Category: Legal immigration and jobs

Large numbers of Iraqis resettled in El Cajon, CA not finding work

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Gee, I wonder why.  Just one more in a long list of stories about the large number of Iraqis being resettled in the US and then not finding employment.

From Prospect Journal:

When these refugees arrive in the country, the U.S. federal government provides them with a monthly stipend of around $800 to help them get situated. However, the payments expire after eight months, which is assumed to be an adequate amount of time to resettle, gain employment, and assimilate into the local community. Not surprisingly, this does not happen in most cases. Instead, refugees become increasingly reliant on non-profit organizations like the International Rescue Committee and Catholic Charities to provide assistance in a number of tasks ranging from the complicated immigration process to filing online job applications in the service sector. [The writer doesn’t know that these two supposed non-profits are actually the government contractors responsible for the resettlement in the first place.  They are being paid by the federal government to assist the refugees-–ed]

The quest for employment can be long and defeating. Of the few employers that are hiring in the midst of an economic downturn, few are hiring middle-aged refugees without a native grasp of the English language or experience in the American workforce. Yalda has filed numerous online and in-person job applications, but has yet to receive a follow-up call from a single employer. The refugees that do gain employment usually find work in the low-level service industry, which primarily consists of jobs in the hotel, retail, and manual labor sectors. These industries offer poor wages and poor prospects for job mobility.

What!  No meat-packers in El Cajon.  By the way, disgruntled Iraqis have gone home to Iraq.  It is possible to do.  As a matter of fact, I’ve advocated that the US State Department fly them home (or to the Middle East somewhere) if they are unhappy and on welfare here.  In fact, it wouldn’t be unprecedented.  Remember in 1999 we brought about 15,000 unhappy Kosovars here and shipped about 10,000 back the following year, here.

The price of the return airline ticket would sure be less costly to the taxpayers in the long run.

Immigration and jobs continued: foreign college students taking low wage jobs

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

If you are wondering why the unemployment rate is so high for teens and college students looking for summer jobs—look no further than the State Department’s Summer Work Travel program that imports 100,000 kids from abroad each summer.  They work cheap and are described as virtual slaves to big business.  The Center for Immigration Studies will hold a panel discussion on the program in Washington, DC on March 13th.   Read all about it here.

If you are trying to help legitimate refugees find scarce jobs you should be telling your legislators in Washington that this program stinks!

When did the US State Department become the headhunter for big business?

Radical open borders group, the US Chamber of Commerce and Lutherans prove my point

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Legal immigration and jobs….

Yesterday I began (with a post about Tyson Foods and cheap captive labor) what will surely be a series of posts on immigration and jobs.  And, sure enough, right out of the box comes this story about the hard Left open borders political group, Immigration Policy Center (a benign-sounding George Soros enterprise) joining forces with the US Chamber of Commerce to push for more immigration and it’s all cheered on with a big fat wet kiss from the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services (LIRS) (like those fancy digs!) which will be paid by you (the taxpayer) to help all the job seekers “nest” (that is their euphemism for helping the new immigrants tap into social services).  LIRS will then serve to put a “humanitarian” patina on the whole big business/big money enterprise.

Here is the story making the rounds yesterday:

BALTIMORE, Feb. 29, 2012 — /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Humanitarian refugee resettlement benefits American businesses and communities, a fact made clear yesterday at a joint US Chamber of Commerce and Immigration Policy Center (IPC) event to promote their new report,  “Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Creating Jobs and Strengthening the Economy.”

Refugees make up nearly a third of the case studies in the new report, which was authored by the Immigrant Learning Center (ILC) Public Education Institute as a joint effort of the Chamber and the Immigration Policy Center of the American Immigration Council.

“Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service welcomes this recognition by the Chamber and its partners that humanitarian refugee resettlement creates economic gains,” said LIRS Vice President for Mission Advancement Stacy Martin, who attended the event at the Chamber’s Washington, DC headquarters.

“The need for a careful study of immigrants’ role in job creation has never been more relevant.,” Randy Johnson, the Chamber’s senior vice president for labor, immigration, and employee benefits and former LIRS Board member, notes in the forward to the Chamber’s newly-released report. “The report… demonstrates how these immigrant businesses create jobs for US workers and contribute to America’s economic growth.”

Read it all.  They couch it all in terms of how great it is that immigrants open businesses, but they don’t tell you about the huge government racket in micro-loans and other lending products geared toward immigrants (when is that bubble going to burst?).   Don’t get me wrong, I am definitely not against business and people making money, my problem is twofold—that it is being done with your money (remember the billion bucks per year, here) and that they are lying to you.

Stop pretending that helping refugees and immigrants is all about helping the downtrodden and tell the truth that immigrants fill the Lutherans’ pockets (via the taxpayer) and the Chamber wants cheap labor for the big boys in industry and the George Soros gang wants reliable Democrat voters.

An afterthought:  I posted this a few minutes ago and then decided to have a look at LIRS most recent Form 990, here. Are you ready to throw-up!  Out of an annual gross income that recent year of $40 million, $38 million came from you in the form of government grants.  Salaries for the head honchos totaled a half million dollars.  So where is the ACLU and the separation of church and state that the Left is always screaming about?

Tyson Foods Shelbyville, TN: all sorts of goodies to get and keep immigrant labor

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is the first in what will be many posts in my new category‘ Legal immigration and jobs.’  In fact, it’s this piece of information, now mysteriously missing from the US State Department’s website, that inspired this new category.

Clinton brings cheap refugee labor to Iowa

I’ve reported on this many many times on these pages.  I think the first time was when I wrote about the Clinton Administration acting as employment head hunter and dropping off thousands of Bosnian refugees in Iowa for the big meatpacker—IBP, here.  (Tyson Foods bought IBP in 2005).  That was such an eye-opener!  The Clinton Administration was solving an employment problem for big beef by bringing 6000 Bosnian “refugees” to Iowa in 1995.  And, Clinton, I am guessing, got a few benefits for his campaign war chest.  S**** Iowa and American workers!  Remember Hillary had that little lucrative connection to Tyson Foods too.

BTW, a former employee of Tysons told me that at one time these meatpackers paid very good wages and Americans were eager to do the work.

Cheap labor to Shelbyville, TN

Now jump forward in time to Shelbyville, TN last month.  I reported that acting Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration, David Robinson, presided over a mission to Tennessee to ascertain just how things are going in the only state in the nation to pass a law to try to get the refugee flow under control.  (Although readers should know that Wyoming doesn’t participate in the refugee program for some unexplained reason).  Please read previous posts here on the visit to Tennessee.

After returning to Washington, Robinson penned a glowing piece about how great the refugee program is (wow! three million since 1975!) that was published at the Huffington Post.   But, keep in mind that Robinson is also the author of this ten-year-old report on how the program has been misused (to the detriment of the taxpayers and to the so-called refugees themselves!).

Here then is what Robinson said about Tyson Foods in an e-mail which originally was linked here at the State Department website (if you click on the link it is gone now):

In Tennessee, I heard firsthand the commitment of businesses to making
refugee resettlement successful. Tyson Foods support to refugees is
remarkable: $100,000 per year for on-site ESL, $3,500 per year for
college costs, 100% reimbursement for naturalization applications,
full-time interpreters on site, financial assistance, on-site banking,
and tax preparation services, all of which demonstrate why the company
had only a 12.5% turnover last year and has proven to be such a strong
example of leadership in integrating refugees, not just into their new
community, but into the wider U.S. economy.

WTF! So, let’s see, the town of Shelbyville has been roiled by controversy for years over the arrival of demanding, culturally challenging Somali refugees obviously lured by Tyson Foods with all sorts of special deals for them.   And, I am still working on finding out exactly what the tax benefits are to Tyson Foods for hiring LEGAL IMMIGRANTS (instead of Americans) in the first place. 

Click here to see what we get so Tyson Foods can have cheap labor.  I wonder does David Robinson sleep at night?  Never mind Robinson, how do you resettlement industry “church” people, in bed with big business and selling out small town America, sleep?

And, to top it all off, anyone who questions these arrangements, any taxpayer who doesn’t want to subsidize this deal, is promptly labeled a racist, xenophobic hater!  What a racket they have!

Legal immigration and the jobs issue

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I have so many links and bits of information that have come my way over the last few days about LEGAL immigration and jobs, that it’s too much to put in one post.  Additionally, I don’t have all the pieces to the puzzle either.  But, my basic thesis is that under the guise of doing the humanitarian thing, businesses are benefiting from the less expensive (and in many cases captive—refugees can’t get home!) immigrant labor to the detriment of unemployed American citizens.

Businesses benefit as well because for some categories of legal immigration (refugees and asylees) any meager salary the refugees receive is helped along by the welfare benefits the employee receives on the side.  So what if wages are low, the immigrant laborers get all sorts of other taxpayer-funded benefits

Federal refugee contractors benefit themselves by bringing in the labor (via the US State Department of course) and being paid to do so (by the taxpayer) all the while wearing the white hat of the do-gooder.  This isn’t a new theory of mine, it’s just that I plan to get to the bottom of it now.

Oh, and one more thing, certain big businesses use their connections to government to get this cheap immigrant labor and thus out-compete their competitors—it has a name, it is called “corporatism” —and it allows the hard Left (the Obama Administration) to work in concert with big business.

So, I’m making a new category called, “legal immigration and jobs,” and will begin writing posts for the category in hopes of eventually proving my thesis.

I am sick to death of the hypocrisy—that this is all about helping the downtrodden!  It is about money and political power, not the poor immigrant.

Although not related to refugees, to start things off, here is a link to an investigative piece on the HB visas which allow hundreds of thousands of foreign workers to enter the US each year.  This was on facebook this morning, hat tip Jackie.