Tag: refugees

Obamacare applies to legal immigrants—all 150 varieties!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment
Obama: Have no fear! We’ve got your Obamacare instructions in 150 different languages!

Before you read this, here is my disclaimer:  Like most Americans, I don’t know what the heck Obamacare does or doesn’t do, but this is one supposed expert’s view on whether legal immigrants (although they may be non-citizens) must also sign-up for Obamacare.  Yes! says the expert (with some caveats!).

From About.com:

The Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare, begins a period of open enrollment on Tuesday, Oct. 1, and immigrants will have to comply with the new law.

Immigrants with legal status — green card-holders, asylees, people with Temporary Protected Status (TPS) — are required to have health insurance coverage just like U.S. citizens.

For immigrants without legal status, nothing changes. Obamacare has nothing to offer unauthorized immigrants other than the status quo. Hospitals are still required to provide emergency room care to anyone who comes through their doors, regardless of immigration status, race or ethnicity.  [Caveat #1:  hospitals will still have to treat everyone and then try to squeeze the patient for payment later—-good luck with that!—ed]

Immigrants who have lived in the United States legally for at least five years and meet income requirements may be eligible to get Medicaid health coverage.  [Caveat #2:  A large number of legal refugees will just sign up for Medicaid, and probably not be truthful about income.—ed]

Are there penalties for immigrants who qualify to participate in the new system but don’t? Yes, immigrants are subject to fines, just like U.S. citizens. [Caveat #3: We keep hearing that the fines are so low that it’s better to pay the fine, but do they even file a tax return on which to be fined?—ed]

Fear not!  If you are a confused immigrant, Obama said two days ago, this is all you need to do:

…. there’s a hotline where you can apply over the phone and get help with the application, or just get questions that you have answered by real people, in 150 different languages.   So let me give you that number.  The number is 1-800-318-2596 — 1-800-318-2596.

If any of you speak another language well, why not call and see what is available in that language!

Migrants, including refugees, evicted from tents under Indianapolis bridge

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

So we do have migrant camps in America.

Indianapolis tent city where immigrants and refugees were living until a few days ago.

Although not all of the 60-plus evicted from under an Indiana bridge are immigrants, I’ve been wondering for some time if the overload of unemployable (for one reason or another) immigrants in the US would eventually lead to encampments like those we see in Israel and Europe.  And, then I wonder if those stories (like this one) ever reached the mainstream media would the average American get-it about the perils of open borders and unlimited immigration.

From the AP (hat tip: ‘pungentpeppers’):

INDIANAPOLIS — Indianapolis police arrested several homeless people Monday who ignored the city’s order to vacate a makeshift camp near the city’s downtown area where dozens of tents had been set up beneath a railroad bridge.

The bridge on downtown Indianapolis’ south side was home to about 24 tents, and about half the residents folded up their shelters and left in response to the city’s 9 a.m. removal order.

But city police arrested at least five people who refused to the leave and disposed of the remaining tents.

Maurice Young, the camp’s self-appointed caretaker, was taken into custody along with a handful of camp supporters. Young told The Indianapolis Star (http://indy.st/19TvijU ) all the city has done is disperse the homeless residents.

Mixed group of residents, many with mental illnesses, drug addictions:

Young said he and his supporters want individualized solutions but he said that since Indianapolis doesn’t offer that he and the others have chosen to live outside the city’s homeless shelter system and on their own terms.

He said the homeless camp’s population fluctuates, but until a few weeks ago 67 people lived in the camp.

After the city’s Department of Public Works posted signs Aug. 19 ordering the land to be vacated by Monday, he said that about 10 people moved out.

Those that stayed until Monday ranged in age from about 30 to 74 and included about 15 women, two of them pregnant, and 10 veterans. The others are immigrants or refugees from Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, Liberia, Haiti, Jamaica and Mexico.

Young estimated about 80 percent have mental health issues, while others have addictions.

Indiana Overload!

For new readers, Indiana has had quite a problem with an overload of refugees especially in the Ft. Wayne area, although Indianapolis is also a “preferred” resettlement site.  Catholic Charities of Indianapolis is a primary refugee contractor there and I hope they have been contacted to see if any of their ‘clients’ have been living under the bridge.  Maybe the good Catholic parishioners of the Archdiocese of Indianapolis will take some of these destitute people into their homes?

Back in 2010, then Indiana Senator Richard Lugar requested a GAO study of the refugee program as a result of the lack of communication between the federal government/contractors on one side and local governments/citizens on the other who felt they were being swamped with refugees they couldn’t possibly afford to care for.  The GAO report is here and it is well worth your time to read it.  Whether it mattered one bit to the State Department and the ORR is not evident.

For more information type ‘Indiana’ or ‘Fort Wayne’ into our search function.

Four Israelis arrested in Tel Aviv for beating African migrants

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The African “asylum-seekers” have been sleeping in a park in Tel Aviv.

African migrants sleep in Tel Aviv park.
Photo: Ronen Zvulun/Reuters

Regular readers know we have been following the on-going tension in Israel as thousands of mostly Africans came across the Egyptian border in recent years and asked for asylum.  The flow was slowed when Israel built a substantial border fence, but the political battles are on-going as to what to do with the thousands already there.

See our entire category on Israel and refugees for more.

Here is the story from the Jerusalem Post:

Four men driven by a hatred of foreigners beat and robbed African migrants in south Tel Aviv in recent months, before they were arrested Monday by Tel Aviv police.

Tel Aviv police said Tuesday that the four men operated in the neighborhoods of Hatikva, Shapira, and the area around the Central Bus Station. They would single out foreigners walking around these neighborhoods and then would attack them “using great cruelty” – police said – using bottles and sticks to beat them into submission.

Police said the robberies were of secondary interest to the men, who were driven by a hatred of foreigners and were looking to beat and terrorize them, robbing them as a sort of afterthought.

The men, all aged 22 and 21, are themselves residents of south Tel Aviv, and will be brought for a remand extension at the Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court on Tuesday.

In April, Tel Aviv police arrested five Israeli males, including two minors, for carrying out a series of attacks on Africans in south Tel Aviv.

Of course we don’t condone what these men have done, but frankly it is human nature to protect one’s territory so it’s not unexpected.   I think it has a name—Ethnic nationalism.  It is something the multiculturalists would like to stamp out permanently.

How long before we in the US have migrant camps like this one, and the ones in Germany, France, and Holland?

Addendum:  Here is an earlier story where an Israeli cabinet member says the migrants must be dispersed.

Is Rush reading RRW?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I caught a bit of Rush Limbaugh’s discussion today of the story we reported yesterday—-the one about “asylum-seekers” flooding the US border one day last week.  All said the same thing, that they wanted asylum because they had a credible fear of persecution by Mexican drug cartels.

Narco refugees!

This idea is not new.  I checked our archives and see that in 2012 we wrote about a Texas immigration lawyer working to expand the definition of asylum to include people some call “narco refugees.”    Immigration lawyers like Carlos Spector, and he is not alone, are looking to fatten their wallets while changing America.

Imagine if lawyers like this guy prevailed, we would have people on the border expecting to be granted asylum from every crime-ridden country in the world!

***Update*** Looks like the O-man has already expanded the definition, here.

***Update August 13th***Commenter to this post, pungentpeppers, alerts us to more on the story—we give them hotel rooms and all are not Mexicans!

Here (below) is some of what Rush had to say.  He doesn’t get all the nuances of the asylum process, but that doesn’t matter.  The words “asylum” and “refugee” were heard by millions of listeners who may in the future pay a little more attention to what I believe has been an immigration law (Refugee Resettlement Act of 1980 thanks to Carter, Kennedy, Biden) misused and abused by too many, for too long.

If Rush only knew that the Obama–Gang of Eight amnesty bill will make receiving asylum easier and put more cash in the pockets of the refugee contractors whose job it is to hook the new refugees and asylees up with social services he would probably have a heart attack.  (See Rand Paul: “They bring’em in and sign’em up for welfare!).  And, don’t tell him those same contractors, largely funded with tax dollars, are also busy lobbying for passage of S.744!

Limbaugh:

“Just this past Monday, Border Patrol agents say about 200 people came through the Otay Crossing claiming a quote: ‘credible fear’ of the drug cartels.  So many were doing this that they had to close down the processing center and move the overflow by vans to another station.  ‘They are being told if they come across the border, when they come up to the border and they say certain words, they  will be allowed into the country,’ said a person who did not want to be identified on camera.  ‘We are being overwhelmed.’  Pete Nunez, former U.S. Attorney and immigration expert says, ‘This will swamp the system.’ ‘To make our system even more ridiculous than it has been in the  past,” he adds.  ‘There are no detention facilities for families, so the family would have to be split up. We don’t want to split families up, so we end up releasing people,'” out into the wild, essentially.

So what this essentially is, folks, is refugee status.  And refugee status is about the best status you can have, living in America.  Being a refugee is right up there with being a citizen, because benefits for refugees include food stamps, housing vouchers, English language training, job training, transportation passes, Medicaid, supplemental security income assistance, SSI, as well as other public and private benefits.  I mean, the Tsarnaev family were refugees.  They landed in America either at Logan or JFK, and they claimed asylum.  And that’s all you have to do.

Now, theoretically you’re kept track of, but if you come in claiming oppression, political asylum or, in this case, a credible fear of the drug cartels, then you’re admitted.  And somebody has come up with this idea.  Now, it’s not known who, obviously, but somebody’s come up with this.  What are the odds that whoever has come up with this is either a Democrat or a Democrat activist?

And then he said this—-the Syrians are coming!

Now, look, we’re already taking in thousands upon thousands of Mexicans and Hispanics, and there’s a companion story here about Syrian refugees are now pouring into the United States.  And there hadn’t been anything signed.  There’s no new immigration bill.  All this happened, the Republicans didn’t sign on to some 1,000 page bill.  There are plenty of laws on the books to overwhelm the country with new immigrants without any amnesty bill taking place.  So while we’re all debating that, this new influx just continues.

That is right!

Read it all!  Limbaugh links this story to one about taxpaying Americans fleeing the country.

Catholic Church in Chicago to sponsor two refugee families

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

O.K. So what is so interesting about that?

They are talking about raising $1600 privately to sponsor a family for the first three months, and that is about what Catholic Charities or the Bishops get per family from the US taxpayer.  So does this mean that since the local church will sponsor for three months, the local Catholic Charities contractor gets to pocket what they got from the feds for the same family?

I’ve been an advocate for private sponsorship from the earliest days of writing this blog, HOWEVER, my plan would leave the contractor-middleman (in this case some bureaucracy of the Church out of it), and my reform suggestion is that the family be supported privately for a year or two (three months is hardly time enough to find a job and be self-sufficient) with NO dependence on taxpayer-funded social services.  In that way, the parishioners wishing to help a family would be doing so out of a purely private charitable motivation and there would be a heightened opportunity for the family to truly assimilate.

Here is the story from Chicago.  Again, does this mean the funds received by the contractor for this family can be pocketed?

RIVERSIDE – Earlier this year, St. Mary Parish of Riverside started an initiative to help refugee families resettling in Chicago become self-sufficient in three months by providing housing, job opportunities, financial support and a medium to develop relationships with the church’s parishioners.

St. Mary Parish began its Refugee Sponsorship Committee in March in collaboration with the Catholic Charities Refugee Resettlement program and plans to help resettle two families by the end of this year.

It needs to raise $1,600 per family to be able to supply services, including a welcome pack, subsidized rent for 90 days, an apartment in Rodgers Park, financial help and assistance in finding a job.

The church has raised $1,556 so far and has furniture in storage for the potential apartment.

“The goal is to ease [them] in,” Dalia Rocotello, a member of the Refugee Sponsorship Committee said.

To be clear, my plan would naturally limit the number of refugees entering the US by the amount of private charity available for their care until they are truly on their feet.