immigrant welfare Archives - Page 3 of 3 - Refugee Resettlement Watch

We have reported on the problem in Maine for months (years!). The gist of it is that Maine has had a wonderland of welfare for immigrants (that is what brought the first Somalis to Lewiston years ago) and now the LePage Administration is trying to cut back social services to asylum seekers. (The federal government does not give welfare to asylum seekers until they have become legitimate legal refugees.)

Apparently the word got out throughout Africa and elsewhere—get to Maine and you can get social services while you wait for your asylum application to be processed. So they came.

For new readers, asylum seekers get into the US on their own (visa overstays etc.) and then apply for asylum (claiming to be persecuted at home). If granted asylum they become “refugees” in the full sense of the word and get federal taxpayer goodies and help from a federal resettlement contractor. But, thanks to the border crashers an already over full asylum court can’t get to cases for years.

Here is a bit of the story at CentralMaine.com, but you should read the whole thing (of course it starts out with a sympathetic ‘star’ of the story, Journalism 101?). They are all “vulnerable” you know! (but aren’t there Americans who are vulnerable as well?).

Once vulnerable in their homelands, Maine’s asylum seekers, in growing numbers, are left waiting – for permission to work, for their status to change and, now, to see if looming welfare reforms will make them vulnerable all over again.

[….]

Thousands of people from war-torn or politically troubled nations in sub-Saharan Africa have arrived in Maine in recent years on their own with visas that allow them to visit, work or study on a temporary basis, only to seek asylum so they can stay permanently. Asylum applicants wait in a fuzzy legal status in which they are considered to be undocumented but protected from deportation. And at the same time they are prohibited by federal law from working for at least six months – and sometimes much longer.

Meanwhile, the wait for asylum can take years, with a nationwide backlog of applications that is expected to grow because of the surge of unaccompanied minors crossing the southern U.S. border in recent months.

Read it all.

Moral of the story—if your state gives generous welfare benefits to asylum seekers, they will come.

See our entire Maine archive, here. Or narrow your search and put ‘Lewiston Maine’ or ‘Portland Maine’ into our search window.

O’Reilly: Why are we supporting questionable foreign folks?

(LOL! He doesn’t know the half of it!)

I’m an ‘occasional’ fan of O’Reilly, and happened to catch part of his show last night when he used Alan Colmes as a punching bag about the Boston Bomber family’s reported $100,000 dip into the pockets of American taxpayers.

If O’Reilly continues to investigate the refugee/asylum system, I will be his number one fan!

Mediaite has the story and the clip:

Bill O’Reilly kicked off his show tonight expressing outrage with the mother of Boston bombing suspects the Tsarnaev brothers for accusing the United States of a conspiracy to frame and kill her children, when her family has been taking more than $100,000 in welfare benefits for years. O’Reilly and Monica Crowley expressed outrage at the lack of welfare oversight, and when Alan Colmes challenged their claims, O’Reilly told Colmes to “shut up.”

O’Reilly called the mother “disgraceful” for her comments, and asked exactly why “we the people [are] supporting questionable foreign folks.” He wanted to know why President Obama and Governor Deval Patrick aren’t expressing outrage with the fact that the Tsarnaevs were getting welfare assistance, decrying the lack of outrage as “business as usual” for an immigration policy and a welfare system that turns a blind eye in situations like these.

Watch the 8 minute segment on Mediaite.

The Asylum question!

Why did we let them in and how persecuted could they have been if they were, and are, traveling back and forth?

Funny that the Mediaite report just focused on the welfare use, but to me O’Reilly’s outrage about their “vacations” to the land of persecution struck a cord.

Readers, we have seen it over and over again. We give refuge to people who claim persecution and then we see them go ‘home’ for visits and to do business. We have written at RRW about Bosnians going ‘home’ because they still own property, Mesketian Turks have houses to sell back ‘home’ and we can only speculate that they too must go back to Russia for occasional business, but the most outrageous are the Somalis. (Muslims all!)

We are resettling Somalis by the hundreds each month RIGHT NOW, yet many we have fed, housed, clothed and educated go back for various reasons—primarily “business” or to visit the family. Who can afford a plane ticket to Africa? But, we can’t forget that dozens of ‘youths’ went back to learn the fine art of Jihad, here in 2008!

Since the beginning of the 2013 fiscal year we have resettled 3,674 Somalis. If that rate continues we will be bringing nearly 9,000 Somalis to your cities this year, putting 2013 right up there with some of our top resettlement years (since 9/11!) for Somalis!

BTW, the family reunification program for Somalis recently re-opened after being closed for years because of widespread fraud—those getting in as ‘family’ were found (through random DNA testing) not to be related at all. The State Department admitted that tens of thousands of Somalis are in the US illegally!

Yet, we have one report after another that the new government of Somalia is welcoming American Somalis HOME!

Don’t forget!

The Gang of Eight bill will make it easier for so-called asylum seekers and refugees to be admitted to the US because it makes whole groups of people eligible while under the present system they are still supposed to prove they personally fear persecution!