Category: Legal immigration and jobs

Guatemalans must be lobbying for temporary refugee status

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Your tax dollars!

I wrote a post back in February at Potomac Tea Party Report about how Guatemala’s Foreign Minister traveled to the US to lobby for Temporary Protected Status for ‘his people’ in the US.  Every day that post is still near the top of my list of most read posts, so I can only assume that there is a campaign on-going to get Obama to grant the backdoor amnesty for Guatemalans already in the US.

Here is what I said in February about the program that Mark Krikorian at the Center for Immigration Studies rightly pegs when he says there is nothing quite so permanent as temporary refugee status.

While we are all busy arguing over illegal immigration and how to combat it, the Obama administration is busy with backdoor amnesty.  One such program to legalize the illegals is quietly becoming increasingly popular— Temporary Protected Status (TPS)

Just recently TPS was extended for Salvadorans who have been here illegally for more than a decade.  We’ve also extended TPS for Haitians who got here illegally prior to the earthquake.  And, now in light of the turmoil in Syria, an open borders cabal* is asking for TPS for Syrians.

The basic idea behind TPS is that those who are in the country illegally, or whose Visas might expire are allowed to stay and WORK in the US because it would be a hardship on their country (and the illegals themselves) to send them back to a country that is a mess for some reason.

However, the way things are going, this administration would have a good excuse not to deport illegals back to almost any country in the world for some reason.

Now we learn that Guatemala wants TPS for its people here too—because of heavy rains related to tropical storm Agatha nearly two years ago!

Read my whole post that is attracting so much attention.  The great benefit to Guatemala is that their nationals living in the US can readily send remittances back to their homeland without any legal hassles.

Flimsy excuses like this one—a two year old storm—have perverted what might have been a limited program for very rare circumstances, instead it is one more egregious misuse of the concept of “refugees.”   These are illegal aliens/economic migrants not true refugees.

What got me thinking about this again today was this story from North Carolina about one more taxpayer-funded benefit TPS “refugees” get—instate tuition.

Trying to make Lancaster, PA a model for refugee resettlement?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

That appears to be the goal of a new consortium of resettlement agencies and ‘stakeholders’ who have been roundly criticized in the past for “dumping refugees on Lancaster.”

Before you read the latest news from the overloaded city, be sure to check out this detailed post from last May which centered on testimony sent to the US State Department by a resident of Lancaster who charged that Church World Service (one of the top nine federal refugee contractors) was dumping refugees there.

They wouldn’t need to build this coalition or have a pow-wow if everything was peachy in Lancaster.  From Lancaster Online:

With a significant number of refugees coming to Lancaster County in recent years — including 560 in the 11 months from October 2011 to August 2012 — a Lancaster County Refugee Coalition has been formed to better coordinate services and support.

Susan Dicklitch, director of The Ware Institute for Civic Engagement at Franklin & Marshall College, said the coalition grew out of a conference hosted by F&M last March.

Sponsored by The Ware Institute, Church World Service of Lancaster and a student organization at Franklin & Marshall, the conference brought together more than 200 providers, employers, landlords and others who work with refugees, in such areas as health care or English literacy, she said.

“The idea was to provide a forum for those who interact with resettled refugees,” Dicklitch said.

Church World Service and Lutheran Refugee Services are the two agencies that resettle refugees in Lancaster County. Most of the recent arrivals have been from Bhutan, Myanmar (Burma), Iraq and Cuba. Refugees in the past have also come from Russia, Turkey, Sudan and Somalia.

During the conference, participants analyzed the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and challenges of how the county is resettling refugees, she said.

“We got a real sense of how to move forward” by doing that, Dicklitch said.

Previously, there hasn’t been enough communication among agencies and providers, or a centralized effort to streamline the resettlement process, she said.

By agreement with the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, resettlement agencies have 90 days to provide core services to refugees, such as finding housing, Dicklitch said.

The goal of the Lancaster County Refugee Coalition — with The Ware Institute and CWS as the main partners —is to optimize the resettlement experience during that 90 days and beyond, she said, with an aim toward making this area “a national example” of how to integrate refugees.

Why Lancaster?  Because (we are told) that big manufacturing businesses need cheap/captive labor (they don’t say it that way but I do), there is apparently a good supply of welfare and healthcare and supposedly they have adequate affordable housing (or so we are told).

Today, refugee resettlement agencies view the county as an ideal spot for several reasons, Dicklitch said.

There’s a sizable manufacturing base here that allows for lower-skilled jobs, she said, and the cost of housing is relatively affordable.

Also, public transportation and health care resources are available, Dickitch said.

Not enough churches to help!

Then here is the one line in this lengthy warm and fuzzy story that made me laugh—they can’t find enough churches to help!

In addition, there traditionally have been a large number of co-sponsors (such as churches) for refugee families, although that number has been shrinking, she said.

Why shrinking!  How could that be?   It’s because when a church discovers the huge and overwhelming time commitment involved with dealing with excessive numbers of third worlders who don’t speak English, have very little education, don’t know how to live in modern countries, have enormous health care and transportation needs, the church “volunteers” burn out!

We saw that happen in Hagerstown, MD  in 2007 when this very same Church World Service and its subcontractor Virginia Council of Churches suddenly brought a couple hundred needy refugees (over-flows from Lancaster, PA btw) to the city.  A few churches and the local mosque immediately jumped on the opportunity only to mostly burn-out a few months into the project—the “charitable” work was going to be foisted off on to the county if the whole resettlement program hadn’t been abandoned.

So, how do you find an optimum number of refugees for a community—each refugee family should be sponsored and taken care of by a church or some other charitable organization on that organization’s dime.    In that way, the carrying capacity of a city will quickly be determined.  And, frankly, the refugees might then have a shot at assimilating into American life.

For more on Pennsylvania refugees and stats, go here.  Also, type ‘Lancaster’ into our search function here at RRW, we’ve got a lot.  You might especially like this post about the woman responsible for ‘transforming’ Lancaster.

Oh boy, here we go again “meatpacker” sob stories; demands for “rights”

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

It’s been awhile since we’ve had a story about meatpackers and their immigrant labor.  Heck, a few years ago we set up whole categories on the controversy.  We had stories from Emporia, KS, Greeley, CO, Shelbyville, TN, Ft. Morgan, CO and Grand Island, NE.*   Most of those involved Somali refugees demanding their rights to worship their religion on the job (and some stories about other immigrant groups angry at the company for bending to Somali demands).

The long and short of these stories is that the “international” meatpacking companies (some are not even owned by Americans) figured out that they could use cheap immigrant labor and keep wages low.  I’ve been told by Americans who worked in meatpacking decades ago that wages were very good at Midwest meatpacking companies, BEFORE the illegal aliens were hired.  (This article I’m about to report tells us that too.)

Then the giant corporations realized that they couldn’t function with immigration raids of their plants where the feds were looking for the illegals, so BINGO! they hit on the refugee population—not only were they in abundant supply, they worked cheap and were captive (most refugees can’t get back home even when they want to).

Bill Clinton’s Bosnians!

Bill Clinton was among the first (that we know of!) to bring large numbers of refugees for his corporate buddies in Iowa.  I told you about that here in 2008.  And, I continue to maintain that the US State Department is working as the head-hunter for large corporate interests and supplying them with cheap subsidized labor.   I say “subsidized” because some of these companies are getting tax breaks for hiring poor people—and the refugee employees are getting welfare on the side.  It is a very sweet deal for these companies!    And, it’s doubly good for the Hard Leftwing Socialists because they get the third world population pouring into the US.

But, it’s not just the Lefties who want cheap labor for their Corporate friends, see Mark Krikorian at NRO on Republicans looking for cheap immigrant labor as well.   The difference is that the Republicans only want the cheap labor while the Leftists get a twofer—cheap labor and they get to change the US population (and they can demand “rights” for the downtrodden as this article tells us).

I almost forgot—and the Islamists get the Hijra.

Now to the latest story on the poor and suffering meatpacker immigrant labor force  from the Daily Planet (the reporter is Somali).

First the requisite sob story (LOL! is this basic Leftwing media reporter training—sob story right up front!).

Mohamud Kahin left his war-ravaged country five years ago, promised his siblings in Somalia they would never have to go to bed unfed and rolled up his sleeves for a new life in the United States.

Kahin arrived in Minneapolis in 2007. He has never been to school, and English remains a forever-foreign language to him.

It’s almost impossible to find a job around the Twin Cities, his relatives in Minneapolis told him when he first arrived. They gave him the most common advice given to a new adult immigrant with no English: go to the meat processing companies.

And Kahin did.

In 2008, he moved to Postville, Iowa, joining hundreds of Somali immigrants with similar stories. The 26-year-old Kahin got his share of large knives and cleavers on the fast-moving animal slaughtering and processing lines of Agri Star Meat & Poultry LLC — formally Agriprocessors. It’s the largest producer of kosher meat in the country and the biggest employer in Postville.

Kahin worked more than 40 hours a week as a meat packer in both frigid and oven-like conditions.

“My feet got really swollen,” Kahin said of the first few weeks of the job, speaking in Somali. “There were blisters on the bottom on my heel. The pain was constant.”

He had to stick with the job so he could send $500 a month to his family in Kismayo — it was a way to keep the promise he had made to his siblings: they would never go to bed hungry.

And, we sure don’t want those Al-Shabaab Jihadists going to bed hungry either.  Remember, the US government stopped this money transfer awhile back because some was surely going to the Jihadists.

In the early 1980s [at the same time the Refugee Resettlement Act passed Congress and was signed by Jimmy Carter—ed] meatpackers left US cities and moved to the countryside—surely because property taxes in the cities drove them out and they discovered cheap immigrant labor.

According to the report, 20 to 50 percent of workers at meat processing industries are immigrants and refugees from Africa, Central America, and Mexico.

More than 30 years ago, meatpacking and processing industries were located in the heart of Midwestern cities, including St. Paul, Chicago and Kansas City. New immigrant workers [there weren’t many then, it was mostly American labor—ed] and many Americans in the industries enjoyed “comparable salaries to middle-class workers in the auto and steel industries,” according to the report.

In the early 1980s, however, these jobs were relocated to rural parts of the Midwest and South because “of a much broader reorganization of the industry,” the report said. And a sharp decline in wages has followed. [So tell me why a move to the country would necessarily reduce wages?—ed]

Today, new immigrant communities, documented or undocumented, are finding themselves in rural areas in search of meatpacking job opportunities.

Poor discriminated-against Muslim workers!  Can’t speak English, can’t take prayer breaks—boo-hoo!

Many meatpacking immigrant workers are undocumented or don’t speak enough English. Most don’t know their rights as employees or are afraid to complain. Consequently, they fall victims to supervisors.

“Abuse was often based on race, ethnicity, and immigration status,” the report said. “Undocumented immigrants were insulted and singled out for the worst jobs because they were unlikely to complain.”

Two years ago, JBS Swift was alleged to be a hostile work place for the Somali and Muslim workers because of their race, immigration status and religion, according to a 2010 news release from The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

If you have the energy, check out our 83 previous POSTS (Greeley/Swift/Somali controversy category) on what really happened with those Somali demands and turmoil created in those midwestern meatpacking plants a couple of years ago.   By the way, JBS Swift is a Brazilian Company and we get to help support their immigrant labor force through our social services!  Cool huh!

*Type each of those city names into our search function for more fun with refugee meatpacker stories.

Republicans would expand LEGAL immigration, including chain migration in their proposed bill

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

But, they would eliminate the Diversity Visa Lottery which I just mentioned here the other day.  Advocates for mass immigration into the US fittingly call this diversity-enhancing program “new seed” immigration.

From AP at the Washington Post on Friday (while you were relaxing):

WASHINGTON — House Republicans still smarting from their poor showing among Hispanics in the presidential election are planning a vote next week on immigration legislation that would both expand visas for foreign science and technology students and make it easier for those with green cards to bring their immediate families to the U.S.

This is generally known as chain migration (Rep. Eric Cantor is all for it according the article):

Republicans are changing the formula this time by adding a provision long sought by some immigration advocates — expanding a program that allows the spouses and minor children of people with permanent residence, or green card, to wait in the United States for their own green cards to be granted.

There are some 80,000 of these family-based green cards allocated every year, but there are currently about 322,000 husbands, wives and children waiting in this category and on average people must wait more than two years to be reunited with their families. In that past that wait could be as long as six years.

Here is the part that sounds pretty good, but will go nowhere until people across America get involved and demand that their member of Congress KILL the Diversity Visa Lottery (sometimes called the “green card lottery”).  In fact, anyone who really cared about the refugees would oppose this lottery program too because it imports the kind of immigrants who will be in direct competition with refugees for jobs.

But the legislation would still eliminate the Diversity Visa Lottery Program which gives out a similar 55,000 green cards a year to those from countries, including many in Africa, with traditionally low rates of immigration to the U.S. That prompted the House’s Hispanic Caucus, Congressional Black Caucus and Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus to all come out against it in September.

The three caucuses said Republicans were trying to increase legal immigration for people they want by ending immigration for people they don’t want.

Ahhhhhh!  That is exactly what the goal of our immigration policy should be—-TO TAKE THE IMMIGRANTS WE WANT, THOSE THAT WOULD BENEFIT AMERICA and not the ones that will drain our resources while refusing to assimilate.

Immigration lawyers:  Looks like the Republicans are ready to talk, but this isn’t enough to satisfy us!

Crystal Williams, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the bill is a message from Republicans that “we are here and we are ready to talk about immigration reform.”

But she said she doubted it will make much progress in the Senate during the short lame-duck session. People “are now starting to think about broader reform,” she said, adding that a limited bill that doesn’t increase visas won’t get a lot of support.

Send those squishy Republicans back to the drawing board because they don’t get it—-no matter what they do it isn’t going to be enough for the Hard Left and their friends in the corporate world who need low wage laborers.

For new readers: Check out wikipedia here on the Diversity Visa Lottery, it has a pretty good write-up.  I’ve started a new category for the Diversity Visa but only have this post and a previous one in it so far.  Type ‘diversity visa lottery’ into our search function for the many posts prior to the creation of the category.

Australia: Islamophobia on the rise says new study

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Seems that regular folks in Australia are leery of employing Muslim immigrants after terrorist attacks in the US and in Bali.  Imagine that!

Note to friends of mine who have said they want to move to Australia after the recent US election—you are dreaming.  They have the same problems we do with a growing population of non-western, largely third world immigrants.  My google alerts are filled daily with stories about recent illegal boat arrivals of mostly Muslims and hunger strikes by asylum seekers that have the government and the people of Australia in regular turmoil.

Get with the program—it is always your fault!  It has nothing to do with events like this one in Australia just this past September—Muslim kids carry signs demanding beheadings.

Tell me, what have supposedly ‘moderate Muslims’ done to disavow and stand up to the so-called hijackers of their religion—nothing!  But, you bad ol’ westerners don’t want to hire them because you are Islamophobic.

Here is the report from News.com.au:

A NEW report paints a devastating picture of Muslim unemployment in Australia and links workplace discrimination to terrorist attacks such as the Bali bombings.

The report says that reducing the deep-seated hostility toward Muslims by a minority of Australians was hard to achieve in an atmosphere created by an open-ended war on terror.

The Newcastle University report was completed last year and quietly released on the Immigration Department’s website.

Using Census data, it found that the jobless rate for Muslim men was more than double the national average and that only 57 per cent of Muslim males aged 15 and older had jobs compared with 68 per cent of all working-age men.   [They must have some generous welfare program—ed]

The seven-person research team, led by Prof Terry Lovat, said that Muslims faced workplace barriers including poor English proficiency, difficulty having overseas qualifications recognised and cultural and religious issues.

But they said that Muslims were also viewed as “others” by employers, and they suffered rising discrimination in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks and the 2002 Bali bombings.

[….]

“Since the terrorist attacks Islamophobia is on the rise in Western countries, including Australia,” he said.  [By the way, if you haven’t noticed there are lesser attacks and many foiled attacks every day in the West.  It is not just some ancient history attacks like 9/11 that have people “Islamophobic”—ed]

The report’s authors called for a long-term concerted campaign to change societal attitudes that are reflected in workplace discrimination.

How come NO ONE ever asks the Muslims to change?  (click here)

For more on Australia, see our whole category here.