House Republican leadership wimps out on choice for immigration subcommittee chairmanship

Update January 23rd: This is really an update of Falknor’s Blue Ridge Forum piece on the two Kings in Congress and how Congressman Peter King has also wimped out on promised shariah hearings.  See Diana West here.

Update January 22nd: Richard Falknor writing at Blue Ridge Forum has more background on what is happening with the Republican establishment in Congress on the issues of immigration and shariah law.

Just when some of us were hopeful that the new House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security and International Law (here, apparently not updated as of this writing) would hold hearings on some troublesome areas of the refugee and asylee programs (like the Somali asylum seekers arriving on our borders by the hundreds, here), it looks like Speaker of the House Boehner has blinked and must have had some behind the scenes role in choosing a moderate (sounding) Republican rather than Rep. Steve King of Iowa for the chairmanship.  King would really have shaken things up.

This is from AP a week ago. And, here is a story from The Hill.  Maybe there is something more up-to-date than the AP story, but this is very discouraging news:

WASHINGTON — Republicans eliminated a potential liability with Latino voters Friday by refusing to give the top spot on an immigration subcommittee to a congressman who once proposed stopping illegal immigrants with an electrified fence.

The expectation was that Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, House Judiciary Committee chairman, would choose fellow

Republican Rep. Steve King of Iowa to be the next chairman of the Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on immigration, citizenship and other related issues.

Instead he chose California Rep. Elton Gallegly, who is considered an immigration hawk, but who is less likely to make explosive comments that make him a target for critics.

[.....]

By choosing Gallegly, Republicans get a subcommittee chairman whose public comments are less likely to be incendiary and won’t GOP hurt efforts to become more Latino-friendly, while depriving Democrats of an easy target in the run-up to the 2012 presidential elections.

Alfonso Aguilar, executive director of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles, said the decision is a clear message Republican leadership doesn’t want to antagonize Latinos.

The AP says Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith passed over King and chose Gallegly, but I don’t believe it for a minute. This is the inside the beltway Republican leadership wimping out!   And, to me, it is clear evidence that the pro-open borders Republicans (the Bush/McCain gang) are taking control.

A reminder to readers. Check MicEvHill.com daily for what is happening in Congress on immigration.  This blogger is an open-borders advocate but it’s a good place to see what they are up to and what is happening in Congress and in Washington on immigration and refugee issues.  Oh, and since he works for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops you probably pay his salary!

Tyson’s Shelbyville plant gets another bomb threat

Update January 18th: Arrest made in the graffiti incident—bored twentysomething confesses,  bomb threats appear to be stunts too, but those responsible have not yet been identified, according to this report.

Update: Jerry Gordon got the scoop and posted it at New English Review. An arrest was made today in this case.   I’m sure we will have more news tomorrow on the motives of this Tysons employee.

I didn’t even tell you about the first  bomb threat, here, but over the weekend the controversial Shelbyville, TN chicken plant got another bomb threat.

This is what News Channel 5 from Nashville is reporting:

SHELBYVILLE, Tenn.- For the second time in less than a month, a terror threat is made at a mid-state plant.

Shelbyville Police say a bomb threat was made Saturday night at the Tyson Plant. They say the threat was written in graffiti on a wall inside the plant.

This is not the first time this has happened. At the end of December, someone also used graffiti to make threats against employees at the plant.

For the earlier graffiti (reportedly “all americans must die”) terror threat that the feds were called in for, go here.  Tysons has still not released what exactly was written in that pre-Christmas event, nor whether a woman’s bathroom had been set on fire.

Meanwhile, the ‘Welcome to Shelbyville’ propaganda film has been selected by the US State Department to be shown around the world.

The documentary film is meant to show how a southern redneck Bible-belt town can learn to live with Somali refugees who have come to work at Tyson Foods.   I told you more about that Saturday, here.

Last evening I happened to see a Fox News critical report of this State Department program that is apparently sending films around the globe that are showing the world our dirty linen at a huge cost to taxpayers.  Searching around for a link to this story, the only thing I found quickly was this AP story by none other than Matthew Lee.  Longtime readers will remember Lee as the reporter who each month at the end of the Bush Administration pounded Bush and the State Department on not bringing enough Iraqi refugees to the US fast enough.

Here is what Lee says about the State Department’s multi-million dollar propaganda film series of which ‘Welcome to Shelbyville’ is a part.

The “American Documentary Showcase” series is funded and organized by the State Department’s Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs. It brings “award-winning contemporary American documentaries to audiences around the world to offer a view of American society and culture as seen by independent documentary filmmakers,” according to its website.

[....]

The department said that this year’s selections, chosen by the University Film and Video Association and independent international group of filmmakers, educators and students, explore topics ranging from civil rights and the treatment of military veterans to environmentalism and freedom of the press.

More later, I don’t think this issue is going away.

Jordan: Trees or refugees that is the question

I just love it when two great missions of the political Left come in conflict.  This story from Jordan captured my interest this morning.  Environmental activists in the Middle East (I didn’t know they had any!) are trying to stop the destruction of an important forest ecosystem.

Turns out that one of the pressures on Jordan, its environment, and its water supply is the large numbers of Palestinian and Iraqi refugees living there.

From the Green Prophet :

As well as the threats posed to local ecosystems and economic activities, the Halt Ajloun Deforestation campaign say that the danger to Ajloun Forest from the new development has wider significance. Jordan as a country already has less than 1% forest cover and suffers extensively from a lack of water. It has a high population density for such an arid country (partly resulting from the large numbers of Palestinian and Iraqi refugees living there), and has been named one of the ten most water-scarce nations on the planet.

Save the Middle East—bring refugees to America!

So since the Sierra Club and other US environmental groups have become either outright in favor of open borders, or dead silent on the issue, we could just take all those refugees off Jordan’s hands and thus save Jordan’s environment.

As for the US environment, well, we have already noted that Somalis like reader Abdi, here, thinks America is pretty empty and they can just fill it right up by taking over and having lots of babies.

This is what I said about the Sierra Club most recently:

Why has the Sierra Club led a campaign to keep our borders open? I believe it is because Carl Pope, their longtime head honcho, is first and foremost a Socialist (maybe a Marxist) one-worlder.  Longtime advocates of closing our borders have horror stories to tell about how Pope has over the years fought any effort by Sierra Club members to get into the immigration issue.  In fact, immigration control groups like NumbersUSA,* FAIR, and the Center for Immigration Studies were initially created to counter the pro-immigration (through silence) bias of the major environmental groups.   Now, of course, they have a much broader mission.

I did a lot of research on Pope, here is just one story (with links to previous posts on Pope), he sits on the notorious Apollo Alliance board and is good buddies with Marxist Van Jones.

Maybe the Green Prophet should research that story!

ORR! Where is the Annual Report to Congress?

With each passing month that the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) continues to break the law and not send an Annual Report to Congress it sends a clear message— they are hiding something.  

The ORR is now two years behind having only produced Annual Reports up to fiscal year 2007, here.

This is the law:

 Section 413(a) of the Immigration and Nationalities Act states:

Sec. 413. [8 U.S.C. 1523] (a) The Secretary, shall submit a report on activities under this chapter to the Committees on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives and of the Senate not later than the January 31 following the end of each fiscal year, beginning with fiscal year 1980.

So, in just a few weeks, on January 31st, ORR will be behind three Annual Reports.  They already have broken the law for FY 2008, FY 2009 and soon they will be due the FY 2010 report!

What are they hiding?   My guess is that they don’t want Congress and the public to know the horrible employment rate for refugees, the increasing use of public assistance and the huge amounts of tax dollars going to the program via grants and contracts to federal contractors (here are the federal contractors, called VOLAGs*) during the great recession.

*VOLAG stands for voluntary agency which is such a joke because you are paying for the resettlment programs of many religious organizations.

Readers might want to visit our ‘where to find information’ category (we have 162 posts there!) which I just now revisited for some information.  We have quite a bit of good material posted.

Welcome to Shelbyville! The rise of a propaganda film

When the BeCause Foundation filmmakers arrived in the tense Tennessee town of Shelbyville in 2008, this is what I said:

BeWare BeCause!

Shelbyville BeWare BeCause, they are using your town!   They will gloss over the tensions and problems of the Tyson’s African employees and then show what great work the TIRRC and the Somali Community Center are doing to bring you all together in harmonious unity.  This is a politically motivated campaign.  Your film, your town, will then be used to shame other towns into silence.

And, so it is!  But, there was one other element I hadn’t fully focused on when the filmmakers arrived coincidentally when the Somali Community Center of Nashville and the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition had organized a “unity meeting,” and that was that the US State Department would latch on to the film and show it around the world before it had been distributed in the US.  (And, who knows, perhaps they even commissioned the film in the first place!)

You see the State Department under Hillary Clinton has a huge stake in this—in convincing Americans that it’s just, well, American, to welcome diversity, to erase borders, and to create one great big happy multicultural world.

Well, that and they have a stake in keeping the spigot for cheap labor flowing to big business political donors and convincing Africans and others that they should come to America (why else show it in Africa).  They also aim to keep your tax dollars flowing to the international immigration industry and the federal contractors who are supposed to be resettling refugees.  So, it’s no surprise that “Welcome to Shelbyville” was selected by the State Department for a big bucks award.

What got me started on this story again was a piece earlier this week where filmmaker Kim Snyder, tells us that the recent Tyson’s controversy was all baloney and that they are busy showing their version of Shelbyville in Ireland and Belgium. The general theme is that if redneck Bible-belt Tennesseans could start to see that maybe Somalis weren’t so bad after all, then your town should be ashamed of itself if you have concerns.

Why Belgium and Ireland?  Because both of those countries are experiencing an influx of Somali Muslims and people are worried about it as we have reported previously on these pages.   Also, Snyder reveals that the film was rushed out to Oregon to pacify citizens of Portland after the recent terrorist threat there.  No attempted terrorist threat by a Somali refugee, just an anomaly—go back to sleep citizens of Portland and Corvallis.  (Heck, if those redneck Tennesseans can see the light, so can you!)

Then on top of that, the New York Times is now talking-up the film, but at least had the good sense to mention the word PROPAGANDA!

The people at the BeCause Foundation are community organizers plain and simple (one need only visit their website).  They are promoting a political agenda.  If someone gave me the big bucks I could produce a documentary film with a completely different and opposite slant—even if I interviewed the exact same people.

Welcome to Shelbyville is modern-day propaganda. Someone should trace the making of this film and write a book  using this film to show how Americans are being manipulated by one-worlders inside and outside of government.

California Christians converting Bhutanese to Christianity

It’s illegal for Christian refugee agencies (taking the big bucks from the federal tax payer) to promote Christianity with refugees they resettle.  However, it seems that, according to this article from the Contra Costa Times, Christian church leaders are actively converting mostly Hindu Bhutanese to Christianity.  I can’t say how big a trend this is based on this one article.  But, what do you (readers) think?

Contra Costa Times begins:

OAKLAND — Of all the wonders the Mainali family hoped to experience in America, salvation through a newfound faith in Jesus Christ was not on the list.

Then the family matriarch, Bishnu Mainali, discovered a Baptist church near downtown Alameda and listened each Sunday to the scripture and sermons. The lifelong Hindu found camaraderie among the friendly congregation and a positive message in the Christian teachings. Now, she is trying to convince her reluctant family it is time to be saved.

“The U.S. is a country of Christians,” said the 64-year-old refugee, speaking at her apartment a few days before Christmas. “We have to move toward the side of the majority.”

Read it all.  Send us your comments.

Bringing over the family—largest portion of legal immigration to US

CNS.News reported yesterday that who one is related to, not one’s skills or humanitarian need, is the most reliable way to get Legal Permanent Residence (LPR) status putting the “new American” on track to becoming a US citizen.   In 2009 (in a recession!) we gave LPR status to 1.1 million immigrants, 748,000 of them came as relatives to someone who got in here ahead of them. Hat tip: Ed.

Called chain migration, I’ll bet there is absolutely no DNA testing to prove that these people are related at all.

From CNS.News:

(CNSNews.com) – Foreign nationals with family ties to American citizens and green-card holders accounted for about two-thirds (748,000) of the total 1.1 million individuals who were granted legal permanent residency status by the U.S. government in 2009, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

The number of foreign nationals who became legal permanent residents (LPRs) of the U.S. in 2009 as a result of family ties (66 percent) outpaced those who became LPRs on the basis of employment skills (13 percent) and humanitarian reasons (17 percent), the CBO revealed in a December 2010 report entitled, Immigration Policy in the United States: An Update.

“People granted permanent admission to the United States are formally classified as legal permanent residents and given a green card,” noted the CBO. “LPRs are eligible to live and work in the United States, own property, and join the armed forces; eventually, they may apply for U.S. citizenship.”

An individual who becomes an LPR or U.S. citizen can then sponsor the admittance of immediate family members into the U.S.

You can readily see how the number will multiply exponentially each year.   See NumbersUSA latest video demonstration of the quantum leap in US population already underway.

Preferred categories

There are five categories under which the U.S. grants permanent residency status to foreign nationals, according to CBO. They include: relatives of U.S. citizens, family-sponsored preferences, employment-based preferences, the Diversity Program, and humanitarian reasons.

The sub-categories under family-sponsored preferences admissions include – First preference: unmarried adult sons and daughters of U.S. citizens; Second preference: spouses and dependent children of LPRs, unmarried sons and daughters of LPRs; Third preference: married sons daughters of U.S. citizens; and Fourth preference: siblings of adult U.S. citizens.

I’m puzzled why unmarried adult sons and daughters would be the highest preference category.  Is it because they are the cheap worker-bees that big business wants?

Diversity Visa

We haven’t written much about it lately, and the mainstream media virtually NEVER mentions it, but readers will be shocked to learn that we have a diversity lottery where those wishing to come to the US from certain under-represented countries, oh, like Yemen and Nigeria for instance, can come if they win the diversity lottery. Here is one story I wrote about this giant loophole in our security.   When this CBO report discusses diversity,  that’s the program they are talking about.  We take about 55,000 lottery winners each year to bring more diversity to the US! No, this is not a joke!

Almost forgot, for new readers, the family reunification program (P-3) of the Refugee Resettlement Program has been suspended for about 2 years due to the discovery of widespread fraud in Africa with mostly Somalis.   Surprise! the State Department learned that as many as 80% of the Somalis applying to bring family were not even related to each other!

I’m looking forward to reading the whole CBO report carefully and am posting this in our ‘where to find information’ category.

Boston: Haitians living in hotels as wards of the state

Ho hum.  It’s a year since a massive earthquake devastated Haiti and by all the news accounts this week, international aide did not pour into Haiti, Bill Clinton and George Bush were not successful in raising money to re-build the country and where is the Obama Administration?   No where according to this article in the Boston Globe!  Critics say the Obama US Citizenship and Immigration Services is responsible for not moving fast enough to give “deferred action” status to all those Haitians who got in here by hook or by crook after the quake and now want to stay.

By the way, the Obama Administration did make Temporary Protected Status available to all Haitians illegally in the US before the quake.

The people discussed in this article, got in somehow after the quake and live in limbo.  Some got in through a need for medical treatment and don’t want to leave, others were probably snuck in across our borders with the help of NGO’s and now live in hotels or are homeless in Massachusetts (elsewhere probably too).

This is how the story in the Globe begins:

BROCKTON — The young schoolteacher fled Haiti after the powerful earthquake, the day she spent four terrifying hours pinned under a car and a pile of rubble. In Massachusetts, she found medical care to heal her grotesquely swollen leg, counseling to quiet her nightmares, and hopeful messages from the US government that it would help her start over.

But today, the one year anniversary of the quake, she is homeless, with no documentation to work or drive, and living in a Brockton shelter with her husband and two daughters, aged 3 and 2 months. She is among a flood of Haitians silently adrift across the United States. Many fled the horrific disaster, using visitor visas to enter the United States and stay with friends or relatives, hoping to stay, at least temporarily, to work and rebuild.

In April, a top federal immigration official said Haitians who fled the earthquake could apply for deferred action, a rarely used immigration benefit that could allow them to stay and work for a fixed amount of time. But hundreds of applications are still unresolved nationwide, and advocates say that many Haitians are still unaware that the option exists.

Because they are not permitted to work, many are becoming burdens on their families or finding themselves homeless, according to Catholic Charities and other advocates. In Massachusetts, some are reluctant wards of the state, which pays for food stamps, apartment shelters, or hotel rooms for destitute families.

“I just want to have legal status. I need to start over,’’ said the woman, who asked not to be identified because she has applied for deferred action and fears deportation.

No kidding, she and millions of others just want to start over in the US.

But Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based group that favors tougher restrictions on immigration, said the Haitians should return to their homeland, because the visas were supposed to be for temporary travel. He pointed out that other nations in dire straits, such as Congo, do not receive special treatment.

If the truly charitable leaders of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Catholic Charities, World Relief, Church World Service, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society can’t find it in their hearts to find private charitable money for all those they help get across the border, then maybe it is time for them to go home.   Kind of makes you wonder if there really is a Cloward-Piven strategy to create chaos and bring down our welfare system—ultimately as well our form of government.

 

Church World Service looking to send refugees to State College, PA

Judging by comments to this story in the Centre Daily Times, local folks are not too happy about the plan.

State College is used to newcomers — incoming Penn State freshmen, university families, job-seekers, retirees. If a global humanitarian agency’s plans come to pass, more fresh faces will join the community.

Church World Service, out of New York City, is considering opening a local refugee resettlement office here. Last fall, the organization met with municipal officials, human-service leaders and church representatives to discuss the prospect of relocating about 40 people in the first year, and then about 100 annually.

As some housing advocates worry about finding affordable apartments in a tight market, Church World Service expects to hire an office director soon.

[....]

As one of 10 agencies in partnership with the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, it runs 34 local offices, mainly in large cities but also in midsize towns. The Lancaster office last year resettled the fifth-most refugees among all branches, trailing only Indianapolis; Columbus, Ohio; Los Angeles and Phoenix in ascending order.

Read the article, there is a discussion about the lack of affordable housing in a town where students pool their money and share homes and apartments.   Then there is this comment that makes me laugh:

For Corman [director of county adult services], one issue could be increased demand for social services already strained by budget cuts. Walters [county housing case manager] wants assurance Church World Service will help refugees beyond resettlement.

Laughing my head off!  State College, you will be lucky if the refugees are properly cared for in the first 6-8 months, then they will be all yours after that!   So, tell me, what constitutes an assurance?  And, what is the penalty if they don’t follow through?

Readers, I don’t want to go into a long history lesson, but Judy and I started following refugee issues in 2007 when Church World Service (CWS) began to send its refugee overflow from Lancaster, PA to Hagerstown, MD.  That was the beginning of the story, and the end is that they are not bringing refugees to Hagerstown now.

Readers comments to the Centre Daily Times appear to be universally negative.

Church World Service a radical left wing organization says one commenter:

Look under the covers as to who the radical leftists in the State College Borough are welcoming to our area. Check out the website for pro-Dream Act Church World Service and you will find every left wing cause in the known universe hypocritically masked as the work of God with a Communist vocabulary. Do a careful google for Church World Service‏ in this regard and see a liberalization theology political arm that has no problem contributing to communist causes worldwide, and which promotes the entirety of a culture-of-eternal-death, proving that the CWS serves another master.

See my post, one of several on CWS, here, and the other occupants of their New York City office building.

Who is going to pay for them, asked another commenter:

Wow get real, More medical assistance, more food stamps, There is no affordable housing, NO Good Jobs . Who is going to pay for them to move here ? 100 annually. Get Real .

Yet another commenter says, Lancaster is crime ridden:

Lancaster has one of the highest crime rates in PA..wonder why?

I tried to figure out exactly where Lancaster fell in the crime rate for Pennsylvania.  I don’t know if it has the worst crime rate, but this should be interesting to you.   At this site the crime rate for Lancaster is 9 (100 being the safest) and Philadelphia is 12 (100 being the safest)—what does that tell you!

Lancaster is considered near the heart of the Pennsylvania Dutch country and you know the Amish aren’t contributing much to the crime rate.

As a matter of fact, when refugees were being sent to Hagerstown in 2007, we learned that there had been some crime issue in Lancaster and CWS was told to not bring more for awhile.  Guess Lancaster has relented and refugees are still arriving there, but it looks like CWS has its sites set on State College now.

Is there a conspiracy by NGO’s to bring asylum seekers to US borders?

This post is a call for a Congressional investigation!

Last March (March 16th to be precise) I attended the 30th Anniversary “celebration” of the passage of the Kennedy/Biden Refugee Resettlement Act (signed by Jimmy Carter) at Georgetown University with Human Rights First! in Washington, DC.  This is just one post I wrote at the time.

Note there are a few lines in that post that have been rattling around in my mind on and off ever since.

Expressing gratitude for being granted asylum in the US an African young man from Sierra Leone described how he somehow (mysteriously) got a plane ticket to the US and ended up in NYC.  He was placed in detention for 4 months, but also mysteriously was visited by a lawyer from Human Rights First who helped him through the asylum process.

I was also struck at the conference by how much emphasis the pro-refugee, pro-open borders activists and speakers were placing on our asylum program.   They wanted to educate more asylum lawyers and hire more asylum judges (apparently the refugee program itself wasn’t bringing immigrants in fast enough!).  One speaker even said that the original idea behind the program was to rescue the odd ballet dancer seeking asylum from some repressive regime, but had now expanded to thousands every year.

Last night as I began reading all of my backed-up articles on refugees, two jumped out at me, both are about Somalis arriving at our borders and being granted asylum.  Both stories involve young Somalis, supposedly running from Al-shabaab and who mysteriously had the resources to trek across the world and just happened to end up on our borders where they then knew enough to immediately ask for asylum.  Come on folks, we all know that some poor third worlder who knows only an obscure African language could not manage such a thing without enormous amounts of help.

Where are they getting their help?  I don’t know but maybe that’s where Mr. Foster, the RICO lawyer could help.

Below are the stories I came across that set off my warning bells.  Both, of course, are meant to be feel-good stories.

The first article is from the Las Cruces Sun News and it highlights a Somali woman recently granted asylum:

Asha Omar, a native of Somalia, spent almost a year looking for safety, away from the Islamic militants who murdered most of her family.

Late last year, she found it in El Paso.

In November, a federal immigration judge granted Omar’s application for asylum based on her fear of being persecuted in her home country.

[....]

At least two other Somalis are in El Paso seeking asylum, said Louie Gilot, executive director of Las Americas.

Nationwide, more than 300 Somalis requested asylum in 2009. Almost 200 were granted their requests.

Now this is the sentence that jumped off the page:

She managed to make her way to Cuba and then flew to Mexico. At the San Ysidro port of entry in California, she requested asylum, and she was taken to the El Paso Immigration Detention Center while her application was processed.

She MANAGED! She MANAGED to make her way to Cuba and then flew to Mexico! Some 19-year-old shy third worlder MANAGED to get to Cuba!   How many of you adults reading this could manage to get yourselves to Cuba!

Who helped Asha Omar?

My second story comes from the Minneapolis Star Tribune on January 5th.  and it is yet again about a young Somali managing to make it to the US.  Who helped Liban Hussein?

Fearing for his life and still mourning his murdered family, Liban Hussein fled Mogadishu in 2009 and eventually found refuge a world away in the Twin Cities.

But Hussein didn’t follow the route of most Somali refugees, who live in overcrowded camps in Kenya or other neighboring countries and wait months, even years, for a travel visa.

Instead, he resorted to an option that an increasing number of desperate Somalis bound for Minnesota are choosing: He paid underground operatives $10,000 to smuggle him to America. The smugglers, relying on forged documents and bribes, passed Hussein by air and land through 11 countries, stopping everywhere from Dubai to Moscow to Havana.

Finally they got him to Tijuana, where he went to the nearby U.S. border and asked for asylum.

Then listen to this immigration lawyer, she makes me want to scream!

“It’s a free-market solution to a refugee processing backlog,” said Kim Hunter, a local immigration attorney who represents Hussein and about a dozen others smuggled into this country.

One Los Angeles law office interviewed 200 Somalis smuggled into the United States in 2010 alone.

Free-market solution!—trafficking human beings is a massively criminal activity!

Reading on, my heart is pounding because here we have it, getting Somalis into the US through the asylum process is apparently being condoned by “leaders” in the refugee field.  Meissner, quoted in this article is the speaker I heard last March at the “celebration” say that the asylum program was established for the purpose of helping the odd ballet dancer seeking freedom but has long since become a major conduit for NGO’s to bring Somalis across our borders.

And then get this, they are not detained while awaiting a decision, but freed to go live with family and friends in your neighborhoods!

Doris Meissner, former commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, said applicants can wait in camps for years with no assurance they’ll get into the country of their choice.

“Sometimes they decide that smuggling is the best shot,” said Meissner, now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington.

Dick Zonneveld, a St. Paul immigration attorney, recently taught a law class on Somali immigration issues. “Many times their only way to travel to the United States is illegally with false papers,” he said.

Previously, amnesty seekers were detained, sometimes for a long time at a high cost, until given asylum. But in January 2010, U.S. policy changed to release them if they have a “credible fear” of persecution and can stay with friends or family until a final court decision.

Nationally, the number of Somali asylum seekers found to have a “credible fear” more than doubled in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, from 186 in 2009 to 394 in 2010, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Please read the entire Minneapolis Star Tribune story where there is also a discussion of the 270 smuggled Somalis that have not been found—maybe Ms. Meissner or Ms. Hunter know where they are!   Maybe a Congressional committee should ask them!

Who is paying the smugglers?  Who pays the lawyers?  US Non-governmental organizations? We don’t know but Congress should find out.   Everyone reading this page should immediately contact your Congressman and US Senators and demand Congressional investigations!