Here is an article to break your heart

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Shame on Catholic Charities and the US State Department!   A 51-year-old Eritrean refugee, father of 10, was killed trying to walk home from his job as a dishwasher in Dallas, TX.   He missed the last bus and attempted to walk 9 miles to get home where his wife waited with a 3 month old baby.   Read about his death on the highway in the first half of the article here.  Hat tip: Chris.

Then this is what makes my blood boil: 

Family members said Catholic Charities helped get Mr. Bilay the dishwasher job and conducted a cultural-orientation session.

But they said the orientation session was conducted in the Tigrinya language, unintelligible to someone who speaks only Kunama.

“I asked the family if they had a meeting with Catholic Charities, and they said they did, but they didn’t understand what they said,” said Stefano Dago, Mr. Bilay’s cousin, who lives in Minneapolis.

Residents of the Shimelba camp were given orientations before their departure, but a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration, the intergovernmental group that conducted the sessions, could not be reached for comment.

Todd Pierce, a spokesman for the U.S. State Department Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration – which oversees the resettlement program that brought the Bilay family to Dallas – said that while resettlement in a strange country is difficult in the best of circumstances, he was unaware of a situation in which a family had been as isolated as the Bilay family.

Mr. Pierce said he was unaware what the immigrants were taught.

“But obviously no orientation course could possibly prepare a family from rural Eritrea for a life in a big American city,” he said.

To Mr. Bilay, a man who was virtually illiterate in his native language, Dallas was a bewildering place, family members said.

“He didn’t know how to live in a city. At first he didn’t know how to ride in a car,” said Mr. Kallafo. “People at home ask me if they should come here. I tell them that America is a very hard country to live in.” 

We have written about this lack of cultural orientation here.  Life in America is tough and without proper training refugees have a difficult time.   This time it cost a man his life.

I don’t get it.  With all the Catholic churches in rural America, some church couldn’t have taken care of the family and found farm work for this man?  Don’t we hear every day that we need Mexican illegals to do our farm work, what about this family?   And, it’s not as if they even resettled him in a community with his own people.   

Rural town/supportive church, is that combination so hard to find for all you do-gooders?   It seems to me that too many volags just collect their government payment and throw the refugees out to fend for themselves?

We hear it all the time.

 Note:  I’m posting this in our “crimes” and “reforms needed” categories for obvious reasons.

WordPress takes it upon itself to add links to RRW

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

For your information you might have noticed that we have a new feature at the end of some articles called “possibly related articles”.   WordPress began this feature out of the blue recently.   You might find it useful to learn more about a particular issue, but we want to assure you that some linked articles that appear are not necessarily views that we hold.

Utah Board to make sure refugees are served

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The State of Utah set up an 11 member board last Monday to begin monitoring services to refugees in the state.   This article says that Utah has 20,000 refugees. 

All existing state, county and private-service providers are being asked to make a “good faith effort” to hold themselves accountable for the successful delivery of services to refugees throughout the state, DePaulis [Dir. Utah Department of Community and Culture] said. “Each government entity dealing with refugees is to report back to the new state office the steps they intend to take to fill in or reduce the gaps cited by the working group.”

Not a word was mentioned in the article about the rape and murder last month of the little Karen refugee girl by another refugee in the building.  That case seems to have disappeared into a black hole.

You can find out more information on Utah at “Your State”.   And, here is a link to all of our posts mentioning Utah where things must be hopping regarding an influx of refugees.  Apparently Utah is a welcoming state.

Refugees International gets award from Arab pressure group

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Now the picture begins to get clearer.  I just have not been able to wrap my brain around the fact that NGO’s who work in the field of refugee resettlement appear to be focusing on bringing Muslims into the U.S.   Can’t they see what is happening in Europe?  Why would they want to bring those problems here?

One such group leading that effort with on-going concern for Somali Muslims, Rohingya, and Iraqi Muslims is Refugees International. 

Then up pops a press release from them touting an award they received at the end of April from one of the leading pro-Arab groups in the United States—the Arab American Institute.   The picture comes into sharper focus.  Their press release begins:

On April 23rd, Refugees International was presented with the prestigious Award for International Commitment at the Arab American Institute’s Kahlil Gibran Spirit of Humanity Awards gala. RI was recognized for 29 years of confronting the world’s worst refugee crises through a unique combination of advocacy and action. As actor and RI board member Sam Waterston said to the 800-strong audience: “When people ask me about Refugees International, I say it is a gadfly, a pest, an irritant to governments and institutions that fail do enough to protect the world’s 50 million displaced and stateless people…and it has many times moved mountains.”

Here is what Discover the Networks says about the Arab American Institute. 

Then go over to the Arab American Institute site and  get a look at this event.  The keynote speaker was Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas no less!   By the way, Refugees International gave testimony to Congress in March about the dire circumstances of the persecuted Iraqi refugees.  They say they have the most concern for Iraqis who have worked for us and for the Iraqi Palestinians.   What no concern for the truly persecuted Christians?     I’m getting yet a more focused picture.

 RI found two particularly vulnerable groups—people who have worked for U.S. or Western employers and Palestinians.

The prestigious Kahlil Gibran “Spirit of Humanity” Award was given at the April 23rd dinner to Refugees International Chairman of the Board,  Farooq Kathwari.   Need I say more.  Mr. Kathwari is the mega-wealthy owner of Ethan Allen Furniture and a supporter of the pro-Muslim Kashmiri seperatist movement.   You can read about him here, and here.

The above links also discuss Kathwari’s American born son who reportedly dropped out of medical school to become a fighter in the Jihad and died in Afghanistan.

Secretary of State Condolezza Rice also gave Kathwari an award–the Outstanding American by Choice–on the same day as the Arab American Institute dinner.  Busy guy!  Read about it here.   

What a tangled web.  So, Muslim immigration will increase in America because groups like Refugees International are run by Islamists.  It’s too bad the general public doesn’t have all the facts about who is running our government.  I used to like Secretary Rice.  I even thought at one point she might make a good President, but what a dhimmi she has become.  I wonder if Mr. Kathwari had a role in convincing her to drop the word “Jihad” from the government’s lexicon.

Getting our facts straight: numbers of refugees admitted to the US each year

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

A commenter at this post about Canada said that we only ever admit 28,000 refugees a year even though the annual ceiling in the last few years has been about 70,000.   I don’t know what the final number was for 2007, but it was over 50,000 for sure.

The President sets that annual ceiling each year in consultation with Congress in a document appropriately called The Presidential Determination.  You can see the FY 2008 Determination here.     President Bush set the ceiling at 80,000.    Ceiling means that that is the top number of refugees we would take barring any unforeseen huge emergency.   

The Volags (voluntary agencies), funded to resettle refugees, would like to see that number become a goal instead of a ceiling and we should look to continued lobbying pressure to bring about that change.  They are paid by the head to resettle refugees so if the numbers drop as they did in 2002 and 2003 (due to concerns about terrorism in the wake of 9/11) the volags might have to lay off employees.   They got real lucky in those years when the federal government paid them anyway in order to keep their doors open.

For a history of the annual ceiling and the actual admissions for each year from 1983-2005 go here.  You will see in a number of years we got very close to the actual ceiling, despite our reader’s allegation that we only take 28,000 a year.

Hoping to make things easy for those of you trying to understand how Refugee Resettlement works, this post is filed in our category called “where to find information.”