Category: Who is going where

Sterling Heights mosque could be delayed further as local community files its own lawsuit

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

For background see our earlier post, here. And, take note that the Obama US Attorney who sided with the mosque builders was one of those asked to resign by President Trump a few days ago.
From Leo Hohmann at World Net Daily (Christians who escaped persecution in Iraq are fighting back!):

The saga of the 21,000-square-foot mega-mosque in Sterling Heights, Michigan, is not over yet.

The mayor and city council voted Feb. 21 to settle a lawsuit by a Shiite Muslim group and allow it to build a mosque in a residential neighborhood populated largely by Chaldean Christian refugees who escaped Islamic persecution in Iraq.

A companion suit against the city by Barack Obama’s Department of Justice alleging the city had denied the mosque a permit based on “anti-Muslim” sentiments in the community was also settled at the Feb. 21 meeting, paving the way for the mosque to start construction.

Nahren Anweya: “This minority group consists of more than four generations of refugees and genocide victims under radical Islam.”

But the counter-lawsuit filed Monday argues that city officials were actually favoring the Shiite Muslims of neighboring Madison Heights while ignoring the wishes of its own citizens who were overwhelmingly against the mosque.

If built, the American Islamic Community Center, or AICC, will become the third mosque in Sterling Heights.

Second DOJ-imposed win for Muslims in less than year

It was the second bitter mosque battle in Southeastern Michigan in less than a year.

Obama’s DOJ forced a madrassa on Pittsfield Township, near Ann Arbor, and that town had to pay out $1.7 million to the mosque while sending township employees to be trained on how not to discriminate against Muslims.

After the contentious Feb. 21 meeting in Sterling Heights in which the mayor ordered police to empty the city-hall chambers before the council took a vote on the mosque deal, WND reported that the Chaldean Christians were upset and talking about a counter-lawsuit.

On Monday, they acted. They had Ann Arbor-based American Freedom Law Center, or AFLC, file a civil rights suit on their behalf against the city and Mayor Michael C. Taylor, alleging violations of state and federal law.

“The mayor and the corrupted personal interests behind him have outraged a community which is comprised of the largest minority Assyrian/Chaldean Christians from Iraq,” said Nahren Anweya, spokeswoman for the Chaldean and Assyrian Christians in Sterling Heights. “This minority group consists of more than four generations of refugees and genocide victims under radical Islam.”

CAIR crows and threatens:

Dawud Walid CAIR Michigan. Learn more about him here: http://www.investigativeproject.org/2438/dawud-walid-unhinged#

When the city agreed to settle the suit and allow the mosque to be built, the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, said the victory for the mosque should teach Michigan cities a lesson.

“We hope that this settlement, along with last year’s settlement in Pittsfield Township regarding a previously blocked Islamic school project, sends a strong message to city governments in Michigan seeking to deny zoning of religious institutions simply because they are led by Muslims,” said CAIR-Michigan Executive Director Dawud Walid.

An attorney for the AICC mosque, Azzam Elder, threatened to “monitor” local residents he felt were Islamophobic.

“Moving forward, we’re very concerned about some of what you’ve seen at the public hearings with some of the residents,” Elder told the Detroit News. “We’ll be monitoring what we feel (could be) potential hate groups.”

Hohmann’s story is very thorough.  I have only snipped a small portion of it, go here to learn more.
Besides the lawsuit, I’m thinking that the citizens there might follow the Rutland model and work very hard to remove (at the ballot box!) the elected officials who caved!
One of the great and lasting legacies of a naive federal refugee program is that the US State Department and its contractors have placed Middle Eastern groups who have been in conflict for centuries in close proximity to each other in American cities assuming, we can only presume, that their religious conflicts will melt away in the great (mythical?) American melting pot.

In the past year, 600,000 Afghans have returned home, so why are we bringing more to the US?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

PBS has a report from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees which says that hundreds of thousands of those who fled Afghanistan over the last 30 years are returning home.  The UNHCR is looking for western governments to give more money to Afghanistan to soften the blow on the economy there as this many people return.
 

Photo in the PBS story: Afghans wait to cross into their home country at the border post in Torkham, Pakistan, on March 7. Photo by Fayaz Aziz/Reuters (Where are the women and children?)

 
When I checked Wrapsnet to see how many we were bringing to America, I was surprised to see our ‘refugee’ intake from Afghanistan increasing, not decreasing.
First see what the PBS Newshour is reporting, here:

For years, Afghans have fled the violence in their country, seeking asylum in Europe or elsewhere in the Middle East. But over the past year, about 600,000 Afghans have crossed the border back into Afghanistan, coming from Pakistan, Iran and Europe when they are denied asylum.

Human Rights Watch says Pakistan is using a UN incentive program that gives refugee families a cash grant of $400 to voluntarily return home as a way to pressure Afghans to go back to Afghanistan.

[….]

United Nations High Commission for Refugees spokeswoman Ariane Rummery said at a press briefing last month the organization is concerned that the pace of those returning is outstripping the country’s ability to accept them. She urged donor countries to follow through on their pledges to support the Afghan government.

So how many are we taking and where are they going?

(I want to know why we are taking any!)
Checking Wrapsnet going back to FY03 (because prior to that we can’t get good data) up until today, this is what I learned.
From FY03-FY13 we admitted on average 674 Afghans (small compared to the massive numbers of Iraqis, Somalis and now Syrians we have brought). In FY09, our lowest year, we admitted 349 from Afghanistan.
In FY14 the number started to pick up and we admitted 753 Afghans.
FY15 was 910.
FY16 jumped to 2,737 and in the first five plus months this fiscal year we admitted 1,008.
The total number was 12,824 and 97% were Muslims of various stripes. 6,537 were Sunnis and 4,531 were Shiites (once again admitting both sides of the religious divide!).
Here is where they were placed since FY03:
 

Florida is 319. Alaska got zero as did Hawaii, something we reported here as Hawaii (ha! ha!) sued the Trump Administration EO. https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2017/03/10/hawaii-needs-refugees-sues-feds-over-refugee-pause-travel-restrictions-from-certain-muslim-countries/

 
For more on refugees from Afghanistan, click here.

Idaho refugee contractor: Refugees pay taxes!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Who are you trying to kid?
Message to the head of the local resettlement agency in Twin Falls, Idaho: It is not a good idea to start putting out information about a refugee’s tax liability that can be easily checked!

70% of the workers at Idaho dairy factories are immigrants, many illegal, however refugee labor is being employed not just at Chobani Yogurt in Twin Falls, but at the milk production end as well. https://www.pri.org/stories/2013-10-31/lesson-immigration-reform-head-idaho-dairy-farm

Zeze Rwasama spoke earlier this month to the Pocotello Rotary Club and made the claim that refugees are not getting much in the way of taxpayer support:

“Resettlement in the U.S. in not for them to become a burden to our public assistance,” Rwasama said. “Yes, we help them for only eight months. After that, they become taxpayers as well. That means we can help more. … A single refugee brought in 2014 working in a dairy made about $26,000 that year. But when you look at how much the agency spent on that person, it was only about $4,600. When you look at the W-2 form and see how much money that person paid into tax that one year, it’s actually close to that $4,600. So in one year this person has paid into the tax funds the total amount of money that was spent on him. That means we can help more because they are coming here to contribute and coming here to support themselves.”

LOL! I’m betting members of the Rotary Club were doing some mental math as he spoke—$4,600 federal tax liability on $26,000 annual income? No way!
Do you see how Rwasama has parsed his words. His dairy worker “paid into tax” close to that $4,600, but when you check his tax liability it is about $2,255 ($2,345 less than the $4,600 withheld).  He will get a tax refund of that difference—approximately $2,345!  (That tax calculation may vary depending on which year, but you get the idea!).
And, then Zeze Rwasama is only referring to the $4,600 his agency paid to subsidize the dairy farmer’s employee and doesn’t mention the medical care, food stamps and possibly even a housing subsidy that the refugee making $26,000 a year would be eligible for!
And, I just realized that what is never calculated is the cost of the overseas processing of this dairy worker: the vetting, the medical checks, the cost of sending US workers to do the paperwork.
BTW, if the dairy farm employee took a refugee wife on this salary (filing jointly) he might only pay in about $530 in federal income tax.
Rwasama’s agency would presumably have spent $4,600 on her and the couple would then have cost you $9,200 (not including Rwasama’s salary and office expenses, which you paid too!).
If you are interested, just search around for news on Idaho (Oregon, Wisconsin) dairy farms and refugees=controversy!
See our extensive Twin Falls archive by clicking here.
For all of you working in ‘pockets of resistance’ be sure to find out what industries are driving the resettlement where you live.  Look for large corporate farms, meatpackers, hotels, manufacturers requiring few skills, and anyone needing cleaning staff. (This is why you see little interest on the part of Republican leaders in Congress to reform the US Refugee Admissions Program.)
This is not about humanitarianism!
Endnote: If there is some accountant out there who has better numbers than I can find, have at it! Let me know what you find. Wouldn’t it be great if someone followed one of these dairy (or hotel, or meatpacking) workers from a camp in Thailand, Kenya or Nepal all the way through the system to see how many tax dollars support the delivery of one (captive) worker to BIG MEAT or BIG DAIRY.

Michigan: More confirmation that refugee resettlement is an industry

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I don’t have enough time in my day to post all of the stories from around the country where federal refugee resettlement contractors are crying about their loss of clients and thus their loss of taxpayer funding.
But, this one from Michigan has a few extra nuggets of information that further confirms our contention that refugee resettlement is more of an industry than it is a humanitarian endeavor.

Julie Harris, St. Vincent Catholic Charities Refugee Services, photo here from one year ago this same week (what a difference a year/election makes). http://www.secondwavemedia.com/capitalgains/features/fugee1005.aspx

The Trump Administration must pressure Congress to repeal, and, if necessary, replace the Refugee Act of 1980 with its perverse incentives to place refugees (secretively) in towns that can ill afford the additional poverty.
If a town is overloaded with costly-to-support refugees, the system is set up in such a way as to conspire against rational decision-making.
Watch for these key points:

~Contractors are paid by the head, so there is no incentive for contractors to voluntarily slow the flow.

~Landlords with low income and subsidized rentals have become dependent on the arrival of poor people from the third world.

~Businesses want the cheap compliant immigrant labor.

~And, ‘refugees’ have become dependent on the idea of being able to bring over the whole family after one member scouts out your town to see if it suits them before others are brought over (with the help of those same contractors and their per head payment).

From WKAR Lansing, Michigan:

The executive orders on immigration directly impact immigrants and refugees trying to come to the US and those living here already. But the orders are also causing problems for organizations who support refugees.

[….]

There’s a call for a 120 day delay on all refugee resettlement from everywhere. And during that time presumably there will be a revision and a a reestablishment of vetting procedures. And then the other piece of that that will be hurting us is the overall reduction in the number of refugees coming in for the rest of 2017 and 2018 probably.”

And this impacts St. Vincent and other refugee resettlement organizations because they are based on a per-capita funding structure.

“All of that greatly reduces the number of refugees that we’ll be receiving, and that in turn reduces our budget. So we’ve had to do some staff reductions and layoffs and reorganizing while we’re still trying to serve the people who are here, the people who have already arrived” Harris says.

It goes beyond just St. Vincent. Harris says the community and the organizations they partner with when resettling refugees are impacted too.

“We work with a lot of different landlords and different apartment complexes and different landlords around the city and some of them have called us and said ‘what are we going to do? Who are we going to put in our housing?’

Because they rely on us because there’s a lot of folks who move in and out, and a lot of the low income places who have been very kind to the whole community, they need people to be coming in and keeping their units full. And also a lot of our employers, we work with some big companies who look forward to having a steady stream of people who come in. A lot of refugees will start off in an entry level job and they’ll work hard and after they learn English, they learn a few more things, they’ll move up. And so these companies need the steady flow of people coming in and keeping their businesses running.”

Continue reading here to learn about how the family reunification works and will be disrupted by the Trump EO.
If you are working in a ‘pocket of resistance’ investigating the program where you live, be sure to research costs, but look for those people/businesses benefiting from the refugees.  Remind your fellow (taxpaying) citizens that there is money (for some people) in the resettlement industry.
Endnote:  I just did a quick look at USASpending.gov and see that the Diocese of Lansing gets millions of $$$ of federal funding from the usual agencies—HHS and Dept. of State, and that St. Vincent’s also got money from HUD.
They aren’t in the landlord business themselves are they?

Why do we take any 'refugees' from Russia? Are they even legitimate refugees?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Who are the 47 non-Russians (processed through Russia) that were brought to America in the first 5 months of this fiscal year?

I hope to write more posts on the issue of Processing Country asking why we process refugees in from places where clearly the definition of a refugee is being stretched to something unrecognizable!
(LOL! Since Russia is in the news every day, I’m starting with Russia***).
Legitimate refugees are supposed to have left the country from which they have been persecuted and ask for asylum in the first safe country they arrive in, so what is this business of taking Russian nationals from within Russia? Or, others who got there looking for asylum?
Longtime readers know I have been asking about the Malta scam for years (yes, I will call it a scam) where we take illegal aliens off the hands of the Maltese government for no apparent good reason. (Malta archive here). And, then, not to be overlooked, there is the South Africa ‘refugee’ express to America! And, why are we processing refugees to the US from Israel???
I’ve told you about the Processing Country data at Wrapsnet previously, here.
Each month (of the present fiscal year) the Refugee Processing Center updates the information on those pages for the previous months of the fiscal year.  Therefore, available now is the data from October 1, 2016 to February 28, 2017 (5 months of FY17).  Click here.
 

 
 
Today I was interested in the fact that we processed in to the US 273 ‘refugees’ from Russia in those 5 months.
Of course for years we took tens of thousands from the Communist Soviet Union, but why now?
When one uses other data at Wrapsnet for those same 5 months we see that of the 273, 226 were Russian nationals. 
Who are the other 47 ‘refugees’ we took off Russia’s hands in the last 5 months and why are they our problem?  (Why are any of the 273 our problem for that matter?)
Of the 226 Russian nationals, we clearly had a ‘religious’ test! The top religions of the 226 included 95 Baptists, 68 Pentecostals, and 30 Jews. (We have been perverting the refugee definition for decades with the Lautenberg Amendment).
More troubling to me is: Who are the 47 individuals who got to Russia and are then processed in to the US? Are they from Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere? Were they thoroughly vetted? And, again, why are they our responsibility???
Holy moly!  I just looked up Afghanistan and see that we admitted 988 Afghan refugees in those 5 months! Only 18 were processed in from Afghanistan.  Where in the world were the other 970? Were a few in Russia? Think about it! How thoroughly vetted is an Afghan ‘refugee’ who has wandered to another country!
Russia only takes a tiny number of refugees, see here.  But, I repeat, why is anyone from Russia our problem today?

I sure hope the Trump people in charge of the US Department of State know about all of the perversion of the definition of refugees going on around the world!

***People trying to escape poverty (poor economic conditions) or violence from criminal activity are not legitimate refugees!  A refugee must be able to claim they would be persecuted for their political views, race, religion etc. When you look at the Processing Country map link, here, ask yourselves why on earth are we processing ‘refugees’ from countries with stable governments (in addition to Russia) like Austria, El Salvador, Cuba, Malaysia, South Africa, and ISRAEL (among others!)?