Tag: UNHCR

Lutherans and UN sign agreement to work together worldwide on refugees

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Is it official then—that we no longer have poor and suffering Americans (or Europeans) who need the help of the Lutheran Church?

Here we learn that the Lutheran World Federation (expanding its power base among the religious Left?) has signed an agreement to help the UNHCR with refugee camps, etc.  And, we learn that the Lutherans had previously signed an agreement—the first ever—to join forces with an Islamic charity.

Lutherans signing earlier agreement with Islamic charity. http://www.ecumenicalnews.com/article/world-lutheran-body-and-islamic-aid-group-sign-cooperative-pact-26168

From Ecumenical News:

The Lutheran World Federation and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to provide assistance to internally displaced persons and refugees.

“We are witnessing record levels of forced displacement globally, and this makes it all the more important that we and faith-based organizations work together for the sake of the world’s refugees and internally displaced,” Janet Lim, UNHCR’s Assistant High Commissioner, said.

“LWF is a long-standing close partner, and we’re delighted to see the scope for our joint work expand.”

The LWF has worked with UNHCR for more than 50 years the LWF reported on its website.

“This MoU between UNHCR and LWF is not just about our two organizations” LWF general secretary Rev. Martin Junge emphasized. “It is about a dramatically increasing number of refugees and migrants that require concerted efforts and strategic partnerships as the one we have signed today.

Is this why they need more places (like Wyoming) in which to resettle refugees?

They joined forces with Islamic Relief Worldwide in August:

Junge said, “I look forward to exploring together with UNHCR and faith-based actors engaged in the humanitarian field the concrete value we add to humanitarian response in our world today.”

He referred to a similar agreement between the LWF and Islamic Relief Worldwide signed in August to cooperate in humanitarian work.

It is the first official cooperation between a global Christian and a global Islamic humanitarian organization.

In the news about the August agreement, Rev. Junge said “religion is not about violence…”    Tell that to ISIS!

We know the Catholic Bishops get their money from the US taxpayer.  Where does the Lutheran World Federation get its money—are Lutherans worldwide dumping their spare change into collection plates on Sundays?  Or, are they getting some of it from the UN (which is mostly US taxpayer money too!)?

Will the thousands of Syrian refugees now being admitted to the US be Christians?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update December 9, 2015:  We have much more up-to-date data and the percentage of Syrian Muslims coming into the US this fiscal year is now 99%, here.

Update November 17, 2015:  This post is over a year old. We do know exactly how many Muslims are in the refugee stream arriving from Syria, it is well over 97%, see today’s post, here.

That is a question I get all the time.  My best guess is that a few will be, but the vast majority will be Sunni Muslims.

My guess is based on a few facts from the past, first that of the Iraqi refugees we have resettled in recent years, the majority (we hear 62% this past year) are Muslims, and secondly, I have never seen in print any clamor from our major refugee resettlement contractors***, most of which are ostensibly Christian groups (US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee service and others), for specifically saving the Christians of the Middle East.

Now outdated map (thanks to ISIS), but it gives you some idea of the areas that were Christian. See this article about Christians fighting with Assad against the “rebels.” http://thechristians.com/?q=node/880

Maybe someone could direct me to anything where these contractors said to the US State Department—we want more Christians to resettle!  My guess as to why they haven’t said that (correct me if I’m wrong and they have) is because of an overwhelming and insane desire to be politically correct and a fear of being called Islamophobes.

(Oh, and believe me, they aren’t taking mostly Muslims because they think they can convert them to Christianity, this is all about multiculturalism, diversity and inclusiveness!)

A writer (Terry Mattingly) at a website called ‘GetReligion’ addressed his question—how are refugees being chosen?—in response to the Washington Post article of this past week (our post here) where the WaPo tells us the State Department is processing 4,000 resettlement applications.

Mattingly found more evidence that most will be Muslims.

He says that since they will come from UN camps (after all the UN is pre-selecting for the US State Department), and the Christians are not in camps, surely the majority will be Muslims.  As a matter of fact, I’ve read that many Christians are still in Syria somewhat protected by the secular Assad government.

Here is ‘GetReligion:’

First, the WaPo said this:

Most Syrian refugees considered candidates for U.S. residency have been living in refugee camps or elsewhere outside Syria for a year or much longer.

And then this from Terry Mattingly (emphasis is mine):

This leads to a logical question: Who is, when push comes to shove, running these UNHCR camps? In particular, I was curious to know how this selection system would affect the cases of refugees who are part of oppressed religious minority groups. I decided to ask a veteran human-rights activist about that.

The response? Christians on the run have been avoiding these camps because they tend to be hostile to minority-faith refugees. In other words, these camps are run by those in majority forms of Islam, even if they have – logically enough – clashed with the radicalized Islamic State.

In other words, we have a major religion ghost in this story. It is likely that the current pipeline to safety is all but closed to Christians and members of other minority faiths in this ravaged region.

Read it all.

***The US State Department’s nine major contractors (they have hundreds of subcontractors working for them if you don’t recognize these names in your cities):

Obama announces Syrian refugee numbers for resettlement to US—4,000 for FY2015

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

But, I don’t buy it! The numbers will be much higher!

The UNHCR has been spouting-off that the US will be on par with Germany in taking Syrians which is 10,000 or more per year!  Also, State Department honcho Simon Henshaw said in Turkey recently that our Syrian resettlement will come close to our Iraqi numbers in recent years which is close to 20,000 per year (approximately 68% of the Iraqis we are taking are Muslims)!

Syrian refugees coming to a town near you starting today! Photo: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/10/16/world/middleeast/syrian-refugee-crisis-photos.html?_r=0

Here is the Washington Post on the FY 2015 Presidential Determination.  Hat tip: Skip

As you read this article with its several references to 2015, remember FY 2015 begins TODAY!

The Obama administration will greatly increase the number of Syrian refugees approved for permanent resettlement in the United States next year but has opted against a separate refugee program to serve victims of that intractable civil war, administration officials said Tuesday.

The State Department is reviewing more than 4,000 applications from Syrian refugees seeking permanent homes in the United States next year or beyond, up from dozens considered for resettlement this year and last, officials said. The expansion reflects determinations by the United Nations refugee agency and the United States that tens of thousands of refugees living outside Syria are unlikely to ever be able to return.

The White House said Tuesday that it has approved permanent resettlement for up to 70,000 refugees worldwide next year, the same figure as for fiscal 2014.

Up to 33,000 could be resettled from the Middle East and South Asia, including Syria. Although there is no set target for Syrian refugees, they are expected to form a far larger percentage of the total than ever before.

The State Department has received more than 4,000 referrals in recent months and is processing them, a State Department official said. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for attribution, said “large numbers” of Syrian refugees will begin to arrive in 2015.

We are then expected to be grateful to Obama for not setting up a separate Syrian program to bring in even greater numbers which the refugee resettlement contractors must have been clamoring for.  Remember the State Department kept the contractor’s testimony secret from the public here in June.

The Bhutanese resettlement program which the Bush Administration began will be closed we are told, so there will be lots more room in the regional allotment for the Syrians!  We resettled over 8,000 Bhutanese in 11 months of FY2014, here.

So we will increase the number of Muslims entering the US because the Bhutanese are mostly Hindus (60%), Buddhists and Christians.

Next year, Syrians seeking resettlement in the United States will benefit from the closure of a dedicated program for refugees from Bhutan that has brought tens of thousands of refugees to America over several years.

Because all the nations of the Middle East and South Asia are lumped together for purposes of refugee consideration, elimination of special consideration for the Bhutanese gives other applicants from the same region a better shot.

More importantly, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees has expanded the number of Syrians it screens for resettlement anywhere, including the United States.

The UN picks most of our refugees!

The overwhelming majority of refugees resettled in the United States are first identified as candidates by the UNHCR. The United States then does its own review. The UNHCR hopes to identify 50,000 for resettlement somewhere next year, and another 50,000 in 2016.

The WaPo story mentions briefly at the end that the Presidential Determination released yesterday does not mention Syrians by name at all—of course not!    Would you expect any honesty from this White House in the run-up to November elections?

Update:  Be sure to check the WaPo comments, they are more interesting than the news itself (well almost!).

Click here for our very large archive on Syrian refugees.

New UNHCR report on asylum: US is second most desirable nation in the world for asylum seekers

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees has released his ‘mid-year’ report and it’s no surprise asylum claims are up world-wide.

For clarification, asylum seekers are people who get into another country on their own and then apply for asylum in hopes of being declared legitimate refugees a designation which brings with it access to social services and usually puts them on track for citizenship in their new country.   The Tsarnaev family had been granted asylum and thus were called political refugees.  The no-borders agitators are trying to make the case that the ‘Unaccompanied alien children’ fit this category as well.

A few countries have temporary asylum.  In the US if you are granted asylum you are in!

UNHCR Antonio Guterres, former President of the Socialist International, said that the US has pledged “open-ended” numbers for Syrian refugee resettlement! https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2014/06/30/unhcr-says-us-has-pledged-open-ended-resettlement-numbers-for-syrians/

The other track for potential refugees is to be selected by the UN abroad and then to be assigned to a resettlement country—most are assigned to the US!

From the Malta Independent:

A UNHCR report released today shows that the number of people seeking refugee status in industrialized countries continued to climb in the first half of 2014, driven by the wars in Syria and Iraq as well as conflict and instability in Afghanistan, Eritrea and elsewhere.

[….]

We are clearly into an era of growing conflict,” said UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres. “The global humanitarian system is already in great difficulty. The international community needs to prepare their populations for the reality that in the absence of solutions to conflict more and more people are going to need refuge and care in the coming months and years. Unfortunately, it is not clear that the resources and the access to asylum will be available to help them.”

Despite the net overall increase in new claims shown in the report, more than two thirds of these were in just six countries – Germany, the United States, France, Sweden, Turkey and Italy.

Central Europe, in particular Hungary and Poland, as well as Australia saw declines in the numbers of people asking to be accepted as refugees.   [The Abbott government is clearly having success in pushing back the illegal alien boats!—ed]

Go here for the whole report.  The UN is happy to help you replace your population!

Need your population replaced? The UN will be happy to assist

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

As the UN General Assembly continues to disrupt New York City, a reader sent us this old (over a decade old) press announcement from the United Nations alerting certain countries that their people were getting old and not having enough kids so it was time to start moving in the replacement population.   No mention here, of course, about the quality and character of the replacement people (replacement workers for big companies?).

UN: We are all here to help make it possible—to help you replace your old people with our poor people!

Readers, remember that the UN chooses most of our (US) refugee populations.  Yes, for some political reason from time to time, the US State Department uses the refugee program for some other foreign policy purpose, but the majority of those arriving now are ones the UN has identified.

Yesterday, we learned that they are already pretty far along with the US, here.

Replacement Migration:
Is It a Solution to Declining and Ageing Populations?

United Nations projections indicate that over the next 50 years, the populations of virtually all countries of Europe as well as Japan will face population decline and population ageing. The new challenges of declining and ageing populations will require comprehensive reassessments of many established policies and programmes, including those relating to international migration.

Focusing on these two striking and critical population trends, the report considers replacement migration for eight low-fertility countries (France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, Russian Federation, United Kingdom and United States) and two regions (Europe and the European Union). Replacement migration refers to the international migration that a country would need to offset population decline and population ageing resulting from low fertility and mortality rates.

So, of course, the UN is busy, out of genuine concern for us, replacing our population!

The UN even has a whole population division working on this “problem.”

Some nagging from me!

This story reminds me that we need more bloggers willing to focus, focus, focus on some aspect of our immigration problem (other issues too!), not bloggers in need of running their mouths on myriad topics to satisfy news junkies all day long.

Basically, my dream blogging force would be research bloggers who would every day (or several times a week) report the news on the topic and dig into documents, reports etc.  Someone could write a whole blog just on this “work” of the United Nations!  Real investigative journalists are rare these days, so some of you reading this right now must become citizen journalists if we are ever going to save this great country.

The more of us there are, the less likely they can shut us up!