Syracuse Letter Writer: Take Care of Americans First!

10/11/2019 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ 1 Comment

Easily the first question anyone asks who is hearing for the first time that we have admitted to the US, at great taxpayer expense, hundreds of thousands of refugees over the last four decades is this:

Why aren’t we taking care of our own vulnerable people first?

The other day when I said that we need a grassroots group called ‘Migration Moratorium Now!’ I figure the subtitle would be something like this: ‘Take Care of Americans First!’

And, that is the gist of this letter, thanks to reader Joanne for sharing it, at Syracuse.com:

Syracuse is falling apart, and Mayor Walsh’s priority is refugees?

The writer, Paul Strail, is responding to a lengthy opinion piece written by the latest liberal mayor of Syracuse, Ben Walsh, with the help of Michael Melara executive director of Catholic Charities of Onondaga County.

Here is just a bit of Mr. Strail’s response to the mayor:

Mayor Ben Walsh establishing his bonafides as an Anti-Trump liberal.

The Post-Standard recently reported that Syracuse is still one of the poorest cities in the country. Nevertheless, Mayor Ben Walsh wrote in your paper that President Donald Trump was wrong to limit the number of refugees that the United States could allow (“Dear President Trump, Syracuse wants refugees,” Sept. 26, 2019).

This seems like a strange priority for Walsh to stake out, especially because his city is falling apart . At times, there seem to be homeless men and women panhandling on every street corner. Many of these folks are veterans.

[….]

The murder rate in Syracuse is too high. Academic achievement in the city schools is too low. So, when the mayor should be focused on meeting the many vital needs of his own city, he has to let everyone know that his real concern lies in preventing Trump from restricting the flow of foreign refugees into his city. How that misguided priority will help improve the crime rate, boost academic achievement in the schools, elevate the standard of living of the city’s poor and homeless, and give struggling homeowners some kind of tax relief, is anyone’s guess.

The truth is that Syracuse’s reputation as a sanctuary city must be maintained if Walsh hopes to win the support (and donations) of enough liberal Democrats in the next election. Loudly criticizing the president is the best way to do that. The suggestion that the president must hate refugees because he is an extraordinary bigot is the means by which Walsh is feeding red meat to Syracuse’s Trump-haters.

I dare not copy any more of it, please read Mr. Strail’s sensible analysis.

One thing that the refugees of Syracuse have done is to turn this Catholic Church into a mosque. Read about how the crosses were removed and how there was to be no media coverage of the conversion. https://www.syracuse.com/news/2015/08/from_church_to_mosque_syracuse_islamic_group_cuts_crosses_tries_to_connect_to_ne.html

One of the first things I would ask the mayor is this: Since Syracuse has ‘welcomed’ 10,000 refugees to the city over a recent ten year period, where is the proof that they have revitalized the city?

Indeed are they still there, or like the Bosnians who supposedly helped boost the economy of St. Louis have they moved out of a city run by progressive politicians?

Amazing how either people don’t read, or have very short memories.

In 2015 we reported on a story from the Atlantic about how Syracuse is falling into perpetual poverty as its poorer sections become poorer with the importation of already impoverished refugees!

I call this illogical argument—that refugees bring economic boom times to struggling cities—the big lie!

Syracuse, NY letter to editor: help me with Catholic Charities fuzzy math

08/15/2018 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I’m happy to report on a letter-to-the-editor at Syracuse.com because I had meant to post on the original article that generated this reader’s letter and never got around to it.

Letter-writer George Checksfield is referring to an article, here, in which we learn that the State of New York is plugging the “hole” created by lost federal revenue for Catholic Charities (from you really, the taxpayer).

He wants to know why does a private group like this need taxpayer dollars to hold on to employees they don’t need.

holy trinity Syracuse — In 2014, Syracuse’s Holy Trinity Catholic Church became a mosque and these Catholic Charities refugee pushers don’t even get what is happening to them. https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2014/03/30/syracuse-refugee-group-buys-catholic-church-will-be-converted-to-a-mosque/

The mainstream media rarely makes the connection clear to the average taxpaying citizen reading a story like this that there is a direct relationship between the number of refugees being brought in and Catholic Charities of Onondaga County (this one and many others throughout the US) budget.

Their payments from the feds are based on how many refugees the agency places. It is a per refugee head basis and so big families bring in bigger bucks to CC (sorry for the zillionith time I’ve repeated that!).

When the President reduced the number of refugees being admitted to the US, it caused all these federal contractors to see their budgets shrink.

Below is a screenshot of Mr. Checksfield’s letter.

But, do not miss the nearly 30 comments, virtually all negative toward Catholic Charities, that have been sent in to Syracuse.com.

Continue reading “Syracuse, NY letter to editor: help me with Catholic Charities fuzzy math” →

Dear Welcoming Community, is your school system rolling in dough?

07/03/2016 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Are your local taxpayers ready to pay for a “NEW REALITY”—that they must pay for the translation services that the federal government is now demanding in immigrant ‘rich’ towns and cities.
Diversity isn’t strength, but it is expensive!

Bill and Hill — In Bill’s last months in office he left a ‘legacy’ of executive orders and one (order #13166 ) said that any institution receiving federal funds was required to provide interpreters. So, today you see medical facilities, school systems and the criminal justice system paying for expensive interpreters as refugees are spread out to more and more small cities and towns. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13166

This is a lengthy story that everyone in towns anticipating refugee arrivals must read. From the Hechinger Report which features Syracuse, NY as its star of story (the city where a Catholic Church has become a mosque when refugee numbers expanded):

The Bhutanese population has grown into a flourishing, tightly knit group of about 3,000 people. They are part of a substantial refugee population from South Asia, Africa and the Middle East that has transformed the city and its schools. Students in the Syracuse City School District speak more than 70 different languages and four of the most common among them are Nepali, Karen, Somali, and Arabic. [Arabic is the number one language spoken by refugees entering the US, see here.—ed]

In 2010, to better serve this population, the Syracuse City school District created a new position — nationality workers — to serve as a bridge between new immigrant communities and the schools.

I’ll bet the federal refugee contractor trying to sell your town a bill of goods (they say the feds pay for everything!), never mentioned this:

A failure to communicate effectively with immigrant parents is a violation of their civil rights, considered discrimination based on national origin, which is prohibited by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Without language services, non-English-speaking parents are considered to be blocked from equal access to school information and resources.

As refugees spread out across the U.S., settling in the Southeast, Midwest, and many rural areas that, before, were fairly insulated from large immigrant populations, schools are being forced to adapt to a new reality.

Syracuse is one of the more proactive districts when it comes to providing language access. While it struggles, at times, to meet its obligations, districts in other cities and states have fared worse. Dozens have been investigated by the Office of Civil Rights or the Department of Justice in recent years following complaints that they did not provide interpreters or translated materials to parents who needed them. These schools are in Yuma, Arizona; New Orleans, Louisiana; Richmond, Virginia; Detroit, Michigan; Modesto, California; and Seattle, Washington, among others.

[….]

The legal rationale for language access requirements has existed for decades, but the Obama administration has been more aggressive than others in holding schools accountable. [Not surprising!—ed]

While the Civil Rights Act doesn’t specifically require schools to offer interpretation and translation services to parents — or any special supports for their non-English-speaking children – it bars discrimination based on national origin in any program or activity receiving federal dollars. The courts have consistently relied on this rationale to require schools to provide these services, and a “Dear Colleague” letter from the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights and the Department of Justice in 2015 went into explicit detail about what schools have to do to communicate with immigrant parents.

Read it all and get ready Reno, NV, Rutland, VT, Ithaca, NY, Missoula, MT, Asheville, NC, Fayetteville, AR, Charleston, WV, etc. Have you got your Arabic interpreters lined up?
And, you know what is really funny, often the well-paid interpreters are refugees themselves (just as in this story) and the contractors can crow about how refugees find jobs!
You might want to look for other stories here at RRW involving interpreters because there have been refugee criminals who got off the hook because of poor language translation by court-appointed interpreters.
P.S. If you want to know more about Bhutanese refugees (not Muslims), click here, because we have followed their arrival in America since George W. Bush welcomed 60,000 of them in 2007 (we are now probably looking at (at least) 80,000).

Another story about refugees living in slums, Syracuse this time….

03/27/2016 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

….where Catholic Charities is seeding the city with Somalis!
Let me repeat! Catholic Charities is responsible in this story about Somalis living in slums in Syracuse.

Watch! Instead of recognizing that we are resettling more impoverished people (with no chance at upward mobility) to American slums in the name of ‘Christian charity’ than we can afford, they will all be demanding more tax dollars rather than a slowdown in the process.
Obama and his ‘religious’ contractors, are expecting to resettle a whopping 85,000 this year alone!
Cloward and Piven live before your very eyes!
From Syracuse.com (emphasis is mine):

Syracuse, NY — There’s no heat or water in the dead of winter. Urine and feces dirty the hallways. Children go to school scarred by bedbug bites. Drug dealers take refuge inside busted doors.

This is what America looks like for dozens of refugees, who fled war and persecution to find a North Side apartment complex that is no refuge.

And U.S. taxpayers are footing the bill, paying thousands of dollars in rents each month to owners who haven’t consistently paid water bills, maintained the property or provided adequate security.

That’s according to a class-action lawsuit filed in February on behalf of more than 40 Somali refugees living at the Kimton Apartments, 1313 Butternut St., for years known as “Little Mo” after the Somali capital of Mogadishu. The lawsuit argues the problems are so big that they affect everyone living in the building.

Mike Melara runs this office of Catholic Charities using his “entrepreneurial” instincts.

Tenants “came to this country with the promise of a new life, where they and their children would be safe,” lawyer Josh Cotter wrote in the lawsuit. “Upon their arrival, they found their new home is not much better than the refugee camps they just left.”

[….]

“African houses are more beautiful than American houses,” she said.

[….]

Very few Somali refugees make it to America. [The reporter apparently has no clue that the number of Somalis admitted to the US is well on its way to 150,000!—ed]

Continue reading about the slum landlord and its property manager connected to Catholic Charities.
The report says the Somalis have been offered opportunities to leave, but don’t want to break up their Somali “community.” So much for assimilation!
Photo: Learn more about the man running the resettlement program in Syracuse, here.
For new readers, click here for past posts on New York, one of the top 5 resettlement states in the nation.
Update! This morning Chuck Todd on Meet the Press suggested that what happened in Belgium wouldn’t happen here because our Muslims were not living in slums with no assimilation going on….oh really Chuck!

Syracuse, NY refugee story confirms imported immigrant poverty does not revitalize cities

11/13/2015 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Did you ever hear of the ‘big lie theory?’ Basically it says that the lie is so colossal no one would believe you made it up. But, one of many big lies perpetrated by the refugee resettlement industry is the one which says pouring thousands of impoverished immigrants into a dying city will revive it—-a concept which defies logic and commonsense!
Here is a story in The Atlantic (not some right wing blog!) about how the city of Syracuse is becoming more impoverished as the refugees pour in.
For our readers from Minnesota, read the whole thing, because Somalis who are resettled in Syracuse are hightailing it to your neighborhood in search of jobs and better welfare (one Somali says he has to get money to send ‘home’ to Somalia). Which reminds me that phony-baloney studies on how immigrants supposedly bring boom times to cities, NEVER factor in the remittances the immigrants send out of the country thus making those dollars unavailable to the local economy.

New York map — If you live in New York State and want to learn more about what your state is giving refugees and who is involved, go here to this interactive map: https://otda.ny.gov/programs/bria/providers/default.asp?region=Central

Refugees falling into “perpetual poverty.”

SYRACUSE—Drive around this economically depressed city and the signs of the more than 10,000 refugees who have settled here are everywhere, from the ethnic grocery stores on the Northside to clusters of Somali Bantu women sitting in brightly colored veils and dresses in Central Village, one of the city’s housing projects in the Southside.

The number of refugees arriving in America is nearing a recent high, and will continue to track upward following an announcement by President Obama last month that the country would welcome at least 10,000 displaced Syrians.

Syracuse, like other cities in the North and Midwest that have experienced population losses, has put out the welcome mat for refugees, with Mayor Stephanie Miner joining 17 mayors in a letter to President Obama encouraging the country to accept even more Syrian refugees.

But Syracuse, like many other cities with large populations of refugees, is grappling with the challenges of bringing strangers from abroad to a down-and-out area. More than 70 different languages are spoken in Syracuse City schools, which a court has declared underfunded. Nearby Utica banned 17-to-20-year-olds from city schools, instead choosing to bus them to a school where they can’t earn a diploma. Syracuse is still trying to figure out how to find housing for refugees who can’t afford much and how to ensure, in a region where jobs are hard to come by, that refugees don’t fall into perpetual poverty.

So far, the city has struggled to deliver on those goals. According to analysis by Paul Jargowsky, a fellow at the Century Foundation, the number of high-poverty census tracts doubled in Syracuse from 2000 to 2013. Many of the areas that saw the highest jumps in concentrated poverty were Northside neighborhoods where large populations of refugees have resettled. Even there, refugees have a hard time finding affordable housing.

There is so much more, but I am running out of time. Please read it all yourself especially if you are in a ‘pocket of resistance’ and need more ammunition to persuade your local government to keep refugee contractors out of your cities and towns.
Because there is so much other interesting news today, apologies to all who were waiting for a report from my trip to Washington yesterday, I am likely not going to get to it until later today or tomorrow…other duties call.
Click here for our many, many posts on Syracuse.