Immigration Costs America: Big Time!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday the Washington Times reported on a new study that concludes that immigrants cost the country a staggering $9000 per person.

“This is another nail in the coffin of economic growth,” said Edwin Rubenstein, director of research and president of ESR Research, which released the report. “There is absolutely no reason immigration policy shouldn’t be discussed on its economic merits.”

Mr. Rubenstein, a former director of research at the Hudson Institute, a nonpartisan policy research organization, said U.S. taxpayers paid more than $9,000 for each immigrant in the country, a third of whom are believed to be in the U.S. illegally.

………

The loss estimates, the report said, included $100 billion in federal taxes lost “from the reduction of native incomes caused by immigrant workers.”

………

“Immigrants are poorer, pay less tax and are more likely to receive public benefits than natives,” Mr. Rubenstein said, adding that while immigrants account for 13 percent of the U.S. population, they and their children will account for more than 80 percent of the population growth through mid-century.

Mr. Rubenstein, former senior economist at W.R. Grace & Co. where he directed studies of government waste and inefficiency for the Grace Commission, said there is a “deliberate policy of the federal government to suppress the fiscal impact of immigration,” and interest groups like big business should be responsible for the information stonewall.

And while arguing that business is the beneficiary of immigration, Mr. Rubenstein said native workers are hurt the most.

“(Workers) don’t have the incentives to protest this,” he said, noting that individual losses often are small. “They are busy just putting bread on the table.”

Read the whole article here.

Billboard guilt-trip campaign in Tennessee

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Long after the citizens of Shelbyville, TN were kept in the dark about how their city had become a magnet for Somali refugees and long after the local newspaper, the Times-Gazette, ran its now nationally distributed series on the influx of refugees and how they aren’t joining the community, the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition begins a public relations campaign to make people feel guilty. 

As if a sign campaign is going to make everything o.k.  Go here and check it out.

New billboards at the entrances to Shelbyville are intended to educate the community about immigrants and their contributions.

The Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition (TIRRC) kicked off its Welcoming Tennessee Initiative in Shelbyville by placing the billboards and is planning other events in the next few months to help bridge the wide gap that exists between the community and newcomers of different nationalities.

TIRRC was formed in 2001 around a campaign to support a bill that would increase immigrant access to driver’s licenses. The group is made up of immigrants, refugees and U.S.-born supporters.

Catalina Nieto, public awareness coordinator for TIRRC, said the public relations campaign is being done “to educate the Shelbyville community about their new neighbors. There are many things that they contribute, to the economy and the culture and the city in general.”

They just don’t get it.  If tens of thousands of refugees are being settled in the US each year, the communities in which they are to be resettled need to be consulted in advance.  Not guilt-tripped with a sign campaign after everyone is pretty angry.  Oh brother!

Let us know if your state is doing this, and probably with your taxes!

For more on our on-going coverage of Shelbyville, TN, just type Shelbyville in our search function.

 

If Utah murder suspect is a Muslim….

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

On Monday they buried 7-year-old Hser Ner Moo,  a Burmese Karen (Christian) refugee girl.   500 mourners, including the governor of Utah, attended her funeral.  The little girl who loved school and wearing pink clothes, had allegedly been raped and beaten to death by a 21-year-old refugee from the same camp in Thailand.

A week to the day after she disappeared, an estimated 500 mourners, including Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. and his wife, Mary Kaye Huntsman, attended her funeral Monday at the South Salt Lake LDS Haven Ward Chapel.

The number of mourners was perhaps larger than Utah’s entire Burmese refugee community to which she belonged.

In the same paper on Tuesday, The Salt Lake Tribune reported that the murder suspect faces the death penalty.  

Seven-year-old Hser Ner Moo apparently tried to fight the man who allegedly beat, raped and strangled her last week at a South Salt Lake apartment complex. 

An autopsy revealed she was clutching hair in her right hand similar to that of accused killer Esar Met. And the autopsy showed Hser Ner Moo had been beaten about the head, neck, and torso. Some injuries were consistent with strangulation or suffocation.

That information and more – including evidence of sexual assault and a bloody footprint matching Esar Met – was included in documents charging the 21-year-old with aggravated murder. The crime is punishable by death.

But, no reporter seems to have the guts to go beyond this standard superficial reporting.   

And, yes, before someone pounces and tells me that white American guys are also rapists and murderers, I’m not saying they aren’t.   I am saying that maybe this terrible tragedy could have been averted, and someone now needs to look deeper.

From a reliable source, someone who works with the camps in Thailand, we have heard that Burmese Muslims get into the camps and tensions run high with the Karen people, then our naive (at best) US State Department and the contractors who resettle them in the US place them in the same neighborhoods.  In this case they were placed in the same building.

We have it from those same sources that Met is a Muslim, and we suggest reporters begin to do some serious work on this case, if there are any investigative minds out there!   For those of you saying, it doesn’t matter if he is or isn’t, it does.  It matters because resettlement agencies need to start facing the reality of the tensions in the world and be sensible about what refugees can be placed together.   We also need to ask why are we bringing all these single men in the refugee program.

The proponents of refugee resettlement can’t be running some grand experiment in multiculturalism at the expense of children like Hser.

P.S.   If it turns out I’m wrong  I’ll admit it.   But, someone first needs to find out the truth about how the murder suspect, Esar Met, came to be living in America in the same building with this little girl.

Note: See our earlier coverage of this story here.

 

 

 

Polygamy in the news, do we have a double standard?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

With all the attention these days on rounding up Christain polygamists in Texas  (See the latest here)….

I’m anxious to see when we will begin rounding up the Muslim polygamists which we have written about on several occasions.

And, speaking of double standards, note that taxpayers of Minnesota are funding a Muslim religious school (hat tip:  Janet) to benefit Somali refugee kids among others near Minneapolis.   See excellent investigative reporting from Katherine Kersten in the Minneapolis Star Tribune yesterday here.

Milwaukee, WI has thousands of poor African Muslim immigrants

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

It’s not often we find someone telling us what the numbers of Muslim refugees in a city are, but here is a church newsletter (page 3), thanks to Robert, that tells us that Milwaukee has 12,000 poor Africans and that 75% are Muslim.

There are more than twelve thousand African immigrants living in Milwaukee, and 75 percent of them are Muslims. These immigrants face many challenges adjusting to the American way of life. This is further complicated by those who do not have the financial means to provide for themselves and their families. SWD African immigrant missionaries in Milwaukee are reaching out to them with the Gospel of Jesus Christ—by way of one of life’s most basic needs.

We haven’t written much about Wisconsin at RRW, so I just checked my statistics and found this puzzling.  The Refugee program has only brought 23,000 or so refugees through 2005 to Wisconsin and the largest percentage by far were from Southeast Asia.   So, how did all these African Muslims get to Milwaukee, or to Wisconsin for that matter.

I don’t have a lot of time to google search today, but this article popped up right away and offers some explanation.  Regular readers of Refugee Resettlement Watch probably have already guessed!  Secondary migration of Somalis to work in meat packing (what else) is at least partially responsible.   This Journal-Sentinel article from 2004 tells of the trouble in little Barron, WI.   

But after decades of almost glacial transformation, this conservative city of 3,400 in the northwest part of the state has gone through a dramatic change, one that has tested America’s reputation as a haven for those fleeing strife-torn homelands.

In less than a decade, a river of refugees from Somalia has flowed into Barron, lured by good-paying meatpacking jobs at the Jennie-O Turkey plant, the city’s largest employer. Today, 12% of Barron’s population is from Somalia, a small East African nation on the Indian Ocean.

Since almost 4 years have passed since this article was written I would like to know if Barron has adjusted or not.   Calling all readers to send me more on Barron and the secondary migration of Africans to Wisconsin.

Here is a list of volags in Wisconsin to help with the research.