Tag: Senator Angus King

Federal officials visit refugee-overloaded Lewiston, ME: we feel your pain, but isn’t much we can do

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is a bit of old news from January that I just came across today.  I hadn’t seen it, so I figured you might not have either.

Laurence Bartlett (DOS) and Eskinder Negash (ORR) listen to complaints in Lewiston, ME. Photo: Scott Taylor Sun Journal

Seems that head honchos from the US State Department and the Office of Refugee Resettlement traveled to Maine (and elsewhere) to calm the locals.

But, how many times have we been told that everything is copacetic in Somali-overloaded Lewiston?  If everything was just peachy these two wouldn’t have bothered to go there in the first place.

From the Lewiston Sun Journal:

LEWISTON — Federal immigration and refugee resettlement policies will continue to be felt by local communities, federal officials told a roomful of city and social agency representatives Wednesday.

Eskinder Negash, director of the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, and Larry Bartlett, director of the Office of Refugee Admissions, discussed immigration policies at Lewiston City Hall.

It was part of a two-day trip through Maine, one of many similar meetings held around the country* throughout the year. A similar meeting was held Tuesday in Portland.

Desired by whom?

Immigration policy is shaped by two factors: a desire to help less fortunate people and fiscal realities at home.

The humanitarian industrial complex wants more refugees, but it’s up to local folks to pay for it and tolerate the cultural upheaval!  That is not exactly the words used, but that is what they are saying!  To me, the “humanitarians” are like little children who want more stuff regardless if Mommy and Daddy have the money to pay for it.

When the “humanitarians” say jump, the feds ask, “how high?”

“There is no greater responsibility than that (which) we get from community leaders to make sure refugees get the support they deserve,” Bartlett said. “But there are many pressures from the humanitarian side of our country to grow this program.”

Too bad that some cities “find themselves” in a tough place!  We are willing to listen but that’s about all we can do!

Cities such as Lewiston find themselves in a tough place with little federal support when refugees begin calling it home.

“In some ways, we have a challenging program and you feel the effects on a community level, and we have to thank you for that,” Bartlett said. “We don’t have all the answers and that’s why we have these discussions to hear what the problems are.”

For local officials, the biggest problem is a lack of federal aid for education, English language and other resettlement programs.

Heck, the State Department doesn’t have money to give to communities (only to our contractors!), and it’s up to the state to decide how much money to send to struggling overloaded towns.  Sun Journal story continued:

Bartlett said his office, part of the State Department, has no programs designed to help at the local level. Negash, whose office is part of the federal Health and Human Services agency, said there is federal help, but it’s limited.

“The money goes to the state,” Negash said. “The money always goes to the state, and the state has all the discretion it needs to use the money.”

Bartlett:  We just carry out the will of Congress.  We feel your pain, but not much we can do about it.  Criticize us, but ain’t nothing gonna change!

Those funding and policy priorities are decided by Congress, the officials said.

“This is the way this country has designed this program to work,” Bartlett said. “We know it works, but it’s not perfect and we accept criticism willingly.”

Readers, if you live in overloaded refugee resettlement hotspots, you must complain to your Member of Congress and US Senators.  And, don’t be afraid of someone calling you a racist! This is one more of a long list of state’s rights issues abused by Washington.

* By the way, not long ago we reported on the ‘we-feel-your-pain roadshow’ to Ft. Wayne, Indiana.

For new readers, click here for our extensive archive on Lewiston, ME.  Be sure to see this post on Maine as a welfare magnet and the role of Catholic Charities in bringing Somalis to Maine in the first place.

For our Maine readers, your Senators Angus King and Susan Collins want MORE refugees and immigrants.  They both voted for S.744, the amnesty bill.

Maine Senator Angus King: We want more immigrants in Maine!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We want more immigrants in Maine and in America because Thomas Jefferson said that’s good for America!  (Or I think he did! Well, sort of!). King opened a floor speech last week with words from Jefferson that frankly I read three or four times and couldn’t figure out how the words fit today’s immigration situation, especially when one considers the large number of Muslim immigrants entering the US and Maine.

Indeed Jefferson, of all people, knew what violence Muslims were capable of.  He would never have ‘welcomed’ Muslims to America, but maybe King doesn’t know about the Barbary Wars.

Here are a couple of excerpts from King’s speech on S.744:

Vibrant refugee? Portland Somali convicted of rape after breaking into woman’s home while she slept. King: Immigrants are a little scary!

Does this discussion affect the State of Maine? Well, yes, it does. We have migrants and immigrants picking our crops in northern Maine, blueberries and potatoes and broccoli. We have a vibrant refugee and asylum-seeking community in Portland, ME, and in Lewiston. Many of those from Africa come here with very different cultures. We have 52 languages spoken in the Portland public schools. Yes, we have strains and difficulties adjusting one culture to another. But we are making it work and it is making our State richer spiritually, culturally, intellectually, and, yes, financially. It is working.  [Readers: Type Lewiston into our search function to see how it’s working!—ed]

King:  We need more immigrants because the white birthrate is declining, and so we need to speed up the decline of America as we know it by allowing the Third World to enter in a speedier manner!   Heck!  Might as well get it over with sooner than later!

We are living in a negative demographic time bomb. Last year, I believe for the first time in American history, we had more deaths than births of White Americans. One doesn’t have to be a mathematician to know if that continues, we will shrink and shrivel as a society. We need immigration to add to our population, to add to the ideas and creativity.

[…..]

Immigrants are always going to be different and a little scary, and that has been true throughout American history.

Read the whole speech.  It is the usual blah, blah, blah….but read it anyway!  By the way, King says this is the job he has been preparing for throughout his entire life, here.

Then below is a report from some readers of Refugee Resettlement Watch who visited a staff member in King’s office the following day.

We need to take in Syrian refugees!

The speech was on Thursday.    On Friday we visited with a Senator King aide who is paid $73,000 per year and who works on immigration issues. We were there to discuss the 24-pound Immigration bill, S. 744.  The aide did give us a  lot of time and we discussed many points.  The below points may be of particular interest to readers of Refugee Resettlement Watch and to those in Maine.

The aide, on his own, blurted out, without any question or provocation from us, that whenever “we [America] invade a country or create a war and chaos, we need to take in refugees from that country.  We need to take in Syrian refugees. We need to take in Iraqi and Afghan refugees.”

[I didn’t think we had gone to war in Syria yet, but I guess I’m quibbling! We did send arms through Benghazi earlier and we are promising more weapons to the rebels real soon, so I guess that means, at least in the mind of King’s staffer, that the refugees are ours!—ed]

Later, in response to one of our group suggesting that her experiences in the Middle East indicated that Muslim and Arabic culture are just too different and should not be allowed into the USA, the aide responded  “that is exactly the same argument that was used against the Catholics 100 years ago.”  One assumes that the aide does not foresee within the  Muslim refugee and immigrant population the possibility of an embedded catastrophic problem.  The aide had no response when recent events in Boston, the World Trade center and other places were mentioned.

Go here to learn more about the Portland Somali rapist.

The problem King has here (was the speech written by this staffer?), by using emotional arguments and platitudes to make his point, is that for every appealing “creative” blueberry picking immigrant, I can find him an immigrant criminal, a terrorist or a welfare mooch, or an immigration advocate in the Chamber of Commerce looking for cheap blueberry-picking labor!