Iraqi refugee admissions—falling short already

Just an hour ago, before your kids even got their Halloween candy spread out on the kitchen table to properly  examine the loot, the AP was reporting the end of the month count on Iraqi refugees resettled to America.   You would think they could have waited at least until the official end (about 3 and a half hours from now) of the first month of the new fiscal year to complain.

I can just see the press officers of the multi-million dollar refugee industry organizations madly dialing their press contacts telling AP and others in the mainstream media to nail that dastardly Bush Administration TONIGHT!   [Additional comment on Nov. 1, things are improving in Iraq so now you will be hearing more on the refugee subject because the left needs to continue bashing their boogey man Bush .]

Horrors!  Only 450 Iraqi refugees have arrived this month and advocacy groups were promised 1000 a month for each month of FY 2008.

The slow pace of admissions for members of what is the world’s fastest-growing refugee population has sparked criticism from refugee advocacy groups and lawmakers. They complain that Washington is not doing enough for those who have fled the violence in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

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The blame has been placed on bureaucratic slowdowns — including bickering between the State Department, which is in charge of refugee resettlement, and the Homeland Security Department, which must screen would-be admittees. Another factor was a lack of cooperation from some foreign countries, notably Syria, which hosts the largest number of Iraqi refugees.

The article reminds us that it is the United Nations that is picking the refugees for us.

Charitable(?) groups beating the drum, closing the circle

In my view, here is how it works.   What works you ask?  The great taxpayer rip-off of course.   It doesn’t matter whether the groups are left-leaning environmental groups or the ten volags (non-governmental organizations) bringing refugees to America, the strategy is the same.   There are probably many more hands in our pockets then we can imagine,  it just happens I know about these two pets of the liberal big government crowd.

Lets take Refugee Resettlement, the subject of our blog of course.  And, lets take for a specific example, The International Rescue Committee (IRC).  Today I noticed this drum-beating article  in something called “The Globalist” (what else!) about Iraqi refugees by Anne Richard, a VP at the IRC.   The title of the article is, “Americas responsibility to the Iraqi refugees”.  There is absolutely nothing new in this opinion piece dressed up as news.  This is boiler plate; if I’ve seen one of these articles I’ve seen ten.  They are all the same, they are everywhere.  These articles are meant to tug at the heartstrings of Americans, you know to soften us up, to make us feel obligated to bring millions of Iraqis to America NOW.

By the way,  Anne Richard is a former employee of the US State Department having worked for Madeleine Albright  (the revolving door in action).    She makes a salary of between $100,000 and $200,000 (based on the salaries of other VP’s at IRC).  But that is ’chump change’ compared to the IRC CEO’s salary.  Dr. George Rupp, former Pres. of Columbia University, brings in a cool $357,657 a year salary according to the organization’s 2005 Form 990.   Thats more than the Vice President of the United States, the Speaker of the House, or the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court receive (no wonder public service is so unpopular).

The IRC is a $200 million plus a year organization that recieves close to half of its income from you, the taxpayer.   Actually it was $88 million from government grants in 2005.  The immigration industry is big business and in order to stay in business it needs to find “refugees” to move around the world.

So, the circle goes like this: 

*   Beat the drum in the mainstream media to bring more refugees while wearing the ‘white hat’ (its about feeling good).

*    Convince Congress, the President and the public that we must do something.

*    More of your money goes out to these private groups through grants and contracts with the federal government.

*    Employees of these NON-GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS make big salaries while wearing the ‘white hat’.

*    To stay in business (and get more of your tax dollars) they need to beat the drum (create the crisis) to bring more refugees to America.

I wonder if there are actually courses in this because the M.O. is the same from one leftist cause to the next.

10,000 visits mark is reached!

We know it isn’t much compared to the mega-blogs, but we just reached our 10,000 visits mark at RRW! Sometime in the last hour, and exactly 4 months from our first post, we reached this milestone for our down-home clearinghouse for news about Refugee Resettlement.  

We plan to continue bringing you information about this complex program of the federal government so that you can play a constructive role in directing the future of your community.  And maybe, just maybe, we will see the program reformed someday.   Thanks for visiting!

P.S.  If you can shed some light on why 6 days after Judy’s post about the UN ignoring Christian Iraqi refugees it continues to top the list of visited posts, we would love to know!

Haitian Immigrant brought AIDS to US

This report, originally from Reuters, was published all over the world yesterday.

The strain of HIV that touched off the US AIDS epidemic and fueled the global scourge of the disease came to the continent from Africa via Haiti, according to a study released Monday.

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“Haiti was the stepping stone the virus took when it left central Africa and started its sweep around the world,” said Michael Worobey, an assistant professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and senior author of the paper.

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The deadly virus probably arrived on US shores in about 1969, more than a decade before the full-blown US AIDS crisis of the 1980s, and may have been carried there by a single Haitian immigrant, according to the study.

What relevance to refugees?   During the Clinton Administration the ban on immigrants with HIV AIDS was lifted and refugees with AIDS are permitted entry into the US.   We pay for their treatment upon arrival.  This was confirmed by State Dept. representatives at the September Forum in Hagerstown.

From 1983 to 2005 we admitted 28,625 Haitians with the lions share resettled in Florida.  Just a reminder that the 2005 ORR Annual report to Congress is a handy source of information.   See Appendix A for country of origin and resettlement state.

Note:  We may soon make available DVD copies of the Public Forum on Refugee Resettlement held in Hagerstown, MD on September 19, 2007.    If you are new to RRW you might want to review the September Forum category here.

Questions welcome

We have been plugging away trying to get more state information up in our “Your State” page linked above.  However, it takes awhile and we work on it when we can.   If you don’t see your state yet, please just e-mail us at the address under contact information at the right and we will be happy to help you get started researching in your state.   Afterall, we want this to be a community organizing site and one of our goals is to encourage grassroots involvement in directing the future of your community. 

Comments welcome

We’ve said this before but we want to emphasize it now, that government officials at any level, from UN to State Department to state and local officials, are welcome to comment here, to correct facts we have presented, to take issue with our point of view, to give us new leads on information, or to corroborate what we’ve written.

We’ve published a number of posts recently critical of the UN and the State Department, and would be happy to publish responses. Or you can email us at refugeeresettlementwatch@vigilantfreedom.com.

And of course private citizens’ comments are always welcome too.

Background on Iraqi refugees from Robert Spencer

I just came across this post by Robert Spencer on his Jihad Watch blog, explaining the Iraqi refugee situation. It’s from last December, but most of what he says could have been written today. Some of his points:

[Some speak] of a “moral obligation on the part of the United States” to allow resettlement by Iraqis here. There is no such moral obligation. No one has a right to come here or to be here. We have no obligation to admit a large population of Iraqi Muslims that will undoubtedly include many who hold to the ideology of jihad and Islamic supremacism — there are at present no mechanisms in place to screen out such people, but there should be.

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Meanwhile, “officials at the State Department and the United Nations said they understand the danger facing Iraqi Christians but said they don’t want to give the impression that they would favor Christians over Muslims in a resettlement program.” The UN is one thing, but there is absolutely no reason why the State Department should not favor Christians over Muslims in a resettlement program. This is an overwhelmingly Christian country, and the Constitution and Bill of Rights are rooted in Judeo-Christian assumptions. This is part of our national character, and no one should be apologetic about it.

As Ken Timmerman’s recent article made clear, not only are Christians not favored, they are horribly discriminated against by UN employees.

Spencer quotes from a Boston Globe article on Iraqi refugees:

An effort by hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to resettle in the United States would put the Bush administration in an extraordinarily awkward position. Having waged war to liberate Iraqis, the United States would in effect be admitting failure if it allowed a substantial number of Iraqis to be classified as refugees who could seek asylum here.

At the time the article was written, it looked as if there was no hope of winning the war in Iraq. Now that violence there is way down, and we have a strategy to win, this point is even more true. Now is not the time to send the message that the refugees can never return home.

However, the Christian refugees are an exception. The Iraqi constitution is based on Islamic law, according to media reports when it was drafted. More important, the Boston Globe article reports that

Amid growing sectarian violence in largely Muslim Iraq, Christians have faced killings, torture, destruction of churches, assassination of priests, and confiscation of property.

A supporter of the Iraqi Christian effort is the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which has long helped Jews resettle in America and views the plight of Iraqi Christians as similar to that faced by Jews during the Holocaust.

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“There are few religious minorities in the world today as persecuted as the Iraqi Christian population, so we naturally identify with them based on our own history,” said Mark Hetfield, a senior vice president of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

The Iraqi Christians’ situation has not improved since that was written last year, and is not likely to. We do have an obligation to them. And many of them have relatives here in the U.S., so they could come in fairly easily under current immigration law. The State Department needs to recognize they are a special case, and not worry so much about seeming discriminatory.

Fredericksburg: Is it “welcoming”?

Fredericksburg, Virginia, is receiving an influx of refugees, according to an Associated Press article today in that city’s Daily  Press.

FREDERICKSBURG — - City officials are trying to determine how best to serve hundreds of refugees from Africa and the Middle East, amid concerns about the costs and during a time in which immigration has become a political issue.

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Nearly 200 refugees from Africa and the Middle East have settled in the city since 2004, and in the past year the number of refugees has jumped, causing some to wonder if the area can keep pace with the demand.

The tone of the article is that Fredericksburg is welcoming, but other cities have not been.

In Harrisonburg, tensions increased after residents learned Iraqi refugees would resettle there.

And Hagerstown, Md., officials held a meeting to see if the city could stop more refugees from arriving.

When I read something as inaccurate as the description of the Hagerstown meeting, it makes me wonder how true the rest of the article is. And I’ll bet its happy tone does not reflect the reality of how the people of Fredericksburg feel about hundreds of refugees from Africa and the Middle East. Often in stories like this the reporter will interview some “regular folks,” but here only a few officials are quoted.

It looks like these refugees are coming in through the regular refugee program, without individual sponsors. How much better it would be all around if a sponsor were required for each refugee family.

Iraqi refugees in Syria (Part II)

Last week I posted on a report from the Brookings Institution entitled, Iraqi Refugees in the Syrian Arab Republic, in an effort to answer the question, who are the Iraqis who have fled to Syria?  Since the United States has already begun resettling this fiscal year’s goal of 12, 000, it’s important for us to know who is coming to America.   See also Judy’s post about Christian Iraqi refugees in Jordan.

More from Brookings, who are they?

* ”… many [are] urban, moderate or secular Sunnis who do not want to live under the sway of Salafi insurgent groups.”    Salafis are the hard-line fundamentalist Muslims.

* “Many of the Kurds seem to be crossing into Syria in the hope of obtaining third-country resettlment….”  Apparently in May, Kurdish men were crossing into Syria to register as asylees but then freely returned  home making them not true refugees.

*  Shia Iraqis are entering Syria looking for better economic conditions, to escape hardline Islam and to obtain resettlement in third countries.

* Many Christian Iraqis went to Syria in the 1990’s to escape the Saddam Hussein regime.  Others had worked for that regime and left after the regime was toppled.   Many Christians who stayed in Iraq worked for foreign organizations or the multinational forces and have now left Iraq.   The report mentions several times that Christians who sold alchohol were especially driven from Iraq by hard-line Islamic groups.

There are additional reports of radical Sunni insurgents asking Christians to pay the jizya to the Mosque or leave the country.   The report describes the jizya as “a head-tax that non-Muslims historically paid in Muslim states.” 

Brookings says the Iraqi Christians expect they cannot go back to Iraq but “that leaving Iraq will lead to the disappearance of their communities and their distinct identities.” 

* Then there were 30,000 Palestinians in Iraq, ”favored under Saddam”.    Many have gone to Syria and some are in refugee camps along the border between Iraq and Jordan.   Somehow Hamas is involved in the “deadlock around the Palestinian refugees blocked between Iraq and Jordan.”   Incidentally recent reports are that some of these Palestinians are being resettled by Brazil.

*  Finally the report discusses the Sunni and Shia radical groups that have left Iraq and entered Syria.  The first group right after the invasion were members of the Saddam Hussein regime and then in the last couple of years the radicals are likely a result of stepped up military action by the multi-national forces (the Surge?).

According to Brookings some of these are coming as refugees, others come “for rest-and-recuperation, or even to check up on whether other members of the group are living cleanly, in keeping with strict Islamic instructions.”

At the end of this Brookings report, there are some statistics gathered from interviews of 192 Iraqis in Syria.   Although the sample must be too small to be accurate it is nonetheless worth mentioning.

44% of the Iraqis living in Syria are Sunni

22% Shia

13% Christian

73% are men

69% are aged 18-50

41% left Iraq in 2006

1% say they left due to an affiliation with the international presence

2% operated liquor stores

23% left due to sectarian violence

I kind of got a chuckle out of the statistics above.  The primary reason given by the mainstream media for the persecuted refugees who must come to America immediately is because of their involvement with the US government (as translators and such), yet only 1% gave that as a reason for fleeing Iraq.  

Here we go again, another story of refugee neglect

It’s incredible to discover that the complaints about refugee resettlement agencies not doing their jobs are cropping up everywhere.   See our interview with Chris Coen of Friends of Refugees just two days ago. 

Then here is an article about Burmese refugees from the St. Louis Post Dispatch the same day:

A few of these families say they feel abandoned and lost here, unable to communicate their needs and virtually trapped in the apartments provided for them by the International Institute.

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Salim Khan has tried to fill in the gaps. He lives in Edwardsville and emigrated from Burma about 20 years ago. He was contacted a few weeks ago by a friend about the newest immigrants. He and his wife, Linda, first visited Esa, his wife, their three children and his wife’s sister at their apartment on South Grand Boulevard. The Khans were appalled that the front window was broken and that they lacked even a fan to cool off inside the brick building.

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The Khans have reached out to the institute, the family’s landlord and local government agencies on behalf of the families. Salim Khan said he was angered by the attitude he heard from a caseworker who told him the families should be grateful for their life here. It must be better than a camp, he was told.

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“It broke my heart that they weren’t getting too much assistance because they didn’t know how to ask for it,” she said.

These resettlement agencies are being paid by the taxpayer to do this work for the first 4 months and it appears they aren’t even doing that!     I can’t help but think we would be better off if all refugees were resettled by the Private Sector Initiative where refugees are sponsored and cared for by individual churches or groups.   The sponsoring entitity then takes the family under its wing and helps them start life in America for as long as it takes to get the family assimilated.   Let’s just cut out the middlemen!

Update:  The International Institute of St. Louis is a subcontractor of the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants which we posted on here.