Are these Cuban immigrants refugees?

I bet you were under the impression that the era of Cuban refugees streaming to the US had pretty much ended.  A reader sent this article about a Cuban family being resettled in Texas by the International Rescue Committee and commented about this line in the article:

 The family said they sought asylum in the U.S. three years ago for economic reasons.

The legal definition of a refugee is:

REFUGEE - Any person who is outside any country of such person’s nationality or, in the case of a person having no nationality, is outside any country in which such person last habitually resided, and who is unable or unwilling to return to, and is unable or unwilling to avail himself or herself of the protection of, that country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.

So, we don’t just take people, even families like this one who sound like nice people, into the refugee program who are economic migrants as they appear to be.  They need to be persecuted or fear persecution.

What is the big deal?  Well, refugees are entitled to taxpayer subsidized airfare loans, subsidized housing, a case worker provided through the volag and funded by you, food stamps and other forms of welfare.    Other immigrants are on their own.

One bit of information I discovered is that the Cubans don’t even have to be outside of the country to seek asylum, we now process them in Cuba.  See this information.

East Africans breaking into Europe, some dying on the way

I came across this story just as I finished my previous post last night about East Africans entering the US illegally.  What struck me right away in this latest article is that those trying to enter Europe (Spain in this case) illegally are so-called “refugees” from Somalia and Eritrea (two of the 4 countries sending illegals to the US).

A series of tragedies involving migrants off the coast of Spain have raised fears that the summer could see a record-breaking death toll in the region, as refugees embark on increasingly perilous routes in smaller boats to avoid detection.

According to human rights agencies, there has been a sharp increase in the numbers of people attempting to make the sea crossing from North Africa to southern Europe, many of them from sub-Saharan conflict zones such as Eritrea and Somalia.

After a week of disasters and rescues at sea that has shocked Spaniards, authorities have identified the coastal port of Almería as the new favoured destination for human traffickers attempting to avoid increased police patrols and surveillance. A total of 51 migrant deaths at sea has been reported this year, but the actual mortality rate is certain to be far higher, since the bodies of many refugees are never recovered. The Red Cross estimates between 2,000 and 3,000 people die trying to reach Spain every year.

I’m making a new category called ‘Africa’, because we have posted so many times on issues relating to the continent and it looks like there will be no let-up.

East Africans easily entering US illegally

This story is in keeping with the African theme I’ve been stuck on for the last few days. But here is what I’m wondering:   why do these East Africans have to sneak across the border when our immigration programs, like refugee resettlement, will just bring them over, pay the airfare and set them up in an apartment?  And, lest we forget, take care of any HIV problems they might have.

 

Concern about a terrorist threat to the United States is growing among American intelligence officials due to a recent upsurge in the number of East Africans who have been caught trying to enter the US illegally.

Citing an “internal government assessment” that it had obtained, the Associated Press reported last week that the US is focusing new attention on networks that smuggle people from Djibouti, Eritrea, Somalia and Sudan.

These four countries are among 35 confidentially listed by the US Department of Homeland Security as being of “special interest” due to the alleged presence of terrorists in their territories.

A total of 159 citizens of the four East African countries have been captured in the past several months as they tried to enter the US without permission. That compares to 125 for all of last year and a total of 22 in 2003.

          

Read the rest of this sobbering article here.    I bet these illegals can blend right into the African immigrant neighborhoods developing in cities large and small across the country.  Where’s the fence?

Senator Sessions to move to strike HIV provision

Update July 18th:  Senate did vote to lift the ban on immigrants with HIV, see report here at Blue Ridge Forum.

Update July 14th:  Read the latest information on this issue at America’s Survival, Inc. here.   Today is the best day to call Senators with your opinon.

Urgent notice:  The word is that Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) will move to strike a provision in S. 2731 when it reaches the floor as early as tomorrow, Monday, July 14th.   As I reported yesterday, this provision would allow immigrants with HIV/AIDS to enter the US and receive government (read taxpayer) supported medical treatment. 

Critics believe it will serve as a huge magnet to further illegal immigration, and fuel more demands for legal immigration.  Also, foreigners getting into the US and seeking asylum could also presumably then ask for medical care.   I suppose it’s also possible for any HIV positive foreigner entering the US on a tourist visa  to ask for treatment for AIDS.    Refugees can already enter the US with HIV/AIDS.

Senator Sessions was the leader in last summer’s defeat of the McCain/Kennedy Amnesty bill.  It will take 60 votes in the Senate to remove the HIV (come to America one and all for free medical care) provision.

Here they come! Immigration lawyers

Yesterday’s Washington Post had a lengthy article about how the Immigration law field is booming and law schools are cranking out hordes of young idealistic lawyers, often former immigrants themselves, ready to help not only refugees and asylees but illegal immigrants as well.

A subject that three decades ago was a secondary, technical field delegated to adjunct professors is booming at law schools nationwide. Elective immigration law courses taught by tenured specialists are filling lecture halls, immigration clinics are expanding and student groups devoted to the subject are mushrooming.

The momentum is partly driven by a high-profile, rancorous immigration debate. But it is also the result of an era of mass immigration that has fueled demand from foreigners and businesses seeking help navigating U.S. immigration statutes and has created a generation of law students intimately familiar with the issue, often because they are children of immigrants or immigrants themselves.

Suit filed in Walkersville Ahmadiyya Muslim Mosque case

This news is not totally unexpected, the property owners and their lawyer had hinted that a lawsuit might be brought against the rural town of Walkersville, MD when it had earlier ruled against a special exemption request that would have allowed a large Muslim complex to be built in the town.   For background see my post of June 10th and then follow links back for the full story.

From the AP today: 

WALKERSVILLE, Md. - Officials of a rural Maryland town illegally discriminated against a Muslim group by barring them from building a mosque and holding annual conventions on land zoned for farming, the property’s owner claimed in a federal lawsuit filed Monday.

The complaint was filed not by the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community USA but by developer David Moxley and his father Robert, who had planned to sell the group 224 acres in Walkersville for about $6 million.

The Silver Spring-based religious group canceled the land purchase earlier this year after the town’s three-member Board of Zoning Appeals voted unanimously to reject their request for a special exception to land-use restrictions.

Officials of the town of 5,600 based their denial largely on open space preservation concerns and fears that the thousands of people attending the group’s annual, three-day Jalsa Salana national convention would overwhelm the community’s roads and emergency services. 

Think about this next section of the article and the implications of the law that is being used in this suit.  This means, I guess, that no town or jurisdiction could say no to a large or otherwise incompatible religious facility when considering its zoning decisions.  

The complaint alleges violations of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, which guarantees free exercise of religion, and the 14th Amendment, which provides equal protection to all.

It alleges violations of the federal Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, enacted in 2000 to bar land-use regulations that would discriminate against a religious organization.

I spent years working in the property rights movement in this country and it was no secret that the federal government was seeking (spurred on by environmentalists) to control land use at a federal level and take it away from local governments.    But, here you have the tables turned on the environmentalists because local citizens who are concerned about the quality of their environment could have a large and potentially environmentally destructive facility shoved down their throats in the name of religious freedom.

Can you imagine what fun this case could be on a Supreme Court level.  Would liberal environmental groups side with local government (opposing the feds)  against immigrant groups wishing to build large religious facilities on open space?

By the way, I am not a lawyer, nor did I stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night, so the above speculation is just that!

For more go to Citizens for Walkersville here.

South African TB patients riot

While I’m on the subject of infectious diseases this morning, here is a frightening story from South Africa thanks to blulitespecial. 

CAPE TOWN, South Africa - Authorities increased security Friday at a tuberculosis hospital where patients with drug-resistant forms of the disease went on a rampage to protest prison-like conditions.

Twenty-two patients were arrested Wednesday, accused of public violence and assault after they pelted staff with stones and vandalized equipment. But the local police station and prison refused to admit them because of fears of the highly infectious disease. Instead, they were returned to the hospital.

The Jose Pearson hospital, near the coastal city of Port Elizabeth, treats about 300 patients. Many have multidrug-resistant TB and the even more dangerous extensively drug-resistant TB, which is very difficult and expensive to treat. Those with drug-resistant strains are supposed to stay in the hospital for six months to two years, living in isolated wards surrounded by barbed wire and security guards.

South African authorities have reluctantly resorted to enforced confinement of patients with drug-resistant TB because of fears that it might otherwise spread through the community. TB is an airborne bacteria and can be spread easily through coughing or sneezing.

The country is gripped by a tuberculosis crisis, which is feeding off the AIDS epidemic and striking the weakened immune system of victims. Nearly 60 percent of South African TB patients have AIDS. The emergence of drug-resistant TB strains — often the result of not sticking to the standard six-month course of treatment — has worsened patients’ chances of survival.

Why am I telling you this, because as the “rainbow nation” implodes (I wonder if that was discussed at the star-studded Mandela birthday bash this week) we are going to be pressured to take refugees newly created by the violence against immigrants in South Africa.

We are already admitting refugees with HIV and TB.  And, I will bet you a buck that the refugees that roam from city to city are not sticking with their six-month long treatment regime and that the volags are not following up on these people.    A Somali refugee died of TB in a Tyson’s plant in Emporia, KS last year.  Bet you didn’t hear that in the news.

Not much news coming out of South Africa

You would hardly know that South Africa’s grand experiment in multiculturalism, the ”rainbow nation” myth, exploded a month or so ago.   It’s hard to find news to update our readers on the violence that erupted throughout the country—violence against refugees and asylees who local South African blacks claim are taking their jobs and bringing crime with them—that killed scores and caused the creation of makeshift refugee camps.

Here is a small portion of an ‘opinion’ piece from a universtiy professor discussing a report released for World Refugee Day last week.

First, the recent violence is but an extreme sign of how non-nationals are treated as ‘outsiders’ by various elements of South African society, from members of the public, to civil servants, service providers, and government leaders. This report outlines many of the ways non-nationals — refugees, asylum seekers, and other immigrants — are excluded from the services, welfare, and dignity they are guaranteed by South African law and Constitutional commitments.

Second, while South Africa must improve its policing practices and promote tolerance, it must also revisit and fundamentally revise the way it manages migration from the region and further afield. Let us be clear, halting migration is neither possible nor a solution. Are we prepared to follow the United State and Europe in their fruitless, deadly, and hypocritical efforts to halt immigration?

South Africa already deports close to 300 000 people a year. How much further are we willing to go? How can we speak in one breath of promoting tolerance and barricading our borders? Doing so only confirms many South African’s deep suspicion that migrants truly are a mortal threat to South African society. Yes, stop corrupt officials and criminals, but let us not further demonise and criminalise our neighbours.

The gratuitous attack on the United States was laughable especially the hypocrisy charge I’ve highlighted because we aren’t running around calling ourselves the “rainbow nation” and according to all the figures I could find we deport 200,000 illegal immigrants a year.    That figure puts tiny South Africa about 100,000 deportations ahead of us!

Oh, and as for the “deadly” part, professor,  I don’t recall any riots in the US where immigrants were targeted by mobs of citizens and beaten or set on fire.  Last I saw the South African asylee and refugee death toll was around 60.

Islamic sharia law creates gay and lesbian refugees

I’ve read about this before, but yesterday I came across this account of two Iranian men, one a successful  businessman and the other a university student, now living in destitution in Turkey and trying to get refugee status from the United Nations in order to be resettled in the West.   Islamic sharia law in some countries prescribes the death penalty for gays and lesbians.  

Just two years ago, Arash and Javad (not their real names), two young Iranian men were building their future together. Arash was pursuing a successful career in Iran’s financial sector and Javad was a university student in Tehran. Now the men live in abject poverty in a remote area of Turkey. They have no income and are frequently forced to scavenge for food in their neighbors’ trashcans. Javad, a diabetic, needs regular monitoring and medication, which he cannot afford. His health has deteriorated to the point where he regularly suffers diabetic comas.

How did two young, upwardly mobile Iranians end up in such dire circumstances? The answer to this question is simple. Arash and Javad are gay men forced to flee their country as refugees. According to the Iranian penal code, homosexual conduct is a crime that is punishable by death.

Read the rest of the story here.

This is what I don’t get, why aren’t national and international organizations which defend gay and lesbian rights speaking out more forcefully about Islam’s persecution of people for their sexual orientation.   It’s just like the women’s groups, such as NOW, remaining silent on the abuses of women and girls.   The silence about Islamic honor killings, female genital mutilation and forced marriages of young girls to old men is deafening.

There are only two possible answers.  Either the groups are chicken to speak out or somehow they have it in their collective heads that criticism of anything relating to Islam is somehow racist and something that right-wingers do and so they let terrible abuses continue without comment.   Shame on you!

Catholic volag helps immigrant girl get an abortion

This shocking story was reported in the Washington Times earlier this week:

Federal authorities are investigating the actions of a Catholic charity in Richmond which helped a 16-year-old Guatemalan girl to receive an abortion in January, in possible violation of Virginia law.

Officials have called the matter to the attention of US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) headquarters in Washington, urging it to prevent any repetition of the incident.

Four employees of Commonwealth Catholic Charities Richmond, (CCR) have been fired and one supervisor with the bishops’ Migration and Refugee Services agency has been suspended, according to federal sources and a secret April 29 letter written by three bishops to 350 bishops nationwide. 

The USCCB is one of the top 10 volags in the US receiving federal money to resettle refugees and also apparently to care for minors who are in this country illegally but without their parents.  

The girl, whose parents are missing, was a ward of the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

HHS provides $7.6 million a year in contracts with the USCCB for foster care of immigrant children. The bishops group subcontracts services through agencies like Commonwealth Catholic Charities.

“These federal funds are awarded with the clear purpose of caring for unaccompanied minors here from other countries,” said HHS spokesman Kenneth Wolfe. “To that end, we were surprised and disappointed to learn of a chapter of Catholic Charities using this funding to facilitate a minor procuring an abortion.”

 [...]

In a three-page letter dated April 23, David Siegel, acting director of the HHS Refugee Resettlement Office, criticized the Catholic bishops group.

“USCCB’s inability to direct the actions of its sub-grantee was a failure of management, oversight and monitoring,” he said in the letter to Johnny Young, executive director of the USCCB Migration and Refugee Services (MRS) agency.

This case further demonstrates why we need to have increased scrutiny of the volags (supposedly voluntary but actually well-paid agencies) that are contracted by the federal government to take care of minor immigrants and refugees.     These agencies have long been immune from scrutiny because the public assumes they are doing good work.