A town in Massachusetts with a mayor named Kennedy says “we have to stop this!”

What they want to stop is the flow of refugees to Lynn, Mass., a city now overwhelmed with its immigrant population.

The mayor says they are going to the United Nations to ask the UN to stop the flow!   They need to understand that will do little good.  Mayor—you must go to your US Senators and your Representative in the House!

It would probably be a good idea for Mayor Kennedy to also make contact with Mayor Gatsas of nearby Manchester, NH and compare notes.

Here is the story from a roundup of stories for the year from the Daily Item (emphasis mine):

Lynn Mayor Judith Flanagan Kennedy announced in 2011 that she is planning to ask the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees why exactly it has made Lynn a haven city for immigrants and how it plans to help.

“It is our plan to get a delegation together with representatives from the school department, the police department and the housing authority, to go down and say, ‘You’ve got to help us out financially or stop placing people here,’“ Kennedy said during an editorial board interview with The Daily Item.   [The UN is not placing people in Lynn, the US State Department is doing that through contracts to resettlement agencies.]

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was established in 1950 by the United Nations General Assembly and its primary purpose is to safeguard the rights and well-being of refugees. Kennedy discussed the ever-growing number of immigrants – legal and illegal – in the city during the interview.

The flood of immigrants into Lynn is taking its toll on the city and in particular on the schools, Kennedy said.

She estimates there have been 819 new students that have moved into the district since June. She said she would never deny any student the right to an education, but she also called the influx “a huge burden” on the district.

Kennedy was quick to note that Lynn has always been a welcoming city and a city of immigrants, but she said that status is getting more and more expensive.  [LOL!  here is that "welcoming" mumbo jumbo!]

Take, for example, a program developed to give older students that have never set foot in a school a crash course in high school life, she said. Programs such as that cost money, Kennedy noted.

“You’re not going to find programs like that in Lincoln or Sudbury,” she said. “You’re only going to find those kinds of problems in big urban districts.”

It was School Committee members John Ford and Rick Starbard who, Kennedy said, came to her and essentially said, “We have to stop this.”

I’m sure the good Mayor is no relation to Senator ‘bring them to Massachusetts but not Hyannis’ Kennedy who is responsible along with Delaware Senator Joe Biden for spearheading the Refugee Act of 1980 through Congress (signed into law by who else—Jimmy Carter).

Again, the only way to begin to stop the flow of new refugees is to put enormous, and I mean enormous, pressure on your elected Members of Congress who in turn (if you are lucky and have put sufficient pressure on them!) will pressure the State Department.  (Also, refugee contractors get funding from the Office of Refugee Resettlement in the Dept. of Health and Human Services, but it’s at the State Dept. where the decisions are made about who goes where, well sort of, mostly these contractors call those shots.)

Unfortunately, once the word is out that you have a “welcoming” city (and you did that to yourselves) you can’t stop immigrants and secondary migration refugees from coming to your town because, as the immigrant activists will quickly tell you—this is America and people can move around.

For Massachusetts readers, here are the Refugee contractors in your state.   Looks like Jewish Family Services has an office in Lynn.   But, unfortunately for Lynn they even have a New American Center.  I don’t have the time to research it but it seems to be a conglomeration of ECBOs (Ethnic Community Based Organizations).

I haven’t written about ECBOs lately but they are usually also funded with taxpayer money and basically they each help THEIR OWN PEOPLE get plugged into services (taxpayer funded programs and welfare) and then when there is a political problem they become the mouthpieces to the media.   I liken them to mini-ACORNs.  Here is our category on ECBOs.

Below are the ethnic groups that make up Lynn’s New Amercan Center.  Doesn’t look like there is much hope for Lynn to extricate itself.

The New American Center is a collaboration of seven non-profit organizations that work to provide services to the refugee and immigrant community in Lynn, MA. These non-profits include: Bosnian Community Center for Resource Development, Congolese Development Center, Haitian-American Public Health Initiative, Jewish Family & Children Services, Refugee and Immigrant Assistance Center, Russian Community Association of MA, and Southern Sudanese Solidarity Organization.

As I said, no time to research their finances, but if you do, you will likely find that it is the TAXPAYER keeping these ECBOs alive.   And, so much for assimilation if each group is taking care of its OWN PEOPLE.

Sudanese refugee murdered in Denver on Christmas

Recently I reported on the Sudanese gangland violence in Omaha, Nebraska.  On Christmas, a Sudanese father of five was shot outside his home in Denver.  As of this writing the police have no motive or suspect in the shooting.

This is one more story about refugees escaping violence somewhere in the world and dying by violence in the US.

From the Huff Post Denver:

Youn Malual, a 43-year-old immigrant, was found shot to death late Christmas night in front of his home in Arapahoe County, Colorado.

Malual immigrated to the United States six years ago from Sudan to escape the civil war that threatened his family’s survival. “It’s a very tragic death,” said Gatwec Dengpathot, a Sudanese community organizer and friend, to the Denver Post. “He did not have any enemies. He was a family guy.”

Investigators are unsure of a motive and have no suspects, but do have several leads. Malual held two jobs to support his wife and five children, writes the Associated Press.  [Who will support the wife and children now?---ed]

“Over here, [it's] supposed to be a safe haven for all the victim of wars, victim of everything across the world and then instead somebody coming to kill you in your own parking lot,” Dengpathot told 9News. “As someone that escaped all these atrocities trying to come to the U.S., the best country in the whole world, and then seeing some things like this happening to my fellow South Sudanese, it is bizarre.”

Read it all.  There is more information and links to follow.

When I just went back to check old posts on Denver, I see that there has been lots of violence against refugees in Denver, some of it coming from American blacks.  Here and here are previous posts about crimes against refugees in Denver.

Will Nigerians be next?

Will they be the next batch of needy people needing to get to the US through the Refugee Resettlement Program.  You watch there will soon be a drumbeat—maybe its already begun!   Here is a Nigerian writer, writing in the wake of the Muslim church bombings, to suggest a “refugee crisis” is looming.

And, by the way, we have plenty of Nigerians in the US through other legal programs (some probably have stayed beyond their visas too and are now illegal), but we haven’t taken any great number of Nigerians in the refugee program yet.

Check out WRAPS

Reader ‘Mowplsu’ sent us this link to the Worldwide Refugee Admissions Processing Center where the US State Department tracks refugee movements and arrivals.  I keep forgetting about this site, so thanks to ‘Mowplsu’ for bringing it to our attention.   The average American citizen can’t see all the statistics kept at WRAPS so I have tended to forget about it.

Where to find information is a category we long-ago created here at RRW.  You might want to check it out from time to time, there are all sorts of links to agencies, reports etc. that you might find useful.

Special Immigrant Visas not forthcoming for Iraqi interpreters

I remember it like it was yesterday, in 2007 and 2008 the refugee lobby hounded George Bush on the slow flow of Iraqis into the US.  Every month like clockwork AP reporter Matthew Lee reported what the refugee activists deemed too small a number of Iraqis entering the US and Bush was soooo bad!  And, the next month, Bush is bad!  Did you hear that!  Bush is so bad!

Now that President Obama has pulled all of our troops out of Iraq and the violence is on the uptick (no military to protect Iraqis who helped us) and the flow is very slow—especially the flow of interpreters—there is one word missing in this lengthy article about those now in danger in Iraq—OBAMA.   His name is completely absent from the Los Angeles Times story as if what is happening in Iraq is completely disconnected from who is in the White House now that Obama occupies it!

And, by the way, where is Ms. Samantha Powers and her “responsibility to protect.”   She is the White House Iraqi refugee czar after all!   The US State Department is getting the heat in this story, but gee, aren’t she and Obama responsible?  How come the Left isn’t going after them?

From the Los Angeles Times featuring Iraqi ‘Tariq’ who would like to get here, but the process has been slowed after the Kentucky Iraqi terror bust (a story which has disappeared into a black hole in the media!):

The visa process, always slow and cumbersome, has bogged down further since two Iraqi refugees were arrested in Kentucky in May on federal terrorism charges that included providing material support in the U.S. for Al Qaeda.

We reported on the “passage” of the ‘Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act’ back when it was snuck on to a Defense authorization bill (literally at night) by the now deceased Senator Ted Kennedy.  There were no hearings nor debate and it was attached to a bill that Bush had to sign.   So wouldn’t this (below) be a point in the story where the LA Times reporter could tell us how bad Obama is—that he  is not honoring the legacy of the “lion” of the Senate.

Three words from U.S. legislation are imprinted on his brain: “special immigrant visa.” The Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act, passed in 2008, provided fast-track status for Iraqis who had worked for the U.S. government or military.

The law authorized 5,000 special visas per year — 20,000 through 2011. But through October, just 3,415 had been issued to Iraqis, according to the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project.

The State Department says 7,362 Iraqis who worked for the U.S. have received special visas over that period, but that total includes family members.

Through July, 62,500 Iraqis had applied through the special visa program, though many have given up and dropped out.

You might want to read the whole story.

More on Special Immigrant visas here at USCIS.

Texas “Santa” murderer was a Muslim unhappy with teen daughter

You probably vaguely heard the news in recent days but chalked it up to one more crazy person, maybe even a dispute over drugs, and dismissed the murder/suicide story in Texas on Christmas.  Turns out what the mainstream media isn’t saying is that it likely was an ‘honor’ murder.

See the story at Jihad Watch today, here:

Aziz Yazdanpanah, a Muslim, didn’t like his daughter’s non-Muslim boyfriend and was exhibiting stalker behavior. “She couldn’t date at all until she was a certain age, but when he was going to let her date she couldn’t date anyone outside of their race or religion.”

Again and again we have seen honor killings in which fathers kill daughters who are dating non-Muslims or have supposedly besmirched the family honor by some sexual indiscretion. Lt. Todd Dearing says that motive isn’t important — which is generally only the case when Islam is involved.

Read it all.

And, check out two other RRW posts in the last few days here and here on the same subject.

Omaha gets it now: when you bring that many refugees you are in trouble!

Omaha official:  We should have known better!

Reader Michael sent this article about Sudanese gangs in Omaha from the Huffington Post on Christmas Eve day and I planned to post it then, but it was too dispiriting to post for Christmas, so here it is now.  [Hope you all had a Merry Christmas!]  I’ve been amazed several times lately to see such quality reporting from what many think is a politically correct publication.

The article is a long one.  I couldn’t decide where to stop excerpting because it is so brutally honest (no sugar-coating the refugee resettlement program), so I’ve picked the things that jumped out at me.   Please read it all.

John Rudolf at the Huffington Post begins with a story about a 19-year-old refugee being shot in the head in his Omaha neighborhood.  His father brought him from the Sudan as an infant for a better life in America, but he grew up to be a gang member.  At one point his father bought him a plane ticket to send him back to the Sudan to save him from his life in Nebraska.   He didn’t go and now he is dead.  (Emphasis below is mine.)

“I can never imagine that I would end up losing my son on the streets of the United States,” Koak said.

Mun’s murder is the grim consequence of a rising tide of youth and gang violence afflicting Sudanese refugees in the U.S., who have settled mainly in Nebraska, Iowa and other Midwest states. From weekend brawls to shootings and robberies, young Sudanese are victims and victimizers, ending up in hospital beds, behind bars — or dead.

Sudanese street gangs that began forming around 2003 are responsible for the most serious violence, according to Bruce Ferrell, a former gang unit detective with the Omaha Police Department.

“They’ve been involved in a murder attempt on a witness, drive-by shootings, robberies,” said Ferrell, who now leads the Midwest Gang Investigators Association, a non-profit group that studies gang trends in the region. “We’ve had a number of kids getting locked up.”

With no more than 350 members overall, most of them teenagers, the Sudanese gangs represent a small fraction of a massive nationwide gang problem, in which an estimated 1.4 million gang members commit nearly half of all violent crimes in most jurisdictions, according to law enforcement surveys. But their illegal acts earned them a brief mention for the first time in the FBI’s latest national gang threat assessment, released this October.

The agency described African Pride, which began in Omaha but has spread to Lincoln and other Midwest cities with Sudanese refugee populations, as the “most aggressive and dangerous” of the gangs. Other gangs include the South Sudan Soldiers, TripSet and 402, who take their name from the Nebraska area code.

Gangs, the immigrant tradition!

The emergence of the gangs follows a familiar pattern. Driven by poverty, social dislocation and other factors, street gangs have arisen from virtually every immigrant and refugee population to arrive in the U.S. for well over a century, according to Mike Carlie, a retired professor of criminology at the University of Southern Missouri and author of a book on street gangs.

“It’s called the immigrant tradition,” Carlie said. “It’s something that communities should know about before they ever begin to take on a population like this.”

Then here is something you rarely see mentioned—the civil war in the Sudan is between Black African Christians and Arab Muslims.  All those people (celebrities and such) trying to save Darfurians rarely mention that the hell they live in is an Islamic perpetrated hell.   The gang members in this HuffPo article are apparently Christians, or at least not Muslims.

For over 50 years, Sudan — a political invention of British colonizers in East Africa, covering an area nearly three times the size of Western Europe — was wracked by civil war between the ethnically Arab and Muslim north and the black, Christian and animist south.

A 2005 peace settlement, brokered in part by the U.S., finally halted the conflict between north and south, which had claimed more than 2 million lives. By that time, millions of Sudanese had fled the south to live in sprawling camps in neighboring Ethiopia, Chad and Kenya.

The UN to the rescue (America be damned)

The United Nations ultimately resettled nearly 31,000 refugees from these camps in the U.S. with the help of religious groups such as the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.

In the 1990s, Omaha emerged as an unlikely hub for the Sudanese, both for primary resettlement from camps in Africa, and for secondary resettlement, as refugees placed in other cities migrated there in search of jobs, cheap housing and a sense of community.

Lutheran Family Services is the federal contractor which gives refugees ninety days to settle-in then bam! they are on their own in your city.   Why 90 days?  Because they only get ninety days worth of money from the taxpayer and they don’t want to take care of the poor immigrants after the federal money runs out.   And, this is perhaps the closest I’ve seen a mainstream reporter tell the truth about the employment numbers.  The federal contractors are ‘rated’ on the percentage of refugees they get employment for, so they get them working at anything just to keep their stats up.  If the refugee quits after that, oh well!

Lutheran Family Services acted as a contractor for the federal program for Sudanese arriving in Omaha. Neither state or federal agencies track the number of Sudanese on a city-by-city basis, but Amy Richardson, vice president of refugee resettlement services for the agency, estimated the population in Omaha was now between 10,000 to 15,000.

Richardson said her agency had successfully placed almost 90 percent of Sudanese arrivals in Omaha in a job during the three months of the federal assistance program, but she acknowledged that her agency did not keep close tabs on the welfare or employment status of individual refugees after that period.

“After that 90 days and beyond, we kind of don’t have access to knowing how long they kept that job or what trajectory they were on after that,” she said.   [sound familiar Manchester, NH?---ed]

The Omaha school system representative says the system wasn’t prepared.  It couldn’t handle that many needy students and they didn’t have the resources.  However, this quote, in my opinion, is closer to the root of the real problem—there are cultural differences with the Africans who don’t have the tradition as some other cultures have to push their children to success through constant attention.

The lack of parental engagement led many young Sudanese people to drop out and drift into trouble, she (Susan Mayberger, coordinator for migrant and refugee programming for Omaha Public Schools) said. For those that did end up in gangs, some parents either could not, or would not, understand or acknowledge their children’s involvement.

Omaha official:  we should have known better …

To some Omaha leaders, the troubles now afflicting the Sudanese refugee community could have been anticipated.

Gray, the city councilman, called their resettlement in the city during the 1990s and early 2000s well-meaning but poorly thought out.

“We didn’t think through what we were going to do after they got here,” Gray said. “We didn’t think about what were the services they were going to need and how we were going to provide them.”

As more than 10,000 refugees flooded into inner-city neighborhoods and housing projects already struggling with poverty and high crime, services were cut, not bolstered. The result was inadequate policing and a lack of public resources for a community with extraordinary needs, he said.

“You’ve got a recipe for some serious difficulty when you bring in that number of people,” he said.

City leaders across the country can just say NO!, but most are simply too afraid of being called “unwelcoming” by the do-gooders of the political Left and others making a living from the refugee industry.

UK baby adopted to save her from honor murder

Since I mentioned ‘honor killing’ in the US just yesterday (from 20 years ago!), thought I would show what it’s come to in the UK where the Muslim population is much larger than the one in the US.  (LOL! Got to get this all in before the UN and Hillary begin their hate speech hunt).  Hat tip:  Judy

From the Mail:

A baby girl born out of wedlock must be adopted to save her from the risk of being slaughtered in an ‘honour killing’, a court ruled yesterday.

If the unmarried Muslim woman’s father found out about the child, he would feel such ‘unimaginable shame’ he could unleash a vengeful bloodbath by killing the baby and his whole family, three senior judges agreed.

So they made the extraordinary order to have the one-year-old girl – known as Baby Q – adopted for her own safety.

[.....]

It is believed to be the first time an English court has ordered an adoption to prevent a murder.

Read the whole sorry tale.  The article concludes with this bit of information:

Every year in the UK, officials estimate that at least a dozen women are victims of honour killings, almost exclusively within Asian and Middle  Eastern families.

A 2006 BBC poll for the Asian Network in the UK found that one in ten of the 500 young Asians polled said that they could condone the killing of someone who dishonoured their family.

An honor killing in America twenty years ago!

Who knew?  I was amazed to see this little nugget in the Washington Examiner yesterday.  I bet I’m not alone in thinking that Muslim honor killings are a recent phenomenon in the US.  Wrong!  Here, in 1991, the parents were given a death sentence for killing a teenager who became too Americanized.

We’ve written a bunch about honor killings; you can find previous posts by searching ‘honor killing’ or you might want to check out our ‘women’s issues’ category, here.

From the Washington Examiner:

On this day, Dec. 20, in 1991, a Missouri court sentences the Palestinian militant Zein Isa and his wife Maria to death for the honor killing of their daughter.

The FBI planted listening devices in the family’s St. Louis apartment hoping to hear evidence of terrorist activities.

Instead, what the agents heard were the screams of 16-year-old Palestina being stabbed to death as her father yelled in Arabic, “Die quickly!”

The parents were unhappy that they could not control Palestina, who had taken a part-time job without their permission and was dating a black teenager.

Zein Isa died of diabetes in prison in 1997. Maria’s death sentence was commuted to life in prison.

Also interesting is the news that the FBI was investigating Islamic terrorists in 1991.  Guess they didn’t do such a great job investigating since the first highly visible terror attack on the US came just two years later—-the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

Gainesville, Florida food stamp fraud bust nabs 31

I’m still trying to work through my backlog of food stamp fraud busts and picking only those that have some new angle.

Here is one from Gainesville earlier this month.  No Mohammeds this time only Sharifa and two Syeds (pushing my luck with the Islamophobia police!)

Note that there are warrants out for some who sold their benefits.

The Gainesville Sun:

Police arrested 31 people and served at least three search warrants Thursday as part of an extensive food stamp fraud investigation.

The Gainesville Police Department around noon shut down the S.M.I. Food Mart at 404 S. Main St. after arresting the owner, Syed Hossain, 47, and his wife, Sharifa Mino, 30, inside the store. Police said they arrested the couple’s son, Syed Island, 21, at the family’s home.

The family members and others arrested Thursday were charged with multiple offenses related to food stamp fraud and racketeering.

Warrants also were issued for others accused of accepting food stamp benefits illegally and for those who allowed their benefits to be used illegally.

The Syeds used stollen benefits to buy things to sell in their store (at least they weren’t sending your money to the Middle East this time!–ed).

[.....]

At the S.M.I. store, investigators said food stamp recipients would turn over their EBT cards to the owners and in return receive half of the value of the card in cash. If the card had a balance of $100, the card carrier would receive $50 in cash, and the store would have access to the full $100 balance.

Plourde said the Hossain family then would take the card to larger stores, such as Target, WalMart or Sam’s, and buy items in bulk to sell in their store.

Most fraud occurs in small stores.  597 convicted of trafficking in last three years.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the program for about 45 million people, approximately $330 million is fraudulently diverted from the $64.7 billion food stamp program annually. Most of the abuse happens in the nearly 200,000 small stores that are among the 234,000 stores authorized to accept food stamps.  [One solution---only allow big stores to accept food stamps!---ed]

Over the past three years, according to the Office of the Inspector General of the USDA, 597 people were convicted of food stamp trafficking, and courts ordered nearly $198 million be paid by the violators in the form of fines, forfeiture or restitution.  (LOL! But, how much of the $198 million was collected?—ed)

Read the comments to this story at the Gainesville Sun.

Prayer in public schools aok in Wisconsin

This is a story about how as the Arab and Somali population grows in Wisconsin, schools are accommodating Muslim prayer requests even in elementary schools.  The article from Green Bay goes on to say that they accommodate Christian and Jewish religious observances too.  Others?

Green Bay Press Gazette:

Four Muslim students at Keller Elementary School in Green Bay quietly slip out of class or recess each day at about noon to pray in a tiny alcove of the school. For five to 10 minutes, the group of girls is not distracted by students who walk nearby.

“We do it because our parents want us to,” fourth-grader Ayan Artan said. “It’s important.”

The students are part of a growing Somali population in Green Bay. And as that population grows, schools are trying to accommodate the strict prayer schedule for the students, many of whom practice Islam, educators say.

[.....]

A few local residents have approached the Green Bay School District with concerns about the prayer time in schools. They worry the time in prayer takes away from learning and uses school resources to accommodate religion.

But educators say they’re required by law to allow students time and a place to pray or complete other religious practices. They note that the district accommodates Muslim students as well as Christians who choose to pray before meals or read the Bible during study hall.

“The issue of students praying in school has come up a number of times this year, in part, because we have an increasing number of students who practice the Islam faith, many of whom are Somali students,” said Barbara Dorff, director of student services for the district. “But it is our responsibility to find a private place for these students to pray and to allow them to pray.”

School districts that receive federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act funding must certify that they don’t have a policy in public elementary or secondary schools that prevents participation in prayer protected by the U.S. Constitution, she said.

[.....]

It’s been about a year since Keller Elementary School began to accommodate the prayer schedule for Muslim students. It enrolls 34 Somali students out of 189 total students, principal Kim Spychalla said.

Read it all.