Category: Who is going where

Will Malta “push back” latest batch of illegal alien Somalis to Libya?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Has Malta finally had enough?

This is old news—as of yesterday, thanks to reader Charles for alerting us.

(Note: we’ve had cable problems where I live so didn’t get this up sooner.  The NGOs might well have stopped the proposed push-back by now.)

Some of this latest group of Somalis which arrived on Malta yesterday may be sent back to Libya. My suggestion—send them to Somalia! Photo: Times of Malta

From the Times of Malta:

The authorities have booked an Air Malta plane to ferry migrants to Mitiga airport in Tripoli an midnight and 4am, informed sources said this afternoon.

The development comes as the prime minister confirmed earlier this afternoon that the government was considering all options, including the possibility of sending back to Libya migrants who arrived today.

By 5.30pm tens of NGO volunteers gathered outside the back entrance of the police headquarters in Floriana to stop trucks from leaving.

Earlier, they complained that their representatives had not been allowed access to the group. The migrants, totalling 102, arrived this morning and are being held at police headquarters. It is understood that only the men – about 70, will be sent back.

Earlier, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said:

“All options are being considered in the national interest, but no decision had been taken, Joseph Muscat told timesofmalta.com.

“This is not push-back, it is a signal that we are not push overs,” Dr Muscat said when questioned. When asked whether the government would repatriate the migrants if that action was illegal, Dr Muscat reiterated that all options were being considered.

Readers, it’s only common sense that every time a boat arrives and the migrants get tickets to America or some other European country (which has been part of the pattern for Malta–US State Dept. policy) they will keep coming!  Send them back a few times and the word will spread.  Who wants them to stay?

A group of 11 non-governmental organisations said this afternoon that the government must not return the migrants who arrived in Malta this morning to Libya.

[….]

“We, the undersigned 11 NGOs, are shocked that the government is even considering sending back to Libya the group of migrants that arrived this morning. The group of 102 included 41 women and two babies. All are Somali, which means they could very well need protection.

[….]

The NGOs said that it was certain that the migrants would face gross human rights abuses if returned to Libya.

So don’t send them to Libya—send them to Somalia. 

We are all aware that Somalia is improving and that their new President even came to America to encourage Somalis to return and re-build their own country.  And, besides even at the height of Somalia’s terror problems, wealthy Muslim Saudi Arabia was flying illegal Somali Muslims back to Mogadishu and I don’t recall a single NGO squawking about that!

So who are the NGOs opposing push-back?  I see the Jesuits are busy as usual.  They were behind pressuring the US into taking some of the previous Somali illegal aliens to your towns and cities in America.   And the ‘People for Change Foundation’ sounds suspiciously like a George Soros enterprise.

These claims are backed by the research of solid human rights organisations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.”

Aditus foundation, Jesuit Refugee Service (Malta), Migrant’s Network for Equality, SOS Malta, Malta Emigrants’ Commission, KOPIN, Integra Foundation, Foundation for Shelter and Support of Migrants, Organisation for Friendship in Diversity, Koperativa Kummerc Gust and People for Change Foundation said…

Everything you need to know about the mess in Malta can be found in our lengthy Malta archive, click here.

NH Mayor: Still too many refugees being placed in Manchester

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We’ve written dozens of posts over the last few years about Manchester, NH and its refugee overload.  For those of you struggling with overload in your cities and towns, Manchester’s plight is instructive.  Once the US State Department and their resettlement contractors get an ethnic seed community established, it’s almost impossible to stop the flow.

In the case of Manchester, the Mayor and council went so far as to get a bill introduced in the state legislature to give them some rights to call for a moratorium if the city became too overloaded.  It failed. And, interestingly, now even some refugees are saying there are too many in Manchester and THEY CAN’T FIND WORK.  (Someone please tell Grover Norquist and the Gang of Eight—Senator Kelly Ayotte too—that there are immigrants in need of work in New Hampshire!).

From AP at the Nashua Telegraph (Hat tip: Joanne, others):

While many Bhutanese have transitioned well to life in U.S. – and they are all better off than they were in refugee camps – many, especially those older than 40, are struggling, Niroula [refugee featured in this article] said.

“Bhutanese are facing lot of challenges, because they are jobless,” he said.

The refugees aren’t the only ones having trouble coping with the transition. The growing number of refugees could be jarring for one of the least diverse states in the country. In the past decade, the number of immigrants in New Hampshire has grown by 36 percent, outpacing national growth by 6 percent.

Refugees are still a fraction of the population in the state’s largest city. A task force estimates there are 3,500 in Manchester out of a total population of 110,000. State Department figures show that between 2000 and 2010, almost 2,500 refugees were resettled in the city, just over half New Hampshire’s total during that period.

A central fear is that because services for refugees are frontloaded to their arrival, those who don’t transition well immediately are falling through the cracks. That could become costly for the city.  [Unfunded mandate?—-ed]

Mayor Gatsas: the city needs a break!

 In November 2011, Mayor Ted Gatsas, a Republican then newly elected to his second term, drew national attention after asking the State Department to stop resettling refugees to Manchester. In a recent interview, he said he still believes the city could benefit from a break in their arrival.

“We’ve got refugees in this community that don’t know the language, don’t have a job, and what I’ve been saying is let us catch our breath. Let us get these people into working society, so they’re good examples of the city of Manchester,” he said. “You can’t do that by bringing 300 more refugees on top of that.”

Surprise (not!):  Resettlement contractors don’t communicate with community!

They [Bhutanese/Nepalese] are the most recent wave of refugees to land in New Hampshire. Several thousand African and Middle Eastern refugees – mostly Iraqi, Somali and Sudanese – were resettled there in the first part of the last decade and continue to arrive in much smaller numbers.

During the last session, Gatsas led a failed push pass a bill at the state level giving municipalities the authority to enact a one-year moratorium on new refugee resettlement. Among the issues he raised at the time was poor communication between the city and the resettlement agency, though he said that relationship has improved.

Look out Nashua!  This is standard operating procedure, when the contractors get blow-back and big problems develop in a community, they simply start new seed communities not far away.

To take some of the pressure off Manchester, close to 50 will be resettled in nearby Nashua.

Contractors are keeping an eye on that other pocket of resistance—Tennessee—where there has been some success in getting the state to re-exert its right to say NO to the federal government.

Saba Berhane, director of the refugee services division with the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, said the mayor’s request is unusual and most resettlement communities welcome refugees, despite occasional challenges. But lawmakers in Tennessee passed legislation limiting resettlement, though a moratorium provision was stricken. Most recently, the legislature there killed a bill to that would have required refugee resettlement organizations to reimburse the state’s costs related to refugees.

Manchester is overloaded! Even the refugees get it!  Why don’t the contractors?

…Bishnu Dahal, 53, said using a translator that the number of refugees is making it hard to find a job and she wouldn’t mind seeing new refugees settle elsewhere. Several others agreed.

Endnote:  We previously wrote about resettlement contractor—Carolyn Benedict-Drew—quoted in this article, here in April.

Canada announces it will take 1,300 Syrian refugees (to begin with)

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Actually they didn’t say “to begin with,” that was me, because we all know that this is just the beginning with literally millions of Syrians on the move throughout the Middle East.

Syrians on the move. We are coming to Canada!
Washington Post photo

Be sure to read what the director of one of the largest Syrian camps said recently (here)—-most difficult refugees in the world!

Apparently the Canadian government has succumbed to pressure from its 100,000-strong Canadian ‘Syrian community.’

1,300 will soon be on the way, according to The Star:

Ottawa will resettle 1,300 Syrian refugees to Canada from Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey over two years to address the deepening humanitarian crisis there, says Immigration Minister Jason Kenney.

The announcement on Wednesday came a month after the Syrian Canadian community made a public appeal urging the federal government to establish a special program for displaced refugees caught up in the two-year-old civil war between Syrian President Bashar Assad and the opposition.

The latest United Nations data shows more than 4.25 million Syrians are internally displaced and more than 1.6 million have fled to neighbouring countries.

“Our focus . . . is finding a long-term political solution to the crisis there,” Kenney told a news conference in Edmonton. “Our country is making an important effort to ensure the most vulnerable Syrian refugees are provided protection.”  [They love that word too—vulnerable!-–ed]

A coalition representing Canada’s 100,000-strong Syrian community welcomed the announcement, but worry about the lengthy screening and processing involved in the resettlement program.

“It is a step in the right direction. They finally recognized the crisis in Syria, which is the largest refugee crisis in the world today,” said Faisal Alazem of the Syrian Canadian Council in Montreal, one of seven groups involved in the coalition that met with Kenney in June.

Then US readers take note, in Canada many refugees are resettled with PRIVATE FUNDING.  In the US almost all refugees are resettled with taxpayer money funneled through resettlement contractors.

Two hundreds of the 1,300 Syrian refugees will be resettled with financial support by the Canadian government, while the rest will be assisted by community and faith groups that have sponsorship agreements with Ottawa.

If the US required private financial support and added legal responsibility for the resettlement sponsor group or individual sponsors, the refugee flow would be seriously curtailed.  It’s just too easy to want more (and more) refugees when using someone else’s money!

Malta gets a large EU grant to detect infectious diseases in Africans arriving there illegally

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Why do we care?  Because for the last 5 years (at least) we have been taking some Somali illegal aliens who arrive in Malta on boats to the US as legitimate refugees.  So, now I suppose we should be glad infectious disease screening is going to improved.  Here is just one recent post on the Malta mess.

Africans arrive in Malta. Bound for the USA (eventually).

From the Times of Malta:

A new initiative by the Health Ministry, funded by the EU and intended to prevent the spread of infectious diseases in Malta, will kick off tomorrow at Lyster Barracks Detention Centre.

The Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Directorate within the Ministry, has managed to secure an investment of over €700,000 from the European Refugee Fund Emergency Measures Annual Programme 2012 to develop a project to enhance the screening process at Lyster Detention Centre in Ħal Far.

For ambitious readers, I bet we have over a hundred posts (at least dozens and dozens for sure) on Malta here at RRW.

Update: Be sure to see World Refugee Day celebrated on Malta, here.  They celebrated a dinghy.

Maine Senator Angus King: We want more immigrants in Maine!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We want more immigrants in Maine and in America because Thomas Jefferson said that’s good for America!  (Or I think he did! Well, sort of!). King opened a floor speech last week with words from Jefferson that frankly I read three or four times and couldn’t figure out how the words fit today’s immigration situation, especially when one considers the large number of Muslim immigrants entering the US and Maine.

Indeed Jefferson, of all people, knew what violence Muslims were capable of.  He would never have ‘welcomed’ Muslims to America, but maybe King doesn’t know about the Barbary Wars.

Here are a couple of excerpts from King’s speech on S.744:

Vibrant refugee? Portland Somali convicted of rape after breaking into woman’s home while she slept. King: Immigrants are a little scary!

Does this discussion affect the State of Maine? Well, yes, it does. We have migrants and immigrants picking our crops in northern Maine, blueberries and potatoes and broccoli. We have a vibrant refugee and asylum-seeking community in Portland, ME, and in Lewiston. Many of those from Africa come here with very different cultures. We have 52 languages spoken in the Portland public schools. Yes, we have strains and difficulties adjusting one culture to another. But we are making it work and it is making our State richer spiritually, culturally, intellectually, and, yes, financially. It is working.  [Readers: Type Lewiston into our search function to see how it’s working!—ed]

King:  We need more immigrants because the white birthrate is declining, and so we need to speed up the decline of America as we know it by allowing the Third World to enter in a speedier manner!   Heck!  Might as well get it over with sooner than later!

We are living in a negative demographic time bomb. Last year, I believe for the first time in American history, we had more deaths than births of White Americans. One doesn’t have to be a mathematician to know if that continues, we will shrink and shrivel as a society. We need immigration to add to our population, to add to the ideas and creativity.

[…..]

Immigrants are always going to be different and a little scary, and that has been true throughout American history.

Read the whole speech.  It is the usual blah, blah, blah….but read it anyway!  By the way, King says this is the job he has been preparing for throughout his entire life, here.

Then below is a report from some readers of Refugee Resettlement Watch who visited a staff member in King’s office the following day.

We need to take in Syrian refugees!

The speech was on Thursday.    On Friday we visited with a Senator King aide who is paid $73,000 per year and who works on immigration issues. We were there to discuss the 24-pound Immigration bill, S. 744.  The aide did give us a  lot of time and we discussed many points.  The below points may be of particular interest to readers of Refugee Resettlement Watch and to those in Maine.

The aide, on his own, blurted out, without any question or provocation from us, that whenever “we [America] invade a country or create a war and chaos, we need to take in refugees from that country.  We need to take in Syrian refugees. We need to take in Iraqi and Afghan refugees.”

[I didn’t think we had gone to war in Syria yet, but I guess I’m quibbling! We did send arms through Benghazi earlier and we are promising more weapons to the rebels real soon, so I guess that means, at least in the mind of King’s staffer, that the refugees are ours!—ed]

Later, in response to one of our group suggesting that her experiences in the Middle East indicated that Muslim and Arabic culture are just too different and should not be allowed into the USA, the aide responded  “that is exactly the same argument that was used against the Catholics 100 years ago.”  One assumes that the aide does not foresee within the  Muslim refugee and immigrant population the possibility of an embedded catastrophic problem.  The aide had no response when recent events in Boston, the World Trade center and other places were mentioned.

Go here to learn more about the Portland Somali rapist.

The problem King has here (was the speech written by this staffer?), by using emotional arguments and platitudes to make his point, is that for every appealing “creative” blueberry picking immigrant, I can find him an immigrant criminal, a terrorist or a welfare mooch, or an immigration advocate in the Chamber of Commerce looking for cheap blueberry-picking labor!