Tag: Utica NY

"My hometown (Utica) is gone"

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

In recent months I’ve wondered if voluntarily devoting ten years to writing this blog has been worth it—my tenth anniversary is coming up in 3 weeks—but when I see a story like this where someone has the guts (and the first hand knowledge!) to say what is happening in cities being “Islamized,” with the help of the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program, I get the energy to go on.

Read the 2005 UN propaganda report used to entice (embarrass) other cities into ‘welcoming’ refugees. http://www.unhcr.org/publications/refugeemag/426f4c772/refugees-magazine-issue-138-town-loves-refugees.html

Don’t misunderstand, I don’t know this brave soul (reader ‘mjazzguitar‘ sent the blog post), and had no hand in finding her or encouraging her, but her post gives me hope that there will be an awakening in my lifetime after all!
I have written many times about Utica, NY—the town that loves refugees according to a 2005 UN-launched propaganda campaign.  See my Utica archive by clicking here.
Here are a few snips from former Utica resident, Loretta Brady, writing at Thermidor.
(This story first appeared on Brady’s own blog, here.)
Please read the whole thing!

Hi! This is a blog post I threw together in response to the recent increase in refugee numbers by Trump’s State Department, in order to convey what it is like living in an Islamizing area. I gave a talk at a luncheon a few months ago that was basically relating my story of how my hometown has been Islamized by refugee resettlement. So it makes sense to do a blog post.

I’m from the Utica, NY area. Utica is the city nicknamed by the UN “the city that loves refugees!” Soon every American city will be a city that loves refugees! Get ready! So I would like to tell you what it is like living in an area where the major city is about 25% (or more) refugee, mainly Muslim.

[….]

When I moved back home one of the first things I noticed was that an old Methodist church was being converted into a bright shiny white new mosque. The local paper touted this as immense progress and featured a local woman who had attended the church as a child and was positively brimming with joy it was being turned into a mosque. If that is the general sentiment, then it’s odd that my county went for Trump, right? There are at least two mosques in the city now. They just built another.

Where do I start? Utica had always been “the city that loves refugees” but under Obama things accelerated. Muslim immigrants were suddenly in these local bureaucratic positions where they had power over you. This, in what is probably one of the most corrupt states in the union, where the power of the state is everything.

[….]

So let me just summarize: the social worker at the school is Muslim, the administrator who ok’s homeschooling is Muslim, the CPS worker is Muslim, the nurse practitioner at the ER is Muslim, the doctor at the ER is Muslim. These are positions of authority that wield a lot of power.

Are you starting to get the picture?

Drones are a special interest of mine, so this next bit from Ms. Brady really got my attention!  Why are drones popping up in stories about Muslims these days?

The spring before we moved Utica made national news because of a federal grant to the local community college (two million dollars) for a (Muslim immigrant) professor to teach teenage (Muslim) refugees how to build drones. The grant didn’t mention explicitly that the drones would be equipped with bombs or anything, so it was all aboveboard. This was going on like down the road from us. My husband assured me he could shoot any drone out of the sky, and I’m sure he could, but curiously enough that didn’t assuage my anxiety, but only exacerbated it. The last thing I needed was my husband getting arrested on federal charges for taking down a drone.

[….]

There is TB in Utica. I’m sure there is more than reported. Obama stopped screening foreigners for TB, which America has been doing since before the days of Ellis Island, and the refugees are from places where TB is endemic. Whenever I was in a hospital- when I gave birth or when I went to the ER- I would be very aware of my surroundings.

This next comment interested me too! When I traveled around the heartland last summer, everywhere I went people told me that their first warning was that large numbers of Muslims congregated at Walmart.  What is up with that?
The author must be in a rural part of North Carolina because NC is a state busily “welcoming” refugees.

The local Walmart [in Utica—ed] is full of headscarves and burkas. I cried when I went into my first Walmart in North Carolina and all I saw were Americans.

[….]

North Carolina is like Heaven. People are so much happier here. I thank God every day we got here. I consider it a “free zone”, and I want it to stay free.

Read it all!
Ms. Brady and her fellow North Carolinians are going to have to work very hard if they don’t want North Carolina to be New York.  (Search RRW for North Carolina because I have several posts where I question how NC became a state Muslims are gravitating to with the help of Christian resettlement agencies.)
In fact….
I just checked the data and see that NC is #10 in refugee resettlement so far in Trump’s first fiscal year (turning red states blue!).
In FY17 we are up to 47,434 refugees (the fiscal year ends September 30th).  New York was #3 (after California and Texas) with 2,733 admitted so far and NC was #10 with 1,694.  Two states and the District of Columbia were at the bottom of the list with less than ten each (Mississippi (6), Hawaii(3) and DC(2)).  Wyoming is last, but not least with zero.
Endnote: Hopefully I can post this tomorrow, but just as I’m writing today’s post I see that Church World Service is crowing about the higher than expected numbers of Muslim refugees they are dropping off in Buffalo, NY thanks to Trump’s Dept. of State!

Utica: Give refugees summer jobs or pay for it later

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Egads!
Yesterday we told you about the mess in Utica, New York, a city in refugee overload with increasing poverty and stressed-out schools. We also told you about the Obama Labor Dept. (Tom Perez! Watch for him, bad news!) and the department’s special $2 million dollar grant to Utica to give summer jobs to a special subset of the impoverished—-refugees! (But wait! Haven’t we been hammered with the propaganda for years that refugees add to the local economy?)

Perez
This special treatment for a class of immigrant has Labor Secretary Tom Perez’s fingerprints all over it. If you don’t know that name, bone up because he is a man on the move. There have even been rumors that he could be a Hillary Veep pick. Bio here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/author/secretary-thomas-e-perez

Now the Daily Caller tells us those special teens will be learning to build drones. How many American young people, engineer wannabes, would die for a summer job like that!
Here is the Daily Caller (hat tip: Julia):

The Department of Labor has awarded Utica, New York, $2 million to teach young refugees how to build drones as part of a summer jobs program.

About 400 teenage refugee students living in the city will get part-time summer jobs through the program, as well as tutoring in English and Math. Those who demonstrate academic competence will then take part in a year-long drone building challenge during the school year, as the work and tutoring continues.

Sounds like discrimination to me! Discrimination against white and black American teens!

“It was just a population we chose to target,” Alice Savino, executive director of the area Workforce Development Board that applied for the grant, told The Daily Caller News Foundation, speaking to the decision to direct the funds specifically to refugees. “These kids are here, and they need help.”

[….]

“The prime focus will be refugee youth in the city,” the grant application abstract reads. “About 1 in 6 Uticans is a refugee from another nation. State data shows this group has the highest dropout rate, lowest college-ready rate in the city.”

One local commenter is reported by the Daily Caller making this remark:

“So legal Americans are not worthy of summer jobs? Can’t wait for November,” another added.

Now get this! So, remind me why we are bringing tens of thousands of refugees to America each year!

Savino, however, told TheDCNF she has not heard negative comments from the local community. “If we don’t help [the refugee kids] be productive now, we’re going to pay for it later,” she said. “The local community is extremely supportive.”

There is more, continue reading here.
Our Utica archive is here.

Think about Utica, NY before you jump on the "welcoming refugees" bandwagon

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Two years before I started writing RRW, Utica, NY was dubbed the ‘town that loves refugees’ by the United Nations.  They even had some propaganda show they took on the road to embarrass other cities into ‘welcoming’ refugees just as Utica had!

town that loves refugees
Read the 2005 UN propaganda report used to entice (embarrass) other cities into ‘welcoming’ refugees. http://www.unhcr.org/publications/refugeemag/426f4c772/refugees-magazine-issue-138-town-loves-refugees.html

Now (11 years later) Utica has all sorts of problems.
Here in January 2015 we reported on the school system there suing the state of New York for more money. Why?  Refugee overload!
The school system can’t handle the numbers of refugees who speak over 40 languages in their schools.
From the Wall Street Journal:

Utica officials are grappling with high poverty rates, rising enrollment and big deficits.

Now, just a week or so ago, the school system lost a lawsuit filed by six refugee teenagers who claim they weren’t permitted to attend high school there.

Here is what the NY Times said about the case (by the way, typical of mainstream media reports on refugees, the NYT implies that the refugees simply made their way to Utica from the third world without explaining that the city was targeted as a resettlement site by the federal government and its contractors***!):

The Utica City School District settled a lawsuit on Thursday over its treatment of young refugees, who, the suit charged, were being excluded from the city’s lone high school because of their age and because they did not speak English.

The lawsuit, filed last year on behalf of six refugees by the New York Civil Liberties Union and Legal Services of Central New York, claimed that Utica shunted refugees who were older than 16 into lesser alternatives to high school, like a G.E.D. program only for English-language learners. New York law provides the right to a free public education until age 21.

Similar allegations, that refugee children are being excluded from public schools, have been leveled at districts elsewhere around the state and across the country.

Utica, in central New York, has become a magnet in recent years for those escaping persecution in their home countries. Today, nearly one out of six city residents is a refugee, according to the Civil Liberties Union.

Message to towns considering welcoming refugees—They do not bring economic boom times! Refugees bring poverty and social and cultural strife!

Utica mosque
Utica Methodist church becomes a mosque.

Special treatment for special people!
Further confirming that Utica has a problem with refugee overload, the White House has singled out Utica’s refugee teen population for $2 million worth of summer jobs! What about American kids who need summer jobs?
From Syracuse.com:

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Utica is among 11 communities nationwide that will share $21 million in grants for summer jobs programs aimed at helping disadvantaged youth, the White House and U.S. Department of Labor said Monday.

Utica will receive almost $2 million to help 400 students in the city’s refugee population receive summer work experience and part-time jobs the rest of the year, White House officials said.

Again, think about the BIG LIE that refugees will help your struggling city. They won’t! The only money they will bring in to your town is the money Washington throws the city through myriad welfare programs—food stamps, medicaid, section 8 housing, and now funding for summer jobs.  Washington doesn’t grow money on trees!  The taxpayers of America are propping up refugee saturated cities!

If you live in newly targeted refugee placement cities—Rutland, VT, Reno, NV, Missoula, MT and Ithaca, NY (and more!)—think long and hard if you want to be like Utica, NY some day!

Click here for our Utica archive.
*** The resettlement contractor in Utica is the Mohawk Valley Resource Center and that is a subcontractor of Baltimore-based Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (one of the US State Department’s top nine refugee contractors).

Utica (the town that loves refugees) is suing the state of NY for their refugee-generated school funding crisis

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment
When I first started this blog in 2007, this 2005 United Nations report about Utica was being blasted around America! The news today shows what ten more years of overloading a city with refugees will do.

They really should file a case against the refugee contractors and the US State Department and the Office of Refugee Resettlement too!

This is an incredible piece of news published at the Wall Street Journal yesterday and thanks to the ever-watchful ‘Pungentpeppers’ for spotting it.

This needs to be a lesson to every one of the 180 plus “welcoming” cities that host federal refugee contractors!  You will not escape the same fate; it’s just a matter of time.

Before I get to what the WSJ reported, here is the propaganda the UN and the US State Department reported from Washington ten years ago:

“Utica loves refugees,” Gene Dewey, former Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration in Washington, told a Senate hearing in 2005. Utica’s size has stabilized at around 65,000 and 10,000 of these residents nearly one in six are refugees. They come from around 30 countries and have vastly different backgrounds.  Thirty-one languages are spoken in city schools. Utica has benefited from refugees. The town was going downhill, but it is now reviving because of refugees.  

Entitled, ‘Small Cities Fight for More School Aid From New York State,’ the WSJ begins with the predictable struggling student profile and then says this below (by the way, why are we still bringing refugees from Cambodia?).  Emphasis below is mine:

District officials say Utica schools lack enough resources for their 10,700 students, including 1,800 who are foreign-born. Hundreds of refugees from Somalia, Myanmar, Iraq and other war-torn lands settle in the area each year through a federal program.

Utica is one of eight small cities fighting for more state aid in a legal battle that will begin oral arguments Wednesday in state Supreme Court in Albany. The attorney general’s office has sought for six years to get higher courts to throw out the lawsuit. Lawyers for the plaintiffs say the court’s ruling could affect needy districts statewide.

[….]

On average, New York’s per-pupil education spending is the highest of any state, though there are wide gaps from district to district. According to state data, Utica spent $15,323 per pupil in the 2012-13 school year, compared with the state average of $21,118. Some affluent districts, such as Great Neck and Briarcliff Manor, spent more than $30,000 a student.

Utica officials are grappling with high poverty rates, rising enrollment and big deficits. [But wait, we were told the refugees were bring the city back from the brink of poverty!—ed]

[….]

Other cities in the case, Maisto v. New York, are Poughkeepsie, Jamestown, Port Jervis, Niagara Falls, Mount Vernon, Kingston and Newburgh.

[….]

Each city has its own concerns. Utica gets hundreds of refugees a year through a federal partnership with the nonprofit Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees***. The newcomers move into inexpensive housing that was left vacant as the local manufacturing sector has waned over the past half-century. The area has lost textile mills and a General Electric plant, among others.

Utica now serves children speaking 42 languages, including Nepali, Somali Bantu, Arabic and Bosnian. Teachers say they need smaller classes and more interpreters, social workers, guidance counselors and tutors to help students who lag behind, including American children from low-income families.  [Remember in 2005, the number of languages spoken in the school system was 30!—ed]

Many of the city’s children enter kindergarten with the skills of a 2-year-old and would benefit from more individual attention, said Lori Eccleston, the district’s curriculum director. Some arrive suffering from malnutrition or lead poisoning. Several students born in African refugee camps are blind, she said, because they didn’t get drops in their eyes at birth to prevent infections.

[….]

In Utica, 15% of children in grades three to eight passed state tests in language arts last year, and 19% did so in math. Statewide, 31% passed in each subject.

There is more, read it all!

By the way, the next time “WELCOMING AMERICA” (a federal contractor and UN propaganda pusher) shows up in your town peddling one of those economic studies supposedly showing how refugees and immigrants will bring your struggling city back to economic boom times, show them the door!

New York residents should know that your state is always in the Top Five states welcoming new refugees.

See all of our previous posts on Utica by clicking here.

*** Be sure to see the glowing praise for the Mohawk Valley refugee contractor from Hillary Clinton, here at their website.

Utica NY: Latest concern is refugees driving drunk

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment
In 2005, the UN was promoting Utica as the “Town that Loves Refugees.”
http://www.unhcr.org/426f4c772.html

Utica police and judges say the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees needs to develop a program to stem a growing problem of refugees driving under the influence.

Check out the information at the Resource Center’s website, here.  It was established by the Lutheran contractor, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.

The largest number of refugees resettled there come from Bosnia and the refugee population is now 12% of the city.  In another report I saw that the refugee population is 1/4th of the “welcoming” city’s population, but that seems like a stretch to me.

Here is a list of the 31 countries represented by refugees in Utica.

From the Utica Observer-Dispatch (Hat tip:  ‘pungentpeppers’)  Emphasis is mine:

First, it was car seats.

Then, it was driving lessons.

The next expansion of the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugee’s driving education program? Teaching non-native populations the dangers of driving under the influence.

“Driving while intoxicated is a foreign concept to them,” said Alban Uryniak, traffic and safety instructor for the center and former Utica Police Department sergeant.

Jean Skahan, training manager for the driving safety programs at the center, said in an email that drunk and distracted driving “is a growing problem among certain refugee groups.”

She said that Utica police and judges have requested the refugee center concentrate on this issue this year.

Most times when a refugee is involved in an arrest, Utica police Lt. Steve Hauck said alcohol is involved, though it is not always in a car.

“Sometimes, it’s driving; sometimes it’s domestic,” he said.

In an effort to combat the problem, the refugee center is pairing with the Oneida County STOP DWI Program to eventually offer workshops that would teach interpreters ways to communicate with the various refugee and immigrant populations about the subject, how to prevent it and explaining what might happen if they’re involved in an accident.

Language barriers are not the only things that could get in the way of the refugee communities that will participate in the workshops. Driving culture is just as varied as the languages people speak, Uryniak said.  [But, that diversity gives us strength—right!—ed]

We have several previous posts on Utica, here.  And, here, is one about a big food stamp fraud bust there.