VOA: Deportations of Africans up in 2016; very cool data base

05/22/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

You’ve been hearing the news here and at other news outlets about the stepped-up deportations of Somalis back to their homeland. Many failed asylum seekers are in the mix.
Asylum, for new readers, is, in a way, the other side of the same refugee coin. Either ‘refugees’ are chosen abroad (usually by the UN these days) and are flown to your towns after supposedly proving that they are persecuted people, or one gets in to the US either illegally or through some temporary legal way and then applies for asylum.

It is difficult (impossible I think) to find photos of Somalis being deported from the US, but there are an unending supply of the Saudi deportations in 2014. Saudi Arabia deported as many as 12,000 Somalis that year. I wonder did Trump ask the Saudis why they don’t take any refugees, including their fellow Muslims?

When the wannabe ‘refugee’ cannot prove his or her case—that they will be persecuted if sent home—then they are supposed to go home!
Conversely, if granted asylum, the migrant is then given all the rights of a ‘refugee’ who was chosen abroad and flown here and will be put on track for US citizenship.
Now, under the Trump Administration, more of those who failed in their asylum bid are being found, detained and sent home.
By the way, this up-tick in deportations is news that should be sent far and wide so as to discourage even more illegal entry and flimsy asylum claims that clog up the courts.
DHS should actually promote an ad campaign around the world trumpeting the news of stepped-up deportations!
Here is Voice of America on the news about Africans, but more importantly I learned about a new and very cool data base.

The United States has expelled about 326 Somali nationals since January.

That number is greater than the total for all Somalis expelled from the country in 2016.

This is the third consecutive year in which the number of Somalis deported by the U.S. government has risen. The rising numbers have increased immigrants’ fears of raids, detentions and deportations.

The deportations of Somali citizens appear to be part of a larger movement, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse*** at Syracuse University. It found that in the first three months of 2017, the U.S. government ordered the deportation of more than 1,200 Africans. Citizens of Ghana, Nigeria, Somalia and Kenya have received the most removal orders.

Recent deportation orders are undoing a ten-year-long trend.

From 2006 to 2016, the number of Africans deported every year fell from 2,100 to about 1,000. If the trend continues, four times more Africans will be deported by the end of this year than during 2016.

Continue reading here.
***Now check out the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse!
Here is one page that I screenshot to show you what interesting stuff is archived there.
On this page we see that there were 19 deportations for reasons of national security in fiscal year 2017 (that fiscal year began on October 1, 2016). You can learn in what states and what courts those cases came from and the nationality of the person to be deported. From this screenshot page, we note that there was one, an Iraqi, ordered by the court in Detroit to be removed.

This post is filed in our ‘Where to find information’ category.
You can watch that 2014 video about Saudi deportations here: http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Saudi+arabia+deports+Somalis&view=detail&mid=6490B0418567061F00636490B0418567061F0063&FORM=VIRE

Eritreans top list of Muslim 'refugees' entering the US this past week

05/19/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

But, are they really persecuted refugees or are they economic migrants from yet another African country whose government is a mess?
And thus the fundamental question for us, as always, is: So why are they our problem?

Pordenone, Italy. 15th April 2015 — (A group of 47) Somali and Eritrean migrants on the run as they try to escape from a police station in Pordenone while being round up for identification, Italy. https://reported.ly/2015/04/15/african-migrants-make-desperate-attempt-escape-italian-detention/

I did my usual end-of-the-week look at Wrapsnet just now. If you are following my updates in the right hand side bar here at RRW, note that as of today we have admitted 44,888 refugees this fiscal year (the FY ends on September 30th).
Checking the numbers this week I was interested to see that only a little over a quarter of the 813 admitted since last Friday are Muslims. The Syrian numbers are way down (18 of the 22 admitted this week are Muslims). We did admit another 57 Somalis, but of the 49 Iraqis admitted, the vast majority (38) are Yezidis. There were zero Iraqi Christians admitted this past week.
I was also interested to see that our Burmese Muslim numbers are growing with 35 admitted this past week (from 5/12-5/19), but of most interest to me was the large number of Muslims admitted during the week from Eritrea (68!).
I have to admit, I’ve never really paid any attention to the flow of Eritreans to the US. We know they are one of the larger groups flooding in to Europe mostly passing through Hillary’s failed state of Libya, but apparently our US State Department is scooping up a fair number of them as well.
They have an African “authoritarian government,” but why is that our problem?
Eritrea and Ethiopia have been on-again, off-again at war forever. Why is that our problem?
One of the ‘human rights’ complaints about Eritrea is its mandatory conscription to military service, so,again, why is that our problem?

Felix Horne photo: https://www.hrw.org/about/people/felix-horne

Indeed, many question whether the Eritreans are legitimate “refugees” or are they “economic migrants.”

“In refugee law, it can be tricky to draw the line between an economic migrant and someone who is fleeing persecution,” says Felix Horne, a researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Eritrea is the best example of that…”

Admissions of Eritreans are on the rise in the US

I explored Wrapsnet a bit to see what we have been doing for about the last ten or so fiscal years with Eritreans and sure enough, the numbers we admit are on the rise.
In FY2008 we admitted only 251. That number jumped to 1,571 in Obama’s first year. In 2016 it was 1,949 and, in the first seven and a half months of this fiscal year, the number stands at 1,307.
In the past week, ending this morning, we admitted 90 Eritreans and 68 of those are Muslims. That was the highest ethnic group of Muslims in the week. Are they getting “extreme vetting?”

If we continue to admit 90 a week*** for the remaining weeks of the fiscal year, the Trump Administration could reach 3,000 by September 30th (well above any year during the Obama Administration).

Since FY2007 we admitted 16,897 Eritreans to the US.
There is a lot of useful information in the article I linked above and here from the Council on Foreign Relations if you want to learn more about the Eritrean tide spreading to Europe and America. One of the points that jumped out at me is one we discussed, here, recently.
Note that US dollars sent out of the US economy prop up Eritrea’s economy:

Eritreans in the diaspora also contribute to Eritrea’s economic survival by sending their families remittances, which provide the country with foreign reserves and keep families afloat.

So, as Syrian and Somali refugee numbers decline slightly, we are seeing an increase in Burmese Rohingya Muslims to the US as well as the Eritreans we have featured in this post.
*** Here is the breakdown of the Eritrean refugee admissions for the week of May 12-May 19, 2017 from Wrapsnet:

RRW Weekly round-up for week ending May 12, 2017

05/14/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

As you may have noticed, I am trying to add some other legal immigration news and information on programs that must be reformed as we have the best window ever for reform in Washington.

In fact, the Trump team should be at this very minute crafting legislation to send to The Hill to abolish or reform several legal immigration programs that have outlived any usefulness they may have ever had—the US Refugee Admissions Program, Temporary Protected Status and that truly insane Diversity Visa Lottery. All the worker and investor visa programs should also be rewritten or trashed (but I don’t have enough energy for those, and others, like NumbersUSA, are doing good work there).
Frankly, if Trump’s Administration doesn’t take the initiative on reforming our legal immigration system, it will never happen. See my post yesterday about the six REPUBLICAN Senators eager for more refugees (can you say cheap labor!).

Here are the Top Three Posts of the past week.

Note that one of those is about the insane Diversity Visa Lottery. (Top three posts of the last day are in the right hand side bar):

If your city has low income housing (or a greedy meatpacker nearby!) you could get refugees

Another 50,000 wannabe migrants to US learned if they won the lottery to America this week

Minnesota Dept of Health needs $5 million to fight infectious diseases in immigrant population

I haven’t mentioned Top Ten Countries lately, so here below are where readers hailed from who read RRW this past week. There were 134 countries on the list, but here are the top ten (excluding the US):

Canada

Australia

South Africa

Germany

Brazil

Philippines

Kenya

Netherlands

Norway

For new readers!
In this older round-up I outlined how to learn more about RRW and the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program. All of my round-ups may be found in my ‘blogging’ category by clicking here. Yikes! I see that my first video is now at 2.9 million views!
Thanks as always for your notes, your gifts of books, donations, and e-mails of support, even if I don’t acknowledge every communication know that I try, but there aren’t enough hours in the day here on the farm.

Enduring mystery: How did Delaware dodge the refugee bullet for decades?

05/12/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

There is a short news item at Delaware Public Media about how a Jewish refugee agency in Delaware is waiting for seven families (likely Muslim families based on their country of origin) they hope they will soon be settling in Delaware—the First State. So I thought I might revisit a topic I haven’t discussed for a long time and that is the origin of the Refugee Act of 1980.

Senators Biden and Kennedy are responsible for the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program. See list below of other Senators deeply involved in 1979.

But, first here is a portion of the short piece at Delaware Public Media:

The state of Hawaii’s stay on Trump’s second travel ban suspends the FY17 cap for refugees – currently set at 50,000.

That opens the door for refugee families from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and the Eastern African country of Eritrea in line to come to the First State, but none of them have travel plans in place yet.

Jewish Family Services of Delaware Refugee Resettlement Coordinator Sarah Green says that currently, the families are stuck in Jordan and Ethiopia.

“It’s hard to know what’s happening,” Green said. “We just have to wait and see. We get a very limited view of what’s happening over there.”

She says her agency is taking the approach that these families could arrive any day – and working to ensure they’ll be comfortable when they reach Delaware.

[….]

There’s reason to expect they could arrive soon. According to the U.S. State Department, 900 flights for refugees to the U.S. are being scheduled every week.

As of this morning, 831 new refugees arrived in the US in the past week (5/5-5/12) according to Wrapsnet. And, that puts us at 44,072 this fiscal year.

At this rate the Trump Administration will hit 50,000 in about 7-8 weeks. Will they stop at 50,000 which should happen around the first week of July? That is the question!

Delaware, in some ways, is more interesting to me than some of the other very low refugee admission states (LOL! including Hawaii). See chart below.
And that is because then Senator Joe Biden was one of the chief sponsors of the Senate-generated Refugee Act of 1979 (S.643) which became the Refugee Act of 1980 when Jimmy Carter signed it in to law the following year. You can learn more about it here. Pay special attention to the part about how states were NOT to be burdened with welfare costs of refugees.
Here are the co-sponsors of S.643 another of Senator Ted Kennedy’s swamp-America-with-immigrants bills:

So how is it that Delaware is in the bottom ten locations for refugee seeding when then Senator and now former Vice President Joe Biden is that state’s most prominent political figure? Did he welcome refugees to America in 1979, but keep them from swamping Delaware with diversity for decades?

Wrapsnet data only goes back to FY2003, but that gives us enough years to see a pattern. (For researchers more diligent than I am, you can go back through all the previous annual reports and put the data together from the very beginning, but I expect the pattern is similar in the early years.)
So from FY03 through today (in FY17) we admitted 886,324 refugees to America (not including asylum seekers) and Delaware got a whopping 139 of them!

In the years Joe Biden was Vice President, Delaware got only 50 refugees.

Here are the last ten locations for refugee placement from FY03 to the present. What the heck is “Unknown State?” Does that mean 68 refugees were placed secretly somewhere? Yikes!

If Delaware Public Media really wanted to do some important work, reporters there should try to find out exactly why and how Delaware dodged a bullet for so many years when their claim to fame, Veep Joe Biden, sponsored the original law and then apparently kept diversity-seeding from the state! (It is not because of the state’s small size since Rhode Island got thousands more than Delaware).
For new readers, this post is filed in my ‘where to find information’ category and in ‘Refugee statistics.’

AP perpetuates myth that numbers of refugees arriving in the US under Trump are "plummeting!"

05/10/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

It is really amazing to see how blatantly the mainstream media spins the facts!
Before I even get to the story, once again, here (below) is the data for the last ten plus years (from the Refugee Processing Center). FY2007 and FY2008 are Bush years. FY2009-2016 are Obama years. And, like it or not, FY2017 is Trump (even though the FY began on October 1, 2016).
First look at the ceilings set over the years. Did Obama ever set one near 110,000 (set in Sept. 2016) for any of his years prior to his final months in office?
Until Obama’s last years, he didn’t come close to the CEILING in his first 4 years, see especially FY11 and 12 (it is a ceiling not a TARGET)! Obama had two years under 60,000! Did the resettlement contractors complain and moan about Obama—NO!
Much is being made in the media about Trump’s March number (2,070) but who had lower months—both Bush AND Obama. See Obama’s October 2014. It is 1,810! March 2011 is lower too!

Is Trump’s April that far out of line from some of Obama’s months? NO! Obama had some months lower than 3,316!
Now have a look at the first 4 months for the last eleven years. Until Obama’s last months in office, have you ever seen the numbers so high in the first 4 months for all of the years? The Obama State Department began pouring refugees in at record numbers (in anticipation of a Trump slowdown?) and I bet they also skipped a lot of screening to get the flow going at that incredible rate.
Again look at the numbers! Trump is on target for a just below an average year of about 60,000 admissions, but much to my shock the AP is reporting that Congress has granted enough funds for 75,000 this year! 75,000 would put the admission number ABOVE any year from FY2007 to FY2015!
So who is AP trying to kid?

Here are some snips from the AP story by Meredith Hoffmann which begins with a Somali sob story. Why does no one ever ask how it came to be that this Somali man abandoned his family for seven years, got in to the US without them and left them to deal with poverty and war in Africa?
Besides the effort to make it look like numbers are “plummeting,” Hoffmann actually helps make the case why this program needs to be dumped or reformed. The first thing that Congress must do is stop the per head payment to NON-PROFIT resettlement agencies who then whine and moan whenever numbers drop (like Kekic here!). She also points out the many states that are trying to get out of the program. So where is Congress?

The family’s case illustrates how Trump’s travel bans have caused the number of refugees coming into the U.S. to plummet in the last two months, despite his executive orders largely being blocked in the courts. The number of refugees arriving in the U.S. dipped to 2,070 in March, which was a six-year low except for a period in 2013 when the federal government was shut down. The figure was slightly higher in April, 3,200, but it was still much lower than the months preceding Trump’s order. [Note that we pointed out above that Obama had a couple of months below 2,070! I don’t recall any crying and moaning then!—ed]

[….]

It can’t be turned on and off like a faucet because the NGO contractors then can’t figure out how to pay their salaries! This is why Congress must get these middlemen phony religious contractors out this business!

“This program simply can’t be turned on and off like a faucet,” said Erol Kekic, executive director of the Immigration and Refugee Program for Church World Service, one of the world’s largest resettlement organizations.

[….]

Conservatives praise the decrease but insist a total halt in admissions is necessary. Refugee groups say the drop has forced them to lay off employees while trapping thousands of people in war-torn nations, overflowing refugee camps and dangerous living conditions amid the world’s largest refugee crisis in modern history.

At the same time, Republican-controlled [state—ed] legislatures have been doing their part to limit the flow of refugees into their states.

[….]

The legal challenges returned the refugee cap number to 110,000, [No, see the chart above, it is in legal limbo—ed] but the slowdown from January to March and actions in Congress mean the U.S. will likely come nowhere close to reaching that number by the end of the fiscal year in October.

The U.S. is currently on pace for about 60,000, but a State Department spokesman said the agency was “not in a position to speculate as to the final number of refugees that will be admitted by the end of Fiscal Year 2017.” [Obama had two years under 60,000!—ed]

“Tickets were canceled, exit permits were canceled,” said Kay Bellor, vice president of programs for the resettlement agency Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services. “You can’t just turn around and say, ‘everybody get back on the plane.'”

Congress has approved a budget for only 75,000 for this fiscal year. A U.S. State Department spokesman said the country is now resettling 900 refugee arrivals weekly, to remain within that budget.

On this next point, this for me is the Trump test!
Trump has the legal right to set the arrival number for FY2018 at zero if he wants to. What number will he propose in September? The other part of my personal Trump test is this: Will the Trump administration tell Congress (or lead Congress) to dump the law or do a complete legal re-write of the program? If he does not do it this year, it will never happen!
AP continues….

And Trump can set his preferred limit for fiscal year 2018 — likely a steep drop from former President Obama’s 110,000, said Anna Greene, senior director of policy for U.S. programs with the resettlement agency International Rescue Committee. [It is maddening how this 110,000, nothing more that a wish from a departing president, becomes the number the program is expected to submit!—ed]

Resettlement agencies get paid per refugee, causing them to cut back once the flow slowed down. Church World Service cut about 600 of its 640 employees in Sub-Saharan Africa but later rehired some of them, said Kekic.

You can read the rest of the AP story by clicking here.