Category: Other refugees

Japan proceeding with care in new refugee program

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Some time ago we told you that Japan was opening its doors a tiny crack to third country resettlement of refugees and based on this article in the Asia Daily News it apparently is trying to anticipate problems ahead by making sure refugees learn Japanese and Japanese culture in at least  6 months of lessons, if not longer!

Although the government has said it will allow a very limited number of Myanmar refugees currently living in Thailand to resettle in Japan on a trial basis from fiscal 2010, details of the resettlement assistance program remain unclear.

One major complication when resettling such refugees is the relatively brief time allocated for Japanese language education–generally as little as six months.

We don’t even require that.   English lessons are available, but I don’t believe they are required at all.   Our experience has been that as soon as the men, especially the men, get jobs they quit going to any class.  Can you even imagine refugees being required to take lessons about our culture!   Actually I had an English teacher tell me that it was great when the men left class because it gave her a chance to tell the women that in America any money they earned was theirs!  And, that they didn’t have to wear that hijab either.  

Back to my story from Japan.

The government announced on Dec. 18 the Cabinet’s decision to extend on a trial basis the third-country resettlement scheme to Myanmar refugees in Thailand for three years from fiscal 2010, with a view to accepting 30 people each year.

A whole 30 refugees a year!   We took 18,139 Myanmar refugees in FY2008 alone.

Here is what the Japanese have in place already.

The Foundation for the Welfare and Education of Asian People, a government-funded nonprofit organization based in Minato Ward, Tokyo, has been undertaking educational activities for both convention and Indochinese refugees.

The foundation’s Refugee Assistance Headquarters (RHQ) offers refugees 572 45-minute Japanese language lessons as well as 120 “life in Japan” lessons, which also are 45 minutes each, with a view to having them acquire basic Japanese speaking and writing skills.

But, they fear it will not be adequate.

It seems virtually impossible for a refugee to acquire adequate Japanese language proficiency to cope with life in Japan simply by taking a six-month course.

We need to be doing this—-requiring at least 6 months of English and American culture lessons.

US pullout in Iraq will have unintended consequences for refugees

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

President Obama’s plan to pull us out of Iraq may have deadly consequences for thousands of Iranian dissidents who have sought shelter in Iraq where they were protected by American troops.  

From the New York Times:

And in a remote part of northern Diyala Province, Iraqi soldiers surrounded a refugee camp for Iranian dissidents, Camp Ashraf, blockading food and water to the roughly 3,500 residents there. A spokesman for the dissidents’ group, the People’s Mujahedeen Organization of Iran, said Sunday that only the presence of Americans had prevented an attack on them.

[…..]

Far to the north, the Iranian refugees at Camp Ashraf have been a renewed source of concern ever since American forces handed over responsibility for the camp’s protection to the Iraqi Army on Jan. 1.

Last Friday, however, Iraqi forces surrounded the camp and cut off supplies, according to Shahin Gobadi, a spokesman for the dissidents, reached by telephone in Paris. Then, on Sunday morning, the refugees resisted an attempt by Iraqi soldiers to enter one of the camp’s buildings, leading to scuffles and beatings of residents that stopped only when American officers there as observers intervened.

“If the Americans leave, you will see a very serious human catastrophe and a massacre in this camp,” said a camp spokesman, Shahriar Kia, who was reached by telephone. So far, though, no one has been seriously injured or killed.

Whew!  Who knew!  If the refugees are killed that won’t look so good for Obama.

Dallas refugee: “I see people under the bridge and I think, ‘Will that be me?'”

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

You guessed it!   Another article about unemployed and scared refugees.  Another article where the refugee resettlement agencies whine for more money, hoping that somehow all the money flowing from the Obama administration’s printing presses will wash over them and the tens of thousands of refugees they are helping bring to the US this year.

Lal Subba is the young Bhutanese refugee who is worried about being homeless under the bridge someday.   We have commited to resettling 60,000 of Subba’s countrymen within five years. 

“I see people under the bridge and I think, ‘Will that be me?’ ” he said in the halting English he learned in the camp.

The solution is not to slow the number of refugees, but to squeeze more funding from American taxpayers so that the likes of Anne Richard and Lavinia Limon can keep their jobs that fund them well and allow them to feel so very good about their noble work.    Nevermind that there is even talk of tent cities in places like Boise.

“The way the program is set up, we are bringing people in but leaving them high and dry,” said Anne Richard, the International Rescue Committee’s vice president of government relations and advocacy, who believes the financial crisis has threatened the resettlement process.

No kidding!   Yet, slowing down the flow is not an option.

The solution is not to decrease the flow of refugees but to overhaul the entire system during the new administration, said Lavinia Limón, president of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants and the former head of the Office of Refugee Resettlement under the Clinton administration. She wants more resources channeled toward housing assistance as well as programs that focus on the increasingly diverse pool of refugees entering the United States.

There are no plans to slow the flow to Texas, according to this article.   Yet, readers will remember it was only last week that we reported there were no jobs for Iraqis in Houston.

Texas has suffered less than its Midwestern counterparts and has no plans to slow its refugee influx. It took in a little more than 5,000 refugees last year, an increase of almost 800 from 2007. Texas generally places in the top four states for the number of refugees it accepts annually from the federal government.

Then there is the plane ticket issue.

Toward the end of this article another refugee discusses how hard it is for her to meet her financial obligations and one of those is the repayment of her family’s plane tickets to the US.

Her (Paw Htoo, Burmese refugee) increasingly Americanized children ask for pizza and fried chicken, indulgences she said she can’t afford. Her 17-year old brother works weekends at a florist to help with the rent and begin to pay IRC back for the plane tickets.

A well-kept secret of the refugee program is that although the refugees plane tickets are paid by you, the taxpayer, they are supposed to reimburse the federal government.  The resettlement agencies act as the collection agents. 

In September 2007 we asked State Department representatives at the Hagerstown meeting about this practice.   Not surprisingly we had heard that many of these tickets were never repaid.    What was surprising was that we learned the volags, like the ones Lavinia Limon and Anne Richard are leading, serve as the collection agents and get to pocket 25% of any airfare they collect.   State Department reps said, afterall, they would have to hire collection agents, so they might as well contract these volags and kick some more of your money back into their coffers.

Shelbyville Times-Gazette editorial says federal government unfair to local workers

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We told you last week that 150 people, including a large number of  immigrants and refugees, mostly from Nashville, arrived at an employment office in Shelbyville, TN to compete for a few jobs at the local Tyson’s poultry plant.   The police had to be called in when a scuffle ensued.

This morning the Times-Gazette editorializes on the practice of non-profit groups, funded by the taxpayer, bringing immigrant labor to town and competing for jobs that locals would like to have.

Here is the background:

Concerns rose in Shelbyville this week after law enforcement was called out early Monday to quell a disturbance at the state unemployment office downtown after about 150 people, including a large number of refugees and others brought from Nashville by various charitable organizations, camped overnight to apply for Tyson jobs.

Members of our community have expressed anger that jobs are being taken by foreign nationals instead of local workers, and that anger has been wrongly directed at Tyson, which employs 1,300 people, the majority of whom are local residents. Tyson also recruits locally through job fairs and employment advertising.

We believe employment opportunities should be equally available for all legal workers, and agree that Tyson is following the law in its hiring practice, in this instance.

We do not, however, agree with our tax dollars being used to ship people to our county to apply for jobs.

Then here is an editor after my own heart.

We fear that current trends by the government to unwisely hand out our money to religious organizations that pass it on to foreign nationals seeking jobs in these difficult times may help reverse that.

World Relief, one organization that has shipped foreign nationals to apply for jobs in Shelbyville, told the Times-Gazette Monday that it contracts with the govenrment to do so. The organization received more than $31 million in federal grants in 2008, according to its financial report, available at www.wr.org.

This practice, funded by the federal government, makes it unfairly competitive to those who live here and are willing and able to take those jobs.

These are religious organizations. If they want to ship folks down here, let them pay for it out of their church coffers, rather than out of our tax dollars. If not, let the immigrants scratch up their own bus fare to Shelbyville.

Yes indeed!     Read the whole editorial, it was so good I wanted to post the whole thing here, but you should go visit the Times-Gazette.

Be sure to read the news update at the Times-Gazette today too.

Gay Iranian refugees arrive in Canada

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

In addition to the stepped up number of Iraqi refugees arriving in Canada (see my previous post), gay Iranians are arriving in welcoming Canada.  From the Toronto Sun today:

Two Iranian lovers who claim they face death in their homeland because they’re homosexuals touched down at Pearson airport last night after being granted refugee status in Canada.

Ali, 32, and Mohammad, 25, a student, arrived in Montreal after a long trip from India and then boarded another flight to Toronto, where they will be staying with friends.

[….] 

“It took them three years to get here,” said Arsham Parsi, of Iranian Queer Railroad, who helped bring the men here. “Canada is a gay-friendly country and they will be successful here.”

Note to all the leftwingers who invited Ahmahdinijad to Columbia University and defend the form of Islam practiced in Iran,  Shariah law prohibits homosexuality.   It gets my blood boiling when I see these reports in which the reporter is too chicken to say that these men are persecuted because Islam itself calls for their persecution.

Parsi said it’s against the law to practise homosexuality in Iran and the couple could be arrested and sentenced to death.

The UNHCR facilitates the resettlement of homosexuals to the West.

He (Parsi) said his organization has helped more than 60 gay Iranian refugees resettle in Canada, the U.S. and Australia.