Donald Trump, please try to stop this now! We are about to take 1,800 failed asylum seekers that Australia has rejected

11/12/2016 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

When I wrote about this the other day, I didn’t really think our Department of State could be serious, but obviously the Obama Administration is going to shove it down our throats! How many more outrages will we see regarding refugees before January 20th when Donald Trump will be setting US immigration policy?
Watch the 2013 news about the asylum seekers, angry with Australia and the slow processing of their claims, burn down the asylum center. Link here if this doesn’t open: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoL6dASFh8M

German press (Deutsche Welle) is reporting that we are going to transform Australia’s failed asylum seekers, mostly Muslims, into legitimate refugees bound for Anytown, USA.
I would like to know, from the ‘brains’ at the US State Department, how these 1,800 boat people were vetted. And, most of all, why Australia turned them down!
Deutsche Welle:

The US has agreed to accept 1,800 refugees held at Australian-funded camps in Nauru and Papua New Guinea, according to media reports. Human rights groups have criticized the conditions in the camps. [What? And, that means because conditions are supposedly bad in an Australian camp, its inhabitants become our problem!—ed]

The Australian newspaper reported on Friday that the US and Australia were close to announcing an agreement for up to 1,800 mainly Muslim refugees from the Middle East, Africa and Asia on the island nations of Nauru and Papua New Guinea.

Prime Minster Malcolm Turnbull declined to comment on negotiations with the US. “There’s always speculation about these things” Turnbull said on Melbourne Radio. “And we never comment on them.”

[….]

An agreement struck with the administration of President Barack Obama could be opposed by his successor, Donald Trump who has called for tight restrictions on Muslim immigration into the US.

Human rights groups have condemned the conditions in the camps which they have condemned as an abrogation of Australia’s responsibilities as a signatory to the United Nations Refugee Convention. There have been street protests over the treatment of the refugees (photo).

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton said this week he was looking for countries that would accept all asylum seekers bound for Australia, including those who have had their refugee claims rejected, but who refuse to go home.

Donald Trump really can’t do anything yet, but your Washington reps can!

Call your US Senators and member of Congress!

I’ve been preaching for weeks/months that there is only one place right now (before January 20th) where you can have an impact if you choose to do the work! That is Congress. Call your representatives in Washington on Monday (they should be back to work on Tuesday, but their staffs should be working) and complain about this outrage. Use it as an example of how out of control the UN/US State Department Refugee Admissions Program is.
Tell your representatives to call the US State Department (the Asst. Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration) to put a halt to this sheer insanity!
And, while you are at it, tell your members of Congress to DEFUND the RAP in the FY2017 budget that will be before them beginning on Tuesday.

Church World Service head honcho sucking up to the NYT and Chobani Yogurt tycoon

11/12/2016 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We told you recently that the NY Times has gone to bat for Hamdi Ulukaya who is changing Twin Falls, Idaho with a refugee worker flow for his world’s largest yogurt plant there. As I said yesterday, some of the big players in the UN/US refugee program are giant corporations, some of them foreign-owned, that want CHEAP labor.
Think about it! If companies like Chobani didn’t have the steady supply of immigrant/refugee labor they might have to hire American workers and pay them better wages!
Since I’ve been writing about Church World Service this morning, I thought you might like to see what CWS’s highly paid CEO is saying to the NYT. Is he looking for a little moola from Hamdi?
Here:

Re “For Standing Up, Scorn” (Business Day, Nov. 1):

On behalf of CWS, a global humanitarian organization and refugee resettlement agency, I commend Chobani’s founder, Hamdi Ulukaya, for making the concerted effort to employ more refugees at his yogurt company. In a time of widespread xenophobia and hateful rhetoric, his compassion, boldness and good entrepreneurial sense are especially uplifting.

rev-john-l-mccullough-arrested-in-nyc-with-rob-rutland-brown-624x414 — CWS CEO Rev. John McCullough being arrested in Washington, DC protesting in support of Obama’s executive amnesty. Photo and story here: http://njfon.org/2015/04/08/faith-groups-challenge-fifth-circuit-court-on-presidents-immigration-actions/ McCullough pulls down an annual salary of over $300,000 a year from his CWS work and from “related organizations.” Page 13- 14 http://www.guidestar.org/FinDocuments/2015/134/080/2015-134080201-0c44e710-9.pdf

Through his own employment practices, he helps demonstrate that refugees are hardworking, productive members of our society, not the economic burden some suggest.

Mr. Ulukaya, an immigrant from Turkey, also warrants our praise for establishing a foundation that assists migrants, traveling to Greece to witness the refugee crisis firsthand and committing to give away most of his fortune to help refugees.

Mr. Ulukaya illustrates tangibly what’s right about our country: longstanding values of hospitality, diversity and industry.

(Rev.) JOHN L. McCULLOUGH

New York

The writer is president and chief executive of CWS (Church World Service).

Learn about CWS’s finances here.
See our extensive archive on CWS, by clicking here.
Our Twin Falls archive is here.
About the photo on McCullough’s arrest: Why would a non-profit group, that is being paid millions of tax dollars each year to help legal refugees get established and find jobs in the US, be out protesting on behalf of illegal aliens who will in turn (if granted amnesty) be in direct competition with refugees for jobs? I have never understood the sense of this.
The only logical explanation is that CWS and McCullough are out to change America by changing the people no matter how they have to do it!

Poughkeepsie: Church World Service official spins about refugee Islamic terrorists

11/12/2016 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We told you on October 28th that Church World Service is planning to bring refugees, mostly from Syria and the Middle East, to Poughkeepsie, NY, and the plans were kept secret from the city elected officials and the public in general until very recently. The arrival of the first Syrians is apparently only a month or so away.

Because most citizens don’t fully understand how costly resettlement is and they don’t know (because all mainstream media is silent) how disruptive to the social make-up of communities large numbers of refugees have been, they don’t know enough to ask enough good questions so they naturally focus first and foremost on the security issue. They want to know if Islamic terrorists could be hiding among them?
Refugee industry spokesmen are quick to make a joke, asking why would a terrorist want to go through such a lengthy process to get here, when they can simply fly in or walk across the border (a question which invariably brings laughs in the audience).
One thing we never hear about outside of certain circles is the fact that some Muslim refugee children in America have grown up to be jihadists—-dozens of them from the Somali community in Minnesota, for example, have thumbed their noses at your good will and left for battle in Africa or the Middle East. Others have tried to show their jihadist ‘skills’ here.
Read about the Poughkeepsie meeting and pay close attention to how an official of Church World Service attempts to answer security concerns.
From the Times-Herald Record:

Former refugee Erol Kekic, executive director of the Immigration and Refugee Program, told attendees that refugees are vetted vigorously, especially those from Syria.

“We have not had one single refugee commit an act of terrorism,” Kekic said to a large round of applause.

mohamed-mohamud — Mohamed Mohamud a Somali refugee who came to the US as a child is serving a 30 year sentence for planning to blow up a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, OR. https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2014/10/01/portland-or-somali-christmas-tree-bomber-to-be-sentenced-today/

Apparently no one in the audience was knowledgeable enough to ask the follow-up question:

How many refugees have been arrested and convicted of planning terrorist attacks—arrested before they could commit the act?

The answer is a larger number than we should find acceptable!
Off the top of my head: There were the Iraqis men arrested in Kentucky in 2011 who were working with Al Qaeda in Iraq (doing life in prison now). ABC News did cover this story! Indeed the whole Iraqi flow to America was disrupted for a year or so in the wake of that revelation and all Iraqis on the way in were re-screened.
Then here are some of the kids you welcomed:
There was the Somali Christmas tree bomber sentenced in 2014.
Most recently there was the Iraqi refugee who admitted to planning an ISIS bombing in Houston, here.
And, we can’t forget an ISIS sympathizer (Somali refugee) who was successful in attacking and wounding shoppers in a mall in St. Cloud, MN, here.
Although they have never admitted it (to my knowledge), I believe the Chattanooga killer’s family was a resettled refugee family, see here.
There are others, visit our crimes category here with over 2,000 refugee crimes and terror attacks/attack planning from all over the world.
I know many of you will cite the Boston Bombers. Yes, they were ‘refugees’ who entered the US with their parents who were granted political asylum (which made them refugees). Kekic would argue that they don’t count because they didn’t come through the UN/US State Department Refugee Admissions Program run by contractors like Church World Service.
Be sure to revisit my post of last week on Church World Service’s finances. Poor Mr. Kekic is not being paid very well (he doesn’t make the top employees’ list on their recent Form 990) compared to other top execs of the organization. What’s up with that, he has been around for a long time—almost 17 years according to LinkedIn.

What should Trump do about refugees on January 21, 2017

11/11/2016 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

It is not unprecedented to reduce refugee numbers dramatically, we did it following 9/11! By Inauguration Day 2017 we will already be at 35,000 for the fiscal year!

Donald J. Trump will be inaugurated on the 20th of January as our 45th President. Many of you worked very hard to make it happen. He said he will stop the flow of Syrian (majority Muslim) refugees to your towns and cities and at minimum we expect him to do that!

But, reducing the numbers is not enough, he must demand the repeal of the Refugee Act of 1980. The system as constructed is rotten to the core and I no longer believe it can be reformed.

us-chamber-donohue-ap-640x480 — This isn’t just an ideological battle between ‘do-gooders’ on the Left and ‘haters’ in the conservative grassroots, but a third player is the Chamber of Commerce which will fight tooth and nail to buck Trump. They want the cheap immigrant labor! Tom Donohue, friend of Paul Ryan, here: http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/10/12/chris-wallace-establishment-business-groups-ready-to-primary-conservatives-if-they-dont-play-ball-with-paul-ryan/

A simple reduction in numbers, that has been suggested by some in the immigration control movement, is not adequate. If it is deemed in the national interest to resettle third worlders in America going forward, an entirely new program must be constructed by Congress.
In my view, there are three issues that must be addressed in a White House and Congressional review and they are: 1) National security concerns, 2) the VOLAG system where non-profits are paid by the head (out of the US Treasury) to resettle refugees chosen by the UN, 3) lack of transparency (the outrageous secrecy by VOLAGs and the feds involved in choosing target towns). There may be others I can’t think of at the moment.

So as we knew, and as a Newsweek article yesterday confirmed, on January 21st, Donald Trump can turn off the spigot of refugees flowing in to the US and tell Congress if they want a refugee program to get to work and come up with a new one!

He can hold the hammer over their heads by turning off the flow!

But! He will have to battle the major corporations and the US Chamber of Commerce looking for a plentiful supply of CHEAP LABOR.

As much as some want to frame it this way—as a battle between two major forces of Democrat Left wing open borders ‘humanitarian’ activists on one side and Republican Right wing believers in tightly controlled immigration on the other, there is a third player with enormous power—BIG business and US Chamber of Commerce lobbyists always on the hunt for CHEAP (some say captive, compliant) LABOR!
Trump will have to battle Republican Congressional leaders who follow the lead of their industry friends!
That (above) is my main point, for those who want to wade into the numbers weeds, here is what I’ve been looking at this morning.

What do the numbers look like now?

Using data provided by the Refugee Processing Center, we have admitted 12,272 refugees of all stripes between the beginning of the 2017 fiscal year (October 1, 2016) and election day (November, 8, 2016). This rate (319 a day) is higher than anything we have seen in the last ten years (see chart in this post).
If that rate continues until Inauguration Day on January 20th, 2017, then we will have admitted over 35,000 refugees in just over 3 1/2 months, more than we brought in 2002 and 2003. Obama wants 110,000 for the entire fiscal year (319 a day would bring the total over 110,000).
However, it is not unprecedented to dramatically reduce numbers. See here that in the two years following 9/11 we admitted less than 30,000 refugees for each year 2002 and 2003!
So where would the greatest impact be if the spigot were closed on January 21st? On the contractors of course. They will have to close some offices, not open new ones, reduce staff and overhead, and gee maybe even reduce the excessively large salaries their CEOs are getting. Of course they will scream bloody murder and say how mean Trump is by leaving refugees in the pipeline.
By the way, if you like to do research, check USASpending.gov in the coming weeks and see if the federal agencies—US State Department and Health and Human Services—are pouring excessively large amounts of grant money into the coffers of the nine major contractors before Obama leaves office.
More numbers….
When I checked the data this morning, I see that the following numbers have been admitted from Muslim sending countries (from October 1 to November 8):
Iraq (1,635)
Somalia (1,684)
Syria (1,602)
Smaller numbers come from places like Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. Keep an eye on Burma because originally we resettled mostly Christian Burmese, but Burmese Muslim (Rohingya) numbers are ticking up (269 since Oct. 1).
One final note: The UN/US State Department Refugee Admissions Program is only one program of many LEGAL immigration programs admitting large numbers of Muslims and others from the third world. I previously wrote about the Diversity Visa Lottery which admits another 50,000 migrants to America via a lottery system each year because we need more diversity (!). I hardly see it mentioned, so I need to start writing about it again because we have the best chance ever now to review and possibly throw out programs which are detrimental to American workers and our communities.
The Republicans previously have tried to stop the Diversity Visa lottery (some call it the Green Card lottery) and I don’t know why they have shut up about it.

Refugee resettlement industry panicked; fears funds will be slashed

11/10/2016 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

And, if funds are slashed, the numbers to be resettled in your towns and cities will be slashed because as I have told you ad nauseum the resettlement contractors have little money of their own. They need your tax dollars or they wither and die.

“If [Trump] decides to cut the state funds or federal funds for refugees, refugee resettlement will collapse…” (former Church World Service employee)

Here is what Newsweek has to say about the panic (hat tip: Michael). The article begins with Muslim immigrant fears, then this:

Another point of concern to many Muslim families and others is what will happen to the country’s refugee resettlement program during a Trump presidency, considering his repeated Islamophobic statements during the campaign. [At this point, reporter uses the word ‘Islamophobic’, I went back to see if this was supposed to be straight reporting or an opinion piece! It is supposed to be a straight news story!—ed]

[….]

We’re all afraid. Afraid is probably putting it mildly. Most refugee advocates are really terrified of what’s coming,” says Neil Grungras, executive director of the Organization for Refuge, Asylum & Migration (ORAM), a San Francisco-based organization that specializes in helping LGBT refugees. “From a global standpoint, this development could be a real catastrophe.”

He adds: “The world’s resettlement system—if the worst case scenario occurs—will take an extreme blow.”

Readers, pay attention to this next paragraph. Trump has the power to suspend the program, and to cut the funding (pretty much one and the same!).

bill-frelick-2 — Bill Frelick of Human Rights Watch. Call me shell-shocked!

During his presidential campaign, Trump said he planned to suspend the Syrian refugee program, which is “fairly easy for him to do because this is discretionary,” says Bill Frelick, director of Human Rights Watch’s refugee program, who described himself as “shell-shocked” when he spoke with Newsweek on Wednesday. “In the U.S., there’s not a quota that has to be filled. The U.S. has a budgeted amount of money to do refugee resettlement, but there’s no requirement that the U.S. resettle a single refugee, and there’s no legal obligation to do it.”

[….]

Whether the entire refugee resettlement program will be shut down is difficult to predict, but I think it’s safe to say that from a policy standpoint, a Trump administration will be looking to limit the number of refugees resettled, and if refugee resettlement continues, it will be from countries that are ‘safe,’” says Joel Charny, director of Norwegian Refugee Council USA.

I had no idea that we were paying the UN for their work of picking our refugees, this is useful information:

In addition to resettling large numbers of refugees, the U.S. is also a key financial contributor to a number of refugee resettlement organizations, including the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR). The U.S. gave UNHCR nearly $700 million in the last fiscal year, and more than $1.3 billion in fiscal year 2015. What will happen to those contributions remains unclear; UNHCR did not respond to Newsweek’s request for comment.

[….]

“If [Trump] decide to cut the state funds or federal funds for refugees, refugee resettlement will collapse and we won’t be able to bring in any refugees to this country,” Vidhya Manivannan, a former employee of Church World Service—one of the nine U.S. refugee resettlement agencies—said in an email to Newsweek.

Click here for more.
I was interested to see that only one (former) employee of a resettlement contractor was quoted. Where is the gang? Where is the Refugee Council USA (the lobbying arm of the industry)?
More tomorrow!