they discover there are no jobs and most of the Iraqis were rich professionals in Iraq and are disgruntled by low level jobs, or none at all.  No one ever raises the issue of slowing the flow of refugees during the recession.

*Refugee agencies place them in either expensive apartments they can’t afford for long, or lousy stinky ones.

*Bob Carey of the International Rescue Committee is always quoted about how rotten our refugee program is now and we need more taxpayer money allocated to refugee welfare, but no one ever asks how much money he makes and how rich the IRC is.

*Iraqis have doubts about staying here at all, but  most say they want the safety even if life is rotten right now and that they miss their former lifestyle.

Ho hum!  That’s it in a nutshell. Can’t you reporters find some new angle?  Makes me wonder if the IRC is driving these stories.  I wonder if they even send out little press kits and tell reporters exactly what to cover and who to interview.

Georgetown study critical of US State Department refugee program; and are there rich Iraqis?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Students from the Georgetown University Law Center in conjunction with some refugee advocacy groups interviewed Iraqi refugees and issued a report on their findings two days ago.

A report out of Georgetown University released today says the U.S. government is failing to help Iraqi refugees resettle.

“Iraqi refugees face odds so heavily stacked against them that most end up jobless, some even homeless,” the report says.

The report was based on interviews with Iraqi refugees – more than half of them from metro Detroit – that were conducted by students at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington D.C. in partnership with human rights groups at the university. In recent years, thousands of Iraqi refugees have been accepted in the U.S., a significant percentage of them coming to Michigan because of relatives and the high numbers of Arabic speakers.

Titled “Refugee Crisis in America,” the report criticizes the United States Refugee Admissions Program, which is administered by the US State Department, for what it called “poor planning and coordination.” A department spokeswoman was not immediately available to comment.

The report recommends that refugee assistance be extended from eight to 18 months and be administered separately from regular poverty assistance. It also calls for improved planning.

We’ve been reporting on this subject for two years now, so there is no surprise here.  It is not just the Iraqis who aren’t making it in the US.   There is also no surprise that one of the chief recommendations of this report is to expand the program and spend more taxpayer dollars on it. We agree the program needs to be reformed, but I’m not sure I’ll be agreeing with the Georgetown students on how to do it.  You can read the whole report here.   I’ll have more to say when I’ve gotten through it.

We told you about the mess in Detroit on several occasions (most recently here).  Michigan is broke, unemployment is through the roof and the immigrants continue to pour in.

Rich Iraqi refugees?  

I guess these students only found the homeless Iraqis (or those on the verge of homelessness) to interview.  Coincidentally, I just last night got this comment to an old post by someone identfying himself/herself as ‘Stealth’.  I have no way of knowing if this is true but ‘Stealth’ seems to know something, although I don’t know what that last sentence means.

I can tell you that the state knows exactly what they are doing..These refugees you speak of, I handle most of the banking in MI and it would blow your mind to know this. Refugees wire in money to “our MICHIGAN banks”, from IRAQ/Jordan from property’s sold from their homeland..Each incoming wire 2-3 in days apart are between 250k-750k..The Refugees are bringing in new cash, it’s still on the hush hush and most are College Grads..Trust me on this one, if it wasn’t for all the NEW money coming in from the riches of IRAQ refugees, I assure you that is why were gettinh the Ctholics.

So what is up with that?  More later.

Clinton, Obama, Podesta, scandals, ACORN, Podesta, immigrants, diversity, Podesta, Tides, Soros, Podesta

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I guess you get my drift—John Podesta is in the middle of it all!   Podesta as we told you previously is the head honcho of the very far Left “think tank”  Center for American Progress.   He got our attention in January when his Center released a report and a plea to the incoming Obama Administration to airlift 100,000 Iraqis to the US —ASAP—this year—pronto!  

What made me think of him this morning was a column by Andrew Breitbart published in the Washington Times entitled, “Podesta spends Soros money stupidly.”  Breitbart tells us about a recent lunch date between Clinton and Obama and speculates that  they discussed how to manipulate their media friends away from scandals like the growing ACORN debacle.

A telling event occurred on Sept. 15, Day 6 of the drip, drip, drip ACORN video rollout. President Obama met for lunch with former President Bill Clinton at trendy Il Mulino in New York City.

For the second consecutive day, the New York Post featured the ACORN scandal on its cover – complete with James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles in their outrageous “pimp and ho” costumes.

Does anyone think the president and the former president were unaware that the city in which they were dining was mesmerized by the ACORN scandal – especially since ACORN had bragged that its employees had kicked Mr. O’Keefe and Ms. Giles out of their New York office?

[….]

No one in the morally superior media world has asked, why did Mr. Obama have lunch with Mr. Clinton that day? So let me take a guess, and it seems like an obvious answer. Mr. Obama, under siege by a video-a-day expose that was exposing the Democratic Party to an avalanche of consequences (ACORN defunded in the House and Senate, ACORN delinked from the census, etc.), needed advice from the last president to navigate through a major political scandal.

Well lookie here—the next day Mr. Fix-it Podesta is called in to “investigate” ACORN!

The next day, Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta, the Democratic Party’s top fix-it guy with control over much of the left’s well-funded vast attack machinery (think George Soros, the Tides Foundation, et al.), was among a small advisory group placed in charge of investigating the matter.

[….]

So, who is John Podesta? He runs the Center for American Progress think tank, which in 2004 helped launch Media Matters for America, the well-funded watchdog outfit run by ex-conservative journalist David Brock, which feeds the media reams of anti-conservative documents that attempt to diminish the credibility of alternative media outlets.

Now back to my interest in Podesta  (bio here) who ran the Obama transition team, is connected to the Tides Foundation, George Soros and immigrants and who is coincidentally from Chicago like so many of Obama’s other friends.   I wonder did the blogger at New Zeal ever learn anything about the Podesta family in Chicago—where apparently all old Communists went to live in the late 1940’s and ’50’s?

The Immigrant connection!

The Tides Foundation, George Soros, American Center for Progress are all Open Borders pushers.   Do they really care so much for the poor and angry immigrants they import—my answer is NO!  Immigrants are pawns.   Those ACORN tapes and the attitude of ACORN workers toward the idea of bringing young girls across the border illegally tells us that. It’s all about their political agenda and about winning.   With perfect timing I just got an e-mail from reader B.L. with this quote from Clinton about a Vast Right-wing conspiracy.

Yesterday, Clinton was asked on ‘Meet the Press’ (Limbaugh calls it ‘Meet the Depressed’) if he feared a Republican takeover of Congress in 2010 and he confidentally said no:

“There’s no way” that could happen, Clinton said, adding that “the country is more diverse….”

Get it!  Immigrants=diversity=Democratic voters.

Back to Breitbart who is morally outraged, as most of us are, at the idea of ACORN workers not batting an eyelash at the part of the scam involving underaged girls from El Salvador illegally entering the US.  Here he suggests Mr. Fix-it Podesta may have a harder time with this scandal.

Plus, unlike Mr. Clinton’s war-room blame-the-messenger excuse – “it’s just about the sex” – this year’s ACORN scandal won’t be pushed aside, because this time it includes 13-year-old sex slaves from El Salvador.

I hope he is right, but I wouldn’t be so sure.   Thirteen-year-old girls from El Salvador are a twofer for some Democrats.  Think about it!  Useful now, but in 5 years they could be counted on as reliable Democratic party voters.  Recall the Alinsky mantra:  the ends justify the means, any means!

Iraqis making a beeline for Detroit

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Time magazine has a story this week that we have reported previously, but as an old friend reminds me—repeat, repeat, and repeat some more!   Come to think of it, that’s what the mainstream media does too—just repeat the same old stories—and that’s how a couple of twentysomethings scooped them on the ACORN scandal (I guess you can tell those two are my heroes). 

Back to my reason for writing:  according to Time, 1/3 of the population of Dearborn (on the outskirts of Detroit) now is of Arabic descent and the children of Arab heritage make up 2/3 of the school-age population.

For Wasan Aljanaby, the journey from her native Iraq to the U.S. was long and convoluted: with her husband and young son, she fled first to Jordan, then Turkey, Argentina and Ecuador. Everywhere they went, inhospitable immigration rules prevented them from even trying to put down roots. It wasn’t until they were finally granted asylum in the U.S. last year that the Aljanabys could finally unpack their lives and settle down.

The easiest part of it all was deciding where in the U.S. they would settle down. “From the beginning, our destination was Detroit,” says Aljanaby.

It didn’t matter that Motown was experiencing the nation’s highest rates of unemployment or that Aljanaby’s skills as an Arabic-English translator might be more valuable in states with concentrations of defense contractors. More important was the fact that her husband had some relatives in Dearborn. “We knew we’d get shelter, food and the chance to build our lives,” says Aljanaby.

Detroit may be the poster child for urban flight, but there’s one group that still regards it as a city of hope: Iraqi refugees. Like previous waves of Arabs fleeing violence and political upheaval — or merely seeking new economic opportunity — thousands of Iraqis have been arriving in the Detroit metropolitan area since 2007, when the Bush Administration began accepting refugees from Iraq.

The U.S. will admit 17,000 Iraqi refugees this year, an increase from 14,000 in 2008. Mindful of Michigan’s unemployment burden, the State Department, working with nongovernment refugee-resettlement agencies, places most of the newcomers in other states, like Arizona, Maryland and Virginia. Michigan got around 3,000 last year, and that number is expected to shrink by a third in 2009.

But once they’ve got their bearings, many Iraqis placed elsewhere in the country make a beeline for Detroit.

I wondered when I read this story if many Iraqis, like the family above, are coming as asylees.   Generally asylum seekers get here on their own steam then use one of the hundreds (thousands!) of immigration lawyers ready and willing to file their asylum applications.   Once approved they receive the same benefits as refugees, except of course the airfare loan.