Fix immigration policy? Only the part that works

Someone named Craig has written a terrific rant  on a website called Project USA. It’s titled “Washington fixing broken immig system by killing E-Verify, only unbroken part.” Here’s some of it:

Let’s see. Which broken part of immigration policy should we fix first?

Should we fix the broken refugee part, which has spawned a refugee resettlement industry in this country that’s paid by the head?

Or should we fix the broken labor and employment visa part, the SD2, H-1B, R51, T51, E14, H-1C, SM4, E11, H-2A, E22, SM1, E23, SM2, H-2B, L, O-2, E15, O-1, EW5, E32, P-1, P-3, E35, Q-1, T53, E31, SR3, T52, SJ2, E21, SR2, EW4, SR1, C53, SM3, SJ1, E34, SD3, E13, SD1, C51, P-2, H-3, EW3, E12, SM5, and C52 visas part, which generally benefits a rich few at the expense of an insufficiently corrupt many?

Or should we fix the broken ethnic preferences part, which has members of ethnic caucuses in Congress coordinating legislative activity with foreign governments and running citizenship mills out of their district offices?

He goes on to bring in chain immigration, anchor babies, welfare abuse, sham marriages, sanctuary cities, and more. And he tells us:

After some influence-peddling in an amount appropriate to the size of the task, Washington came up with a course of action.

The Washington establishment’s fix for our broken immigration policies, the one significant action on immigration in Congress this year, turns out to be an effort to kill the one part of immigration policy that isn’t broken—the E-Verify program.

The E-Verify program is more than just not broken, in fact. The program is actually in the process of fixing a big chunk of our broken immigration system. But it’s the E-Verify program that’s on the congressional chopping block this year instead of one of the dozens of other broken, harmful, costly, and dysfunctional components of immigration policy Congress might have chosen.

He sure got the refugee part right. And a lot more.

A Muslim campaign against honor killings

We’ve posted a number of times about honor killings by Muslims in the United States.  See here, here, and here for example, or enter “honor” in our search function. It is one of the disgusting practices brought here by Muslims from some countries, like female genital mutilation.

Today FrontPage Magazine interviews a woman named Linda Ahmed, a Swede who married a Muslim man and converted. She converted only to Islam, however, not to radical Islamism, and she is co-chairman of  a campaign called STOP HONORCIDE! that was launched on Mother’s Day of this year. (The word “honorcide” makes no sense — it means killing honor, but we’ll give that a pass.)

Linda Ahmed is also a co-founded of Muslims Against Sharia, a group that seeks to reform Islam. There is great debate among experts about whether Islam is reformable, so we’ll leave that subject too, except to say we’re glad such a group exists. Here is some of what she says:

Ahmed: As you probably know, honor killings or honorcides are common in non-Western cultures. Even fairly westernized countries like Turkey have a huge honorcide problem. When non-Westerners move to the Western countries, they bring with them their traditions, honorcide being one of those “traditions”. 

Unfortunately Western media is downplaying honorcide problem in the West for fear of offending immigrant populations. You don’t hear names like Amina & Sarah Said, Aqsa Perves, Morsal Obeidi, or Hatin Surucu on evening news.

Honorcide is ignored to such degree that a proponent of honorcide could be prominently featured on an American presidential campaign website. The idea behind this campaign is to attract attention to this problem and to prosecute honorcides to the fullest extent of the law.

She wants to use existing hate-crime laws to do this.

Muslims Against Sharia have no opinion on necessity of the hate-crime laws, but since these laws exist, why not put them to good use? It doesn’t cost much to amend existing hate-crime legislations to include honorcide, but the benefits are tremendous. First, these amendments will shed much needed light on the problem. Second, if that’s not done, it won’t be long before some clever lawyer will figure out the way to present honorcide as a cultural tradition and use it a mitigating factor. Amending the legislations will make sure that the cultural/traditional nonsense is never used in such way.

Such a person as Linda Ahmed is needed here in the United States, but needed more desperately in Sweden. As she tells it,

With one of the highest percentages of Muslims in Europe and very liberal immigration policies, Sweden is becoming one of the primary destinations for economic refugees from Islamic countries. While most of the new Muslim immigrants are not Islamists, upon arrival in Sweden, they fall under influence of radical imams who control the majority of Swedish mosques and Islamic cultural centers.

Thus, radicalization of Swedish Muslims is proceeding at an increasingly alarming rate. I believe that majority of Swedish Muslim want to live in an Islamic state governed by Sharia rather than in a democracy governed by a secular government. But if you want to live under Sharia, go to Saudi Arabia or Iran; do not attempt to change my home country.

And she doesn’t mess around when she prescribes what to do:

Any person from a country where a substantial part of the population is pro-Sharia should not be allowed in the West, not only as an immigrant, but even as a visitor with a few exceptions, i.e., political asylum or as a diplomat etc.

A person claiming political asylum should be thoroughly screened and evaluated and if accepted, accepted on probationary basis long enough to establish his/her loyalty.

Every illegal immigrant should be immediately kicked out. Every legal immigrant should be allowed to stay only if he/she did not display desire to establish a Sharia state in a host country. Any naturalized citizen who displays a desire to establish a Sharia state in a host country should have his/her citizenship revoked and promptly deported. I think the latter two groups is where the real danger lies.

That’s my kind of Muslim. Go, Linda.

Germany’s Angela Merkel supports helping Iraqi refugees return home

Iraq’s prime minister Nouri al-Maliki is visiting Germany this week. Deutche Welle, Germany’s international broadcaster, reports:

Speaking to reporters after talks with Chancellor Merkel in Berlin, al-Maliki said he also wanted to encourage the thousands of Iraqis who fled the spiraling violence in their country in recent years to return home without forcing them to do so. His government did not discriminate between Muslims and Christians, or between Sunnis and Shias, he added.

 

Chancellor Merkel reacted positively.

 

The Iraqi government has stated that the security situation is improving and that “it will adopt a program on the return of refugees within the next 60 days,” Merkel said. “I think we should back plans to see the greatest number return home, with necessary encouragements,” she said, adding that Germany would brief its EU partners on the Iraqi position at a meeting of interior ministers on Thursday this week.

 

Maybe Merkel should get on the phone with President Bush and tell him to overrule the gaggle of NGOs, volags, UN officials and other self-interested parties who want to resettle as many Iraqis as possible in foreign countries. Instead he could immediately announce that helping as many refugees as possible return home is now official U.S. policy, and he will work with her and Maliki and any other nations that want to join in to help make this happen. Maliki’s government has had ongoing problems implementing its plans, so concrete help would no doubt be welcome. We already have a few people in Iraq, don’t we? Why can’t some of them work on this pressing issue?

 

(There is always the possibility that the U.S. is working on it already. We’d never know from our own media.)

 

South African churches have had it with refugees

I’m quickly posting this as I head out of town for a few days.  So, I’ll leave it to you to go to this blog from South Africa and get a feel for what is happening there in the wake of the “xenophobic” riots in the “rainbow nation.”

Here is a portion of one news article linked on the blog:

A second Durban church has washed its hands of a group of refugees left homeless after xenophobic attacks in the city last month, saying it has had enough of their “filthy and dishonest ways”.

A representative of the Greyville Methodist Church, which had housed about 40 Congolese refugees since the violence broke out nearly five weeks ago, Cecil van den Bergh, said enough was enough.

“They have refused to clean up after themselves. The place has become a filthy mess. My staff have been intimidated and threatened. And now we have caught them stealing food and blankets meant for our own pavement people. We were left with no option but to tell them to leave.”

And further down in the article:

“We took these people in gladly. We pooled our limited resources to assist, only to be treated in this way. To be honest, we feel abused,” he said.

Amazing that we never hear this information from the mainstream media.

To follow our South Africa coverage, go to the Africa category at left.

Sunni sheikh is protecting Chaldean Christians

This very positive report comes from Steve Schippert at National Review. Of course you wouldn’t see it in the mainstream media; it has to be a conservative publication that tells us good news about Iraqi Christians and Muslims.

…not many are aware that Sheikh Ahmed al-Rishawi’s Iraq Awakening Movement (Sahwah al-Iraq), which led the rejection of al-Qaeda from within Iraq, is also the protector of Iraq’s Chaldean Catholics — not only in Fallujah’s Anbar Province, but throughout Iraq, wherever the Awakening’s “Sons of Iraq” anti-al-Qaeda forces can be seen patrolling the streets.

Schippert quotes a Catholic website called Against the Grain:

As readers are no doubt aware, by virtue of their Christian faith, the Chaldeans have been subject to horrible persecution, the imposition of jaziyah, kidnappings and even targeted assassinations by Al Qaeda in Iraq.

As my source reports, Sheikh Iyad has apparently agreed to join the Sahawa [Awakening], allowing Sheikh Ahmad to add “Protector of the Chaldean Catholics” to his list of formal titles in a public ceremony covered by Arab media:

After hearing Sheikh Iyad’s account of the suffering that the Chaldean Catholics have endured in Iraq, Sheikh Ahmad publicly declared that from this time forward they would be under his protection, that anyone who killed a Chaldean will be regarded as one who has killed in a member of his tribe (under the medieval Islamic concept of qisas this is a capital offense), and money will be provided from the Sahawa al-Iraq treasury to rebuild the churches and cemeteries that al-Qaeda destroyed. He justified this by quoting from the Qu’ran and stating that there should be no compulsion in matters of religion because truth stands free from error.

Consequently, in a moment of Muslim-Christian solidarity, it would appear that the Chaldeans have a new and very significant protector from persecution at the hands of Al Qaeda.

Then Schippert comments:

Maybe so so few actually know this because nothing blew up to make the evening news. Regardless, shame on me for not writing on the Iraq Awakening’s embrace and protection of Iraq’s tormented Chaldean Catholic community when it happened.

If only more Americans knew of such things: Armed Sunnis protecting Iraqi Catholics, Sunni and Shi’a working together in Anbar protecting each other, and each of them wanting American forces to stay and see them through.

This answers many questions I have been asking. The sheikh is protecting the Chaldeans from al Qaeda. No mainstream media outlet that I’ve seen has made this clear. The Christians are always under threat from “Muslims,” “Iraqi Muslims” or some other vague term. Since the Christians lived among the Muslims in Iraq for many centuries I did not understand why their neighbors would suddenly turn on them. As I suspected, it was al Qaeda that was targeting them.

What I still don’t understand is why the media don’t report this. I understand why they don’t report cooperation between Muslims and Christians: that might provide a bit of positive news that could make the hated George Bush look good. But why imply that ordinary Iraqis are trying to exterminate their Christian neighbors if that is not the case? Perhaps they just can’t be bothered to find out the truth.

If this cooperation and protection is widespread, it means that perhaps at least some of the Iraqi Christian refugees can go home. So I am going to stop saying that we should try to resettle all the Iraqi Christians, at least until I can find out more.

Kevin Myers’ followup to his Africa article

Kevin Myers reports on his previous article which Ann posted on a week or so ago:

Since dear old Ireland can often enough resemble Lynch Mob Central on PC issues, I braced myself for the worst: and sure enough, in poured the emails. Three hundred on the first day, soon reaching over 800: but, amazingly, 90pc+ were in my support, and mostly from baffled, decent and worried people. The minority who attacked me were risibly predictable, expressing themselves with a vindictive and uninquiring moral superiority. (Why do so many of those who purport to love mankind actually hate people so?)

Myers didn’t mention the official complaints against him; probably his lawyers told him not to write about it. He goes on to restate his concerns about giving aid to Ethiopians without paying attention to the behavior of the people getting aid. He points out that the population explosion after the aid in the 1980s was half female, at least 80 percent of whom are genitally mutilated. And running the numbers, he estimates 3 million have died from this butchery since the famine  – “roughly the same as the number of Jewish women who died in the Holocaust.”

He points out that if white males had committed this atrocity western feminists would be up in arms.

But, instead, the state was run by black males, for whom a special race-and-gender dispensation apparently applies.

And then Kevin Myers does something rare in the world of journalism. He takes responsibility for his past actions:

I am not innocent in all this. The people of Ireland remained in ignorance of the reality of Africa because of cowardly journalists like me. When I went to Ethiopia just over 20 years ago, I saw many things I never reported — such as the menacing effect of gangs of young men with Kalashnikovs everywhere, while women did all the work. In the very middle of starvation and death, men spent their time drinking the local hooch in the boonabate shebeens. Alongside the boonabates were shanty-brothels, to which drinkers would casually repair, to briefly relieve themselves in the scarred orifice of some wretched prostitute (whom God preserve and protect). I saw all this and did not report it, nor the anger of the Irish aid workers at the sexual incontinence and fecklessness of Ethiopian men. Why? Because I wanted to write much-acclaimed, tear-jerkingly purple prose about wide-eyed, fly-infested children — not cold, unpopular and even “racist” accusations about African male culpability.

I am so impressed. Kevin Myers is a very honest man of great integrity. If more journalists were like him the world would be a better place. When media people leave the world of tear-jerkingly purple prose for the world of cold reality, they put themselves at great risk, as Myers has found out.

Hat tip: John Derbyshire.

Will Obama bring hope and change to Iraqi refugees?

Many of the articles on Obama’s trip to the Middle East mention that he will talk to leaders about the Iraqi refugees. In Jordan, the L.A. Times reports,

Regional stability, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the fate of Iraq war refugees were likely topics of discussion between Obama and the king, advisors said.

CNN says,

Obama and his senate colleagues [Chuck Hagel and Jack Reed] stressed the importance of doing more to help Iraqi refugees, who have fled the country, as well as those who are displaced within Iraq.

And so on. I’d like to know, if Obama is so concerned about helping the Iraqi refugees, why hasn’t he? He doesn’t have to wait until he’s president; he’s a U.S. senator now. What’s stopping him from working with a colleague in the House to write a bill to aid the refugees? But Obama has a history of being all talk and no action.

Muslim Brothers and Sisters Trucking Company busted

You will be outraged by this story!  Ponder it as you zip along a busy highway in your little hybrid surrounded by 16-wheelers traveling at 60 plus miles an hour, and thank ever-watchful blulitespecial for tipping us all off to this story. 

Muslim Brothers and Sisters Trucking is (was) made up of drivers hailing from Somalia and Bosnia (our refugee program supplying labor for jobs Americans won’t do?) who were never qualified to drive a big rig thanks to this scam busted by the US Attorneys Office in Missouri.

A former superintendent of a truck driving school in West Plains pleaded guilty in federal court today to his role in a scheme that provided fraudulent commercial driver’s licenses to large numbers of Somali and Bosnian nationals, said John F. Wood, United States Attorney for the Western District of Missouri.

Read the whole story here.  It is a detailed anatomy of a scam of major proportion.     Some of those busted are going to prison, but you can bet they never caught all those students who are now spread throughout the US driving a rig on the highway next to you.

And then there is the larger question, what is in those tractor trailers?

Are these Cuban immigrants refugees?

I bet you were under the impression that the era of Cuban refugees streaming to the US had pretty much ended.  A reader sent this article about a Cuban family being resettled in Texas by the International Rescue Committee and commented about this line in the article:

 The family said they sought asylum in the U.S. three years ago for economic reasons.

The legal definition of a refugee is:

REFUGEE - Any person who is outside any country of such person’s nationality or, in the case of a person having no nationality, is outside any country in which such person last habitually resided, and who is unable or unwilling to return to, and is unable or unwilling to avail himself or herself of the protection of, that country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.

So, we don’t just take people, even families like this one who sound like nice people, into the refugee program who are economic migrants as they appear to be.  They need to be persecuted or fear persecution.

What is the big deal?  Well, refugees are entitled to taxpayer subsidized airfare loans, subsidized housing, a case worker provided through the volag and funded by you, food stamps and other forms of welfare.    Other immigrants are on their own.

One bit of information I discovered is that the Cubans don’t even have to be outside of the country to seek asylum, we now process them in Cuba.  See this information.

Obama: Islamic terrorism is all about poverty and racism

I’m getting off topic a bit here, but thought you should see this important story.  Hat tip:  Robert.    Here is how the story at World Net Daily begins:

JERUSALEM – The 9-11 attacks were carried out because of a lack of “empathy” for others’ suffering on the part of al-Qaida, whose terrorist ideology “grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair,” Sen. Barack Obama explained in largely unreported comments eight days after the mega-terror attacks that rocked the nation.

Please read the whole article.   Obama isn’t alone in his thinking that poverty breeds Islamic terrorism, we see that notion as a driving force even among high level  State Department officials.  Note former Asst. Secretary of State Ellen Sauerbrey’s comments last year here (bring more refugees to the US so they won’t become terrorists).    Sauerbrey, before joining the Bush Administration, was a Republican leader in Maryland, but must have been drinking too much of the kool-aid at the State Department.  Her comments, and Obama’s, show a fundamental misunderstanding of the imperatives of Islam.