Category: Other Immigration

Immigrants threaten society: Quebecers openly debate preserving their culture

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I’ve seen mention a couple of times in the last few days that polls in Quebec, Canada are showing an increase in the number of Quebecers who believe that non-Christian immigrants are a threat to their culture.  I don’t know much about what is happening in Canada, so I can’t make a judgement about recommendations made here,  but thought I should make readers aware that there is an on-going open debate about preserving the province’s culture.

On the one-year anniversary of the Bouchard-Taylor Commission report — it was released on May 22, 2008 — which recommended more openness and tolerance on the part of heritage Quebecers for the cultural habits and religious expression of newcomers to Quebec, it appears the report has had no effect whatsoever. Or at least not the effect the commission wanted.

Quebecers are not only resisting the commission’s recommendations, their attitudes have hardened. A Leger Marketing poll commissioned by the Association for Canadian Studies, conducted May 13-16, found that 40% of Quebec francophones view non-Christian immigrants as a threat to Quebec society, as compared to 32% in 2007.

No doubt galvanized by the Bouchard-Taylor experience, which many Quebecers felt was over-solicitous of immigrants’ feelings and under-appreciative of heritage values and customs, the Movement Laique Québeçois (Quebec Secular Movement) (MLQ) has called upon the provincial government to draw up a social contract that would affirm Quebec’s secular character.

The MLQ proposes the implementation of a secular charter of fundamental rights, which would include neutrality around religion in publicly funded fields. It is asking specifically for a ban on religious symbolism in the outerwear — including kippas, hijabs and crosses — of all employees in the public sector, such as medicine, education and law courts.

Read on.

I always did think it was a good idea to get out of the public school system anyway, however one needed to make that happen, so maybe as schools get necessarily more cumbersome people will bail out.

Wealthy immigrant couple ripping off Medicaid in the Peoples Republic of Massachusetts

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I’m getting somewhat off track this morning but this article popped up in my alerts on Food Stamp Fraud, an issue I’ve written about many times here at RRW.  The basic Food Stamp scam involves ‘mom and pop’ convenience store owners from Middle Eastern countries buying food stamps for 50 cents from the food stamp recipient and then turning it into the federal government for the full dollar.   Thankfully many of those are being busted across the land.

Somehow this case was in the middle of a bunch of Food Stamp Fraud articles.   Although not identified by their country of origin, the paper has seen fit to publish a photo to help the reader understand that these people are immigrants, probably from the Middle East and probably of a certain religious persuasion.

Joseph Youshaei owned 19 businesses and properties, from commercial office space in Downtown Crossing to three local Honey Dew Donut franchises. He drove a Mercedes and lived in a $650,000 Chestnut Hill house with his wife, Jila, and three children, whom the couple sent to a pricey private school. 

Yet the couple claimed just $475 of weekly income from 1999 to 2005, an amount that allowed them to collect Medicaid benefits under MassHealth.

The Youshaeis pleaded guilty Monday in Suffolk Superior Court to charges of fraud and larceny for illegally obtaining those health benefits, according to a statement from the state auditor’s office.

“This is truly an unbelievable example of fraud,” said state auditor Joe DeNucci in a statement. “A wealthy family that could afford to pay for its own health insurance took money from a taxpayer-funded program meant to help those people who are truly needy and cannot afford health insurance.”

There must be some kind of worldwide underground hotline that tells people to go to America and rip off the system.   Imagine what will happen if Obama-care comes to pass and the feds manage everyone’s health care from Washington.

Common sense on Somalis and immigration from John Derbyshire

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

John Derbyshire, curmudgeon extraordinaire and writer for National Review, ended a blog post on Somalia’s chaos and Somalis with “And for crying out loud, keep them out of our country.”  

Naturally he was taken to task by a reader. Here is his very sensible reply:

An outraged reader:

Mr. Derbyshire — You say “And for crying out loud, keep them out of our country.”

Keep who out? Somalis? But most Somalis are not terrorists. On what grounds can we keep them out?

On the grounds that we can grant, or deny, permission for a foreigner to enter our country, according to what we perceive to be our interests. Otherwise, in what sense is this our country? And in fact we do have procedures for deciding who may, or may not, enter the U.S.A. If a foreigner wants to settle in the U.S.A., the procedures are even longer and more burdensome. I know they are; I’ve been through them. This is at is should be.

If the objection is, that we ought not base this decision on some factor as broad as national origin, I can only say I disagree. We should not let people enter if we have no way of verifying what they tell us about their background and intentions. Somalia has been in a state of utter chaos for decades. We have no effective consular presence there. There is no way we can verify what any aspiring Somali immigrant tells us about himself. Since there are a great many jihadists there — the place is on the point of being taken over by them! — the wisest thing, for our own security, would be to admit no Somalis. What is wrong with this reasoning?

Of course I know that most Somalis are not terrorists. Some Somalis are terrorists, though, and we have utterly no way of distinguishing them from the others. So let’s play safe and keep ’em all out. Again, I don’t see what’s wrong with this. In fact, I think our public discourse has come to a sorry pass when I even have to say the things I just said.

As Ann pointed out last week, our admissions of refugees have increased this year despite the recession, including 2,232 Somalis.

Would-be White House visitors found to have deportation orders against them

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Here is an amusing little story on Drudge tonight.  Two immigrants in the country illegally were hoping to be part of an adult education tour of the White House, but oops! a security check revealed they were in violation of immigration law and had been ordered deported.

And, no, it was not Aunt Zeituni and the long-ago missing Uncle George (or at least we don’t think so).   Surely not Omar Jamal either!

From AP:

WASHINGTON – Two people facing deportation from the United States have been taken into custody at the White House gate. They had arrived for a tour of the executive mansion.

The pair was part of an adult education program, and a routine background check showed they had an outstanding immigration order against them.

If anyone learns more about who they were, I would love to know.

Postville postmortem

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

You can go read the Los Angeles Times update story on the Postville, Iowa meatpacking crooks yourselves, but you won’t read much about the crooks who owned the plant, just the bad federal government for raiding it!    Entitled, “Immigration raid leaves damaging mark on Postville, Iowa,” it ticks me off!   The whole article is about how bad the raid was for the town, and virtually nothing on the lying, cheating crooks who ran the plant—the one’s encouraging illegal immigrants to come there in the first place.

We have written about Postville on many occasions here, especially because plant managers were hauling Somalis and other assorted immigrants to Postville too, further disrupting the small town.

When the meatpacking plant, Agriprocessors Inc., opened in the late 1980s, Orthodox Jews arrived to work as kosher butchers and envisioned a rural paradise for new synagogues and shuls. Migrants, mostly from Guatemala, began arriving in the 1990s — creating an ethnic stew with natives of mostly Eastern European descent.

“Rural paradise,” “ethnic stew,” what a bunch of B.S!