Category: Other Immigration

You think we have refugee problems now??

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The always-pessimistic writer who calls himself Spengler today has an even more gloomy article than usual, called The Failed Muslim States to Come.  (The original Oswald Spengler wrote The Decline of the West, so you can see why this writer chose that pseudonym.)  He begins:

Financial crises, like epidemics, kill the unhealthy first. The present crisis is painful for most of the world but deadly for many Muslim countries, and especially so for the most populous ones. Policy makers have not begun to assess the damage.

….As I commented in the late autumn, the world is not flat, but flattened (see Asia Times Online, October 28, 2008), leaving the economies of the largest Muslim countries in ruins. It is hard to forecast the political fallout, for when each available choice leads to a failed state, it is a matter of indifference which one you adopt. As state finances crumble, states will become less important, and freebooters will seize the stage.

He goes through the various countries, especially Iran, Pakistan and even Turkey. There’s too much to summarize; here’s a sample:

Pakistan’s military-age population is far greater than those of other Muslim military powers in the region. With about 20 million men of military age, Pakistan today has as much manpower as Turkey and Iran combined, and by 2035 it will have half again as many. Half the country is illiterate and three-quarters of it subsists on less than $2 a day, according to the World Bank. That is to say that Pakistan’s young men are more abundant as well as cheaper than in any other country in the region. Very poor and ignorant young men, especially if their only education has been in Salafi madrassas, are very easy to enlist in military adventures.

The West at present is unable to cope with a failed state like Somalia, with less than a tenth as many military age men as Pakistan, but which nonetheless constitutes a threat to world shipping and a likely source of funding for terrorism. How can the West cope with the humiliation of Pakistan’s pro-American president and the inability of its duly-constituted government to suppress Islamist elements in its army and intelligence services? For the moment, Washington will do its best to prop up its creature, Zardari, but to no avail.

Here is Spengler’s conclusion:

The lights are going out across the Middle East; states are failing, and it is not in the power of the West to make them whole again. All the strategic calculations that busied policy analysts and diplomats are changing, and the West has a very short time to learn the rules of a new and terrible game.

It looks like terrible poverty is coming all over the world, and especially in the Muslim countries. If even a few of these become failed states like Somalia, look for all kinds of attacks on western countries in search of loot — Somali piracy writ large.  (I wonder which will take precedence — jihad or surviving.)

And think of the millions or perhaps billions of new refugees. Even if the developed countries of the world survive the financial storm intact, there won’t be enough money in all the world to care for those who will be looking for subsistence. There are bound to be mass movements of needy people into other countries, with who knows what result?

Do you trust the Obama administration, including Hillary Clinton’s State Department, to institute a refugee policy that responds rationally to the coming disaster? I don’t.

More immigrants=more housing starts

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

If you are thinking about boosting the economy this is a good thing.  If you care about open space and the environment this is a bad thing.  I told you I am behind in my posting, so here is  mention of a report in Immigration Daily about a background paper written for Congress from a few weeks ago.

The Congressional Budget Office recently released a “Background Paper on The Outlook for Housing Starts, 2009-2012” which shows the positive impact of immigrants on the real estate sector of the economy. The report says “Over the past 25 years, the annual change in the number of households due to population growth has trended neither upward nor downward, as a rise in net immigration has offset a decline in the natural increase of the adult population.” In other words, without the immigration inflow that we have seen in the past quarter century, the state of real estate values in the US right now would be even gloomier than it is. The report goes on to say “Higher immigration than expected would boost household formation, adding to housing starts, whereas lower immigration would reduce the number of starts.” Congress should seriously consider increasing immigration in light of the recent sharp decline in real estate values across the country.

But, wait, didn’t giving mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them bring about much of our economic meltdown.  Is this report suggesting we do more of that?

You might go back and review this post about the “ecological footprint” each immigrant leaves and re-watch the Numbers USA film .

Just as our population is stablizing these Budget office guys are suggesting we need more people so builders can keep making money.   Did you ever wonder what would happen if the Environmental titans  went up against the Immigration titans?   Well, it won’t happen anytime soon because the major environmental groups in the US are afraid of the issue because they take so much of their funding from the same Leftist foundations and individuals as the Open Borders people do.   Immigration is a verboten issue at the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Audubon Society etc. etc.

We can’t save them all, but we will destroy America trying

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

There is a good column today at Novakio, an alternative news webzine, by Frosty Wooldridge that makes the point that we can’t save the world by bringing the world to America.   Taking aim at news coverage at the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News, Wooldridge begins:

The Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News frequently publish stories on legal and illegal migrants struggling to make a new home in America. Those pieces, filled with sob stories enough to empty a box of Kleenex at a ‘chick flick’, provide the fodder for a never ending flood of immigrants seeking a better life.

But they never talk about the other side of the coin as those immigrants impact American citizens. The DP and RMN never talk about jobs taken from American citizens by legal and illegal immigrants. They fail to talk about the 28 million Americans living on food stamps or 14 million Americans unemployed because immigrants take millions of jobs annually. They fail to tell readers that taxpayers pay for the plane flights, resettlement costs, food, medical, education and housing for immigrants.

He goes on to point out that immigrants displace American workers at the lower end of the job scale.  He’s right, where are the sob stories for those who lose their jobs.

Whether they come from Somalia, Burma or Ethiopia, they find themselves ripped out of their cultures, languages and family connections. They arrive in the USA without any skills that benefit America. They cost U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars in resettlement costs. They become cab drivers, grocery baggers and other jobs that require no skills other than showing up. At the same time, they take jobs away from American teens, working poor and other Americans—who now stand in unemployment lines, soup kitchens and living on welfare.

And, I’ve always thought this was amazing.  The ‘save the earth’ reporters never never seem to link urban sprawl and the loss of farmland and open space to the millions of immigrants arriving in the US every year.

Beyond the sob stories and the human misery, those reporters never talk about the horrific impact of adding 2.4 million immigrants to the USA annually. Each one causes a 12.6 ‘ecological footprint’ whereby 12.6 acres of land must be destroyed to support that person.

From time to time, we remind readers to watch the Numbers USA link at the top of our home page.  This is a good time to see it again.

The attack in India and our refugee/immigration policies

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I was just about to post this when I saw Ann already posted on the same article (different titles, same article). Well, it’s worth two posts, so here’s mine.

Mark Steyn’s commentary, It’s Not the Cold War,  stands out among the mountains of words written about the Bombay attack, especially for us at RRW.   He points out that those who carried out the attack are not  a known group, they do not take orders from al-Qaeda, and they did not target one particular kind of victim.

The Islamic imperialist project is a totalitarian ideology: It is at war with Hindus, Jews, Americans, Britons, everything that is other.

The attackers caused devastation, both in the number of victims and in the chaos and economic damage they caused. And here’s what’s important for us:

What’s relevant about the Mumbai model is that it would work in just about any second-tier city in any democratic state: Seize multiple soft targets and overwhelm the municipal infrastructure to the point where any emergency plan will simply be swamped by the sheer scale of events. Try it in, say, Mayor Nagin’s New Orleans. All you need is the manpower.

What is common to jihadist attacks is a combination of “local lads and wily outsiders.” The jihadist ideology is worldwide, and ubiquitous wherever there are mosques. Any would-be Islamist mastermind anywhere in the world can easily find the angry young guys eager for their shot at glory and put together a plot. Here’s Steyn’s key paragraph:

It’s missing the point to get into debates about whether this is the “Deccan Mujahideen” or the ISI or al-Qaeda or Lashkar-e-Taiba. That’s a reductive argument. It could be all or none of them. The ideology has been so successfully seeded around the world that nobody needs a memo from corporate HQ to act: There are so many of these subgroups and individuals that they intersect across the planet in a million different ways. It’s not the Cold War, with a small network of deep sleepers being directly controlled by Moscow. There are no membership cards, only an ideology. That’s what has radicalized hitherto moderate Muslim communities from Indonesia to the Central Asian stans to Yorkshire, and coopted what started out as more or less conventional nationalist struggles in the Caucasus and the Balkans into mere tentacles of the global jihad.

This shows why it’s so absurd to treat the jihad as a law-enforcement matter. It’s an ideological fight, and we haven’t engaged the enemy on that level. President Bush thought he was getting into the battle by sending Karen Hughes to tell Arabs how nice Americans are. Our government information agencies, which effectively  brought information, hope and inspiration to people behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, now create radio stations to bring American music and other culture to the Muslim masses. Great. America’s corrupt culture is what has helped recruit countless Muslims to the cause. And Obama certainly isn’t prepared for this ideological fight.

So Bush is history, and we have a new president who promises to heal the planet, and yet the jihadists don’t seem to have got the Obama message that there are no enemies, just friends we haven’t yet held talks without preconditions with. This isn’t about repudiating the Bush years, or withdrawing from Iraq, or even liquidating Israel. It’s bigger than that. And if you don’t have a strategy for beating back the ideology, you’ll lose.

All the things Ann has been reporting about the missing Somalis fit nicely into this scenario, doesn’t it? They’re part of the worldwide jihad, one of the tentacles reaching out somewhere or other. Will it be Minneapolis that is subject to an attack similar to Bombay’s? Or have they been recruited into an operation that will surface somewhere else in the world?

It is insane that we let any Somalis into this country, given what is now known. It’s insane that seven years after 9/11 we have not stopped the Wahhabi Saudis from funding mosques, organizations, Middle East studies programs, and God knows what else throughout our country. It’s insane that radical Muslims carry out the stealth jihad under our noses, telling us what they’re doing while we watch them do it.  If all of this went on and got worse during the Bush administration, what will happen during the next four years?

The hypnotic spell of “tolerance” has got to be broken.

Survey: Half of America sees immigration as a problem

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Here is a survey released yesterday by the German Marshall Fund of the US that looks really interesting.  I wish I had time to dig into it, but maybe you do.   The press release begins:

WASHINGTON, DC (November 17, 2008) – A new survey released today shows that that 50% of Americans and 47% of Europeans think immigration is more of a problem than an opportunity, but a closer look shows nuanced views of immigration and integration on both sides of the Atlantic and marked differences within Europe.

Seven years after Sept. 11, majorities on both sides of the Atlantic do not believe that immigration increases the likelihood of terrorism; only 35% of Europeans and 40% of Americans say that more immigration leads to increased risk of terrorism. On the other hand, 52% of Europeans say that immigration will increase crime in their society, and they were joined by 47% of Americans.

I had a laugh over the choice of the word “only” in the sentence about “only 40% of Americans say that more immigration leads to increased risk of terrorism.”   That is much higher than I would have expected.

I’ll bet there are some very revealing numbers buried in this study.