Category: The Opposition

Terrible heart-stopping news! US considering taking Syrian refugees

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment
Syrian refugee protesters at a refugee camp in Jordan. So Homeland Security is supposed to sort through this and only bring us the good people? Photo: Khalil Mazraawi – AFP/Getty Images

We’ve been suggesting for months (here) that this day would come when the US State Department would start making noises about bringing Syrian refugees to your towns and cities. 

But, as recently as a month or so ago a top State Department official told a gathering in Fort Wayne, Indiana that a population (he was answering a question on Syrians) had to have been “refugees” for five years before being considered for refugee status.  It sounded bogus to me!  Guess it was!

Below is the disastrous news at the Los Angeles Times. (Hat tip: Jim).  Just as the Senate is considering making it easier and more lucrative for government contractors to bring in larger numbers (more easily) of refugees and political asylees through S.744, we will be inundated with Syrians.  So, when you call your US Senators today about voting NO on the “comprehensive immigration reform” tell them NO Syrians either!   And, if you are thinking there might be some Christians in the bunch, I assure you we won’t single those out for resettlement!

Once they open the spigot, they open it wide!

Just for your information we have already brought 12,396 Iraqis to America in the first 8 months of FY2013!  Most of them are on food stamps, other public assistance and not working!

Los Angeles Times story recognizes the pitfalls, perpetuates some myths:

WASHINGTON — Two years into a civil war that shows no signs of ending, the Obama administration is considering resettling refugees who have fled Syria, part of an international effort that could bring thousands of Syrians to American cities and towns.

A resettlement plan under discussion in Washington and other capitals is aimed at relieving pressure on Middle Eastern countries straining to support 1.6 million refugees, as well as assisting hard-hit Syrian families.

The State Department is “ready to consider the idea,” an official from the department said, if the administration receives a formal request from the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees, which is the usual procedure.

The United States usually accepts about half the refugees that the U.N. agency proposes for resettlement. California has historically taken the largest share, but Illinois, Florida, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia are also popular destinations.  [See which states are the top resettlement states in the US and will be asked to “welcome” Syrian Muslims—ed]

U.N. refugee officials, diplomats and nongovernmental relief groups plan to discuss possible resettlement schemes at a high-level meeting this week in Geneva. Germany already has committed to taking 5,000 people.

Remember as you read this that Lavinia Limon worked for Bill Clinton and brought the Bosnian Muslims here and then the early Iraqis.  USCRI is a federal RESETTLEMENT CONTRACTOR, not a “service group.”

“It was probably inevitable that in this crisis, with these overwhelming numbers, governments would start moving in this direction,” said Lavinia Limon, chief executive officer of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, a Virginia-based advocacy and service group. “But there will be resistance.”

The Obama administration supports rebels trying to oust Syrian President Bashar Assad, but is wary of deeper involvement in Syria.

The issue is politically sensitive on several levels.

Congress strongly resisted accepting Iraqi refugees, including interpreters who had worked with U.S. forces, after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. Most lawmakers share White House caution about getting more engaged in Syria and may have little appetite for a major influx.

The duo of Samantha Power and Susan Rice being involved is further evidence this will be a disaster for your town or city.

But Susan Rice, President Obama’s new national security advisor, and Samantha Power, Obama’s nominee for U.S. ambassador to the U.N., both have been strong advocates for refugees. They may make the White House more receptive to at least a partial opening.

Much will depend on who (if anyone!) raises the security issues.  Honestly the only really possible opposition leader on this will be Senator Rand Paul who ‘gets it’ about the security risks after the discovery of Iraqi refugee terrorists found to be living in his home town of Bowling Green, KY!

Homeland security officials require careful vetting of refugees, with multiple interviews and background checks before they are allowed to enter the country. Under normal circumstances, the screening process can take a year or longer.

U.S. officials are likely to be extra careful with Syrian refugees. As Islamic militants take a more prominent role in the rebel forces, officials worry about fighters with Al Qaeda ties trying to enter the country. Two resettled Iraqis were convicted of trying to send arms to Al Qaeda from their home in Bowling Green, Ky.

The article goes on to report that Middle Eastern officials say the resettlement won’t be worth it if we and other Western countries don’t take tens of thousands!

Then we have some, pardon the expression, Bull S*** from the State Department:

Western officials try to discourage poor foreigners who are seeking a more comfortable life or business opportunities in the West. They say resettlement is only for those who can’t go home, and seek to dispel notions that an easy life awaits.

According to a State Department publication aimed at refugees, “Cars are not provided…. Most Americans value self-reliance and hard work. They expect newcomers to find jobs as soon as possible and to take care of themselves and their families.”   [67% of Iraqis are not working and 95% are on food stamps.  And, as for this business about cars, we don’t provide cars but YOU pay into a matching savings account that every refugee is allowed to set up and purchasing a car is one of the programs goals.—ed]

Another sensitive issue is who qualifies for resettlement. Western countries often prefer intact, well-educated families with familiar religious backgrounds. [Gee, that’s news!—ed]

But experts say 80% of the Syrian refugees are women and children, many with war-related injuries or psychological problems that could hamper finding work or going to school.  [These will be very costly refugees who will be bringing the men as soon as they can!—ed]

Please spread the word on this and tell your friends and family members to call their US Senators and say NO to S.744 and NO to importing Syrians! 

Please send this to your facebook and twitter friends!

Update June 11: UN wants Germany to take 10,000, here.  Next we will hear that the UN wants the US to take 50,000 when we have just committed to take 50,000 Congolese.

Mother of all legislative train wrecks goes to the Senate floor this week—S.744

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Editor’s note:  This is cross-posted from my other blog, Potomac Tea Party Report.  Regular readers here at RRW know that the Gang of Eight bill is going to expand the refugee and asylum sections of the law and create a “slush fund” for the non-profit organizations involved in refugee resettlement.  Here is our archive on the so-called “comprehensive” immigration reform bill (S.744).

This is it!  After the first punch, Obamacare, the second punch is the Gang of Eight plus Grover bill, the so-called “comprehensive” immigration reform bill.  It’s the one-two punch that is going to destroy America.

Marco looking for love from the Left!

You need to take your eyes off of the scandalpalooza going on in Washington and direct your energy this week to telling your US Senators to vote NO! on S.744.  (Yes, Marylanders, even Mikulski and Cardin!).

I stole that title—Mother of all legislative train wrecks—from this website.  Visit it and follow links to Forty Reasons why the bill is bad for America.

I’ll update this post as the week goes on.

* The caricature of Senator Marco Rubio, a key Republican member of the Gang of Eight and a leading contender for the 2016 Presidential race, is from the Daily Kos, here in February where they call him “Kochsman” (a reference to the wealthy Republican mega-donor brothers who favor ‘immigration reform’ because they want cheap labor).  Once Rubio fulfills their wishes (the Koch’s and the Left’s) on S.744, they, Daily Kos and other Lefties, will go right back to caricaturing him this way.  He won’t have their love in 2016 and he won’t have ours either (unless he bails out of the coming train wreck now)!

Worldwide angst over possible end to Diversity Visa Lottery

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Ahhhh! Whole villages in Ethiopia are sweating, Korean Pop Stars groupies are worried and so is the Soros-funded Center for American Progress that the Gang of Eight plus Grover Senate immigration bill (S.744) would abolish the “popular” program to bring more diversity to your American towns via a lottery.

Rep Donald M. Payne, Jr. from Newark, NJ: Not enough poor Africans are getting to my district! (he didn’t say that, I did!)

Note to readers:  These are not refugees we are writing about, they are 55,000 lucky lottery winners each year from countries where we don’t get enough immigrants.  This is not a joke!  I am not kidding!

Go here to see where your town’s diversity winners are coming from.

If you aren’t a regular reader of Korean Pop Entertainment news you would have no idea about the stressed-out Ethiopians or the New Jersey Congressman who says we aren’t letting enough Africans into the US.

Here is the story from KPopStarz about the “green card lottery:”

The green card lottery, a method through which at least 8 million foreigners wish to obtain their legal permanent residency, has been confirmed not to be cancelled for 2013 and 2014.

Although the odds of winning the green card lottery are not great, foreign hopefuls still have a chance of winning their legal status with a green card.

Just a few weeks ago, there was much speculation that the green card lottery would be taken away this year and that it was likely to be quietly cut. However, the US Embassy Press Secretary confirmed on Thursday that the green card application program will continue as usual for this year and next year.

According to the Armenpress on Thursday, US Embassy Press Secretary Taguhi Jahukyan said, “The Diversity Visa Program is continuing as usual for fiscal year 2013 and fiscal year 2014.”

While Congress has been discussing changes to immigration policy through new immigration bills, President Obama has not yet signed any immigration bill into law.

As the legislative process for changes in immigration policy is ongoing, no comment has been made on whether the green card lottery will continue onto 2015.

Just last year, at least 8 million foreigners submitted a green card application through the green card lottery. Only 55,000 green card applications were able to obtain a green card for themselves, their spouses, and their children.

The green card lottery is extremely popular, and foreigners would be very disappointed if the lottery program had been removed.

One green card lottery winner from Ethiopia said, “In my country, whole cities wait to hear the results of this lottery. I can’t believe they would take it away.”

The Diversity Visa Lottery Program, which issues winners a U.S. green card, started in 1995. Since then, thousands of foreigners have been granted immigrant visas and green cards.

One New Jersey House Representative, Donald Payne Jr. supported the continuance of the green card lottery program saying, “Diversity visas are one of the few ways people from Africa and the Caribbean can come to this country.”  [I guess the Congressman doesn’t know about refugee resettlement and asylum—ed]

You know it’s a bad program if the Center for American Progress (read all about CAP here) wants desperately to save it!

Here is what they say in an introduction to an informative “Infographic” (AN END TO DIVERSITY?—Ahhhhhh!):

The immigration reform bill currently being debated in the U.S. Senate, however, would eliminate the diversity-visa program and grant those who are eligible a small number of points in the new merit-based green-card allocations—explained in the infographic below. Without this visa category, immigration from certain low-sending regions would diminish further and would undermine the goal of welcoming immigrants from diverse backgrounds. The infographic below portrays the current distribution of diversity visas and highlights the disproportionate effect that the elimination of this category would have on migration from Africa.

Tell Rep. Payne that there are 100,000 plus Africans arriving in the US each year according to this useful graphic from CAP.  Eliminating the Diversity Visa could knock that number down by 20,000, but they will surely be picked up through whatever changes are made to immigration by the Gang (unfortunately, you can count on that):

State Department Refugee Program head honcho made some news last month

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

50,000 Congolese refugees coming soon; more refugees generally than previous years; and a warmer welcome (more funding) for all, especially more funding for contractors!

At about the same time that citizens from across the country were sending in testimony to the US State Department telling them they don’t want tens of thousands of refugees admitted to the US in 2014, Assistant Secretary of State for Population Refugees and Migration was making the rounds of refugee contractor meetings and making some news.  And, no surprise, it’s all about how resettlement is getting bigger and better (in their view).

Anne C. Richard, Asst. Sec. of State for PRM and formerly a Veep at the International Rescue Committee, a federal contractor.

Here is a portion only of Richard’s speech which I am breaking-up with explanatory sub-headings of my own.  Emphasis is mine too.

Your community is “enriched by these newcomers!” says Richard.

Richard:

Let’s now turn our attention back to our own country, the United States. As all of you here today know, the United States is also the world’s leading resettlement country, admitting more refugees each year than all other resettlement countries combined – more than three million since 1975. And we all know that our own communities have been as enriched by these newcomers as they have been by the opportunities this country has provided them. Our overall resettlement policy remains the same: we will continue to strive to achieve the President’s refugee admissions ceiling, focusing on the most vulnerable who cannot go home or be integrated in their country of first asylum.

We get into dangerous places and bring out refugees.  In Africa we moved Somalis from a camp that was too dangerous for our Department of Homeland Security to get into, to a less dangerous camp so as to process the twenty-year camp dwellers to your town.

Richard:

The PRM Bureau has gone to extraordinary lengths in the past year to reach refugees in need of resettlement who were previously inaccessible because of dangerous conditions in the places where they had sought asylum.

In Kenya, UNHCR has referred thousands of Somalis in the Dadaab camp for U.S. resettlement. Unfortunately, the Department of Homeland Security was unable to interview them because it was determined to be too risky to send DHS officers to Dadaab. Last year, we provided additional funding to build a transit center in Kakuma camp, where conditions are safer, and have moved close to 1,600 individuals from Dadaab to Kakuma to continue the process for U.S. resettlement. These refugees, many of whom have been living in Dadaab for more than 20 years, will start arriving in the United States this month.

We are working on bringing you Syrians as soon as we can to add to your city’s diversity.

Richard:

In Syria, thousands of Iraqi refugees who have been referred for U.S. resettlement are similarly inaccessible and we are taking several steps to get them to safety.

And, listen up!  Here is some big news!  The UN has announced that 50,000 Congolese will be resettled and THE US WILL TAKE MOST OF THEM!

Richard:

Many of you know by now that UNHCR has announced its intention to refer up to 50,000 Congolese for resettlement over the next five years. Most will likely come to the United States. Given the level of trauma and need among this population, we want to work together with all of you to do this right. That’s why we’ve formed a working group to bring together partners from all across the spectrum – overseas and domestic, government, International Organizations, and NGOs – to see how we can better prepare the refugees and communities for successful resettlement.

We will be getting into Chad so as to bring you some Darfurians too!

Richard:

We were pleased (and a bit surprised) when the Government of Chad reached out to UNHCR late last year to say it had changed its mind on resettlement of Darfuri refugees from Eastern Chad and would now allow UNHCR to refer individual cases (but not P-2 group processing).

PRM traveled to Chad in February to survey the landscape and discuss the resumption of resettlement with partners. We are cautiously optimistic but proceeding slowly in terms of dedicating resources (human and financial) to the effort, given the fits and starts we’ve faced on this program over the years.

Family reunification from Africa is now up and running after being closed for years due to the widespread fraud we uncovered in 2008.  But, we didn’t do anything about those 30,000 plus Somalis who entered fraudulently prior to 2008.

Richard:

Working closely with the Department of Homeland Security, we re-instated the priority three or “P-3” family reunion program this year with a new DNA requirement to ensure that the program is fulfilling its purpose of reuniting relatives.

More refugees coming this year than last, 20% more!  And coming faster!

Richard:

I’m pleased to report that we are on track to admit the number of refugees in the Presidential Determination this year. That is 70,000 refugees– a more than 20% increase over last year’s number. You should also know that we’ve been able to admit these refugees in a much more even pace than in recent years. Just under 50% of the refugees we expect this year were admitted in the first half of the fiscal year.

We know that there are shrinking local budgets, refugees are struggling, but we are going to bring them anyway!  And, we will make sure the contractors get more federal tax dollars.

Richard:

We recognize that this increase comes at a time of shrinking state and local budgets, cuts in social services, and the challenges of raising private contributions. As you know, PRM has helped deal with economic challenges to the program by doubling the amount of funding provided on a per capita basis to receive and place refugees in 2010. We have provided modest increases since then.

We also are providing “floor funding” to our resettlement agency partners, essentially guaranteeing sufficient funding for services to 60,000 refugees so that program managers can plan and hire staff with the assurance that the funding will be there. Despite all these improvements, we know that many refugees are still struggling in the early weeks and months of their arrival in the States.

Not concerned with how communities can cope or finance all of this, just about how to make sure the refugees’ needs are met.

Richard:

This leads me to ask: How can our domestic programs best address the needs of refugees? What more can we do to help refugees effectively integrate into new communities?  [Notice the word ‘integrate.’  They shun that out-of-fashion idea of ‘assimilation.’—ed]

Given the overall budget situation in Washington, we all acknowledge the need to widen the circle of domestic “stakeholders” in the refugee resettlement program. We need to ensure a warm reception for the refugees we resettle. We need to find creative ways to expand participation in the program at the local level and support for the program by community leaders.

There is more, read it all here.

Learn more about Anne Richard, the globalist—this is one of several posts on the revolving door (government employee/contractor).  Richard has revolved several times in her career.

Taking a stand in Tennessee: free speech rally was beyond wildest expectations

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Some estimated the crowd at nearly 2000, but we do know that hundreds never even made it into the conference room!

Pamela Geller sends a message to speakers!

For readers who have arrived here for the first time, you might wish to visit our post here last week about the audacity of the Obama Justice Department and the FBI to participate in a meeting that was essentially organized to send a message to Americans that their negative speech about Islam could be considered a crime.   The announcement caused a firestorm of media attention.

In response to the news about the event, and within days, Pamela Geller (Atlas Shrugs) and others organized an impromptu Rally for Free Speech. 

Here is what Geller said at her blog just after midnight last night:

All eyes are on Tennessee tonight, as the fight for the very soul of America comes to a very small town: Manchester, Tennessee, a town no bigger than 60,000 people. (Almost 2,000 people were there — that’s three percent of the local population.) This was the perhaps unlikely venue for a seminar led by a U.S. attorney and an FBI special agent on how “inflammatory” speech against Muslims violated civil rights laws. Nowhere was it ever explained how there could be honest examination of Islam’s teachings of jihad that wouldn’t be “inflammatory” — and that was just the point.

There were close to 800 people filling the small room to way beyond capacity. The lines were three deep along the wall, with folks spilling out into the hallways — plus many hundreds more outside. Those outside weren’t missing much — unless they were in the mood to be admonished and hectored as xenophobes, bigots and racists by an Islamic supremacist spokesman and two Obama officials who steadfastly refused to address the elephant in the room: the reality of jihad terror and Islamic supremacism, no matter how many times the boisterous crowd called them on their nonsense.

U.S. Attorney Bill Killian gave a power point presentation on hate crimes and hate speech. From beginning to end it was full of condescension, smears, charges that the crowd was racist, and thinly-veiled threats that truthful speech about Islam could be prosecuted.

Visit Atlas Shrugs for more (and to see more photos).

No punishment permitted for speech that is “hostile to a religion.”

Incidentally, the news of the upcoming event made it to Politico a few ago and a report by Josh Gerstein quotes First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams:

While threats directed at individuals or small groups can lead to punishment, First Amendment experts expressed doubt that the government has any power to stop offensive material about Islam from circulating.

Referring to Thomas Perez’s man US Attorney Bill Killian:

“He’s just wrong,” said Floyd Abrams, one of the country’s most respected First Amendment attorneys. “The government may, indeed, play a useful and entirely constitutional role in urging people not to engage in speech that amounts to religious discrimination. But it may not, under the First Amendment, prevent or punish speech even if it may be viewed as hostile to a religion.”

“And what it most clearly may not do is to stifle political or social debate, however rambunctious or offensive some may think it is,” Abrams said.

Why is this happening in Tennessee?  If you are a long time reader of RRW you know that Tennessee is a target  of al-Hijra—Islamic conquest via migration.  It is also one of the handful of states in the Nation making any attempt to regain its Constitutional rights under the Tenth Amendment and is seriously questioning whether the federal government has any right to import refugees with the expectation that the taxpayers of Tennessee will pay for them.

And, why is taking a stand for free speech so important to our work—because the reason that the UK and Sweden and other European countries are now in the predicament they are in is that their citizens do not have the same free speech rights we do (in fact their governments support Sharia blasphemy laws), and so their demographic death spiral is, in my view, unstoppable.

I’ll update this post as more news comes in from Tennessee….

See the Times Free Press, here.

Here is the view from The Blaze.

How the Tullahoma News saw the story, here.

Janet Levy at American Thinker, had this to report.

Killian’s supposed remarks at US Justice Department website, here.

Killian getting backlash, at World Net Daily, here.