Category: Other Immigration

Roy Beck at NumbersUSA calls talk of amnesty this year an Obama “trial balloon”

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is a follow-up to my post of a few days ago about a New York Times article which reported that the Obama Administration is going to push amnesty for millions of illegals this year—in the midst of a recession!

Roy Beck, CEO of the grassroots NumbersUSA, says the article is a way for Open Borders advocates to send up a trial balloon to see if those of us supporting strict enforcement of immigration laws now on the books are paying attention. 

Beck said that his phone rang off the hook for comment on the story.  Here is one of the points he made to one and all:

In all my interviews today, I talked about two numbers that illustrate starkly the irrationality — and callousness — of any move toward an amnesty this year.

6 million — That is the estimate of illegal aliens who are holding down non-agricultural jobs in the U.S. Most of them are working in manufacturing, service and construction jobs that require no more than a high school education.

Nearly 7 million — That is the number of Americans with no more than a high school education who are looking for jobs (primarily in manufacturing, service and construction) but can’t find one.

The legal immigrants, still entering the US by the thousands, are also having a difficult (impossible?) time finding jobs as they too compete with illegal aliens and less-educated Americans.

Obama to take on amnesty issue this year!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

That is what the New York Times reported yesterday, here.  

While acknowledging that the recession makes the political battle more difficult, President Obama plans to begin addressing the country’s immigration system this year, including looking for a path for illegal immigrants to become legal, a senior administration official said on Wednesday

Mr. Obama will frame the new effort — likely to rouse passions on all sides of the highly divisive issue — as “policy reform that controls immigration and makes it an orderly system,” said the official, Cecilia Muñoz, deputy assistant to the president and director of intergovernmental affairs in the White House.

It really makes no sense to take up this issue this year when so many Americans are out of work. 

Opponents of legalization legislation were incredulous at the idea that Mr. Obama would take on immigration when economic pain for Americans is so widespread.

“It just doesn’t seem rational that any political leader would say, let’s give millions of foreign workers permanent access to U.S. jobs when we have millions of Americans looking for jobs,” said Roy Beck, executive director of NumbersUSA, a group that favors reduced immigration. Mr. Beck predicted that Mr. Obama would face “an explosion” if he proceeded this year.

“It’s going to be, ‘You’re letting them keep that job, when I could have that job,’ ” he said.

“Incredulous” indeed!   The only thing that makes any sense is that the Obama Administration knows that this is the only year for his administration to get anything done.  His popularity is already sinking and if the recession deepens, with each successive year it would be even more difficult to explain why we are adding immigrants to compete for scarce jobs.

Looks like Joe Biden didn’t get the message.

Turkish Canadian steals plane and joy rides into US air space

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I know this has nothing to do with refugees, unless Canada admitted this Turkish immigrant as a refugee or asylee, but I thought it was an interesting and informative story nonetheless.   Hat tip:  Blulitespecial.   From CNN:

The pilot of a small Cessna 172 aircraft reported stolen from a Canadian flight school has been captured, authorities said.

The pilot reportedly stole a small Cessna 172 aircraft from a Canadian flight school, flew hundreds of miles across the Midwest, landed on a dirt road in Missouri late Monday and took off on foot, federal officials said.

Federal, state and local authorities launched a manhunt for the pilot, who was identified by the FBI as Adam Leon, 31, a native of Turkey who became a Canadian citizen last year, according to FBI spokesman Richard Kolko. He was formerly known as Yavuz Berke, though officials did not indicate a reason for the name change.

We scrambled fighters jets and I presume prepared to shoot the Cessna down if necessary.

The plane had been intercepted and tracked by U.S. military aircraft as it flew from Canada into U.S. airspace and meandered southward for several hours before landing, a Department of Homeland Security spokesman said.

[….]

“We don’t want to suppose the motive of the individual,” Kucharek told CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” after the landing. “But it certainly made a day for the professional pilots that were flying these missions and a very serious situation from a NORAD perspective.”

Test run or just another crazy immigrant with many aliases?

Update a few hours later:

Supposedly this Muslim man (according to ABC News here) only wanted to commit suicide, was too chicken to do it himself and was hoping to get blown out of the sky by the US military.   Believe that one and I’ll tell you another!

The Canadian man who led fighter jets on a chase across six states Monday flew his stolen plane into the United States. in hopes the military would shoot him down and kill him, according to a Missouri state trooper who apprehended the rogue pilot.

Missouri state trooper Justin Watson told “Good Morning America” today that 31-year-old Yavuz Berke, formerly known as Adam Leon, wanted to commit suicide, but didn’t have the courage to do it himself.

He was happy when authorities caught up with him.  Yes, because he had learned the answer, the US military failed the test, and they were too chicken to shoot him down!

He was found drinking Gatorade, seemingly relieved that his ordeal was over.

“He actually seemed fairly happy that it came to a good end,” Watson said. “He didn’t seem to be down in spirits or anything like that.”

There are lots of provocative comments at this article; one of my favorites is from spinky1 who said:  “Hey….this whole thing is fishy…what can I tell ya???”

Endnote:   I thought it interesting to consider that this was going on just as Obama was sucking up to Turkey and Islam.  See Jihad Watch here.

Bizarre update to shooting story

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Fox News is reporting: 

A Pakistani Taliban militant leader has claimed responsibility for the attack on a U.S. immigration center in New York state in which 13 people were killed, Reuters reported.

“I accept responsibility. They were my men. I gave them orders in reaction to U.S. drone attacks,” Baituallah Mehsud told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location on Saturday.

U.S. officials were not immediately available for comment about Mehsud’s claim, Reuters reported, and one Pakistani security analyst dismissed the claim as a publicity stunt.

I’m inclined to agree that Mehsud is claiming responsibility for something he had nothing to do with. If Vietnamese immigrants are joining the jihad, we’re in even more trouble than I’d thought.

America remaking immigrants, or immigrants remaking America?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Somali immigrants remake Minneapolis is the headline of a good piece by David Paulin in The American Thinker today. He comments on the New York Times article that Ann posted on the other day, about Somalis and health care in Minneapolis.  The article is part of a series in the Times called Remade in America, the first part of which I posted on earlier.

Paulin points out that Mexicans make up most of the influx of immigrants into Minneapolis. But he focuses on the Somalis because their cultural differences, their enormous health-care needs and the terrorist connections that are being investigated by the FBI have a greater impact on the city and on America. He points out that the lengthy account of their health care problems makes no mention of female circumcision; presumably none of the doctors or other people quoted mentioned it.

And he goes on to make this comment: 

One of the unstated assumptions of the Times piece is that America is a nation of immigrants. That’s not quite correct. It is a nation of settlers and immigrants. The original settlers from England were White Anglo Saxon Protestants, as the late Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington observed. Later, there were immigrants from Europe, and they adapted to the culture created by the original settlers while making contributions of their own. But in an era of multiculturalism, those days are gone. Now, every culture is equal. What’s more, the WASP and his culture is vilified.

Then he quotes Huntington from his book, Who Are We?:

Contributions from immigrant cultures modified and enriched the Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers. The essentials of that founding culture remained the bedrock of U.S. identity, however, at least until the last decades of the 20th century. Would the United States be the country that it has been and that it largely remains today if it had been settled in the 17th and 18th centuries not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish, or Portuguese Catholics? The answer is clearly no. It would not be the United States; it would be Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil.