This story is not new to us. Japan is one of the few modern countries in the world actively working to keep Japan for the Japanese and the UNHCR and the international humanitarian industrial complex are riled up over it (again!), even as Japan is one of the most generous countries offering humanitarian relief to legitimate refugees housed in camps in the Middle East and Africa.
They are saving Japan for the Japanese people! So what is wrong with that?
Most asylum-seekers reaching Japan are clearly economic migrants and are not trying to escape persecution.
Japan accepted 11 asylum seekers out of a record 5,000 applications in 2014, Ministry of Justice data showed, drawing criticism from advocates and lawyers that the country is not doing enough to provide protection to refugees.
The number of asylum applications rose 53% from the previous year, while the refugee recognition rate was 0.2%, one of the lowest among industrialised economies.
“The low recognition rate is shameful,” said immigration lawyer Shogo Watanabe.
In 2013, Japan accepted six refugees, its lowest for 15 years.
A lack of planning for the protection and resettlement of refugees, as well as dysfunction in the system that processes asylum claims, was behind the low intake, said Mieko Ishikawa, director of Forum for Refugees Japan.
Unfortunately Germany and the US have a death wish!
Germany and the United States were the largest destinations for asylum seekers in 2013, receiving 109,580 and 88,360 applications respectively, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees data shows.
Wannabee workers come to Japan and claim asylum
“Most people aren’t coming for political reasons. In countries like Nepal and Sri Lanka, many people think they can come to Japan to work,” said Hiroshi Kimizuka, director of refugee recognition at the Ministry of Justice.
The article identifies one of the complainers as Brian Barbour of the Japan Association of Refugees. Doesn’t sound like a Japanese name to me, are there western open borders agitators working there?
Unfortunately, I am going away for a few days and have to dash in just a little bit so I can’t dig into Mr. Barbour’s resume or the Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network. If any readers do find out more about him, send links to this post while I’m away.
Well, what do you know, some international criticism building because the US has not opened its arms (yet!) to mass numbers of Syrian refugees.
But, as I have pointed out on many occasions, Obama’s name is never linked with the criticism as Bush’s was always linked in media blasts every month for probably a year before the Bush Administration opened the spigot for Iraqi refugees (that are now coming in at a rate of over 20,000 a year!).
We have also been pointing out that the refugee resettlement contractors*** have been demanding 12,000-15,000 Syrians a year be admitted. They were getting geared up—finding new towns in which to resettle them—and then a few weeks ago the boom dropped when the FBI testifiedin the House Homeland Security Committee that there is no way they can properly screen the Syrians. Of course, there is no way to properly screen the over 800 Somalis entering the US every month now either!
Anne Richard Asst. Secretary of State with UNHCR Antonio Guterres: partners in deciding what third-worlders are coming to your town!
This is interesting news, despite the lifting of the ban on material support, the Obama Administration has yet to apply the lesser screening requirements to Syrians.
By the way, if you saw the record-breaking post on Spartanburg, SC you know that one group World Relief would like to settle in South Carolina is Syrians.
We have resettled around 500 Syrians so far. Approximately 87% are Muslims. See where they have been placed in the US in the first three months of FY2015, here.
There is one way to get around this worry over screening Muslims, don’t bring Muslims!
We could join Canada and say only Christians and other minorities are permitted entry into the US!
By continuing to select Syrians for America, the UN is putting political pressure on our Homeland Security Department to step it up. There will be much wailing that we couldn’t possibly be so mean as to leave all these people waiting in line!
The US is preparing to permanently resettle thousands of the millions of Syrians forced to flee their homes during the country’s four-year civil war. But as the lengthy resettlement process speeds up, some human rights advocates are concerned that certain refugees are being unfairly excluded. [Once the pipeline is open, and even if the civil war comes to an end, the flow of permanent refugees from Syria will continue for years.—ed]
So far, the US has accepted only tiny numbers of Syrians: 105 in the year to October 2014 and just 36 in the year before that, although it has stepped up admissions with 350 refugees in the past four months.
Last year officials eased the “material support” rule under US immigration law that was designed to prevent terrorist sympathisers from entering the US but instead acted as a dragnet, ensnaring Syrians with no real connection to terrorism. More than a year later, however, advocates say they still have not seen the exemptions applied to Syrian refugee cases.
“What this means is that a lot of people who need protections and who might fall under those ‘material support’ inclusions – by no fault of their own – aren’t getting protection in the US,” said Noah Gottschalk, senior humanitarian policy adviser for Oxfam America. “And that means that a number of people who are among the most vulnerable in the world are being denied protections that they very much need.”
Representatives from a handful of refugee aid groups said they were still waiting for the the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to release guidelines on how to apply the rule change. Until then, they said, Syrian refugees applying for residence in the US were at risk of being denied entry for an act as small as selling sandwiches to rebel fighters. [This is a straw man argument, what refugee in his right mind is going to report on an application for admission to the US that he/she gave sandwiches to rebels?—ed]
“Our main concern at this stage is the absence of that guidance,” said Anna Greene, the policy and advocacy director for US programmes at the International Rescue Committee (IRC). [The IRC is a contractor looking for more paying “clients” to resettle.—ed]
For those who don’t believe it, here it is again. The UN is picking our refugees!
The US State Department has received more than 11,000 resettlement applications from Syrian refugees in recent months, the vast majority of which are referrals from the UN high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR).
Quick! US taxpayers, hide your wallets!
Don’t worry, terrorist men won’t get in because we are only planning to bring economically needy women, children, senior citizens and sick and disabled people!
Richard (Anne Richard, Asst. Secretary of State for PRM) said the US intended to accept thousands of Syrian refugees in 2015 and 2016. She said she did not anticipate security being an issue with the Syrians the UNHCR was referring to the US, as the majority were widows, women and children, elderly people and people with debilitating medical conditions.
Update May 20th: Spartanburg County Council obviously afraid to take a role in the controversy, here.
Update May 5th: Rep. Gowdy gets response from Kerry but wants more information, here.
Update April 19th: Local and state elected officials want answers, here.
Update April 17th: More media pick up the story, here.
Update April 14th: Rep. Trey Gowdy needs to help other towns, hold hearings, here. World Relief admits they get “push back” in some towns, here.
Update April 13th: Rep. Trey Gowdy, who represents the district, wants answers from Sec. of State John Kerry, here.
Update April 1st:If folks in Spartanburg have any doubts about how little control they will have once this office is established, see Concord, NH—no say in how many refugees come! Here!
Update March 31st: Spartanburg citizens want impact statement and public meeting on refugee plan for the city, here.
Update March 23rd: Spartanburg residents, please note that mid-western towns are having difficulty coping with large numbers of refugees, here.
Update March 21st: Folks in Spartanburg, where Syrians may be resettled, need to read about Indianapolis where the resettlement contractor admits the numbers will start small, but will grow!
Update March 19th: See ‘Comment worth noting: Since Spartanburg is my home,’ here.
Update March 17th: Everyone concerned about Spartanburg, must read about Worcester, Mass. here.
Update March 11th: This post has received the highest number of visitors we have ever had to a post in just a couple of days. I realized this morning that we needed a primer of sorts on what your town should do if the federal government is planning to “plant” refugees where you live. See our Ten things you need to know and what you can do, here. ***Update*** Don’t believe me, check out what is happening in Manchester, NH, here.
Update March 10th: This post went through the roof yesterday, thanks to all who sent it around. However, one reader pointed out that I failed to make it clear that refugees are one class of immigrant which can tap into most forms of welfare without being US citizens. That is why the Obama Administration is working overtime to expand the definition of ‘refugee’ so as to make our welfare system more accessible to the newly amnestied aliens.
Update! Please all of you South Carolinians forgive me for initially putting an ‘s’ in the middle of Spartanburg in my first post! And, secondly, I was just informed that some parts of the Spartanburg area are represented by Rep. Trey Gowdy. All readers should know that Gowdy is the Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security that has jurisdiction over the Refugee Resettlement program and should know the threat this resettlement poses for his district!
Editors note: In my previous post I said our next two posts would be about how far along the Obama Task Force on New Americans “integration” (aka seeding) plan is in a couple of cities that are overloaded with refugees, however, reader Robin spotted this news which is more pressing at the moment! Spartanburg beware! South Carolina beware!
Over the years, we have noticed that South Carolina has pretty much stayed out of the top tier of states where refugee seedlings are being planted. Looks like those days are over as it was announced that World Relief (Evangelicals) one of the TOP NINE federal resettlement contractors is about to open an office there!
They must be having refugee overload problems in North Carolina!
World Relief, like the other eight contractors*** are all Progressive advocacy groups, six of them represent the ‘religious Left.’
Demand answers!
Anyone in Spartanburg who is concerned about this news, must speak up now! You might want to look at how Athens, Georgia has so far been holding them at bay by asking the federal government and the contractor for a plan—who pays for this, where will the refugees work, is our school system ready for myriad languages and illiterate children, will our health department be overburdened, do we have enough public housing for our own low-income people, how about our police force, is it ready? Those are the sorts of questions any sensible local government should be asking! Tell the Mayor to ask questions!
Additionally, ask World Reliefif the flow can be stopped once started if the town can’t afford it anymore? Or if there is social disruption? I’ll tell you the answer now—NO!
The truth is that the UN/US State Department is running out of “welcoming” towns and cities, so they are constantly on the move to find new towns in which to “plant” refugees. “Pockets of Resistance” are forming in overloaded communities.
From GroupState.com. They say they will resettle 65 refugees from Syria, DR Congo, and Bhutan. Why not Muslim Iraqis and Somalis too? Of course they will be in the mix because the UN is picking our refugees! A city doesn’t get to choose the nationality of the refugees that will be dropped off!
Here is the story Robin sent:
Spartanburg will soon be home to dozens of people fleeing persecution in their homelands.
Refugees may begin arriving here as early as spring through a refugee resettlement ministry.
Lee, the new director of the World Relief subcontractor, worked with Somalis in Kentucky. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonalee
World Relief is establishing an office in Spartanburg. “In community with the local church, World Relief envisions the most vulnerable people transformed economically, socially, and spiritually,” according to the faith-based organization’s website.
Jason Lee has been named executive director of the Spartanburg office. He said 65 refugees are expected to move here this year.
Lee served more than five years as pastor of Oak Grove Baptist Church. He’s also ministered to Somali refugees in Kentucky and is a leader with Come Closer Spartanburg.
Come Closer Spartanburg [they come up with such warm and fuzzy names for themselves!–ed] is a partnership of faith leaders, Christians and business leaders with a mission to “to unite God’s people for the purpose of loving our city to Christ.” One need identified is serving residents born outside the United States.
[What! Has Spartanburg helped all of its own American poor people and it now needs to import more?—ed]
World Relief works with federal agencies to offer resettlement, placement and various services to refugees. According to the organization’s figures, it has resettled more than 250,000 refugees from more than 80 countries in the past 35 years.
Lee said it’s unknown what nations the refugees who will resettle in Spartanburg are from — Syria, the Democratic Republic of Congo or Bhutan are possibilities.
Read it all, there is a lot of useful information in it.
Urgent! Help save Spartanburg!I don’t normally ask, but please send this story around, especially to people you know in South Carolina! Clearly they have no idea of what they are in for!
Tiny Switzerland is now working overtime to destroy itself with an overload of migrants, while the UK is hanging tough (so far) and not opening its doors to large numbers of Sunni Muslims from Syria. Meanwhile the US has admitted (thankfully) only a few hundred impossible-to-screen Syrians, but critics are silent on the Obama record (when Bush didn’t immediately admit Iraqi refugees they were all screaming like banshees!).
So what country is conspicuously missing? Are Amnesty International and the UNHCR afraid of criticizing America’s first black President? http://www.mintpressnews.com/%E2%80%8Buk-offers-just-90-places-for-syrian-refugees-abject-failure-says-amnesty-international/201909/
The Swiss cabinet agreed in principle on Friday to welcome an additional 3,000 Syrian refugees to Switzerland over the course of the next three years.
[….]
The first batch of 1,000 refugees are scheduled for this year and the cabinet will reassess the situation in Syria in autumn.
The Swiss plan for hosting Syrian refugees will follow two pathways. One will involve taking in 2,000 refugees as part of a sustainable resettlement programme that will take place over several years. This will be similar to a pilot project launched in 2013 in which Syrian refugees were granted asylum without having to go through the standard asylum process.
The other pathway involves granting 1,000 humanitarian visas for close relatives (spouses and minor children) of Syrians who have already been provisionally admitted into Switzerland.
Amnesty International blasts UK Syrian resettlement as “abject failure.”
Indeed, it is the strangest thing! Amnesty and the UN are silent on the fact that the US has not (mercifully for us) taken more than a few hundred Syrians since the conflict began.
Our many new readers may not know that the US State Department has agreed to a UN request to resettle 50,000 or so impoverished, uneducated, (mostly) women from DR Congo over a period of several years.
Congolese women and children waiting for their turn to come to America.
This is an informative article from Episcopal News Service that basically reports how needy these refugees are.
It is also interesting to me because we rarely see articles about refugee resettlement contractor Episcopal Migration Ministries, one of the top nine. Apparently they are less media savvy as they rarely turn up in news stories (like this one) intended to be puff pieces on refugees.
We previously reported on the great need for mental health services for women from DR Congo, here.
A Congolese refugee, Zaburiya arrived in Tucson seven months ago with five children, aged 10 to 26, after spending 18 years in a refugee camp in Rwanda.
Illiterate and not speaking a word of English, she became a member of a women’s empowerment group operated by Refugee Focus, which receives support from The Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society’s Episcopal Migration Ministries service through funding from the United States government’s Office of Refugee Resettlement.
(The Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society is the legal and canonical name under which The Episcopal Church is incorporated, conducts business, and carries out mission.)***
[….]
Through Episcopal Migration Ministries, the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society partners with 30 resettlement affiliates in 26 dioceses nationwide. It is one of nine agencies working in partnership with the U.S. Department of State to welcome and resettle refugees to the United States.
For the umpteenth time, the UN is picking our refugees!
In 2014, the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society and its partners worked to resettle 5,155 of the tens of thousands of refugees who came to the United States through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ (UNHCR) screening process.
[….]
Over the next several years, UNHCR plans to resettle 50,000 refugees from the Congo, with 70 to 90 percent to be resettled to the United States,said Kurt Bonz, Episcopal Migration Ministries’ program manager…
[….]
“Most of the refugees have been in camps an average of 20 years, education is low, and many are single women with children who continue to experience trauma related to living in the Congo, the journey out and living in a refugee camp,” he said.
So who are these refugees from DR Congo and where are they going?
I checked the State Department’s data base for the following dates: 10/1/2012 through 2/28/2015 and this is what I found:
We resettled 9,022 Congolese refugee “seedlings” in that approximate 2 and 1/2 year period. Most were Christians of some sort, but I was surprised to learn that 356 were Muslims (from DR Congo?).
Then here is a list of the states that received over 200 Congolese refugees over that same 2 and 1/2 year time period (apparently all of these states have run out of American poor people to care for):
Arizona (862)
Colorado (290)
Florida (236)
Georgia (398)
Idaho (303)
Illinois (339)
Kentucky (405)
Maryland (259)
Massachusetts (322)
Michigan (417)
Missouri (301)
New Hampshire (260)
New York (325)
North Carolina (379)
Ohio (288)
Pennsylvania (445)
Texas (1078) Working hard to turn Texas blue!
Utah (200)
Washington (273)
*** When you visit this post, you will see more about why this structure of the Episcopal Migration Ministries makes it hard to track their finances. They must be claiming they are a ‘church’ and as such do not have to do a Form 990.
