Testimony to the US State Department from Paul in Montana

05/24/2016 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Editor: I am still combing through my hundreds of e-mails to find the testimony you sent to the US State Department in response to the DOS request for public comment on the “size and scope” of the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program for FY2017.
The day before the deadline for submission of testimony I noticed (maybe you were all ahead of me and noticed!) that the dates were wrong in the Federal Register. I happened to see a comment sent by lawyers to the DOS asking that the comment period be re-opened because citizens, who might like to have testified, didn’t think the notice was for a comment period this year, but for last year. See here.
From Paul who says when the federal government demonstrates such incompetence in so many areas, how could we expect any competent fix for the complicated UN/US State Department Refugee Admissions Program:

To Whom It Should Concern:

The United States exists to benefit our own citizens, and public policy should be made with that concept foremost in mind, not based upon uninformed sentiment and emotion. In the current instance, this means ending the refugee resettlement program, for many irrefutable reasons.

First, going back decades and even ignoring the obvious concerns about terrorists embedded in “refugee” influxes, U.S. asylum programs have been fraud-ridden (which is the reason that quotation marks should usually enclose the word “refugee”). A notable example was the discovery in 2008, via DNA testing, that many “refugee” “families” from Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Guinea, and Ghana weren’t families at all, just unrelated people who’d spotted an opportunity to move to the U.S.

Then there’s the matter of costs. In the experience of many small cities around the country (e.g. Amarillo, Texas; Springfield, Massachusetts; Manchester, New Hampshire), the resulting local impacts can be daunting and onerous. After a spell, they find their schools and social-services agencies begging for relief from the influx.

A Dinka dictionary is not adequate. Feds expected Manchester, NH school system to provide a Dinka interpreter when a student from S. Sudan acted up in high school there. Local taxpayers must foot the bill!

Consider, for example, the ordeal of Lynn, Massachusetts, a city of 90,000 just north of Boston with a school district serving 15,000 students. Lynn’s schools took in about 500 students from Central America between 2011 and 2014. One might think such an increase in school population of “only” 3.5 percent wouldn’t be a big deal, but that’s not how it’s worked out for the city.

As Lynn’s Mayor Judith Kennedy told an audience at the National Press Club in August 2014, her health department had to curtail inspection services to afford the surge in immunizations needed by the schools’ new arrivals. She had to end an effective, gang-suppressing community-policing program to free up resources for the schools. With many of the arrivals illiterate in any language, the schools needed many more classroom aides along with interpreters. (The school district’s website broadcasts the availability of translation services in Arabic, Creole, Khmer and Spanish.) Altogether, Mayor Kennedy had to shrink every other department’s 2015 budget by 2 to 5 percent from its 2014 level to accommodate a 9.3 percent increase in school funding.

(Yes, Lynn’s influx includes—besides “refugees”—illegal aliens and ordinary immigrants, but all three categories of arrivals from third-world countries impose comparable burdens on taxpayers.)

Such costs for translators and interpreters are an unfunded mandate the national government levies on states and localities, applicable to court proceedings, too. The requirement is open-ended. For example, in 2014 Manchester, New Hampshire, got in trouble with federal bureaucrats in a school-expulsion case by failing to provide an interpreter for Dinka, the language of South Sudan.

Dinka!!!

Finally, beyond the specific matter of refugee resettlement, our national government demonstrates seemingly universal incompetence, from Transportation Security Administration airport screeners’ 95 percent failure rate at intercepting test contraband to the slack immigration vetting of San Bernardino shooter Tashfeen Malik to the Environmental Protection Agency’s flooding Colorado’s Animas River with orange, toxic mine waste. So who believes that, with hard-to-investigate “refugees,” suddenly the feds will perform?

In short, it’s time to end it, not try to mend it, as mending anything complicated is manifestly beyond the capabilities of the ever more feckless federal bureaucracy.

This is the sixteenth testimony in our series leading up to the deadline for comments to the Dept. of State on May 19th. Go here for where they are archived to see what your fellow citizens have said.
I intend to keep posting testimonies, a few a day, until I have exhausted my long list! I had no idea so many of you would respond to my offer! But, thank you for your hard work!
P.S. I should have mentioned it, but I have been adding photos and other images just to jazz up the plain text, I hope you all don’t mind!

Testimony to the US State Department from Deborah in California

05/23/2016 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

where do refugee settle — Most go to California and Texas.

From Deborah who raises the TB issue here (before we learned this shocking news yesterday):

To Anne .C .Richard
UN/US State Dept Refugee Admissions Program

As an American citizen who immigrated to this country well over ten years ago I am writing to voice my opinion on the influx of refugees being brought to the U.S. by your dept and this administration. I realize this country has a long standing precedent for allowing immigrants as I was one myself but by ignoring the set procedures in order to bring more in you are risking the safety of every American already here. You must resist the urge to accommodate the will of the current administration and look to the future and the outcome of rushing these immigrants through without proper vetting.

Without screening these refugees for TB, as well as other communicable diseases, ( which every legal immigrant has to do) you risk further strain on our already weakened health care system. Legal immigrants must agree to not be a burden on the welfare system which does not apply to these refugees. How is that possibly fair, to penalize those that want to willingly come to this country, verses those that will not assimilate and expect to be financially cared for?

Even in my community I can see the strain this overworked system is having on the lives of Americans and it breaks my heart. I cannot understand how changing the length of the vetting process from 18 months to 3 months is either beneficial or practical especially in light of the current global upheavals both in the United States and abroad.

As a sovereign nation with a long history of charity for our global brothers and sisters I strongly request that the influx of unvetted refugees be reverted back to the original 18 month timeline with emphasis on reducing the volume and increasing the scrutiny. We as a nation are currently going through extreme political changes. It is important to note that this current administration will soon be surrendering the reigns to a new leader and since the voice of the people have loudly and universally rejected continuing the status quo I again ask that you take that fact into consideration when setting refugee admission guidelines for the 2017 year.

This is the fifteenth testimony in our series leading up to the deadline for comments to the Dept. of State on May 19th. Go here for where they are archived to see what your fellow citizens have said.
I intend to keep posting testimonies, a few a day, until I have exhausted my long list! I had no idea so many of you would respond to my offer! But, thank you for your hard work!
P.S. I should have mentioned it, but I have been adding photos and other images just to jazz up the plain text, I hope you all don’t mind!

Testimony to the US State Department from Coya in Maryland

05/22/2016 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Editor: I am still combing through my hundreds of e-mails to find the testimony you sent to the US State Department in response to the DOS request for public comment on the “size and scope” of the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program for FY2017.
The day before the deadline for submission of testimony I noticed (maybe you were all ahead of me and noticed!) that the dates were wrong in the Federal Register. I happened to see a comment sent by lawyers to the DOS asking that the comment period be re-opened because citizens, who might like to have testified, didn’t think the notice was for a comment period this year, but for last year. See here.

Here is reader Coya quoting Teddy Roosevelt….

To the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration Anne C. Richard

Originally, the Refugee act was to provide qualified refugees a pathway to permanent residence as persons of special humanitarian concern to the United States. The key word is qualified. We cannot properly vet the refugees. We should not place all American citizens at risk.

Prior to the passage of the Refugee Act, a refugee in the United States had to wait two years to apply for adjustment of status. The refugee also had to show that he or she had fled (or stayed away from) any communist-dominated country or country within the Middle East and was unwilling or unable to return due to fear of persecution. This must be adhered to in the strictest sense.

The influx of Syrian refugees would change the voting demographics in the US and to convert America into an Islamic nation.

I whole heartedly agree with President Teddy Roosevelt when he said:

“In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American…There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag… We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language… and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.”
Theodore Roosevelt 1907

Any other means of bringing masses of people to America is an invasion and misuse of the Refugee Act of 1980 and could be considered an act of treason.

This is the fourteenth testimony in our series leading up to the deadline for comments to the Dept. of State on May 19th. Go here for where they are archived to see what your fellow citizens have said.
I intend to keep posting testimonies, a few a day, until I have exhausted my long list! I had no idea so many of you would respond to my offer! But, thank you for your hard work!

Testimony to the US State Department from Sue in Kansas

05/22/2016 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Sam Brownback 2 — Kansas Governor Sam Brownback withdrew the state of Kansas from the federal refugee program last month, however, that effectively gives the job of resettlement over to a non-profit group in the state with no elected official responsibility. It was a good first step, but without step 2 (filing a states’ rights lawsuit), it is essentially meaningless. https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2016/05/03/big-news-kansas-watching-tennessee-on-refugee-lawsuit-but-bigger-still-so-is-texas/

From Sue:

FR Doc 2016-09267

FY 2016 U.S. Refugee Admissions Program

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration

Anne C. Richard

The U.S. Refugee Admission Program is out of control. It wreaks havoc on local communities – economically, socially and culturally. The program favors Islamic peoples and others that have no respect for our customs, laws or citizens.

We the people; we the taxpayers are funding these programs. It is our hard earned money that is used to bring in thousands of immigrants at a time when our country’s economy is at a breaking point. The immigrants, not Americans, are given preferential treatment at every turn – housing, education, medical assistance, food and employment.

There are factions of these groups of people that are violent – towards each other and everyone else. Domestic abuse is not uncommon and that spill out into our communities in the form of rapes and murders against women and children. Strict and time consuming protocols tie the hands of our police on all the federal, state and local levels. Criminals go unpunished. If they are deported, they make their way back into our country because the system is broken.

Each and every immigrant needs to be thoroughly vetted before being allowed into our country. The program, as it is now, is run more like a cattle business. Immigrants are treated like cash cows by the local contractors which have made a business of raking in federal dollars for their non-profit programs. This is detrimental to many immigrants as well as to the local communities. The immigrants receive a crash course in how to survive in America and then are cast out into the community. Is it no wonder that some will turn to theft, drugs and other crime to try and survive?

Professional immigrants are also given preferential treatment. Foreign doctors, scientists and other professionals are recruited into hospitals, research institutions and business. They can bypass the strict requirements our own college students must abide by. How can American students fairly compete within this infrastructure?

Public schools, colleges and universities are not immune to the lure of federal dollars to accommodate foreign born students. Rather than teach foreign grade school children about our country’s history and culture, in many cases, the opposite is happening. Our children are taught and indoctrinated into foreign cultural beliefs. At a time when Christian values and faith are mocked and denigrated, Islam is being promoted as a religion of peace. Make no mistake, I support clear, unbiased education. Let the facts speak for themselves, but how can this happen when Islam mandates a political correctness for themselves and not for all others?

Throughout American history, immigrants have assimilated peacefully into our culture. They became Americans. The Islamic Nation will never assimilate into our culture but instead, will expect Americans to be dominated by their customs and laws. We cannot allow this to happen.

Books have been written about the immigration problems facing our country. Numerous articles, research and statistics are available that are beyond the scope of this comment section. More public input is necessary to work through the many problems that plague this program and are detrimental to our nation. Checks and balances, outside the government agencies, are necessary. If the system cannot be fixed to the satisfaction of the American people; perhaps it should be dismantled. The money could be better spent on helping our own citizens who are in dire need of it.

This is the thirteenth testimony in our series leading up to the deadline for comments to the Dept. of State on May 19th. Go here for where they are archived to see what your fellow citizens have said.
I intend to keep posting testimonies, a few a day, until I have exhausted my long list! I had no idea so many of you would respond to my offer! But, thank you for your hard work!

Federation for American Immigration Reform and its legal arm submit testimony to US State Department

05/21/2016 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Editor: This is a press release from FAIR/IRLI in response to a request for public comment on the FY2017 Refugee Admissions Program. Comments closed at 5 p.m. on May 19th. (Hat tip: Joanne)

(Washington, D.C.) – This week, the Immigration Reform Law Institute (“IRLI”) and the Federation for American Immigration Reform (“FAIR”) filed a public comment (attached here) with the Department of State (“DOS”) regarding its proposed 2017 Refugee Admission’s Program. In their comment, IRLI and FAIR raised three broad concerns regarding the Obama Administration’s current policies and practices:

The DOS and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (“USCIS”) are not complying with statutory requirements. Under U.S. law, only a person who has been persecuted or has a well-founded fear of persecution on account of “race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion” can be admitted to the U.S. as a refugee. This Administration appears to have unlawfully adopted the United Nation’s definition of refugee, which includes those fleeing from natural or economic disaster, civil strife, war, crime or other societal afflictions.
DOS has not addressed the extensive fraud and abuse in the refugee application process. The problems with vetting applicants do not end at ensuring each applicant properly complies with the statutory requirements. Extensive fraud and abuse of the application process has been found, yet the Government does not properly address these findings. Such fraud and abuse will only become more prevalent as the President seeks to fulfill his 10,000-Syrian refugee quota by the end of the fiscal year.
The American public is still not adequately protected under the current refugee screening process. The President’s refugee goals are not properly considering the severe national security concerns that face the country in light of the attacks in Paris and in San Bernardino, where the female terrorist passed the Government’s security screening. While the President, Jeh Johnson, and DOS officials say that the security checks for refugees are rigorous, the screenings are not sufficient to protect American citizens. Other government officials who are deeply involved in screening refugees state that the current background investigation produces little, if any, information on those being screened.

Dale L. Wilcox, IRLI’s Executive Director commented, “The Obama Administration’s unilateral expansion of our democratically-enacted refugee laws will lead to increased fraud and greater chances for terrorist-activity as well as pressure on our state and federal welfare budgets, and on the social-cohesion of our communities.” Wilcox continued, “Not only is this Administration ignoring the laws which define who can come into our country as a refugee, it’s ignoring the immigration catastrophe in Europe that’s resulted from those governments being too open to manipulation from foreign migrants. The American people are tired of both the lawlessness and the extreme naiveté on the part of the political class when it comes to immigration policy.”

Go here to see all of our information (including copies of testimony) submitted for the FY2017 Presidential determination on the “size and scope” of the UN/US State Department Refugee Admissions Program. (LOL! They are pretending to care what you think even as Obama has already said he is going for 100,000 refugees for his last shot at changing America as he exits the White House!).