Catholic Cardinals: we are all bigots and it’s wrong when illegals go home

From Catholic News Service: 

WASHINGTON (CNS) — Two Catholic cardinals called the current U.S. immigration situation “a terrible crisis” and “a dark moment in our nation’s history” in remarks they made July 28 at the opening Mass and plenary session of the 2008 National Migration Conference.

Both Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, retired archbishop of Washington, and Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles urged participants to hold on to hope in their work with immigrants for local and national church agencies.

The July 28-31 conference attended by more than 850 people was co-sponsored by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Catholic Charities USA and Catholic Relief Services. 

There is not one word mentioned that organizations like the US Conference of Catholic Bishops is largely funded by you, the American taxpayer (you paid for this conference as well!).  These Catholic organizations receive millions and millions of tax dollars annually for refugee resettlement (we have 5 pages of posts on Catholic Charities involvement alone) and immigrant services of all sort, including Head Start programs and job counseling.    So, as the immigrant population declines so will their budgets!  I would respect their holier than thow  thou arguments if they at least admitted their vested interest in keeping immigrants coming. 

One of the ‘good’ Cardinals went on:

Cardinal Mahony more directly took on the failure of Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform legislation and the federal enforcement policies that have led to “the separation of families, the harassment and profiling of U.S. citizens and legal residents, the expanded use of detention against those who are not a flight risk or a danger and, tragically, deaths in the United States desert.”

The recent national policy described as “deportation by attrition” has a goal of creating “such a dangerous and unwelcoming atmosphere that immigrants and their families leave the United States because they have no other choice,” said Cardinal Mahony.

It has led to fear among immigrant communities and a hostile atmosphere, “fanning the flames of intolerance, xenophobia and, at times, bigotry,” he continued.

Some of us Catholics don’t need to be lectured and called names.   When the Catholic Church does its charitable work with its own private money then it can lecture all it wants.  In the meantime, if we are all paying for the upkeep of these organizations then frankly, shut up.

As for “deportation by attrition”, a new study from the Center for Immigration Studies is pointing to just that—illegals seem to be leaving on their own.  You can read about this good news here at CIS or in the Washington Post today here.

Israeli legislators call on UN to let real refugee agency take responsibility for Palestinians

David Bedein reports in the July 30 Philadelphia Bulletin:

Jerusalem – Yesterday morning, an unusual coalition of conservative and liberal factions, which usually war with each other, formed in the Israeli Knesset.

A broad-based coalition of Israeli legislators called a packed press conference at the Israeli parliament to demand the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), be replaced by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).

The UNHCR is the UN’s regular refugee agency, whose task is resettlement. The UNRWA’s task is to use Palestinian refugees as political pawns and prevent resettlement.

The UNHCR helps refugees to find solutions, so they can get on with their lives.

UNRWA, however, operates under the premise that Palestinian refugees, and even their descendants, are also refugees. The U.N. body considers them refugees even if they acquire a new citizenship, as many have in Jordan – until they return to their ancestral homes and villages in Israel.

The article explains the politics of the situation very well and is worth reading. We have many posts on the issue, listed here.  There is zero chance that the UN will give the UNHCR responsibility for the Palestinians. The majority of UN members are happy with the way UNRWA operates — keeping the refugees living in squalor so they can blame Israel for their condition, and continuing to educate each generation that their duty is to destroy Israel so they can move in and take over. And of course, UN bureaucracies are like bureaucracies the world over — once one exists, it will never cease to exist. So UNRWA will go on forever with its sordid mission, unless a miracle occurs.

As we’ve said many times, all other post-WWII refugees were resettled quickly. Only the Palestinians continue to be classified as refugees. But we’ve never noticed Arabs countries putting the interests of Arab people over their hateful political goals, and we don’t expect them to start now.

For extensive information on UNRWA go to this page on David Bedein’s website.

Ahhhh! Today it’s a food stamp fraud bust in Toledo, OH

I just yesterday told you about food stamp fraud (again!) and today there is a new bust in Ohio.   What a surprise, looks like most are adherents of the ‘religion of peace’ but the article doesn’t say what nationality they are which would give us some idea if they were initially refugees or asylees.  (For a laugh see this post on how an Arab outfit noticed a pattern with the names of those arrested in these scams.)

Eight Toledo convenience store employees were arrested yesterday following a 10-month investigation into the sale of stolen property and fraudulent use of food stamp cards at local stores, police said.

Six of the eight people were charged with either felony or misdemeanor receiving stolen property. Two were charged with illegal use of food stamps and telecommunications fraud, both of which are felonies, Lt. David Schmidt of the police department’s property unit said.

The employees arrested yesterday were:

•Adel “Eddie” and Nabil “Bill” Saleh of the Peck Market, 1040 Peck St.

•Mohammad Zarour of Wag’s Carryout, 422 Steadman St.

•Rebecca Coffey of Katie’s Baby World, 1822 Lagrange St.

•Tahwer Qavi of Dollar Close-Outs, 2839 Monroe St.

•Ahmad Deen of the Lucky Dollar Mini Mart, 1713 Jefferson Ave.

•Michael Flowers and Sukhwinderdeep Singh of the Uptown Market II, 1602 Cherry St.

Three people charged with receiving stolen property remained at large yesterday, Lieutenant Schmidt said.

They were Wasif Alshahar of the Beer Dock, 932 Huron St.; Nawal Mamoud of the Prospect Red and White Market, 1902 North Detroit Ave., and Samir Braiteh of the Sunoco gas station, 350 West Bancroft St. 

Said the police lieutentant in charge:

“It’s been going on for years, just in varying degrees at varying times,” he said.

He said there is no conspiracy suspected, but I wonder if there are seminars taught in certain countries of the world in which ’students’ are taught how to enter the US, get a convenience store and start scamming the dumb Americans.    You know there is a visa program (E-2 Treaty Investors) whereby someone with some money can get into the US if they say they are starting a business.

We need a leader in Washington who would work to change the law and make it impossible to use food stamps at these convenience stores and little gas stations.   Only large reputable supermarkets should trade in food stamps.

See my ever-growing list of posts on Food Stamp Fraud here.

Maybe refugees are involved in food stamp fraud after all

I’ve been posting on Food Stamp Fraud ever since a convenience store in our county was raided due to allegations of fraud.  I always put a disclaimer on those posts saying that as far as I knew refugees weren’t involved, just other immigrants who happened to also be members of the religion of peace.

Today this post was on one of my google alerts.  It’s from something called the Ohio Attorney Lawyer.  You can go here and see it.   It’s so garbled and the English is so horrible I wondered how anything called Attorney Lawyer would get any business with such awful writing skills.   So, I searched around with some words in that garbled post and came up with a story about Somalis being arrested a few years back for food stamp fraud.

This is from the article, 6 years old now, that began with the same story that the garbled post reported today.    Read the whole article about how Somali asylees (just refugees who got here on their own steam and asked for asylum) have scammed the taxpayer.   But here is an even more serious part of the scam:

Food stamp fraud has taken on more sinister dimensions within the last year and a half. Last autumn, the FBI determined that the Somali asylee community in Seattle, set with food stamps and other forms of public assistance, was targeted by the Al-Barakaat Wire Transfer company, a wire transfer and hawala banking outfit with known connections to Al Qaeda. Al-Barakaat set up a storefront in Seattle and immediately went to work selling Qat, a mild narcotic popular with Somalis, and converting food stamps to money for Somalis to send back to their relatives in Somalia. The FBI believes Al-Barakaat skimmed tens of millions of dollars off of the proceeds of these two activities, and funneled it directly to Al Qaeda.

Do you think the immigration lawyers who help these people get asylum ever feel guilty later when they learn their clients are crooks and possibly terrorists?

Then here is another Somali food stamp scam bust, in Ohio no less, and more recent (January of this year):

Eight men who ran four area food markets are accused of abusing federal food programs for the needy at a cost to taxpayers of more than $1.5 million, newly unsealed charges allege.

Federal officials announced the indictments and arrests yesterday, though six of the eight men were indicted on Jan. 10 and arrested Friday.

The indictments say that the owners and managers of two stores on the North Side and two on the West Side allowed their customers to use food stamps and WIC vouchers illegally. They permitted, authorities say, the exchange of the stamps and vouchers for cash and allowed people to use them to buy prepaid international phone cards and to pay off personal loans.

In some cases, the money also was laundered through U.S. bank accounts and wasn’t disclosed on tax returns, said IRS spokesman Craig Casserly.

All eight of the men indicted are Somali immigrants who were in the country legally but are not U.S. citizens.

I wonder where those eight are now.  Prison? Deported? or loose in a city near you?

More news on Iraqi IDP’s, government announces incentives to return

On July 16th the Iraqi government announced incentives for IDP’s (Internally Displaced Persons) to return home.   Judy reported on this in an earlier post here, and now we are hearing some of the details.

NGO’s* and their reporter friends have been saying we broke it (Iraq) and now we need to fix it by bringing thousands of Iraqis to the US.   So it is welcome news to see that the Iraqi government is taking steps to resettle its own people.     Note in this story that there are incentives not only for internally displaced but for displaced people who have left Iraq to return as well.

BAGHDAD, 20 July 2008 (IRIN) – The Iraqi government has adopted a number of measures aimed at encouraging the return of over four million internally displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees to their homes, a government statement has said.

The most significant measure is the one-off payment of 1.8 million Iraqi dinars (about US$1,500) to families who are illegally occupying the houses of other displaced families from a different sect and who want to return to their homes, the statement said on 16 July.

The aim is to help those families to rent other places, the statement said.
All IDPs or refugees willing to return to their houses will be paid one million Iraqi dinars (about $840), it said.

Another measure stipulates an additional monthly payment of 150,000 Iraqi dinars (about $145) to each internally displaced family which has not yet returned to its home. The payment will be for three months while the family is still displaced.

Other measures include helping Iraqi refugees in neighbouring countries with free airline tickets if they choose to return home, the free shipment of their belongings, and compensation for damaged property.

“These decisions are designed to facilitate and expedite the return of displaced families to their houses to boost the peaceful coexistence among Iraq’s different components in mixed areas,” the statement said.

According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), over 4.2 million Iraqis have fled their homes since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Of these, about 2.2 million are living as refugees in neighbouring countries – mostly Syria and Jordan – while the remainder are IDPs.

* NGO’s (volags) need refugee numbers entering the US because that is how they are paid, by the head.  And, since this is also an opportunity to whack the Bush Administration over the war, the issue is a ‘twofer’ for them.

Readers help needed!  If you see this story reported by the Associated Press, send the link to us.

Some Iraqi IDP’s are not legit

IDP’s are Internally Displaced Persons in the vernacular of the refugee resettlement industry folks.  The mainstream media tells us that a couple of million are displaced within Iraq and we must begin resettling these so-called refugees to the US.    The normal definition of “refugee” specifies that the person must have left his or her own country due to persecution or the fear of persecution; economic migrants don’t count.   We, at RRW, are trying to get to the bottom of this issue.  

Here is an article from Relief Web that gives us a bit more information:

BAGHDAD, 27 July 2008 (IRIN) – A provincial investigative committee in the southern Iraqi city of Najaf is to go check the files of more than 200 displaced families living in a camp outside the city to determine who are genuinely displaced and who are not, an official said on 26 July.

Mashkour al-Mousawi, director of the Ministry of Displacement and Migration’s Najaf province branch, added that the committee will expel from the camp those families claiming to be displaced and will encourage the return of some genuine internally displaced persons (IDPs) to areas now deemed safer for them to return to.

“We have reports that there are some families from remote areas pretending to be displaced who have joined other displaced families in al-Manathira camp to benefit from financial, food and non-food assistance,” said al-Mousawi.

We are glad to learn that the Iraqi government is working to sort this out and look forward to reports from reporters in the US media telling the American public the whole story and not simply regurgitating press releases from NGO’s.

Somali gangs in Minneapolis? Open warfare?

Clan warfare maybe, but gangs too?   

This is the second ‘Somali watch’ post I promised this morning, thanks to our unofficial Somali researcher, blulitespecial.

This story from the Minneapolis Star Tribune is from the end of June and we missed it, as did most of you,  because these stories do not make it to the national media—it goes against most reporters’ notion of the beauty of cultural diversity.

Police and a Somali leader [where do we know him from?] met with members of the Somali community Friday to seek their help to find suspects in four unsolved slayings of Somali men since December in Minneapolis and Brooklyn Center.

Open warfare!

Brooklyn Center police Cmdr. Stu Robinson and Minneapolis Lt. Amelia Huffman, head of the homicide unit, told the group that police can’t solve the killings without community help.

“I was begging them to have their people come forward,” Robinson said. “Unless they step up, the cycle will continue and there will be more people dying in their community. It’s no different than other communities.”

Some Somalis at the meeting said they fear talking to police because of immigration status. [Ed:  What the heck, I thought they were all here legally!]   ”I said we don’t ask and don’t care,” Robinson said. “We want to help stop the violence in your community and the greater community, that includes Brooklyn Center.”

Jamal [Omar Jamal, executive director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center] said word in the Somali community is that friends of Jama [one of the guys who was murdered] think they know the shooter and may try to kill him. He said he encouraged people to give tips on the suspect to police instead because “it is almost like open warfare right now among the Somali minors and youth. We are deeply troubled.”

As I read this story I wondered if some of these gang members went over to Postville, Iowa in the recent migration for meatpacking jobs.

Then there is this:

Jamal said some of his people are afraid Somali gangs are involved and may retaliate if members of the community name suspects. Some hide suspects who are in their clans, as they did in Somalia, and sometimes try to smuggle them out of the country, Jamal said.

So, in addition to gangs we now have clans!   And, then I wondered, if they can smuggle them out of the country are they also smuggling them in?  Hum!

Endnote:  I thought I recognized the name Omar Jamal.  You can read all about him here.  He was defending the Somali Hallway Rapist last summer whose violent act was caught on camera.   Busy guy, Jamal, wonder if he got the rapist freed.   Does anyone know?

Refugee Awareness blog!

I just came across this blog entitled Refugee Archives Current Awareness Blog and it looks like a great source for news on refugees.  It apparently comes from the Refugee Studies program at the University of East London (oh brother!), but nonetheless looks like it is getting information out that I am not seeing elsewhere.  There are two articles today on the Iraqi internally displaced people—an issue not being honestly covered by the mainstream media.

By the way, you may want to occasionally visit our category ‘where to find information.’

Somalis on the march to Postville, Iowa

Update:   I only posted this a few minutes ago and already the story is changing.  See the Des Moines Register and note that the bloom is already off the rose at Agriprocessors.   Teach me to read all my e-mail from Blulitespecial before I write!

I have a pair of Somali stories for you this morning, both thanks to Blulitespecial, this is the first one.

Do you all recognize the town of Postville?  It is where the Kosher meat packing plant is, Agriprocessors, the one raided by the feds in May where 389 Hispanic illegal immigrants were found working.

Word of the raid reached Minneapolis, home of the largest Somali population in the US, and Somali men are now flocking to Postville to fill the jobs vacated by the illegal workers, some of whom were apparently underaged according to a story in the New York Times two days ago.  (Sorry, you will have to google that story, the link is screwy).

Here is what the Minneapolis Star Tribune is reporting:

POSTVILLE, Iowa – Scores of Somali immigrants are taking jobs at the nation’s largest kosher meatpacking plant, replacing Hispanic workers arrested in a huge immigration raid and forcing a remote Iowa town to make another cultural shift.

Before the May 12 raid at Agriprocessors, hundreds of Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants maintained a vibrant community in little Postville, a largely white community of 2,200 people in far northeast Iowa.

Now the stoops and haunts once occupied by Hispanics are being filled by about 150 Somali men.

The $13 an hour offered by Agriprocessors is drawing workers away from Tyson’s Food which has been the primary employer (Swifts too) herding Somalis from city to city and causing disruptions in places like Shelbyville, TN and Emporia, KS.

Regardless of previous claims, Somali workers such as Hassam Jilmale said he left work at a Tyson plant in Nebraska because he heard he could make more money with better conditions at Agriprocessors.

If the New York Times allegations are true, one of you volag do-gooders should be warning Hassam.

Then there is this comment by a Somali from Minneapolis involved in legal aid for Somalis.  Mark my words there will soon be special arrangements for Muslim prayer at the Jewish meatpacking plant:

“They go to these places and they’re not well equipped …” he said. “They do not speak the language. They do not know their legal rights and they live in fear of losing their jobs. They need someone who can bridge the two levels and balance the interests but they are not there.”

Then finally toward the end of the article is some mention of the town and its people.

The new Somali residents seem fine, but he [town resident] fears there is only so much upheaval the town can take.

“We’re just always adjusting and it’s scary, it’s hard,” he said. “We get all these new people and we don’t know who they are.”

Dear residents of Postville, to know what you are in for, read our archived stories on Shelbyville, TN here.  And, our category on the Somali controversy that swirled in Emporia, KS here.

Blog on Iraqi refugees: more questions then answers

We have written 201 posts on the Iraqi refugee situation and still feel like we are not getting the truth, or anything near the accurate story of the supposed “crisis” with Iraqi refugees.   I came across this blog the other day reporting on a first hand account of a visit to the UNHCR office in Jordan.  Now I have even more questions.

First, we have been inundated by the media, especially the Associated Press, telling us how bad the Bush Administration is in admitting refugees from Jordan and Syria.  However, according to this UN office in Jordan, up until sometime in 2007 the UNHCR had not registered very many refugees (the UN is the gatekeeper to refugee resettlement).   As a matter of fact, the blogger here, says that when he entered the UN office he had expected to see a long line of refugees and saw none.

In 2007 UNHCR set a submission target of 7500 Iraqis, they met this target and more with 8062 Iraqis registered and processed. A cumulative total of 4,663 persons have been submitted to these 16 countries.

So, now my question is, if the refugee crisis is so great why had the UN been dragging its feet?

The blogger then reports that he asked the UN employee about the problem of Muslims who have converted to Christianity feeling threatened by revealing that information to Jordanian Muslim officials.  Why haven’t we heard about this before?   And, we have been told over and over again that information was not collected on the religious affiliation of refugees.

I asked about the some of the concerns of the people I have interviewed. One was concerning Muslims who had secretly converted to Christianity. That they were afraid to tell the caseworkers of their conversions, afraid of reprisals as it is illegal in the Kingdom of Jordan for a Muslim to convert. Ziad assured me that anyone giving information about their case had to be forthright and need not fear any reprisals.

The UN employee then tells the blogger that single men are not given priority in resettlement, but that doesn’t fit what we are hearing on this end.   We have reported on many single Iraqi men getting into the US.  So, what is the truth?  Just the other day I reported on the Iraqi refugee who exposed himself and a few weeks back I wrote about two questionable Iraqi young men in the Bay area interviewed on a radio program (the volag representative even said they were resettling single men in California).

I also asked Ziad who was given resettlement priority. He replied that priority was given to; single females, the elderly, children separated from their parents or relatives, and family reunification.

Last, the blogger relates how Jordan is trying to push Iraqi refugees out of that country by imposing fines on those who stay too long.  According to the blogger this has pushed “hundreds of thousands” to Syria.  What the heck?  How come we haven’t heard about this?

Second option: if they choose to leave the fine would be waved. *This may account for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees who have left Jordan for Syria.

Where is Matthew Lee and all the rest of the biased and lazy mainstream media?