Category: Who is going where

Obama announces Syrian refugee numbers for resettlement to US—4,000 for FY2015

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

But, I don’t buy it! The numbers will be much higher!

The UNHCR has been spouting-off that the US will be on par with Germany in taking Syrians which is 10,000 or more per year!  Also, State Department honcho Simon Henshaw said in Turkey recently that our Syrian resettlement will come close to our Iraqi numbers in recent years which is close to 20,000 per year (approximately 68% of the Iraqis we are taking are Muslims)!

Syrian refugees coming to a town near you starting today! Photo: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/10/16/world/middleeast/syrian-refugee-crisis-photos.html?_r=0

Here is the Washington Post on the FY 2015 Presidential Determination.  Hat tip: Skip

As you read this article with its several references to 2015, remember FY 2015 begins TODAY!

The Obama administration will greatly increase the number of Syrian refugees approved for permanent resettlement in the United States next year but has opted against a separate refugee program to serve victims of that intractable civil war, administration officials said Tuesday.

The State Department is reviewing more than 4,000 applications from Syrian refugees seeking permanent homes in the United States next year or beyond, up from dozens considered for resettlement this year and last, officials said. The expansion reflects determinations by the United Nations refugee agency and the United States that tens of thousands of refugees living outside Syria are unlikely to ever be able to return.

The White House said Tuesday that it has approved permanent resettlement for up to 70,000 refugees worldwide next year, the same figure as for fiscal 2014.

Up to 33,000 could be resettled from the Middle East and South Asia, including Syria. Although there is no set target for Syrian refugees, they are expected to form a far larger percentage of the total than ever before.

The State Department has received more than 4,000 referrals in recent months and is processing them, a State Department official said. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for attribution, said “large numbers” of Syrian refugees will begin to arrive in 2015.

We are then expected to be grateful to Obama for not setting up a separate Syrian program to bring in even greater numbers which the refugee resettlement contractors must have been clamoring for.  Remember the State Department kept the contractor’s testimony secret from the public here in June.

The Bhutanese resettlement program which the Bush Administration began will be closed we are told, so there will be lots more room in the regional allotment for the Syrians!  We resettled over 8,000 Bhutanese in 11 months of FY2014, here.

So we will increase the number of Muslims entering the US because the Bhutanese are mostly Hindus (60%), Buddhists and Christians.

Next year, Syrians seeking resettlement in the United States will benefit from the closure of a dedicated program for refugees from Bhutan that has brought tens of thousands of refugees to America over several years.

Because all the nations of the Middle East and South Asia are lumped together for purposes of refugee consideration, elimination of special consideration for the Bhutanese gives other applicants from the same region a better shot.

More importantly, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees has expanded the number of Syrians it screens for resettlement anywhere, including the United States.

The UN picks most of our refugees!

The overwhelming majority of refugees resettled in the United States are first identified as candidates by the UNHCR. The United States then does its own review. The UNHCR hopes to identify 50,000 for resettlement somewhere next year, and another 50,000 in 2016.

The WaPo story mentions briefly at the end that the Presidential Determination released yesterday does not mention Syrians by name at all—of course not!    Would you expect any honesty from this White House in the run-up to November elections?

Update:  Be sure to check the WaPo comments, they are more interesting than the news itself (well almost!).

Click here for our very large archive on Syrian refugees.

Joe Biden’s Delaware one of the states hammered with ‘Unaccompanied alien children’

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is from an AP story so the reporter is looking to balance her piece with some nice sounding quotes from beleaguered educators, but it is nonetheless informative.

Joe Biden: We (me and Ted, God rest his soul, and Jimmy) love refugees, just don’t drop ’em off in Delaware.

According to AP almost all US states are experiencing the problem of trying to educate teenagers many of whom are illiterate in their own languages (some are tribal languages).   AP features Delaware.

And, this couldn’t be happening to a more deserving state!

Senator Joe Biden was one of the chief sponsors of the Refugee Act of 1980 which was pushed through Congress by Senator Ted Kennedy and signed into law by Jimmy Carter.  Yet, surprise! Delaware only takes a few refugees every year—you can count the number on two hands most years!

The ‘Unaccompanied alien children’ are under the legal protection of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (although they are not refugees).

From the Associated Press:

FRANKFORD, Del. (AP) — American schools are scrambling to provide services to the large number of children and teenagers who crossed the border alone in recent months.

Unaccompanied minors who made up the summer spike at the border have moved to communities of all sizes, in nearly every state, Federal data indicates, to live with a relative and await immigration decisions. The Supreme Court has ruled that schools have an obligation to educate all students regardless of their immigration status, so schools have become a safe haven for many of the tens of thousands of these young people mostly from central America living in limbo.

Delaware’s rural Sussex County has long attracted immigrants, partly because of work in chicken factories, and soybean and corn fields. The district’s population is more than one-quarter Hispanic, and for years has offered an early learning program for non-English speakers.

Still, officials were caught off guard by about 70 new students mostly from Guatemala – part of the wave crossing the border – enrolling last year, mostly at Sussex Central High School. The Indian River School District over the summer break quickly put together special classes for those needing extra English help.

[….]

The students are eager but face barriers. Some can barely read or write in their native language.

The district’s goal is to get them assimilated – and eventually into a regular high school. There, they can earn a diploma, even if that means participating in adult education programs and going to school until they are 21. [At the expense of US and local taxpayers!—ed]

The federal government (that would be good ol’ Joe) just dropped them on us!

Donald Hattier, a school board member, said advance warning would have helped with planning. The federal government, he said, “just dropped this on us.” He wonders what’s next.

“The kids are still coming across the border. This problem has not been solved,” Hattier said.

There is more, read it all.

All of our posts on ‘Unaccompanied minors’ can be found by clicking here.

Liberians can thank Ebola (and Senator Jack Reed) for extended stay in the US

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Temporary Protected Status for Liberians should have ended years ago, but now, thanks to Ebola, they will get a reprieve and stay for what will amount to another decade or forever.

I wasn’t going to post this story (I mentioned the possibility of the Ebola excuse, here already) until several readers sent it to me and I had some time to read some of the comments.  People are generally becoming more educated (and disgusted) by these LEGAL immigration programs and loopholes.

Rhode Island Democrat Senator Jack Reed is the champion of Liberians in America. As commenter Pete F. suggests below, find his home address and pass it out to Liberians telling them that is where they can be housed and fed.

From Yahoo News:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Liberian immigrants living in the United States without a visa won’t be sent back to the epicenter of Ebola crisis in West Africa for at least another two years, the Obama administration said Friday.

President Barack Obama signed a memo extending a legal protection called “deferred enforced departure” that continues a protection from deportation that has been in place for more than a decade.

The government first granted Liberians temporary protective status during that country’s bloody civil war, which started in 1991 and ended in 2003.

That original protection expired in October 2007. President George W. Bush then approved deferred enforced departure for the community.

Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island continues to be the champion of Liberian migrants in America. We have written several posts on Senator Reed and Liberians over the years, here.

Comments that caught my eye—but there are about 90 more….

Here is one from Kolchak:

Sweet! This provides a huge incentive for Liberians to escape their country, get smuggled into the US and then claim they’ve been here for long enough to avoid being deported if they get caught. Paid ‘witnesses’ will vouch for them.

We’d better just hope none of them are sick.

Oh, I forgot to mention, most of them will be allowed to stay indefinitely. (This will be done by executive order late on a Friday afternoon when nobody is paying attention.) Those who become citizens will be reminded the Obama saved their lives and thus they are to be Democratic voters for life.  [I don’t think they have to wait to become citizens to vote, I bet they are already voting!—ed]

Patti:

Obama won’t send Liberians back for fear they might catch Ebola, but he’ll send 3,000 American soldiers there to possibly catch Ebola. How ’bout we send the Liberians back with some carpentry tools and blueprints to build their own damn treatment centers!

Pete F:

What we should do is get the addresses of every single Liberal that supports Amnesty and open borders. Give those addresses to every single Illegal that comes into our country, and tell them that these people will take you in, house you, feed you, cloth you, provide you with healthcare, etc.

This should also apply to Limousine Liberals such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Lady gaga, Bill Mayher, Matt Damon, and Micheal Moore.

Someone should write a blog just on Temporary Protected Status, the Diversity Visa Lottery and those Investor Visa programs that allow all the Middle Easterners in here to buy convenience stores—-all LEGAL immigration programs in need of being exposed!

Here are all of our posts on TPS.  Syrians have that special refugee status now too!

Australia’s refugee deal with Cambodia infuriates ‘human rights’ industry activists

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I meant to write this post last week as the deal was coming to fruition and the human rights gangsters/no borders activists were screaming their heads off, but didn’t get to it and now I see that the deal has been sealed.

Immigration Minister Scott Morrison working to save Australia from the No-borders movement.

Australia is planning to allow some ‘asylum seekers’ who broke into Australia illegally to choose to be resettled in Cambodia.

The Abbott government’s immigration minister Scott Morrison got into hot water some months ago by asking (or stating) this very important point:

Why do we assume that asylum seekers have a right to resettlement in a first-world country?

That is a really good point, if they are seeking freedom from persecution, what is wrong with Cambodia?  Or, are they all really just economic migrants masquerading as persecuted people.

Here is the news from Friday at Yahoo News:

Australia’s refugee resettlement deal with Cambodia is a long-term arrangement that will start small but build over time, Immigration Minister Scott Morrison said.

The deal, announced on Friday and many months in the making, has been condemned by the United Nations’ refugee agency and human rights advocates.

Speaking to the ABC’s AM program, Mr Morrison said four or five refugees will be resettled in Cambodia in the early stages, but only time will tell how many refugees will make the move.

“And it’ll be based on the success of the program over time. And of course it’s a voluntary program,” he said.

He said it was a long-term agreement and Cambodia would determine how many refugees it would accept.

And, here is the story I was going to post last week from  The Australian ( Charities call Cambodia refugee resettlement deal immoral):

Mr Morrison, who has lobbied for developing nations to share a higher burden of the world’s refugees, said the arrangement with Cambodia would be “an ongoing, developing relationship” to build the country’s capacity to offer protection to refugees.

Former Family Court chief justice Alastair Nicholson, speaking on behalf of a coalition of charities, described the proposal as “inappropriate, immoral and likely illegal”.

“It is inappropriate because Cambodia has no capacity within its social sector to take an influx of refugees. Immoral because these vulnerable people are Australia’s responsibility, and while we await the detail, it appears illegal in contravening Australia’s humanitarian and refugee obligations to vulnerable children and families,” Mr Nicholson said.

[….]

 Mr Nicholson’s comments were endorsed by a coalition of charities including UNICEF Australia, Save the Children, Plan International Australia, World Vision, Amnesty International, Refugee Council of Australia, International Detention Coalition and Children’s Rights International.

The proof of progress is in the statistics! 

The Australian government’s hard line position against open borders (against an asylum-seeker free-for-all) has put Australia in the category of only a few advanced countries whose “asylum seeker” numbers have actually gone down.  See the recently released UN report we told you about here.  It can be done, but most Western governments, including the US, have apparently no will to live.

Can you just imagine how ticked-off UNHCR Antonio Guterres must be at Australia!  He likely fears that some other countries might grow a spine!

Michigan writer: we should take all the Syrians and Iraqis we can get!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I suspect this opinion writer (C.A. Joseph Peters) from Ypsilanti, Michigan writing in The Eastern Echo is connected in some way to federal resettlement contractor US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, but there is no mention of his affiliation and we are thus expected to believe he is just a member of John Q. Public.

Michigan is already in the top five states for Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) immigrant population. https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2014/02/26/what-is-the-population-of-middle-eastern-and-north-african-immigrants-in-your-state/

From The Eastern Echo (emphasis is mine):

Michigan is the best candidate to accept Iraqi and Syrian refugees, not because of its railroads and factories, forests and rivers, or even because of its system of government, but because of Michiganders themselves. Of the many chapters of the American immigration success story, two of its finest – Polish immigration in the early 20th Century and Lebanese immigration half a century later – were written in Michigan. Michigan may yet write a third.

The situation is this: Iraqis and Syrians are fleeing in the tens of thousands, and Michigan is in need of people. Michigan accepting these refugees would not only be generous but practical.

Mr. Peters then goes on with a lot of the mumbo-jumbo about Polish and Italian immigrants as if they are the same as Middle Eastern Muslims in their world view.  Then he talks about the Christian Middle Easterners as if that is all they will get from Iraq and Syria.  In fact, they will get mostly Muslim refugees from Syria.

The U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI), a non-profit refugee aid organization, reported that of the more than 120,000 Chaldeans (Iraqi Christians) who made their way to Detroit almost half a century ago, more than half of them are now business-owners, now helping new Iraqi refugees get on their feet in their new state.

Peters:  Michigan ought to “welcome” hundreds of thousands!

The crisis in Iraq and Syria is known well enough. Hundreds of thousands are fleeing. And Michigan, a state that has welcomed Middle Eastern refugees before, ought to welcome these hundreds of thousands who are feeling [fleeing?–ed] the region today, and encourage one generation of Middle Eastern Michiganders in preparing the next.

Michiganders need to bombard The Eastern Echo with another point of view!

Michigan is this year in the top five resettlement states, see here.  A few years ago the US State Department, fearing Michigan was in overload, slowed the flow (Detroit News 2008) but it looks like that limited moratorium is off now!