Bill would make special immigrant visas available for Tibetans

I haven’t been at this long enough—following refugee resettlement—so I don’t know if this is unusual.  Two Congressmen have introduced HR 6536 which would allow 3000 Tibetans to enter the US as refugees over the next 3 years.  See this news account.

Dharamsala, July 19: A bill to provide 3,000 immigrant visas to Tibetans has been introduced in the US House on Thursday.

U.S. Representatives George Miller (D-CA) and Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI) introduced the Tibetan Refugee Assistance Act on July 17 to provide 3,000 immigrant visas to long-staying Tibetan refugees in India and Nepal, according to a report by International Campaign for Tibet (ICT).

The Tibetan Refugee Assistance Act extends support by providing 3,000 immigrant visas to qualified Tibetans over a three year period, ICT’s report explained.

Why a special bill?   Each year the President determines what the ceiling will be for how many refugees will be admitted to the US, so it’s not clear to me whether bills like this one are attempts to add to the present ceiling of 80,000 for FY08, or are part of that 80,000.  It also strikes me that this is the State Department’s (really, the UN tells us) prerogative to choose which refugees we take and from where, and am now wondering if bills such as this are meant to tell the State Department what to do, or is it to stick a finger in China’s eye. 

A reminder to readers:  Refugees entering the US receive air fare loans, housing subsidies, food stamps, a case worker and other forms of welfare while immigrants entering the US through other means are basically on their own.  That is why there is such an interest in declaring someone a refugee.

Utah refugee coordinator speaks the hard truth—too many refugees

The director of Utah Refugee Services spoke to KCPW radio earlier this week about the problems he sees with the large number of refugees being resettled in Utah from cultures that are very differant than refugees of the past.

(KCPW News) Utah’s refugee services are not well-equipped to handle the large number of refugees being resettled in the state, says Gerald Brown of the new State Office of Refugee Services. But he remains confident the problems will be fixed.

The biggest challenge to the system is tracking refugees after their social service benefits end, Brown says. While the number of refugees has declined since the 80s and 90s, they now require more services, Brown says. Twenty years ago, refugees were mostly Russian or Bosnians. While different cultures, they were still based in Western philosophy. Now, many are from Africa, Asia and the Middle East and their cultural differences are greater. Integrating into the social fabric of Utah is more difficult for them, Brown says. But it is vitally important for the community that they do, he says. 

Unfortunately I can’t get the radio program to play, but maybe some of you will be luckier.  I would love to have heard what else he said.

Indeed Utah is having a lot of problems with refugees with certainly the saddest case being the one of the 7-year-old Burmese Karen girl’s rape and murder a few months ago.  She was killed by another refugee in the apartment building in which she lived.   Only now are those refugees venturing forth from their apartments.  See the latest at the Salt Lake City Tribune here.

For more on Utah, use our search function for ‘Utah’.  We have written many posts on the state.

Vietnamese refugees have brought a great skill(?) to America

We’ve been writing so much lately about Congress, crimes, abuse of women and other such nasty business, that this post is a Saturday morning change of pace.    According to this article the number of original Vietnamese refugees and their children in the US today number nearly 1 million. 

Some of those have an interesting talent they apparently are naturally suited for—gambling!

Why i’m telling you this story is because fast forward 3 decades or so and some of these folks have become professional gamblers. Five of the those who walked away from the recent World Series of Poker after more than six weeks of gambling at the Rio Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas are Vietnamese, winning a combined total of 5.3 million dollars, with Scotty Nguyen on top, with $2 Million in his pocket.

In fact, Vietnamese have been dominant in the world of professional poker playing for the last decade. 

Read the rest of the story here.

Global warming causing an uptick in refugees–not!

I’ve been trying to ignore this because it strikes me as ludicrous, but readers should know that leftists are shamelessly linking their pet  projects.   The UN reported in June that climate change (note they no longer say global warming because there is no warming) fuels conflicts which in turn produce refugees.

Climate change is fuelling conflicts around the world and helping to drive the number of people forced out of their homes to new highs, the head of the UN’s refugee agency said yesterday. After a few years of improvement, thanks mainly to large-scale resettlement in Afghanistan, the numbers of civilians uprooted by conflict is again rising. During 2007 the total jumped to 37.4 million, an increase of more than 3 million, according to statistics published today.

The figures, described as “unprecedented” by the UN, do not include people escaping natural disasters or poverty - only those fleeing conflict and persecution. But Antonio Guterres, the UN high commissioner for refugees, said that climate change could also uproot people by provoking conflicts over increasingly scarce resources, such as water.

In an interview with the Guardian, Guterres said: “Climate change is today one of the main drivers of forced displacement, both directly through impact on environment - not allowing people to live any more in the areas where they were traditionally living - and as a trigger of extreme poverty and conflict.”

I wonder if I will live to see the day when news from the UN says that Islamic terrorism is one of the main drivers of forced displacement.    I thought maybe UN High Commissioner for Refugees Guterres  was getting close here until the last line.

“What we are witnessing is a trend in the world where more and more people feel threatened by conflict, threatened by their own government, threatened by other political, religious ethnic or social groups, threatened by nature and nature’s retaliation against human aggression - climate change is the example of that.

Threatened by nature’s retaliation against human aggression!  What!   Nature is retaliating?  Nature is getting even?  Nature doesn’t like people fighting with each other?  Nature is angry about human aggression and is fighting back by changing its climate?    Ahhh!

Maybe I just haven’t had enough coffee this morning.

More on North Korean refugees possibly coming to the US

At the end of June I wrote a post in which I said that the drumbeats had begun to bring North Korean refugees to the United States.  I wondered why they couldn’t just go to South Korea—they are all Koreans afterall!  A reader named simply  ”R” told me I didn’t know what I was talking about.   That is o.k.  I admit I don’t know everything.  It is not my job to be an expert on every refugee “crisis” in the world.   I see my job as bringing information, even incomplete information, to the average citizen who has a right to know what government bureaucrats and elitist NGO types are doing.

My blood is boiling because this touches on my driving force.  I get furious at those oh-so-smart people who have plans that affect ordinary people (affect refugees too) who keep their secrets (whoever has the information has the power in Washington) because somehow the rest of us are not smart enough to understand what is good for us.  It is that patronizing attitude that makes me want to scream!

I’m getting away from the subject, but I would never have started writing this blog or asking my original questions last year in Hagerstown, MD if I felt we were being told the truth and not being treated like we, regular people, were too stupid to understand the big picture—that someone sharper than we were was planning for what was good for us.  They know they can’t win—promote their plans—if the rest of us are equally informed.

So, I asked “R” to tell us all what was going on, but he/she hasn’t been back.  It’s easy to jump in with a comment about how I’m wrong and then disappear.  Well, if I am wrong then tell us where I am wrong!

Thankfully another reader, Mark, submitted additional comments and sent the following information.  Eventually, “R”, we will put it together.

This is an interesting proposal from writers at the American Enterprise Institute suggesting the US create a kind of underground railroad to freedom for North Koreans through China.   O.K. sounds like a plan as long as the last stop on the line is South Korea.    Apparently South Korea is constitutionally obliged to take North Korean refugees.

Some will worry loudly about international resettlement for tens (never mind hundreds) of thousands of North Korean refugees, but the logistical issues are basically solved in advance: as a matter of national law, South Korea is obliged to welcome them all. Under Articles 2 and 3 of the Republic of Korea’s Constitution, as reaffirmed by the country’s Supreme Court in 1996, every North Korean refugee has the right to resettle in South Korea. Commitments by Washington and other free governments to take in North Korean refugees are desirable and commendable (the United States is already committed to doing so under the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004), but it is natural and fitting that South Korea should be the destination for the overwhelming majority of North Korea’s freedom-seekers.

I don’t agree with the part about us taking Korean “refugees” as “desireable and commendable”, but the concept sounds like a generally good plan assuming we have government people brave enough and tough enough to buck the Chinese.

Apparently there is legislation in Congress involving North Korean Human Rights here.  And, then here is an older post at VDARE (Is America the World’s Kleenex) about this issue indicating that its been around for awhile.

Readers:  Please continue to send us links to your research on the North Korean refugee issue.

Good summary of the Bhutanese situation

We have written about the Bhutanese refugees on many many occasions and this article has nothing new.  However, I am posting it because it is a good summary of what the situation is at a time when some of you have Bhutanese refugees coming into your communities.    Also, some of our newest readers may be unfamiliar with the fact that the US will be bringing 60,000 refugees from camps in Nepal over the next few years.

According to the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Nepal, seven western governments — the United States, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway and Denmark — have offered to resettle nearly 90 thousand refugees.

The United States said it was ready to pick up 60,000 initially, followed by as many as wishing, in the next five years.

That last sentence is a little confusing because our Presidential determination for FY 2008 has set the ceiling for the total number of refugees from around the world at 80,000.  It is extremely unlikely that 60,000 would come from one country alone.

Please read the article because you should know that some Bhutanese do not want to be sent to another country and it has caused conflicts in the camps and splits in families as well.

Weighing the merits: gorillas vs. refugees. What happens when two leftwing causes conflict?

Today I came across an article about threats to UN designated World Heritage Areas.   By the way, World Heritage area designation is a way for the United Nations to begin to have a say about land use in sovereign nations.    You should know we have some in the US too.  Maybe you live in one and don’t even know it.  But, that is another story.

The article that caught my interest said that a gorilla preserve,Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo, is threatened by refugees. 

Virunga National Park has been on the list of World Heritage sites in danger since 1994. It faces threats from refugees, who set up home in the park, armed militia, and continued poaching and deforestation, particularly for fuel and illegal charcoal production.

In 2007, 11 gorillas were slaughtered in Virunga, out of the 750 that remain in the wild. A joint monitoring mission by IUCN and UNESCO was organized.

I don’t know if it will work, but frankly I was surprised to find a sensible (although short term) solution.  The World Wildife Fund with Bruce Babbitt as chairman of the board ( Do you remember him?) is helping to create tree plantations and purchase wood for the refugees so that they will not have to enter the park.   You can read about it here.

Here in the US, the subject of immigrants and the environment has caused a rift in major environmental groups with some members complaining that large numbers of immigrants will put a strain on our natural resources.  (Yes, they will.)  Fearful of veering from their leftwing roots (and annoying their leftist sugar daddies), most major environmental groups will not touch the immigration issue at all even in light of the obvious destruction of natural areas traversed by the illegals flowing in from Mexico.

International Organization for Migration office bombed in Nepal

Update, later in the day:  The IOM and two UN agencies including the High Commisioner for Refugees today said they would suspend all aid to refugees if intimidation continues.  I’m wondering if harming all innocent refugees makes any sense.

Why would anyone want to bomb the IOM office— because as we scatter the Bhutanese to the four winds there are elements within the refugee camps that don’t want this to happen.   If we scoop up a promised 60,000 Bhutanese who are of Nepali origin (but Nepal doesn’t want them), the chances of their returning to Bhutan as a political force are diminished.

Kathmandu - At least two crude bombs exploded in the office compounds of the International Organization of Migration (IOM) in eastern Nepal, causing panic but no injuries, media reports said Tuesday. The bombs were hurled at the IOM office compound in the town of Damak, about 450 kilometres east of the Nepalese capital Kathmandu, on Monday evening, the Kathmandu Post newspaper reported.

The IOM is involved in third-country resettlement of Bhutanese refugees, which has been vehemently opposed by several political groups representing refugees.

The blast caused no human casualties, but highlighted growing security concerns for refugees favouring third-country resettlement.

Although no group has yet claimed responsibility for the blasts, Nepalese police said they suspected the involvement of underground groups operating inside the refugee camps, the newspaper said.

The underground groups, which include the militant Bhutan Communist Party - Marxist Leninist Maoist, had previously demanded a halt to the resettlement programme terming it “human trafficking.”

The group has also been accused of intimidating refugees against applying for resettlement.

Read the rest of the article here.

Don’t get me wrong, I sure don’t condone what these Marxist groups are doing (if they are the perpetrators), but they make one point that is close to the truth.  They say the refugees will just do menial labor for cheap wages in the US, but note they are using the more provacative term— “human trafficking.”  

For more information, use our search function for Bhutanese refugees, we have written extensively on this resettlement.

Campaign underway to bring North Korean refugees to the US

So far we have only brought a few North Korean refugees here, but the push is on.   I don’t have anything definitive, but it’s just like the Rohingya situation, one starts to hear the faint drumbeats that the US MUST save another beleaguered group. 

This is from something called MyDD (direct democracy) which I confess is a political blog I had never heard of:

This is a terrible situation [Editor: aren't they all?]. Surely, the United States has it in our hearts to provide some kind of help to North Koreans living as refugees in China.

North Korea pays China a bounty of around $300 for each North Korean caught and returned to North Korea. Returned escapees will typically be prosecuted, then imprisoned, or, if it is their third attempt, summarily executed, for the crime of betraying the fatherland by leaving.

Surely the US could match that $300 [Editor: can you see it now, a bidding war with North Korea to benefit the Chinese] and provide a new start for North Korean refugees somewhere in the US, where they would be happy to get a new start. Many have led terrible lives and they are also discriminated against in South Korea.

And then this:

They need a safe place they can go and live in peace.

Why the heck should the South Koreans discriminate against their cultural kin.  South Korea is a peaceful prosperous country and if they are a friend of ours, we should tell them to take in their own people! 

Besides, a reader tells me (but I haven’t researched it yet) that there is a shortage of marriageable men for South Korean women and that they are importing Thais for husbands (oh brother!).

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.