As second MERS case reported by CDC, Obama briefed

05/14/2014 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Another Saudi national has brought a case of the deadly MERS virus to America. This story has been all over the national and local news since it broke two days ago.

The US will now have to be added to the map. Where else?

See our coverage of the previous case in Indiana here ten days ago.

As we have said on previous occasions, if Americans don’t wise up to the security threats, the cultural challenges, the expense to taxpayers of opening our borders to the world, the one thing that will get their attention is the threat of deadly diseases their kids might contract at school, or they might pick up in a hospital or on the subway.

MERS is making the national news, but others, especially tuberculosis, are on the rise in the US immigrant population and the cases are reported only in the local media. See our Health issues category for more.

From AP:

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — Employees at two Orlando hospitals who came in contact with a Saudi resident infected by the second confirmed U.S. case of a rare virus are being monitored for symptoms and have been told to stay home for two weeks, health officials said Tuesday.

Fifteen hospital workers at Dr. Phillips Hospital and another five employees at Orlando Regional Medical Center were being monitored at home for fever, chills and muscle aches, said Dr. Antonio Crespo, an official with the hospital system.

So far, none of them has tested positive for MERS, or Middle East Respiratory Syndrome. MERS is a respiratory illness that begins with flu-like fever and cough but can lead to shortness of breath, pneumonia and death.

The Saudi resident was being treated at Dr. Phillips Hospital, where he showed up at the emergency room May 8. Three days earlier, he had visited Orlando Regional Medical Center with a friend who went to the hospital for a test.

Two workers at Dr. Phillips Hospital, who were not identified, have shown flu-like symptoms recent days. One of them was sent home, and the other has been hospitalized in isolation. Both are awaiting test results that could come later this week. Crespo said MERS has been shown to have a 14-day incubation period.

[….]

The White House said Tuesday that President Barack Obama had been briefed on the MERS cases in the U.S.

We would be so much better off as a nation without the Saudis money, oil, students and diseases!

Buffalo non-profit running out of federal/local $$$ may close its doors

05/04/2014 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Not all supposed refugee resettlement agencies are in the orbit of the nine major federal contractors that monopolize refugee placement in America or they wouldn’t be running out of money.

Close-reading of this article tells us that Vive Inc. in Buffalo, NY is taking care of asylum seekers and other migrants who are in legal limbo. They haven’t been contracted by the feds and therefore they can’t raise enough cash to stay in the black.

This is an important point: there would be a smaller number of migrants arriving in the US if they had to depend on private charity and/or finding work. Your tax dollars grease the skids of the migrant flow into the US.

From Buffalo News (Hat tip: ‘pungentpeppers’):

Vive Inc. Executive Director Angela Jordan-Mosely running out of money. Photo: http://www.buffalonews.com/life-arts/people-talk/people-talk-angela-jordan-mosely-20140330

The refugee resettlement organization Vive Inc. is contacting past and present supporters with an urgent plea for help. If financial support is not forthcoming, the message says, outlook is bleak. “We are facing the harsh reality of closing our doors,” the message states.

An email from Vive Executive Director Angela Jordan-Mosely this week describes the situation at the nonprofit as “desperate.” Vive celebrated 30 years of operation in March, but recent years have seen funding cuts by the county and federal government. The losses are compounded by delays in legal proceedings to get the immigrants Vive serves permanently settled.

“What used to take days now takes months or even years, leaving hundreds of refugees in limbo,” Jorden-Mosely writes.

The result is a significant increase in the length of time individuals and families stay with Vive at its Wyoming Avenue location and a need for the organization to reconsider how it can achieve its mission of helping international refugees build new lives.

Former Amherst Council Member Shelly Schratz, a Vive volunteer, said that the uncertain status makes it hard for the refugees to contribute to their own support.

“Many of these people want to work, but there are matters of transportation and language, and they don’t have a Social Security card yet,” Schratz said. “We have a business (Bing’s restaurant), but you can’t hire someone who isn’t legal yet.”

Schratz said that, in trying to get financial support, Vive may be hampered by misunderstandings about its clients. The refugees it serves arrived in the United States legally, often having received asylum or temporary residency while they work on permanent status in this country or Canada. Most live at Vive while their cases work through the legal system.

Asylum seekers, of course, have gotten into the US through various means—either as illegal aliens who came across our borders by land, sea or air, or came in on a visa of some sort and have over-stayed. Once granted asylum they can work and all of the welfare goodies other ‘refugees’ get are available to them. Others that Vive serves are aliens on Temporary Protected Status who are planning on staying no matter what. These are not ‘refugees’ the US State Department has brought in to the US.

Vive Inc. got its start in illegal Sanctuary Movement

Check out Vive Inc’s history, here. Originally called Vive La Casa, it sure looks like they got their start in the Sanctuary Movement in the early 1980’s (at the same time the notorious CASA de Maryland got its start) where Leftwing churches helped illegal Central Americans, including Sandinistas, get into the US and hid them in their “sanctuaries.” I guess Buffalo’s Casa didn’t get as firmly entrenched with the politicians who dole out the cashola as did CASA de Maryland.

Check out our many posts on multi-culty Buffalo here.

CIS: High levels of LEGAL immigration will erode Republican Party

04/18/2014 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

It is pretty simple math. Most immigrants vote for Democrats who promise them stuff, or they come from cultures where government gives them stuff and expect it here as well. Pat Buchanan penned a whole book on the numbers, here, a few years ago.

The Center for Immigration Studies confirms in a new report that Buchanan is right—with increased legal immigration, conservative, small government voters will be simply outnumbered.

And, my personal view is that GOP RINOs can’t convert Hispanics to Republicans fast enough to save themselves without drastically reducing the numbers of LEGAL migrants entering the US. And, heck they can barely say no to illegal aliens, imagine any of the Republican leadership having the testicular fortitude to slow LEGAL immigration.

Here is a CIS press release earlier this week (emphasis is mine):

WASHINGTON, DC (April 15, 2014) — The nation’s prolonged flow of legal immigration has changed – and continues to change – the political landscape. A new Center for Immigration Studies report, “Immigration’s Impact on Republican Political Prospects, 1980 to 2012”, finds that each one percentage-point increase in the immigrant share of a large county’s population reduces the Republican share of the two-party presidential vote by an average of nearly 0.6 percentage points.

This shift is relatively uniform throughout the country, from California to Texas to Florida, regardless of the local party’s stance on immigration. It is due to immigrant communities’ lopsided support for big-government policies, which are more closely aligned with progressives than with conservatives. As a result, survey data show a two-to-one party identification with Democrats over Republicans. Increased immigration also significantly expands the low-income population [ie. refugees—ed], making voters overall more supportive of redistributive policies championed by Democrats to support disadvantaged populations.

See the report at http://www.cis.org/immigration-impacts-on-republican-prospects-1980-2012.

“As the immigrant population has grown, Republican electoral prospects have dimmed, even after controlling for alternative explanations of GOP performance,” wrote James Gimpel, author of the report and a professor of government at the University of Maryland at College Park. “Republicans are right to want to attract Latino voters,” he continued. “But expanding the flow of low-skilled immigrants into an economy ill-suited to promote their upward mobility will be counterproductive.”

Over one million legal immigrants enter the United States each year. If this number were drastically increased, as called for by the Gang of Eight bill (S.744), the decline of the Republican Party would be accelerated. “The impact of immigration is easily sufficient, by itself, to decide upcoming presidential elections,” Gimpel wrote.

And, what is so maddening to me is that we taxpayers are footing the bill for the invasion!

Santa Barbara, CA: TB outbreak among Mexican ethnic group called “tip of the iceberg”

04/17/2014 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Although the ethnic group members harboring an outbreak of active TB in scenic Santa Barbara are not refugees, but largely illegal aliens, this is still an important story especially coming at the same time as the case in Illinois we reported last week.

We have, over the years, been following TB outbreaks largely coming from the foreign-born because we think it is one of the most under-reported problems (due to political correctness!) with our willy-nilly immigration system. See our ‘Health issues’ category, here.

From the Santa Barbara Independent last week (Hat tip: ‘pungentpeppers’):

Santa Barbara health officials have been quietly working for months to contain a tuberculosis (TB) outbreak, and are now ramping up suppression efforts after publicly announcing that a Santa Maria High School student has been diagnosed with the infectious disease.

While the single diagnosis is a cause for concern, prompting both a community meeting on Friday and mass screenings at the school next Monday, the County of Santa Barbara Public Health Department’s grander ground plan has been actively kept under the radar for the past six months due to fears of alienating an already marginalized population and concerns about political backlash.

In 2013, 26 Santa Barbara residents were diagnosed with TB; 16 are North County residents, and nine are of Oaxacan descent. Figures for 2014 are not yet available, said Public Health Department spokesperson Susan Klein-Rothschild. At least one person died in 2013 from the disease (which typically attacks the lungs and has a 50 percent mortality rate if left untreated) and many had let it progress to advance stages before receiving treatment (which makes it much more contagious). Three children younger than 10 years old were diagnosed last year, and one was left severely and permanently disabled.

The disease has taken a real hold in the Oaxacan community!

Five of the Oaxacan cases “have epidemiologic links and the same genetic pattern on their TB isolate,” meaning they are all part of the same transmission chain. The Center for Disease Control declares an “outbreak” when three of more cases display that genetic link, and this week’s high school student case has been connected to the chain……the disease appears to have taken a real hold in the Oaxacan community.

Challenging job partly because they speak neither English or Spanish (diversity is strength, right!)

Thoman explained during an interview this Wednesday that Public Health nurses have been combing North County communities “day and night” in recent weeks, searching for signs of the disease. It’s a challenging assignment, she went on, as some of the Oaxacan individuals may be undocumented and harbor a distrust of government workers. Plus, many of them only speak Mixteco.

Only ten percent of California TB cases will become active! Do the math! Yikes! Isn’t ten percent of 3 million, 300,000?

While an estimated three million California residents carry the bacteria that causes the disease, only about 10 percent of them will come down with active TB, which can be cured with medication. [if they get it in time, and if the foreign-born person completes the prescribed drug treatment regime—ed]

Why isn’t this story all over the national news? For the same reason Santa Barbara health officials kept it quiet for so long—political correctness!

If fears of terrorism or crime don’t wake up Americans regarding our present out-of-control immigration, then surely the fear of ones kids getting TB in school will do it. Or, how about Mom bringing the disease home because she is a public health nurse, a social service worker, or simply a volunteer for refugee and immigrant groups?

Two other LEGAL immigration programs of concern

04/14/2014 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We wish there were more hours in a day to write about other legal immigration programs that are changing the demographics of America and swamping our culture besides refugee resettlement, but alas there are not.

Here are reports on two Visa programs for you to watch. Both offer opportunities for massive immigration fraud.

The first is the Investor Visa, as described in this article from Michigan Live (Hat tip: Dianne):

Michigan luring “entrepreneur aliens” from Asia and the Middle East!

LANSING, MI — Michigan’s new status as a federally designated center for an increasingly popular investor visa program — just the second of its kind in the nation — will uniquely position the state to attract foreign capital and create local jobs, according to experts and stakeholders.

United States Customs and Immigration expedited and approved Michigan’s application to run its own EB-5 Regional Center, the Snyder administration announced this week, citing support from the governor, the state’s entire Congressional delegation and Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan.

The federal EB-5 visa program is designed to attract “entrepreneur aliens” by offering them a green card in exchange for domestic investments that produce at least 10 new jobs in the U.S.

Read it all. The Center for Immigration Studies has done a lot of reporting on problems with this program, here. Michelle Malkin calls it the “cash-for-visas racket,” here.

Religious workers Visa

This isn’t just for the Imams, Priests, Ministers, but for “religious workers” supposedly needed to back-up the leaders. Rep. Honda wants to make the program permanent so Congress doesn’t have to revisit it every few years with the possibility each time of killing it!

From ZeeNewsIndia:

Washington: Aimed at facilitating immigration of religious workers including those of Hindu and Sikh faith, a US lawmaker has introduced a legislation in the House of Representatives.

Introduced yesterday by Congressman Mike Honda, the Freedom of Faith Act (HR 4460), will make permanent the special immigrant provision for non-minister religious workers.

The current religious workers programme is set to expire in 2015.

When passed by the Congress, the Act would cover religious workers, who provide a variety of services, such as translating for Korean Presbyterian churches, singing as cantors in Jewish temples, delivering sermons as mullahs (clerics) in Muslim mosques, and helping with Hindu pujas during Dussehra, Naimittika, Shivaratri, and Sikh ceremonies such as Akhandpath. [What! We don’t have enough religious workers here already? If not, how about training some right here—ed]

Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Jain, Mormon, Catholic, Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim workers would benefit from this.

“For over two decades, Congress has reauthorised this programme time and time again,” Honda said.

Can you just imagine how broadly the “workers” definition is being interpreted!

The next time you hear someone say: ‘I don’t like illegal immigration, but we welcome legal immigration!’ Think about these kinds of LEGAL immigration and give them a bop over the head!