Category: Other Immigration

Darn! We missed the Catholic Bishops’ National Migration Week

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Your tax dollars

January 6th to the 12th was the big week when the US Conference of Catholic Bishops ginned up its pro-amnesty political indoctrination campaign with National Migration Week.

Mind you, the Bishops can pressure the Catholic flock however they wish, it’s a free country (for now!), but it’s when they take taxpayer money to do their “charitable” and political work then it becomes every taxpayer’s business.

Before you read the excellent discussion of their latest parishioner indoctrination campaign by Dominique Peridans at the Center for Immigration Studies please visit this comprehensive review of the Bishops finances by Thomas Allen at VDARE.

Allen:

….in fact USCCB independently raises only about 2% (two percent) of its $72.1 million total revenues. The rest comes from contracts, grants and earnings from federal programs.

Also, we have written extensively here (see our archive!) over the years about the USCCB as one of the top nine federal contractors resettling refugees to your towns (and their lobbying for other issues as well, including global warming) while feeding from the federal trough.

Peridans at CIS:

Ecclesiastes offers a rather honest and blunt appraisal of human life, and seeks to articulate basic human truths. Chapter 1, verse 9 of the book in the Hebrew Bible reads “What has been, that will be; what has been done, that will be done. Nothing is new under the sun!” Now, human truth, if indeed truth, is trans-situational, that is to say, can be applied to host of situations.

The situation in this case to which this truth can be applied is that of National Migration Week (January 6-12), sponsored by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops through its Migration and Refugee Services Offices. I perused the promotional materials, almost naively hoping to find a few nuggets of newness, some refreshing insight, a slightly more holistic perspective being put forth. “Nothing is new under the sun” here.

In fact, it is striking to read how the American Catholic Church’s pastoral proposals regarding immigrants display how hardened the Church’s “official position” is becoming: presented as a given. There is no acknowledgment whatsoever that the issue is complex and there is no margin of freedom granted to the laity to discern varying responses to the issue.

Against the spiritually magnificent, yet concretely vague backdrop of “welcoming Christ in the stranger” (drawn from Christ’s own exhortation in Matthew 25:35), the document restates the American Catholic Church’s presumption that any perspective different from that which it articulates is characterized by in-hospitality. The document then invites the reader to labor for a “conversion of hearts and minds” in those who hold these differing perspectives.

To what one must convert? Comprehensive immigration reform. In this campaign (and beyond it), the bishops hope to help Catholics at the parochial level to enact local expressions of such reform and to incite Catholics at the national level to promote such reform.

Bishops:  Border enforcement is “meanness.”

Not only are the bishops very concrete and very specific in their proposals, they are unabashedly political. They are in the business of a “broad legalization program”. In their minds, charity can only and must work this way. An enforcement-only approach (which no one is really proposing, but which they confuse with an enforcement-first approach) they decry as antithetical to charity – and, according to their expertise, a failure. So much money is being devoted to meanness!

There is more!  Read it all.

Maryland readers of RRW might be interested in MD CAN conference

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update January 10th:  Controversy brewing.  CAIR bullies speakers, here.

We won’t be talking about refugees, but we will hear from speakers on the issue of blogging and free speech, immigration generally, national security, and Obama’s war on the suburbs and much more at the Maryland Conservative Action Network conference (Turning the Tides 2013) on Saturday, January 12th in Annapolis, MD.

I’ve been involved in the planning and so my posts might drop off here at RRW later in the week.  Check out the website and if you are a reader in Maryland or DC or anywhere nearby this is your chance to hear speakers such as Pamela Geller (Atlas Shrugs), Diana West, Stanley Kurtz and Tom Fitton (Judicial Watch) among many others.

Click here for the program and how to register.

Greece sealing its borders; dramatic decrease in ‘asylum seekers’ results

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Operation Xenious Zeus began in August and shows it can be done!

Greece, the European country whose name we invoke when we worry about financial chaos coming to America has one up on us with its newest strategy to seriously close the border.   Most Greeks blame the flow of illegal impoverished migrants into Greece in the last ten years as the source of much of its financial ruin.

But, check this out!  Some sections of the Greek border are now sealed!

From EU Observer:

Orestiadas, Greece – A chief of police in a border town in northeastern Greece says irregular migrants are no longer crossing into the country from its land border with Turkey.

Barbed-wire fences, landmines, thermal night vision cameras and regular patrols are among the tools used to stop a phenomenon the Greek state considers a national security threat.

Some 55,000 people were detected attempting to wade across the Evros River into Greece from Turkey in the region in 2011.

The figures have now dropped to near zero, says Pashalis Syritoudis, director of police in the run-down Greek border village of Orestiadas.

“In July 2012 we had 6,500 illegal migrants who passed the border. In August, we had only 1,800. In September, only 71 illegal immigrants, in October only 26 and now there are none,” he told EUobserver on 22 November.

[….]

He says the trend stopped since Greece launched Operation Xenious Zeus in early August.

Migrants are now targeting the more treacherous sea crossings near Lesvos, Sumos, Symi and the Farmkonis islands instead.

“We have given a very clear message to the facilitators [migrant smugglers] and their source countries in North Africa and other countries that Evros is no longer an easy passage to enter Europe,” Syritoudis noted.

There is more, read it all.

We have reported on struggling Greece, here, many times over the last few years.

Here is an idea!

Remember those Libyans who came to Texas recently to see how we seal our borders?  They should be going to Orestiadas, Greece to see how successful professionals get it done!

Watching the collapse of Europe: Italian asylum problems a harbinger of what is to come?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

So what the hell is Italy supposed to do?  Here is an article from the hoiyty-toiyty at the New York Times chastising the Italian government for how it is handling the huge populations of immigrants flowing toward Europe.  Italy, and to a lesser extent Malta, are the first bits of land illegal aliens reach as they in ever-increasing numbers run from Africa and the glorious Arab Spring on-going there.   Here is just one of our recent posts on the topic.

According to this story in the NYT, Italy allows too many asylum seekers to stay and then doesn’t take care of them.  With the European economy teetering, how the heck can they take care of all these destitute people (America pay attention!)?   And, if they said they were going to deport more, the international ‘humanitarians’ would scream bloody murder over that!  It is a no-win situation for Italy.  The NYT calls it a “paradox:”

ROME — The abandoned university building on the outskirts of Rome, colloquially known as Salaam Palace, was once a sparsely populated makeshift shelter where new arrivals from Africa — fleeing war, persecution and economic turmoil — squatted to create their own refuge.

Over the years, scattered mattresses were joined by sloppily plastered plywood walls, slapdash doors and scavenged furniture. Today, an irregular warren of tiny rooms includes a small restaurant and a common room. On a recent cold afternoon, a hammer clinked as a bathroom was added to a one-room apartment where an oven door had been left open for heat.

More than 800 refugees now inhabit Salaam Palace, and its dilapidation and seeming permanence have become a vivid reminder of what its residents and others say is Italy’s failure to assist and integrate those who have qualified for asylum under its laws.

Salaam Palace and an expanding population in shantytowns elsewhere are the result of what refugee agencies say is an Italian paradox surrounding asylum seekers.

“Italy is quite good when in the asylum procedure, recognizing 40 percent, even up to 50 percent of applicants in some years,” said Laura Boldrini, the spokeswoman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Italy. “What is critical is what comes after.”

She and others involved in aiding refugees say that neglect and absence of resources add unnecessary hardship to already tattered lives and are creating a potential tinderbox for social unrest.

One of the reasons the European Union came to be was so that all of the countries would share in trying to solve problems that in this case only stem from the geographic location of Italy.  But, Italians now see that they are, for the most part, alone in coping with the migrant problems from Africa.

Because of its geography, Italy is more exposed to migration from Africa, and it has called on other European Union countries to help bear the burden. Even so, the country has lagged in its own response, refugee agencies say.

“It has never invested in a system that’s structural,” said Ms. Boldrini, of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. “Every year is treated as if it’s any emergency.”

Under European Union rules, asylum seekers must stay in the country in which they entered Europe, and can be sent back if they go elsewhere. Many residents of Salaam Palace say they sought something better, in France, Britain or Germany, but found themselves back in Rome.

Read it all!

So, when are we in the US going to start taking Italy’s illegal aliens as we do Malta’s?  Our lengthy ‘Malta’ archive is here.

Time to read The Camp of the Saints?   Change the locale to Italy rather than France, and the origin of the onslaught Africa rather than India.

Here is what one reviewer at Amazon says about the nearly 40-year-old DARK novel:

This book is so politically incorrect that I admire Amazon.com for actually carrying it. Written in the early 1970s, this book looks beyond the cold war to a North-South confrontation in which European civilization is unilaterally morally disarmed. The thesis is simple: suppose a million starving people from the Ganges actually took Western rhetoric of compassion, explotiation, etc., to heart, and comandeered, en masse, shipping, with the intention of moving to the shores of France? (Raspail, of course, is French.) Would anyone stop them? The imagery employed is interesting. The title comes from Revelation, Chapter 20, and refers to the forces of evil laying seige to the camp of the saints, here meant to be the nations of the West…..

Guatemalans must be lobbying for temporary refugee status

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Your tax dollars!

I wrote a post back in February at Potomac Tea Party Report about how Guatemala’s Foreign Minister traveled to the US to lobby for Temporary Protected Status for ‘his people’ in the US.  Every day that post is still near the top of my list of most read posts, so I can only assume that there is a campaign on-going to get Obama to grant the backdoor amnesty for Guatemalans already in the US.

Here is what I said in February about the program that Mark Krikorian at the Center for Immigration Studies rightly pegs when he says there is nothing quite so permanent as temporary refugee status.

While we are all busy arguing over illegal immigration and how to combat it, the Obama administration is busy with backdoor amnesty.  One such program to legalize the illegals is quietly becoming increasingly popular— Temporary Protected Status (TPS)

Just recently TPS was extended for Salvadorans who have been here illegally for more than a decade.  We’ve also extended TPS for Haitians who got here illegally prior to the earthquake.  And, now in light of the turmoil in Syria, an open borders cabal* is asking for TPS for Syrians.

The basic idea behind TPS is that those who are in the country illegally, or whose Visas might expire are allowed to stay and WORK in the US because it would be a hardship on their country (and the illegals themselves) to send them back to a country that is a mess for some reason.

However, the way things are going, this administration would have a good excuse not to deport illegals back to almost any country in the world for some reason.

Now we learn that Guatemala wants TPS for its people here too—because of heavy rains related to tropical storm Agatha nearly two years ago!

Read my whole post that is attracting so much attention.  The great benefit to Guatemala is that their nationals living in the US can readily send remittances back to their homeland without any legal hassles.

Flimsy excuses like this one—a two year old storm—have perverted what might have been a limited program for very rare circumstances, instead it is one more egregious misuse of the concept of “refugees.”   These are illegal aliens/economic migrants not true refugees.

What got me thinking about this again today was this story from North Carolina about one more taxpayer-funded benefit TPS “refugees” get—instate tuition.