Category: Other Immigration

Open season begins Oct. 1 for FY2015 Diversity Visa Lottery

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I bet most of you reading RRW don’t know about this ‘ingenious’ (not!) lottery program the US State Department has been running for years (Congress made them do it!).  You see we don’t have enough diversity in America’s immigrant population so each year the State Department selects 55,000 people (through a lottery system) who can legally come from around the world to live and work in America .

Cool graphic from 2009 Diversity Visa Lottery, most winners come from Africa and Middle East

However, once the number of immigrants from a certain country tops 50,000 in the previous 5 years, that country’s citizens are cut off from putting their name in the hat.

The program, sometimes called the Green Card lottery, began in 1995, see history here.

The State Department website is here.  The countries and number of ‘winners’ for FY 2013 are here.

Nigeria (others) has been cut off for FY2015 and that is the subject of this short article at
Afrique Jet Actualité en Lignesubject.

BTW, I’m pretty sure the Gang of Eight’s Senate bill on “immigration reform” drops this program, but at the moment I can’t remember and am too lazy to go look it up (especially since the bill may be dying in this Congress).  Supposedly the entrants under the Diversity lottery program are somewhat educated and come with some job training/experience (because Congress thinks we need more foreign workers to compete with Americans along with bringing the joys of multiculturalism to your towns and cities).

Nigeria barred from US visa lottery – Nigeria has been barred from the 2015 US Diversity Immigrant Visa Programme, according to the US State Department.

It said Nigeria was excluded from the DV-2015 because over 50,000 of its citizens have immigrated into the US in the last five years on the strength of the programme.

‘For DV-2015, natives of the following countries are not eligible to apply, because more than 50,000 natives of these countries immigrated to the United States in the previous five years: Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, China (mainland-born), Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Haiti, India, Jamaica, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, South Korea, United Kingdom (except Northern Ireland) and its dependent territories, and Vietnam,’ the State Department said on its official website.

The DV 2015 Programme will begin 1 Oct. 2013 and run through 2 Nov. 2013.

PANA reports that the Diversity Immigrant Visa Programme, which is administered annually by the  Department of State, provides for a class of immigrants known as “diversity immigrants,” from countries with historically low rates of immigration to the US.

The next time you hear someone (especially a Republican) say “legal immigration is fine, it’s illegal immigration I have a problem with” remember this LEGAL program and know that they don’t know what they are talking about!

Valerie Jarrett: Obamacare and Immigration Reform will bring fundamental change to America

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Editors note:  I posted this today at Potomac Tea Party Report and have slightly modified the introduction.

We know how detrimental these two laws (of course one is not yet a law) will be to America, so how come the ruling class Republicans don’t get it!

At Potomac Tea Party Report I’ve called Jarrett the “Rasputin” of the Obama Administration and have many posts, click here, on who she is and how she operates.

Valerie ‘Rasputin’ Jarrett: Obamacare and Immigration Reform will be OUR crowning achievements!

We haven’t heard much from her lately.  There was some speculation that she was calling the shots that terrible night in Benghazi and so she has been hiding out ever since.

Here she is front and center making it very clear that ‘Comprehensive immigration reform’ is an Obama plan (so hey, McCain, Graham, Rubio, Ryan and Boehner why hand him this victory?).

From the Daily Caller:

Valerie Jarrett, one of President Barack Obama’s top deputies, said Tuesday that immigration reform would be as important to the country’s future as Obamacare.

“It will be a landmark piece of legislation,” she told a videotaped meeting of progressive allies in a building alongside the White House.

“Together with the Affordable Care Act — two major pieces of legislation — that when we look back 50 years from now, I think we will all just be extremely proud,” said Jarrett.

Jarrett’s close relationship to Obama was underlined by her repeated use of the first-person plural. “We are confident that with everybody making [immigration] a priority, it will in fact pass, and we will sign it into law,” she said.

Jarrett’s pairing of Obamacare and immigration echoes her critics, who say the immigration rewrite is an effort by Democrats to gain political supremacy by adding tens of millions of Democrat-leaning immigrants to election rolls after 2020.

“Politically, pairing them in her mind suggests that the administration sees both pieces of administration as transformative,” said Mark Krikorian, a noted critic of immigration and the director of the Center for Immigration Studies.

It is fundamental transformation alright!

Obamacare and increased immigration are “ways of fundamentally changing the United States so that it will not be like our country before Obama was elected, which has always been his goal,” he said.

So Paul Ryan and others, what the hell are you thinking!

The Daily Caller continued:

Jarrett’s pairing of the two bills also contradicts efforts by Republicans to focus the GOP’s base on the existing Obamacare law, and to divert the base away from the closed-door, bipartisan efforts to pass an immigration rewrite, Krikorian said.

“Without realizing it [Jarrett] is probably doing a favor to opponents of amnesty because [Rep.] Paul Ryan and other other Republicans are trying to distract attention from immigration by focusing attention on Obamacare,” said Krikorian.

“Valerie is bringing everyone back to the connection of the two,” Krikorian said.

Go to all of our coverage of S.744, here, to see how the new “comprehensive” immigration bill will increase the number of refugees/asylees in the US and how the contractors will be raking in the taxpayer cash.

Why the Catholic Bishops are wrong on immigration

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

That is the title of a piece by writer Brad Miner at The Catholic Thing.   Miner asserts that the primary thrust of their interest in the so-called “comprehensive immigration reform” effort now being debated in Congress is driven by a desire to increase the number of Catholics in their dioceses.    He may be be correct, but only partially, since he leaves out any mention of the payola the Bishops receive from the US taxpayer to ‘service’ immigrants in need of social services and jobs.

He says the Bishops are “apolitical when it suits them.”  And, he does say they are farther to the political Left then some Democrats on immigration.  And, they love Obama on immigration (that is me saying that, not Miner).  But, Miner never mentions Caesar’s $$$$ that the Bishop need to survive!

I’m grateful though for one more voice saying that the Bishops are wrong (they are wrong too because they are doing a terrible injustice to the American working class in need of jobs and impoverished Americans of all races and faiths who could use their help!).

Here is how Miner’s piece begins (Hat tip: Judy).  Emphasis below is mine.

BEFORE his role in the “Gang!”

My purpose here is neither bishop-bashing nor politician-baiting, and I have no reluctance in supporting an immigration measure that respects the rule of law and actually accomplishes the goals set down by the U.S. Senate’s most recent “Gang of Eight” in its Border Security, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013 [S.744]: progress towards citizenship and secure borders.

However, my guess is that this law – which can’t even be rendered as a proper acronym! – will be about as effective as that monument to futility, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. Marco Rubio’s career – he’s one of the Eight – may get a boost from . . . BSEOIMA, but as long as the border’s a sieve and Latin American governments are either socialist or plutocratic, nothing will change the pace of illegal immigration except a depressed economy in el Norte.

Anyway, I suspect Sen. Rubio, who is Cuban-American and speaks Spanish, believes he is the answer to the Republican Party’s recent electoral woes, and the GOP is just desperate enough to believe him. We’ll see how that works out in 2016.

And I suspect Christian compassion plays a role in animating both the politicians’ and the Catholic bishops’ concerns about the plight of Central American immigrants.

That said, immigration reform as it now stands is a baldly political business, and that’s as true of the bishops as it is of the politicians: votes for the latter; devotees for the former.

Read it all.

As for Rubio and the other Republicans pushing amnesty, for all of their efforts to get dead parrots to speak, it won’t even get them votes.  It will get him money from big business for his campaign war chest, but Rubio has already been abandoned by a large segment of the conservative base.

For new readers, we have an extensive archive on the USCCB here.

Blog cites RRW on Bishops taking money from Caesar, gets a good discussion going

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

You might want to check out Juicy Ecumenism a blog at The Institute on Religion and Democracy on the issue of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops receiving millions of tax dollars every year to resettle refugees.  I wasn’t familiar with it, but blogger Marjorie Jeffrey cites RRW and pulls in other information about the USCCB pushing the Gang of Eight bill (S.744) through Congress.  A lively discussion follows in the comment section.

You might want to join the discussion!

Our extensive archive on the USCCB and its entanglement with the US government and dependence on taxpayer dollars is here.

UK: sign of the collapse of the multicultural dreamland?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This story is a couple of days old, so it’s possible the Lefties have already killed the sign project.

I have to laugh when I think of Presidential candidate Romney suggesting illegal aliens in the US “self-deport” and the American media went nuts on him.

This dramatic measure in the UK shows how serious a problem illegal (and legal!) migration to the UK has become because, as a member state of the EU, they are not completely free to close their borders or to reject asylum seekers.

From RT.com:

Mobile billboards calling on illegal immigrants to leave the UK have been criticized as a step too far by politicians. Campaign backers have hailed the initiative as an “alternative to arrest,” while critics decry the adverts as outright “intimidation.”

As part of a pilot scheme to help reduce illegal immigration in Britain, vans with billboards emblazoned with the slogan “Go home or face arrest” will be driven around London boroughs.

Read it all and watch the video.

Meanwhile in the US we have the Obama Administration, the Gang of Eight, and the refugee contractors  all pushing to open US borders to illegal aliens even wider!