Category: Other Immigration

Food stamp fraud making the national news (finally!)

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I’m going to have more later today (or tomorrow) on this story, but for readers who have followed RRW for years, you know this subject has been one of great interest to me.  Convenience stores, gas stations and other ‘mom & pop’ grocery stores have been for YEARS ripping off the taxpayer by buying food stamps at ‘fifty cents on the dollar’—the store owner/manager gives the food stamp recipient often half the value of his/her benefit and then turns around and gets the full value from the federal government.

Some of these scams have netted the crooks hundreds of thousands of dollars.

If you search ‘food stamp fraud’ here at RRW you will see dozens and dozens of these stories—the large majority are stores owned and run by immigrants.  In some cases the money they took from the taxpayers went to Muslim countries. Honestly, I think there is some training program abroad where they get the seed money, get into the US through treaty investor visas, and set up these fraudulent enterprises.

Here Rep. Daryl Issa tells Fox News about the scam (brought to light by real investigative reporters from Scripps Howard News Service).  Issa will hold hearings in the House of Representatives this week.

Issa is wrong about one thing he said in that Fox News interview—he said its happening under this Administration, implying that somehow Obama’s people are turning a blind eye.  Let me assure you it was on-going during the Bush Administration too and probably long before that.

Legal immigration and the jobs issue

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I have so many links and bits of information that have come my way over the last few days about LEGAL immigration and jobs, that it’s too much to put in one post.  Additionally, I don’t have all the pieces to the puzzle either.  But, my basic thesis is that under the guise of doing the humanitarian thing, businesses are benefiting from the less expensive (and in many cases captive—refugees can’t get home!) immigrant labor to the detriment of unemployed American citizens.

Businesses benefit as well because for some categories of legal immigration (refugees and asylees) any meager salary the refugees receive is helped along by the welfare benefits the employee receives on the side.  So what if wages are low, the immigrant laborers get all sorts of other taxpayer-funded benefits

Federal refugee contractors benefit themselves by bringing in the labor (via the US State Department of course) and being paid to do so (by the taxpayer) all the while wearing the white hat of the do-gooder.  This isn’t a new theory of mine, it’s just that I plan to get to the bottom of it now.

Oh, and one more thing, certain big businesses use their connections to government to get this cheap immigrant labor and thus out-compete their competitors—it has a name, it is called “corporatism” —and it allows the hard Left (the Obama Administration) to work in concert with big business.

So, I’m making a new category called, “legal immigration and jobs,” and will begin writing posts for the category in hopes of eventually proving my thesis.

I am sick to death of the hypocrisy—that this is all about helping the downtrodden!  It is about money and political power, not the poor immigrant.

Although not related to refugees, to start things off, here is a link to an investigative piece on the HB visas which allow hundreds of thousands of foreign workers to enter the US each year.  This was on facebook this morning, hat tip Jackie.

Now Guatemalans are asking for Temporary Protected Status!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Because of a tropical storm that happened two years ago!

Sorry, I have been so busy in Maryland that I haven’t gotten much posted here.  This is a story I just posted at Potomac Tea Party Report earlier this morning and it might interest readers here as well.

While we are all busy [in Maryland and elsewhere] 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).

Read it all, here.

Formal request submitted to give TPS to Syrians in the US, volags involved

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Since the open borders crowd has been so successful in keeping hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants in the US (Salvadorans, Haitians, Liberians,  Somalis etc) through Temporary Protected Status they now want to secure TPS “protection” for Syrians presently in the US due to the turmoil on-going in Syria.

So who is next? — TPS for Yemenis, Egyptians, Libyans, Palestinians and the list goes on!

Just a reminder that Mark Krikorian at the Center for Immigration Studies shrewdly noted in 1999—there is nothing quite so permanent as a temporary refugee!

Here is the news:

On Wednesday, January 25th, United for a Free Syria (UFS), in close coordination with a broad coalition including the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), Syrian Expatriates Organization (SEO), Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), Syrian Americans for Democracy (SAD), South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT), Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI), and Refugee Council USA (RCUSA), has formally requested that the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) grant Temporary Protected Status (TPS) under section 244 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, to Syrian nationals presently in the United States. The request was sent directly to DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano.

UFS understands the urgent need to file for TPS and will continue the political lobbying behind this effort at the US Congress and the White House as well as all relevant agencies. The thorough petition has been sent not only to DHS, but also to the Office of the Secretary of State, the National Security Council, and the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service. The petition cites numerous facts regarding the current Syrian regime’s atrocities from numerous international governmental and non-governmental organizations, including Human Rights Watch and the United Nations, among other reliable sources.

Since two of the top refugee contractors (highlighted above) are in on this, I can only assume there is money to be made as visa overstays, illegal aliens, Syrian students, and Syrian tourists are magically transformed overnight into formal “refugees.”   There must be something more tangible in it for the volags besides the joy of enhancing our ethnic diversity.

One final thought.  As the refugee program itself comes under greater scrutiny (the numbers are down under Obama), I think those looking to bring ever greater numbers of immigrants to the US are just searching for more creative ways to get the job done.  TPS is one such legal program.

Santorum soars on immigration!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Readers: this is cross posted from Potomac Tea Party Report (my other blog).   You may want to check out other posts there over the last few days as they are related to immigration issues.  Keep in mind the post is written for an audience which may not be as savvy as RRW readers on Legal immigration problems and programs.

Yesterday I wrote a post based on a Washington Times story from Thursday that said that the immigration control crowd was forming behind Mitt Romney.  But, all that appears to have changed when Rick Santorum gave a speech on Friday in South Carolina that will change the playing field for many.  Michael Savage, for one, should be pleased that one of the candidates has finally come out forcefully on immigration.

In a press release late last night, NumbersUSA announced that the former Pennsylvania Senator had soared to the top of their Presidential scorecard primarily because he didn’t just stick to the usual talking point—illegal immigration is bad, legal is good—he told people that the numbers are too high.  He took on, without prompting, the Diversity Visa Lottery and chain migration (that is when you get your foot in the door, you can bring a whole host of relatives in with you).

Somalis are a case in point

Not to get too deep into the weeds, but on this business of chain migration, the US State Department in 2008 halted “family reunification” for Somalis (and a few other African groups) when they discovered through some random DNA testing that the would-be family members weren’t family at all.   It is believed that as many as 36,000 Somalis got into the US illegally by claiming family connections.

Diversity visa is insane

Also, I haven’t mentioned it here much (here is one post this past July), but the Diversity Visa Lottery (yes, a real lottery) allows 50,000 immigrants from countries—Nigeria, Egypt, Kenya, Bangladesh etc.—that we don’t (supposedly) have enough people from to apply for a lottery to get into the US to increase our diversity.  NumbersUSA has been working with certain members of Congress in recent years to kill the program.

So, here then is what NumbersUSA is saying about Rick Santorum:

Former Sen. Rick Santorum zoomed from the back of the GOP pack on immigration issues to way out FRONT at a C-SPAN televised event in South Carolina on Friday. For the first time in many years,  we have a Presidential candidate who says LEGAL immigration numbers are too high!

[…..]

Congratulations to all of you Santorum supporters who have been pushing him to greatly improve his immigration platform.  You succeeded beyond most of our wildest dreams.

Now, the rest of you who are supporting other GOP and Democratic candidates need to increase your pressure on them to catch up to Santorum.

Roy Beck explains what happened—Santorum from a D- to an A literally overnight:

We have long said that candidates don’t need a long speech or a huge position paper to make it clear to the American public that they think American workers should get the next U.S. jobs, that illegal aliens should not be rewarded with U.S. jobs and that legal immigration categories should be cut if they don’t serve the national interest.

When Santorum began moving up in the public opinion polls late November and December, we devoted blogs and webcasts to his poor record on immigration that worked out to a D-minus.

But we always said that his bad grade was mainly based on bad decisions in the 1990s and on a lack of statements on various categories during the campaign.  We said that it would be easy for him to improve his platform and grade very quickly with a set of new statements and promises.

Here is the clincher.  Santorum went beyond the usual—I oppose illegal immigration—and took it one step further.

But for the first time in the year-long Presidential campaign thus far, we have a candidate who has brought up the Visa Lottery and Chain Migration.

Go to NumbersUSA to see what Santorum said.

I guess we will now be testing the Michael Savage thesis!