Grand Island, NE police chief: “It is chaotic anarchy” here among all the ethnic groups

The Los Angeles Times has finally caught on to problems created when many diverse immigrant groups arrive in small midwestern towns lured there by the big national and international meatpackers.  Here is a story thanks to Baron at Gates of Vienna that summarizes much of what we have already said about Grand Island, NE and its multicultural woes.  (See our category Greeley/Swift/Somali controversy where we have filed all of our Grand Island posts for a couple of years)

There isn’t much new in this article that we haven’t previously reported, but coming on the heels of the Maine Center for the Prevention of Hate Violence announcement that it would use Somali-saturated Lewiston, ME as an example of how town folks can get along with their immigrants, I’m thinking what the heck are they going to Frederick, MD  for?   Let them go to someplace like Grand Island, NE that will be a real challenge when they have to tell the Hispanics, Somalis, Sudanese and now Cubans that they need to just get along with each other!  Maybe its just a matter of reminding them about our magical melting pot!

This really makes me steam!  They (the hate violence gang) don’t want to sort out the ethnic conflicts between people of color, they just want to claim white people are racists and need government-funded behavior modification! 

Back to the LA Times (rant concluded) here is how the lengthy article begins:

Grand Island, Neb., has long been a revolving door of immigrants, from Vietnamese and Bosnians to Latinos and Sudanese. But with Somali Muslims came a whole new set of conflicts.

The reporter gives the reader a little history about the Hispanics who have been in the town for a long time and then tells us about the raids by ICE.  After those raids other ‘legal’ immigrants came to town.   One townsperson summed it up well!

“There has been more bigotry,” Fulton said, “because there has just been more and more and more of them.”

Then the Somalis came looking for the meatpacking jobs:

The emotions unleashed by the raid would soon find a new target — Sudanese and Somalis attracted by the promise of work at the meatpacking plant.

The new immigrants, who had been granted refugee status because of strife in their homelands, posed new challenges to the status quo in Grand Island.

They were black, and some were Muslim.

At first the Muslims didn’t make too many demands but then in 2008 they stirred up anger among other ethnic workers (we have all this in our posts from that time period).

That changed in 2008, during Ramadan, when virtually all the Muslim workers began leaving the assembly line en masse to pray. Even Muslims who are not particularly religious often make an effort to pray during the holy month.

Co-workers complained that they had to pick up the slack. Management told the Somalis they couldn’t pray because the plant, one of the largest in the country, couldn’t afford to stop the machines. Five hundred Muslim workers, infuriated, walked off the job.

Most came back after Swift & Co. agreed to accommodate them by changing break times.

But other workers protested that the Muslims had gotten preferential treatment, an idea fueled by a story published in a local Spanish-language newspaper that falsely claimed the Somalis had gotten a pay raise. Fights broke out in the lunch room. Hundreds of Latinos — joined by the Sudanese, who are mostly Christian — walked off the job.

The plant settled down because the meatpacker made accommodations to the Muslims and as we learn later in the article many of the nomadic Somalis moved on to another Nebraska town.   However, the LA Times tells us that crime in Grand Island is now out of control!

Major conflict at the plant let up when Ramadan ended. But tensions in town mounted like never before.

At the Autumn Woods apartments on the southeast side of town, police were called several times a day to respond to stabbings, shootings and disputes.

A war was building between the Somalis, who lived on one side of the complex, and the Sudanese, who lived on the other side.

“It’s chaotic anarchy,” Police Chief Steve Lamken said recently.

In late August 2009, a Sudanese man was shot in the head at the apartment complex. Police arrested three Somalis in connection with the killing.Officer Robert Winton blamed the fighting on the Africans’ violent homelands. “They’re at war in their countries and they bring it here,” he said.

Violent crimes in Grand Island have risen in the last two years and the community, surrounded by cornfields, now faces a gang problem.

To top it off the LA Times wraps up by mentioning that 700 Cubans have come to town this year.

I won’t go into it here because this is getting way too long, but the LA Times article also discusses Grand Island’s mayor and the problems she had with the Somalis.  I recommend you go back to my 2008 post on how the Somalis demanded that the mayor resign.  Also, note in previous posts that the Somalis brought CAIR to town and here.

So, hey Center for the Prevention of Hate Violence, how about tackling the ethnic strife and multicultural hate violence going on in places like Grand Island, NE and leave the good people of Frederick, MD alone.

For new readers:

The US State Department has admitted over 80,000 Somali refugees to the US (this linked post continues to be one of the most widely read posts we have ever written) in the last 25 years and then last year had to suspend family reunification because widespread immigration fraud was revealed through DNA testing.  That specific program has not yet been reopened (that we know of), but will be soon. 

Nevertheless, thousands of Somali Muslims continue to be resettled as I write this. We recently learned that we will be taking 6000 Somalis this year from one camp in Uganda and as many as 11,000-13,000 total from around the world.

Americans arrested for taking kids out of Haiti

This was all over the news yesterday, so it may have been resolved, but if you haven’t seen it elsewhere here is the story from Reuters:

Haitian police have arrested 10 U.S. citizens caught trying to take 33 children out of the earthquake-stricken country in a suspected illicit adoption scheme, authorities said on Saturday.

The five men and five women were in custody in the capital, Port-au-Prince after their arrests on Friday night. There are fears that traffickers could try to exploit the chaos and turmoil following Haiti’s January 12 earthquake quake to engage in illegal adoptions.

One of the suspects, who says she is leader of an Idaho-based charity called New Life Children’s Refuge, denied they had done anything wrong.

The suspects were detained at Malpasse, Haiti’s main border crossing with the Dominican Republic, after Haitian police conducted a routine search of their vehicle.

Authorities said the Americans had no documents to prove they had cleared the adoption of the 33 children — aged 2 months to 12 years — through any embassy and no papers showing they were made orphans by the quake in the impoverished Caribbean country.

“This is totally illegal,” said Yves Cristalin, Haiti’s social affairs minister. “No children can leave Haiti without proper authorization and these people did not have that authorization.”

Further down in the story is more news I hadn’t heard.

In addition to outright trafficking in children, authorities have voiced fears since the quake that legitimate aid groups may have flown earthquake orphans out of the country for adoption before efforts to find their parents had been exhausted.

As a result, the Haitian government halted many types of adoptions earlier this month.

Obama’s Open Government Directive means public can participate in refugee resettlement reform task force!

Yes!  Three cheers for the Obama White House (from me no less)!

I’m just now seeing this good news reported in early December at OMB Watch.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released the long-anticipated Open Government Directive on Dec. 8. The directive, a memo from OMB Director Peter Orszag to all agency and department heads, requires that all agencies develop and implement an Open Government Plan specific to each agency.

The directive has been in development since the first day of the Obama administration, when the president issued a memo tasking OMB and other key officials to develop the directive. The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) oversaw a three-phase online dialogue to publicly generate, discuss, and develop policy ideas for the directive. The three phases attracted a great deal of public participation.

The directive continues to emphasize the three principles outlined by President Obama in his original memo – transparency, participation, and collaboration. The directive is comprised of four main components centered on very simple but important themes – publishing information; creating a culture of openness; improving data quality; and updating policies to allow for greater openness. Each section tasks agencies and other key offices with specific goals, complete with deadlines and clear requirements that the public be informed and permitted to participate in almost every project.

Surely that means that critics of the refugee resettlement program’s management should be participating in the Task Force on-going at the White House to reform the floundering program that was discussed yesterday at Friends of Refugees here.   And, we should be able to see the notes from the Task Force meetings too!

Lewiston, ME to be used as assimilation model for other cities

Update February 17th:  US Justice Department funding behind this project, here.

Update February 9th:  Newspaper editor tells the truth about Lewiston, here.

You have got to be laughing if you have been a regular reader of Refugee Resettlement Watch.  The Center for the Prevention of Hate Violence* in Portland, ME is taking its wonderful example of how Somalis have come to live and be accepted in Lewiston to four other cities in the US.

Yes, Lewiston! where thousands of Somalis looking for the best welfare state in the Nation arrived in the city a few years ago.  Lewiston! where we only last month heard about roving gangs of Somali youths tormenting people on the streets.  Lewiston! where a Somali woman just a few weeks ago became impatient in a line of vehicles dropping kids off at Lewiston High School and ran over a young student with her Mercedes.  Lewiston! where Somalis were arrested by the feds for allegedly running a home health care fraud!  And, here is another case of a conviction for welfare fraud there.  Lewiston! where last spring Newsweek did a puff piece article and the town fathers had to come back and say it was not accurate.  That same Lewiston is going to be the model for four troubled cities!

Here is the story from the Sun Journal yesterday:

LEWISTON — How the Lewiston-Auburn community reacted to snuff out prejudice against local Somalis in 2006 makes it a leader in the nation, said Steve Wessler, executive director of the Center for Preventing Hate.

There’s still more work to do, but Lewiston handled it so well that lessons learned here will be shared with cities throughout the country, Wessler said.

He spoke Friday at a daylong conference titled Advice for America: What Lewiston-Auburn has Learned Since 2000 about Fostering Relationships Between Residents and Newcomers. The event was held at the University of Southern Maine’s Lewiston-Auburn College

We’re here to share and celebrate, share the experiences of what has worked, what has helped change the community,” Wessler said. “Where there was a lot of diversity is now a model for cities elsewhere.”

[....]

Shortly after a man rolled a pig’s head into a Somali mosque in downtown Lewiston in 2006 — an event that attracted national and international press — “we did interviews with dozens of people, Somali- and American-born, to get a sense of the community,” Wessler said. “What we found was sobering.”

Almost every Somali girl and woman offered examples of hate and violence directed at them as they walked on streets or shopped in grocery stores.

“That’s not a Lewiston-Auburn phenomenon; that’s a national phenomenon,” Wessler said.

Communities with immigrant populations must reflect and decide they can do better, he said, adding that Lewiston-Auburn did that.

So, where are they taking their Lewiston model?   Other cities in strife!

His group will spend the next three years on The New Migration Project [must be some federal grant], working in cities in strife after immigrants have moved in. Those communities include Boise, Idaho; Fort Wayne, Ind.; Frederick, Md.; and Manchester, N.H. That will be followed up with a national conference in Lewiston later this year.

Boise, ID, Fort Wayne, IN, and Manchester, NH are all overloaded refugee resettlement cities that we have discussed many many times on these pages.  But, Frederick, MD!  Frederick, MD!   That is the county just east of where we live and we have been told over and over again that everything is hunky-dory with refugees in Frederick.  So what is going on there that is not being reported in the media?  I’ll be checking with my political contacts and try to get to the bottom of that! 

Lightbulbs flashing! I bet this is one more attack on Frederick County for its use of the 287g program that allows the local sheriff to deport illegal aliens.  Frederick is the only county in Maryland with the guts to implement the program and I think that including Frederick in this four-city example of implied racism is a political move to embarrass the city.

*Check out the Center for the Prevention of Hate Violence’s most recent Form 990  and note that most of their funding is from government contracts and most of the money goes out to salaries.  Then be sure to see their “resources” page with links to groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center (some call it the poverty palace).

Friends of Refugees organization launches website, asks for answers

We  told you about Friends of Refugees back in March of 2008, here and how it had originally come into existence.  Christopher Coen and those who work with him have been indefatigable defending refugees across the country who have been left in the lurch by certain government contractors, some of them ’church’ groups, who continually lobby for more refugees, are paid to resettle them, and then seemingly abandon them, which of course harms the refugees and the communities in which they have been placed.

*Reminder to our diverse readership:  At Refugee Resettlement Watch our goal is to encourage an open and honest discussion about the refugee resettlement program of the US State Department.  The public should know how this program works and be involved in the decision-making regarding the future of your community.  Additionally, we should have a national debate about how many refugees America will take and from what cultures they will come.  In the meantime, your tax dollars are paying for this business (yes, it is a business!) and the agencies contracted with your money should be held accountable for their work.  That is where Friends of Refugees comes in.

Here is their new site and a bit about what they do:

Friends of Refugees (FORefugees) is a nonpartisan citizens group monitoring the U.S. refugee resettlement program. We serve as an ethical watchdog, promoting refugee resettlement agency and government accountability. We are an all-volunteer citizens group composed of people, some of whom formerly were volunteers at refugee resettlement groups, who are concerned about the state of the U.S. refugee resettlement program – in particular, the welfare of refugees, who are often neglected and who fall through the cracks in the system. We are primarily focused on refugee resettlement agencies abiding by the requirements of the program, although we are also concerned about inadequate government oversight of the resettlement program. We are also concerned about publicly-funded services and material items being provided to refugees.

Be sure to check out the contact information on the above mentioned ‘about’ page.

In a new post today, Mr. Coen addresses the increased funding that was announced last week for what is known as the R & P program (that is the initial resettlement program) that the State Department funds.  FOR has further clarified some of the sketchy information on the doubling of the funds paid to contractors, but many questions remain.  Here is how Mr. Coen opens his inquiry:

Friends of Refugees has had some concerns about the recently announced increase in refugee program funding (see our recent post on this announcement). We wanted to know who made this recommendation and what criteria was used? We understand that President Obama ordered a comprehensive review of the refugee resettlement program by the National Security Council (NSC), but who is on the NSC’s Interagency Task Force and who is the Task Force consulting with?

Read it all!   Note that one of the most important questions he asks is:  Why throw money at the program and reward the contractors when the problems the review was supposed to address have apparently not yet been resolved?

One more thing:  I look forward to reading the State Department monitoring reports FOR is making available on its website.

Comment worth noting: Manchester and Cloward-Piven

Last night we heard from reader Thomas in response to the Manchester Somali story I posted yesterday.  He confirms for us that the Cloward-Piven strategy* to overload the welfare system with poor and angry people was well-established in radical leftwing circles 40 years ago!   Thank goodness we are all catching on, I just hope it’s not too late for us.

Thomas, thanks for the kind words (and don’t apologize, many of us who are the most vocal, and can see the truth, also came from the Left in our youth).  Readers, check out all the comments at the Union Leader.  So far this morning I don’t see Thomas’s, but be sure to follow the instructions to get to the full list of comments which have indeed been moved.

Thanks for the attention to my hometown of Manchester NH. I made a comment on this UL article and referenced your website, if that is all right. Someone there mentioned Cloward and Piven, and boy– that set me off! I first learned of them in the late 60s when I was pretty radical in certain Democrat student organizations while at NYU. (I am not proud of that, by the way, and I am truly trying to make amends for my past embracing of twisted social experiments). Somehow I don’t think my comment will be allowed to post at the UL, though.

I have been visiting your website much in the past year as refugee developments in the United States (specifically in my neighbor state of Maine) have peaked my curiosity. Here in the UK the refugee mess (shoveling tax money toward so-called refugees who very often scam the govt system) has spiralled out of control in the last 3 years and I see the U.S. is following suit. This horrifies me to no end.

I will be moving my family back to New Hampshire in about 10 weeks after my contract is up here. I will no longer be employed, as my department has been transferred to Asia. But that is another story; Perhaps I can be classified as a refugee from the UK?

Thanks Thomas, good luck in Manchester.   The way things are going in that “welcoming” city you will feel like you haven’t even left the UK!

* Please visit or revisit our discussion of Cloward-Piven in our Community destabilization category and when you read this post consider my assertion below:

When you read the Nation article, note that Cloward and Piven were very conscious of the concept of the ‘presumption of good intentions.’ In other words, they knew that this political strategy would go undetected for a very long time because it would be hidden from their average do-gooder minions by the presumption that this was all about aiding the downtrodden.

 

Diversity is strength alert! Manchester Somalis one big happy family (Not!)

Manchester, NH has been struggling with a huge overload of refugees for some time now.  Today I see it isn’t just tension between New Hampshire residents and the newcomers, it’s one Somali group in conflict with another.   Seems one group is claiming that the other is teaching Islam with your tax dollars.

From the Union Leader:

MANCHESTER – A federally funded weekend education program for Somali refugee children has been put on hold after allegations it was teaching Muslim doctrine.

Police Chief David Mara, Mayor Ted Gatsas and Superintendant of Schools Tom Brennan recently received a letter saying the Somali Bantu Community Association is teaching from the Quran during its weekend youth program.

Mukhtar Idhow, director of the group, said the program is not a religious school, but is a tutoring program for Somali children. The program is run through Southern New Hampshire Services and is housed at the city’s Multicultural Center on Maple Street.

The goal, Idhow said, is to raise graduation rates in the Somali community. The program will not meet this weekend and will be on hold until after the group speaks with city officials and decides whether to continue, he said.

Idhow and other local officials say the letter is part of an ongoing feud between the leaders of the Somali Bantu organization and the Somali Development Center, another nonprofit group that provides aid to local Somali refugees.

“There’s been a lot of rumors about bad blood between the different factions, said Dan Calegari of Southern New Hampshire Services. “I work with these people daily. There’s never even been any hint of religious activity. … It really comes down to animosity between different segments of the Somali population.”

Mara said he also heard the letter was part of a feud and is working with the groups to address the rift within the Somali community.

Read the rest of the story and don’t skip the comments!

For new readers:

The US State Department has admitted over 80,000 Somali refugees to the US (this linked post continues to be one of the most widely read posts we have ever written) in the last 25 years and then last year had to suspend family reunification because widespread immigration fraud was revealed through DNA testing.  That specific program has not yet been reopened (that we know of), but will be soon. 

Nevertheless, thousands of Somali Muslims continue to be resettled as I write this. We recently learned that we will be taking 6000 Somalis this year from one camp in Uganda and as many as 11,000-13,000 total from around the world.

Update:  Another blogger takes on this Manchester Somali story here and a commenter (Jake Jacobsen) had this hilarious thing to say:

Somehow the modern Liberal world has become a Monty Python episode. I’m imagining two cross dressing old ladies sitting on a park bench debating the merits of diversity as Bantu and Somali immigrants fight to the death and burn the town down behind them!

I need to put the blog View from the Right in our blogroll.

Another update:  Check out the comments to this post and note I discuss one of Thomas’s comments in a Comment worth noting, here.

Limon: Give Haitian “victims” priority, bring in the family

That is the gist of the opinion piece published today in USA Today.  The author is Lavinia Limon head honcho of the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI). 

Let Haitians with relatives in the USA immigrate here ASAP.

The horrific disaster in Haiti compels us to act in every way possible to reduce suffering and save lives. I salute everyone working on the ground in dreadful conditions to provide medical assistance, food, water and shelter. Although the relief is agonizingly slow, there’s progress, and it will accelerate.

What else can we do?

We can help the approximately 50,000 Haitians who’ve already gotten U.S. government approval to come to this country because they have a close relative (spouse, child, parent or sibling) who’s a U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident.

[....]

But we shouldn’t stop there. Other Haitians who also have family in the U.S. should be allowed to join their relatives for humanitarian reasons. They could work and send money home to help rebuild Haiti.

Readers should know that family reunification is a big part of the refugee resettlement business.  Agencies like USCRI (one of the Top Ten, now nine, federal refugee contractors*) through its affiliates resettle refugees in your town and then they are paid by the government to fill out paperwork to bring extended family members.  That is an important part of their income and how they change your community over time.  They then are paid by the head to resettle the new refugees (and as we learned this week that funding has increased by 100%).

You may recall that the family reunification program has been suspended for “refugees” coming from some areas of the world (most notably Africa) because the State Department discovered that about 80% of the applications were fraudulent.  The anchor refugee was likely not related to those he or she was applying to bring to the US.

As of this writing, there is one comment to the opinion piece at USA Today, it is from Christopher Coen at Friends of Refugees (we told you about Mr. Coen’s work here).

The message to help Haitians is a good one. Too bad it comes from someone who heads an organization, the USCRI, that has severely neglected refugees in this country for years. Just in the past 2 years newspapers around the country have reported about USCRI refugees who have been dropped off in filthy, decrepit, and roach & rodent-infested apartments and left to fend for themselves with little assistance from USCRI’s network of refugee offices. A USCRI affiliate in Connecticut even lost it’s government contract to resettle refugees so bad was the neglect.

Ms. Limon would be better off using her time to adequately care for the refugees her organization has already been entrusted with, rather than advocate for even more refugees to neglect.

Christopher Coen
director
Friends of Refugees

The Connecticut reference involves a story we covered extensively (here is just one link to get you started) involving an USCRI affiliate in Waterbury, CT.  Recently we have chronicled the on-going problems in Bowling Green, KY (and here), that is also an USCRI affiliate involved in Bowling Green.  Complaints against USCRI have been made in other states as well (Ohio, Vermont, Missouri and New York for starters).

*For readers who are completely new to the refugee program there are ten (nine as of this week) volags (supposedly voluntary agencies) that contract with the US State Department to resettle refugees.  They then have affiliates in “welcoming” cities who receive their government funding as a pass-through from the ‘mother agencies’ which are responsible for making sure their affiliates use the taxpayers’ money properly and adequately care for the refugees (find them apartments, jobs and get them signed up for welfare) they have been assigned.   Review by the State Department is sporadic until an agency has been brought to the publics’ attention through the media.

Haitian immigrants fact sheet from Center for Immigration Studies

Please visit CIS for all sorts of handy facts about how many Haitians are in the US and what their status is in terms of citizenship, education, welfare use and so on.  Here are just a few of the facts, compiled by Steven Camarota, to pique your interest:

Of the 546,000 Haitians in the US in 2008 (assuming the census was correct):

The top states of Haitian immigrant settlement are Florida (251,963; 46%), New York (135,836; 25%) New Jersey (43,316; 8%), Massachusetts (36,779; 7%), Georgia (13,287; 2%), and Maryland (11,266; 2%).

[....]

When it extended Temporary Protected Status to Haitians, the Department of Homeland Security estimated 100,000 to 200,000 people could be eligible. While most are illegal immigrants, this estimate also includes those on temporary visas such as tourists, foreign students, and guest workers who will not have to go home.

Read it all!

Some welcome refugees: German home schoolers granted asylum

The Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) reports:

In a case with international ramifications, Immigration Judge Lawrence O. Burman granted the political asylum application of a German homeschooling family. The Romeikes are Christians from Bissinggen, Germany, who fled persecution in August 2008 to seek political asylum in the United States. The request was granted January 26 after a hearing was held in Memphis, Tennessee, on January 21.

“We can’t expect every country to follow our constitution,” said Judge Burman. “The world might be a better place if it did. However, the rights being violated here are basic human rights that no country has a right to violate.”

Burman added, “Homeschoolers are a particular social group that the German government is trying to suppress. This family has a well-founded fear of persecution…therefore, they are eligible for asylum…and the court will grant asylum.”

In his ruling, Burman said that the scariest thing about this case was the motivation of the government. He noted it appeared that rather than being concerned about the welfare of the children, the government was trying to stamp out parallel societies—something the judge called “odd” and just plain “silly.” In his order the judge expressed concern that while Germany is a democratic country and is an ally, he noted that this particular policy of persecuting homeschoolers is “repellent to everything we believe as Americans.”

Homeschooling did not always have such a settled status as a human right in the U.S., or such vocal champions in the courts as this judge.  It took a lot of work over many years by homeschooling activists and supporters to get it where it is today. And there are still some who would deny homeschoolers their rights; I won’t recount recent horror stories, but you can check around on the HSLDA website if you’re interested. But in Germany, the report says,

The persecution of homeschoolers in Germany has been intensifying over the past several years. They are regularly fined thousands of dollars, threatened with imprisonment, or have the custody of their children taken away simply because they choose to home educate.

There have been custody cases here in which homeschooled children were taken away, but at least it’s not national policy.  This is a wonderful use of asylum, and I applaud Judge Burman. I hope the decision helps Germany realize the error of its ways.

Hat tip: Mere Comments

Addendum:  Ann points out that we hope Germany will be as rigorous stamping out parallel Muslim societies as they are with Christian homeschoolers!