Tag: Detroit

Let’s not bring 50,000 Syrians to Detroit, it is a dumb idea!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

It is a dumb idea to bring 50,000 to the whole of the United States, but that is exactly what some in the refugee contracting community want to see. Remember UK Labor Party transplant, David Miliband, now CEO of the largest (financially) US resettlement contractor, the International Rescue Committee recently said Obama must admit 65,000 Syrians to the US by the end of his term in office—by the end of 2016!

Now the New York Times has published an Op-Ed by a couple of open borders agitators suggesting Detroit could be saved by the infusion of 50,000 Syrians refugees into the city overnight.  On what planet are these guys living?

They never mention of course that the FBI testified in the House Homeland Security Committee that we cannot properly screen Syrians for security concerns because there are no records available on who they are!

Republican Governor Rick Snyder expanded Medicaid in Michigan and got a pat on the back from pal Obama. Readers, the expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare is one of the major reasons your state will become a magnet for immigrant and refugee “seedlings” in Obama’s plan to colonize American towns with “New Americans.” http://www.mlive.com/lansing-news/index.ssf/2015/02/michigan_political_points_pres.html

You’ve probably seen this outrageous suggestion because it came out the day before I went to Iowa.  (I have a lot of catching up to do and my internet connection is dropping!—grrrr!)

LOL! looks like the idea was dead in the water by Friday as hundreds of critical comments flooded the NYT!   Maybe it’s not too late for yours to be added!

The New York Times (hat tip: Dick):

Detroit, a once great city, has become an urban vacuum. Its population has fallen to around 700,000 from nearly 1.9 million in 1950. The city is estimated to have more than 70,000 abandoned buildings and 90,000 vacant lots. Meanwhile, desperate Syrians, victims of an unfathomable civil war, are fleeing to neighboring countries, with some 1.8 million in Turkey and 600,000 in Jordan.

Suppose these two social and humanitarian disasters were conjoined to produce something positive.

Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan, a Republican, has already laid the groundwork. In January 2014 he called for an infusion of 50,000 immigrants as part of a program to revitalize Detroit, and signed an executive order creating the Michigan Office for New Americans.  [Here is one story about Gov. Snyder inviting in to Michigan Middle Eastern migrants.—ed]

Syrian refugees would be an ideal community to realize this goal, as Arab-Americans are already a vibrant and successful presence in the Detroit metropolitan area.

You have to give it to these authors for hutzpah as they list cities (as wonderful examples of immigrant assimilation) that are having huge problems with their refugee communities.  And, they don’t even mention the Somali ISIS-wannabes in Minneapolis!

Utica this year filed suit against the State of New York attempting to get more money out of the government for its horrific immigrant-overloaded school system problems, and we have a lengthy archive of horror stories from Lewiston, ME where one recent little problem cropped up when a Somali kid burned down an apartment building!

Refugees resettled from a single war zone have helped revitalize several American communities, notably Hmong in previously neglected neighborhoods in Minneapolis, Bosnians in Utica, N.Y., and Somalis in Lewiston, Me.

Obama would have to lift the ceiling (exactly as David Miliband recommended), the already impossible security screening would have to be expedited, and you the taxpayer, will be hit up for an expansion of the refugee spending budget of $1.5 billion!  (which, by the way, is a figure larger than it has been previously reported).

Resettling Syrians in Detroit would require commitment and cooperation across different branches and levels of our government, but it is eminently feasible. President Obama and Congress would have to agree to lift this year’s refugee ceiling by 50,000. The State Department, which handles overseas processing of refugees, would need to open offices at the camps in Jordan and Turkey, determine eligibility and administer a lottery for resettlement. Homeland Security, which controls the borders, would have to carry out accelerated security checks, as has been done in the past for Vietnamese and for Iranian religious minorities. Health and Human Services would need an expansion in the $1.5 billion it budgets for refugee resettlement.

There is much more, read it all here.

And, as for the African American community of Detroit buying this diversity is beautiful mythology.  Check out Baltimore where black gangs directed mobs to loot Arab and Asian stores!

About the photo caption:  Go here for more information on the expansion of Medicaid as a “key indicator” of the “capacity” of your community to ‘welcome’ refugees.

Detroit: Despite high unemployment, Lutherans and feds still pouring refugees into the area

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This starts out as the usual feel-good fluffy-puffy story about a happy Iraqi refugee landing in Detroit, Michigan, but there are some very interesting nuggets of information that appear mid-story.

From the National Journal:

Detroit’s suburbs have absorbed tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees in recent years after violence erupted in the wake of the war. The established Arab community in Detroit has made it the top destination for Iraqi refugees—and that, in turn, has made Michigan one of the states receiving the largest influx of refugees.

Protestors in Dearborn: A large number of Dearborn’s Muslims are on US Terror Watch List. From Jihad Watch http://www.jihadwatch.org/2014/08/dearborn-residents-on-terrorist-watch-list-second-only-to-new-york

From 2010 to 2014, Michigan saw a 38 percent increase in the number of refugees moving to the state, according to data from the Health and Human Services Department. The vast majority are fleeing Iraq, where they faced violence and retaliation for working with U.S. troops during the war, like Al Saady, or because they belong to a religious minority. The number of Iraqi refugees arriving in Michigan nearly doubled in the last four years, with 2,751 arriving in 2014.

The growing number of refugees exacerbated the economic strain on Detroit communities as it struggled during the Great Recession. Refugees had trouble finding work, and staff was stretched thin at the social service agencies that help families resettle in the area. In 2008, the State Department started limiting Iraqi resettlement to Detroit to those who had immediate family members there. But many of those Iraqi refugees who have been resettled elsewhere in the years since still end up moving to Detroit anyway, says Mihaela Mitrofan, refugee-resettlement program manager for Lutheran Social Services of Michigan.  [Readers, it is called “secondary migration” in resettlement industry lingo. The Iraqis want to live with their own kind, as do the Somalis that flock to Minnesota, but God forbid you want to live with people you are culturally comfortable with!—ed]

“With everything that’s happening with ISIS, we anticipate another wave of refugees from Iraq and also Syria,” says Mitrofan.

Since the middle of 2007, Lutheran Social Services has resettled more than 8,000 Iraqi refugees in the Detroit area. Christian Iraqis are usually integrated into the large Chaldean community in the northern Detroit suburb of Sterling Heights. Chaldeans are a Catholic minority group in Iraq.  [Christians are only about 22-25% of the Iraqis we resettle.—ed]

Muslim Iraqis, like Al Saady, are usually sent to Dearborn, a suburb just southwest of Detroit that has provided a home for Arab-Americans of Lebanese, Palestinian, Yemeni, and other backgrounds for nearly 100 years. Lutheran Social Services runs a small office on the city’s main drag, above a hookah bar and across the street from a halal grocery store.

Getting them their welfare goodies as per the Obama colonizing plan!

One LSS staff member, Arjwan Khadoori, helped 13 Iraqis resettle in Dearborn this past January. Khadoori tracked down housing, took them to buy groceries, and guided them through the process of registering for Social Security cards, Medicaid, driver’s licenses, and food stamps. Each person also receives $925 in federal cash assistance to help tide them over until they find work.

Another staff member, Jawhar Altahesh, persuades employers to hire the refugees. This can be tough, he says, especially in an area with such high unemployment. Sometimes employers will accuse him of taking away jobs from Americans. Even Arab-American Muslims might not want to hire women or Shiite Muslims.  [By the way, we are bringing an almost equal number of Sunnis and Shiites out of Iraq.—ed]

“I tell them that’s against the law,” says Altahesh, “but it doesn’t matter.”

From November through January, the Dearborn office helped find full-time jobs for 30 of 50 refugees seeking employment in Wayne County.

Michigan received the 4th highest number of refugees in FY2014, here.

Detroit: Taxpayer funding for Iraqi mental illness in short supply

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

But surely the money will flow when Obamacare is in full swing—-right?

Therapist, Husam Abdulkhaleq, a Palestinian, says the Israelis imprisoned him for 6 months and tortured him in the early 1980’s, so he fled to America. hmmmm…

From The Huffington Post (emphasis mine):

Muntaha Flufel says on most days she sits alone at home watching TV, unable to interact with the community she lives in. She keeps her windows and doors locked, in fear that someone might break in and attack her like they did in Baghdad in 2004. Her scars are constant reminders — marks where the perpetrators dropped acid on her skin.

Although troops left Iraq nearly two years ago, hundreds of civilians are still being killed each month, leading many Iraqis to flee the continuing violence, which is contributing to an already dire refugee situation. According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, since April of this year, 84, 902 Iraqis have been settled in the U.S., and new arrivals like Muntaha are reporting symptoms associated with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

We need to give some credit to this Huffington Post article by Erin Banco for even mentioning that these Chaldeans were tormented by Islamists!

According to health officials at ACCESS, a community organization dedicated to empowering and enabling individuals and families in the Detroit area, many of the new Iraqi Chaldean arrivals experienced primary and secondary trauma, having witnessed family members being killed, oftentimes persecuted at the hands of Islamist militias.

The trauma has caused what Husam Abdulkhaleq, the program manager of the psychosocial rehabilitation center, says includes nightmares, poor concentration, and extreme anger. The grueling process of integrating and assimilating in a new country only exacerbates the symptoms.   [Reporter Banco even dares to use the word “assimilating” a term usually verboten by the professional resettlers!—-ed]

It will be “disastrous” when the Syrians come!

The ACCESS psychosocial rehabilitation program receives the majority of its funding from the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), an organization that provides refugees with the services needed to integrate into their new communities. ACCESS just recently received another three years of funding from the group, but Abdulkhaleq says the money is significantly less than what it received in previous years.

ACCESS is barely able to provide services for the most recent arrivals from Iraq with the money it has. The next area of concern is the possible wave of Syrian refugees it could see over the next five years. If the UN begins to resettle even a portion of the hundreds of thousands who have been displaced by the violence in the US, officials at ACCESS say the consequences could be “disastrous.”

ACCESS’s potential client load should be increasing even without the Syrians as we resettled 19,491 potentially traumatized Iraqis in FY2013 alone!

The photo is from this 2001 story about ACCESS in the wake of 9/11 (his clients were really stressed!), but I found another article from 2004 only as a ‘document’ in which he describes his “torture” for no reason at all at the hands of the wicked Israelis.

Will Atlanta become the Detroit of the South, and did US State Department help push it that way?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

World Net Daily posted a story three days ago that didn’t say anything about refugees, but asked that question and ended with this line:

DeKalb has changed from majority white to majority black over the last several decades. As the Atlanta Journal Constitution gingerly put it: “The county’s transition from majority white to majority minority was politically rocky.”

Where is Professor Kotkin?  Is this one of his stellar examples of how immigrants are turning red cities and states into blue ones?

These refugees didn’t ‘find their way’ to the Atlanta suburbs, the US State Department and its contractors placed them there!

Debris from a condominium, left, in Brannon Hill (near Clarkston) remains five years after it was leveled. Units in several buildings, right, are in such poor repair that they have been boarded up for years. No money because area populated by Somalis says accompanying story. Photos by Andrew Cauthen

John T. Bennett at WND begins his sorry tale of corruption and how some suburbs are breaking from Atlanta and setting up their own cities (of super-white majorities!) to escape the responsibility of dealing with the Dekalb County suburbs.

As Detroit – beset by violence, debt and social woes – prepares to undergo a historic takeover by the Michigan state government, the city of Atlanta could be sliding toward a similar fate.

Some are quietly wondering whether Atlanta is in danger of becoming “the Detroit of the South.”

The city has experienced an ongoing succession of government scandals, ranging from a massive cheating racket to corruption, bribery, school-board incompetence and now the potential loss of accreditation for the local DeKalb County school system.

For several years, problems of this sort have fueled political reforms, including the creation of new cities in northern Atlanta suburbs. Due to the intensification of corruption scandals in DeKalb, some state-level reform proposals could become national news very soon.

Read all the gory details, here.   Obama must be fuming because with suburbs breaking away to form their own incorporated cities this goes against a fundamental Obama goal of making the burbs pay for the cities as outlined by Stanley Kurtz (read about it here), but that’s a story for another day and another blog!

So, how does the US State Department play a role? 

Because they have been for decades pouring refugees into Dekalb County!  That is why! (Just as they did in Detroit!) But, in fact as we learned here earlier this month they have slowed the flow of resettlements to the beleaguered city of  Clarkston, Georgia where city leaders said, ‘no more!’

However, once ethnic seed communities have been planted, secondary migrants will follow.  So even slowing resettlements directly from a third world country into a town does not necessarily mean the immigrant population will stop growing as their kinsmen arrive from elsewhere in the US because they want to be with their kind of people!

Look at this map of Dekalb County!

Dekalb County, Georgia just east of Atlanta proper. Decatur, Clarkston and Stone Mountain receive majority of Georgia’s refugees via US State Department contractors Catholic Charities, Church World Service and Lutheran Services.

Downtown Atlanta is in Fulton County and Dekalb is the county directly adjoining Fulton to the East.

Then go to WRAPS statistics and see what the primary resettlement cities in Georgia have been since Calendar Year 2007 (too much work to go back further, but this gives you an idea).   Also, have a look at a website which shows the changing demographics for Dekalb County from 2000 to 2010, here (whites are moving out).

Here (WRAPS, arrivals by destination city by nationality*) are the US State Department resettlement numbers for Dekalb County cities.   Georgia received 16,295 refugees from calendar year 2007 to 2013:

Atlanta:  3,826

Clarkston: 2,346

Decatur: 5,861

Stone Mountain: 2,525

So 89% of the refugees resettled in Georgia went to Atlanta and Dekalb County!

* I don’t know what’s up with this, they don’t appear to be giving us the nationalities any more—what are they hiding?

About the photo:

The photo is from this story about how the refugees flooding into Clarkston in previous years have driven out the white residents and brought more poverty and decay.  I first wrote about it here.  Don’t expect to see any balanced reporting any time soon in the mainstream media (including on Fox News) on changing demographics through refugee resettlement.