And, there are twenty, twenty! states including my Maryland that allow voters to show up (and vote!) at a polling place without any identification.
La Raza’s good pal!
It is not just the illegals….
Remember also, we are not talking only about someone who recently sneaked across the border, but millions of legal immigrants who are here as refugees, temporary refugees in the Temporary Protected Status program (includes hundreds of thousands from Central America), the ‘Dreamers,’ and all sorts of others with permanent resident status who have not yet acquired citizenship. All are able to vote.
As a matter of fact, even in those states that do require ID, those LEGAL immigrants (non-citizens) with drivers licenses may well be voting too!
The pro-amnesty Hispanic activist organization the National Council of La Razahelpfully promoted a Washington Post article explaining which states people can vote in without having to use a photo ID.
“Voter ID laws are at-issue across the country, with newly Republican-controlled legislatures having passed them in numerous states after the 2010 election,” explained The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake. “Most states still request some form of ID, but don’t require it. Another 20 states don’t require identification. In case you’re wondering where your state is at in all of this, a helpful (sic) graphic from the Post’s graphics team.”
So who ended up using the Post’s helpful graphic? The country’s foremost pro-amnesty Hispanic immigrant organization.
Go here (Washington Post) to see the list of states and what sort of ID (or none at all) that is required.
Non-citizen Somali voters may have made the difference for funny-man Al Franken in 2008.
On Thursday we reported that some of Obama’s illegal alien “Dreamers” are voting.
And, I should mention that I’ve been asked several time recently if I thought illegal aliens or more importantly legal immigrants, like refugees, are voting before they have even gained citizenship and I’ve said: Of course they are! They simply check ‘yes’ to the citizenship question when they get a drivers license and they are good to go because no one ever cross-checks.
This Washington Poststory (can we believe our eyes that this is in the WaPo?) confirms what we have only surmised (hat tip: Paul). You can read the whole thing yourself but the section that interested me most was the one on the Minnesota Al Franken victory which we reported on extensively in 2008 (here is one of several posts we wrote at the time) may well have been decided with the help of Somali illegal voters.
From the Washington Post (although they don’t use the ‘S’ word!):
Because non-citizens tended to favor Democrats (Obama won more than 80 percent of the votes of non-citizens in the 2008 CCES sample), we find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections. Non-citizen votes could have given Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health-care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) won election in 2008 with a victory margin of 312 votes. Votes cast by just 0.65 percent of Minnesota non-citizens could account for this margin.
Obama and Valerie meeting with “Dreamers” in the White House. Get out there and vote! http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/05/21/aspiring-americans-share-their-stories-congress-debates-immigration-reform
And, you can be sure that many LEGAL refugees, diversity visa lottery winners and temporary protected status holders among other “legal” immigrants are voting too.
Get that drivers license and voting rights are assured. Rarely do states follow-up and check the status of those who checked the YES box to the citizenship question when applying for a drivers license.
But, here in a story from Breitbart (hat tip: Julia) we see that someone is checking in North Carolina:
With the North Carolina U.S. Senate race in a dead heta, state election officials say they have discovered 145 names on the voting rolls who are ineligible to vote because they are illegal immigrants who have been granted President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status.
According to a Winston-Salem Journal report, the State Board of Elections discovered the potential illegal voters Tuesday night when the N.C. Division of Motor Vehicles ran a search for DACA licenses. The 145 DACA recipients whose names appear on the SBOE’s voting rolls will be sent letters requesting documentation that they are citizens, the report noted.
DACA beneficiaries in North Carolina are able to obtain drivers licenses, but they are not able to vote.
The Journal notes that it is likely more ineligible people may still remain on the voting rolls.
Nearly 10,000 names on the rolls are tagged by the DMV as “legally present,” according to elections and transportation officials. But that doesn’t mean that all 10,000 are ineligible to vote at this time. These are license holders who were not U.S. citizens when they got a license. They may have been green-card holders, foreign workers or foreign students, for example.
Most have become U.S. citizens since getting a license, according to an estimate by elections officials based on a sample of the overall list.
According to the report, earlier this month the SBOE officials did a sample cross-check of 1,600 of the 10,000 “legally present” names against a Department of Homeland Security database and found that 94 percent were U.S. citizens and eligible to vote. However, that still meant that six percent were ineligible, meaning if the ratio held for the whole 10,000, 600 people would be ineligible.
Mike Charbonneau, a DMV spokesman, told the Journal that it is now cross checking all the names.
Good for you North Carolina! Every state should be vigorously pursuing the cheaters!
Michelle Obama on refugee gardening: “It’s a model for the nation, for the world”
Michelle O. visits refugee garden project in 2010. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/16/michelle-obama-visits-san_n_540440.html
A reporter once asked me how on earth could these refugee resettlement contractors and their spin-off groups make much money out of resettling refugees by the head when they receive a one time flat fee for each refugee planted in your town. I explained that most of the income for the contractors and subcontractors come through the myriad grants they receive through the Office of Refugee Resettlement for administering everything under the sun—job training programs, English classes,refugee savings accounts, micro-enterprise loan programs, healthy marriage trainingprograms, and even refugee veggie growing projects like those described in an article at TakePart.
Knowing a bit about agriculture and how hard it is to make a profit (unless you are a corporate farm with millions invested in land and equipment) these feel-good gardening projects taxpayers pay for—you pay for!—can only survive with large infusions of federal cash.
There are now agricultural programs across the country—many of which have been bolstered by federal Refugee Agricultural Partnership Program grants—aimed at transitioning people into their new lives in the States by focusing on the agrarian background shared by many refugees. But these garden plots are also meeting the demand for niche produce, such as bitter melon, providing a local market for vegetables that are staples in a refugee’s country of origin but are harder to find in the U.S. and are often sold for a premium.
After a discussion about Cleveland, reporter Sarah McColl takes us to one of our favorite locations for refugee resettlement—Nashville, Tennessee where we learn about an $85,000 grant that the Center for Refugees and Immigrants of Tennessee received from the federal government for FY14-FY16.
So how many veggies can you grow with $85,000 in federal funding!
Somali Community Center becomes Center for Refugees and Immigrants of Tennessee
Some longtime readers may remember that the Center was originally the Somali Community Center in Nashville. Let’s take a minute and go down memory lane. Here is what we said about the name change back in 2009:
So they conveniently dropped the name, Somali Community Center, eh? Could it be they want to shed their bad image with federal granting agencies? We have heard of this before, some agency or volag gets into grant trouble and pretty soon they are going by another name, I suppose hoping that new federal or state grantors (or the public!) won’t link them to the former bad acts.
A reminder to readers, the Somali Community Center got into hot water with the federal government over misuse of grants and with a possible connection to terrorist activities back in 2007. Check out this important and shocking story from Nashville’s Channel 4 news at the time.
The link to the shocking story is gone, but visit our post where we had, thank goodness, preserved the original text.
Back to the gardening grant where you can be sure the Center gets to keep a certain amount of your money for administrative purposes.
Snake gourds trellised up a willow tree? (and you paid for it!)
Lauren Bailey: We grow crops without spending a lot of money. $85,000 is a lot of money!
It’s much the same in Nashville: There are plenty of international grocery stores, explained Lauren Bailey, director of agricultural programs at the Center for Refugees and Immigrants of Tennessee. Access isn’t the problem.
“It’s less that they’re not able to find it and more that it’s expensive,” Bailey said. “But the crops that we’ve grown this year, they’ve been able to grow prolifically without spending a lot of money.” One enterprising gardener told Bailey he’d earned $25 from his mustard greens haul, though most take what they grow home to their own kitchen. “I sense that they’re excited to be growing, but also excited to be providing for their families,” she said.
In its first year after receiving a 2014 federal Refugee Agricultural Partnership Program grant, the Nashville program now includes a community garden, ESL instruction, and a training garden that hosts an 18-week market gardening course that’s regularly attended by refugees from Burma and Bhutan. It’s not a simple matter of the students learning from the teachers, however. “At one training garden they were growing a snake gourd, and they trellised it up a willow tree, and I’ve never seen anything like it before,” Bailey said.
Supplemental income, language practice, fresh veggies, and marketable skills are all important aspects of resettlement that are easier to quantify than some of the other benefits Bailey and Fitzpatrick have observed in the garden.
“It’s not just that it might provide income,” Bailey said, “but that it might bring health or improve their quality of life. For a lot of our gardeners, it’s a sense of ownership and pride—the work that they’re doing, and what they’re able to accomplish.”
Again, check out the whole list of grants for refugee gardens. By the way, I see that the now defunct Indiana gardens that American volunteers had to try to save (when refugees tired of the work) are no longer on the list.
Someone needs to take one of these grants, get the original grant requirement and track the federal money and figure out how much it costs to produce the veggies and what the return on your investment is, photograph the gardens on a regular basis and see how many refugees are actually gardening. I suspect there is lots and lots of room for fraud in managing one of these federal warm and fuzzy give-away programs.
Obama is getting it done with his pen and phone while everyone yaks about the Republicans possibly winning the Senate in a few weeks and while we follow shiny objects—like the Ebola mess.
Obama getting it done!
Folks I hate to break it to you, but Obama will have two years to do his unlawful work because even if Republicans take control of the Congressional branch there appear to be few leaders who have any guts there to stop (or undo) any of the outrageous executive actions he is getting done.
I don’t understand why more Republican Senators and Congressional leaders don’t speak up now and thus assure their victory in November.
We better hope the 80-year-old Senator Grassleystays in the Senate and stays healthy!
By the way, there are already tens of thousands of Haitians here legally under Temporary Protected Status. See our category on Haiti, here, to learn how that came about. Since they are here legally I expect their families will be applying for family reunification under the new Obama plan.
I’m also guessing that these new Haitians will come under the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlementand their contractors thus making this another expansion (in addition to the UACs) of the definition of the word ‘refugee’ and further broadening the refugee resettlement program thus giving the new Haitians immediate access to welfare, one of the plums that comes to those designated as “refugees.” (Someone correct me if I am wrong!).
The ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee took the Obama administration to task Friday for its “irresponsible” plan to allow as many as 100,000 Haitians to immigrate to the U.S. without a visa.
Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa said the administration’s Haitian Family Reunification Parole Program — which will allow thousands of Haitians awaiting a U.S. visa to enter the country and legally apply for work permits — is “an irresponsible overreach of the executive branch’s authority.”
Which countries are next on President Obama’s list?” Mr. Grassley said. “Will there by medical screenings before entry? Will work permits be granted automatically? How will this affect American workers?”
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the branch of the Department of Homeland Security that handles immigration benefits cases, announced Friday the program to unite Haitians already living in the U.S. with family members abroad will ramp up in 2015.
At that time the State Department’s National Visa Center will begin notifying families who may be eligible to take part in the program. Those immigrants will allowed to apply for work permits while waiting for issuance of their permanent visas.
The agency said the program will expedite “safe, legal and orderly migration.”
