May, the State Department held a meeting in Washington, concerning the nation’s refugee program and invited refugee resettlement workers and anyone else who knew about it to comment. The gathering was a rare opportunity for concerned citizens to speak up about a policy that has minimal oversight and is known to be loaded with fraud. Normally a low-key event for Refugee Industrial Complex insiders, the website: http://RefugeeResettlementWatch.wordpress.com alerted readers that they could attend the May 15 meeting in Washington or send written opinions to be distributed among those present.
The refugee program should get a lot more scrutiny, since it recklessly embraces the most extreme edges of diversity. It’s quite a stretch to believe that a Somali tribesman whose skills are suitable to a hunter-gatherer society might someday be a useful citizen of the U.S., but the resettlement industry promotes their presence. Importing guaranteed welfare cases is no way to run a country that is nearly $17 trillion in the hole.
At a time when the wages of low-skilled workers are pushed ever lower by a flooded labor market, the refugee program adds to the pain of America’s poorest workers. Some meatpacking companies have turned to the refugee population for workers to avoid the problems associated with illegal aliens. For example, a Tyson meatpacking plant in Columbus Junction, Iowa, has attracted 400 Burmese refugees to reside in the town, which had 1,900 residents according the 2010 Census.
National security should be a bigger concern after the Boston Marathon bombing, an attack which demonstrated once again that Washington sees importing extreme diversity as more important than protecting public safety. U.S. authorities had been warned by their Russian counterparts that Tamarlan Tsarnaev had become dangerously Islamized after his visit home to Dagestan, but a cursory investigation convinced the FBI agents that he was no problem. The Tsarnaev family entered in 2002 and was allowed to stay on the basis of a “well-founded fear of persecution.” Yet a few years later, the parents moved back to Dagestan, so the “persecution” appears more like fraud, and America’s ability and seriousness about keeping out bad guys looks lame.
At the same time, understanding has been building in some quarters that the refugee program is perilously open. Senator Rand Paul has recognized that rubber-stamping sketchy foreigners can be a bad idea. In May 2011, two Iraqi refugees, Waad Ramadan Alwan and Mohanad Shareef Hammadi, were arrested in Paul’s home state of Kentucky and accused by the FBI of plotting to send weapons and money to al Qaeda in Iraq. In January of 2013, Hammadi was sentenced to life in prison, while Alwan received a lesser term of 40 years for helping the prosecution.
As a result of the case, the Department of Homeland Security ordered the security checks of the 58,000 Iraqi refugees already settled in the U.S.
Senator Paul voiced the opinion during a 2011 hearing that there were too many refugees and asylum seekers to be screened adequately, remarking “I don’t fault you for missing the needle in the haystack. You’ve got to make the haystack smaller.”
Interestingly, the House Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence held a hearing on December 4 titled “Terrorist Exploitation of Refugee Programs” (which can be watched on C-SPAN). As Chairman Patrick Meehan noted in his opening statement, “According to press reports this past February, intelligence indicates that the threat posed by refugees with ties to al Qaeda is much broader than was previously believed.”
Following are my comments regarding the Refugee Admissions Program, now and going forward. This memo was written for the May 15 State Department refugee meeting.
§ § § §
It is incomprehensible to many citizens like myself that Washington continues to admit tens of thousands of unskilled, illiterate third-world refugees during a jobs depression of four-plus years duration when more than 20 million Americans are jobless.
In addition, numerous refugees come from violent backgrounds, which bodes poorly for their assimilation into this country and whether they will present a danger to the citizens who are forced to deal with them. Aside from those who have not personally experienced violence, tribal people like Somalis have been a stupendous failure at acculturation, leaving a trail of gang crime, sexual assault, and support for jihad in the homeland.
For example, the refugee industry and media have sung the praises of the Lost Boys of Sudan and their heroic trek across Africa, some number of whom ended up in the United States. It is hard to criticize such a heart-warming story, but an estimated 80 to 90 percent of Lost Boys suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, according to a 2008 report in the Arizona Republic (“Stress issues still plague ‘Lost Boys’ of Sudan”).
It’s a sad result, but not unexpected to anyone familiar with the effects of war trauma on children.
Abused or traumatized children often grow into violent, disturbed adults. It’s basic psychology that no one questions, except in the immigration/refugee milieu. War-affected kids commonly experience anger and post-traumatic stress disorder as they grow older. Those symptoms may be expressed in crime and violence.
It’s hugely irresponsible of refugee agencies to deposit these human time bombs into American communities with no psychological counseling and expect everything will work out somehow. It doesn’t, and only a fool would expect a positive result. The neighborhood schools do not have the resources to cope with deep-seated trauma, but they are stuck with severely troubled refugee kids in addition to the citizen children who should be their primary focus.
In addition to psychologically damaged individuals, it is inappropriate to import people whose cultural norms include behaviors which our society considers criminal. Those include polygamy, female genital mutilation, honor killing, bride kidnapping, animal sacrifice, child marriage, and other repellant practices. America is not enriched by diversity of this sort.
Immigration is a very stressful enterprise even under the best of circumstances. Establishing oneself economically in a new country while also trying to adjust to an unfamiliar culture can be very difficult. The possibility of failure is real. When the new resident cannot meet his own possibly unrealistic goals of success, violence may occur.
Following are some examples of real harm done to (mostly) Americans by a refugee policy based on extremist multiculturalism which is fundamentally flawed as an ideology and execution vis-à-vis refugee policy. All cultures are not equal, and not all foreigners assimilate, because their home culture remains dominant, or they simply do not want to become Americans.
● A young Sudanese, Gareng Deng, murdered Marilyn Bethell in 2005 in Aurora, Illinois. As a child in war-torn Sudan, he witnessed atrocities and genocide. He came with his family to America, where he participated in increasingly violent crimes, culminating in the murder of Bethell, 47, a substance abuse counselor.
● In Roanoke, Virginia, three refugees — Luke Musa Elbino (age 19, from Sudan), Joshua Kasongo (19, from Rwanda), and Mohammed Hussein Guhad (19, from Somalia) — decided they could make some money by kidnapping wives of wealthy American men and holding them for ransom. Kidnapping has been a popular criminal activity in chaotic Somalia and may have been an inspiration for the young African men. Their attempt to kidnap the wife of a dental insurance company CEO quickly fell apart when they failed to force their way into the home and police arrested them soon thereafter. All three were students with no previous sign of maladjustment.
● Sulejman Talovic, an 18-year-old refugee from Bosnia, killed six people at a Salt Lake City mall in an apparent act of jihad against non-Muslims in 2007. He was shot and killed by an off-duty policeman at the crime scene.
● Somali refugee Said Biyad was settled with his wife and four kids in Louisville by Catholic Charities. In 2006, he beat and raped his wife, then slit the throats of his children, the oldest of whom was eight. He was found guilty of the crime and sentenced to life without parole in 2011.
● Ali Mohamad Mohamud, a refugee from Somalia residing in Buffalo, beat his 10-year-old stepson to death for not doing his homework, striking him more than 70 times with a rolling pin. The 40-year-old stepdad worked as a security guard at the local newspaper, where he got positive reviews from the reporters.
● Ethiopian refugee Ahmed Sule sexually assaulted a legally blind 84-year-old man weak from cancer. At sentencing in 2011, Sule’s lawyer said she had hoped the judge would cut the criminal some slack in prison time because he grew up in Ethiopia while it was in a state of conflict, saying he was psychologically damaged. Perhaps so: but why then does the government inflict persons like him on the unsuspecting American public?
● Iraqi refugees Waad Ramadan Alwan and Mohanad Shareef Hammadi (mentioned above) used their location in the United States to provide material support for jihadists in their homeland. They are poster boys for poor vetting, because Alwan was a soldier in the Iraqi army who fought against Americans as a sniper and bomb maker. In fact, his fingerprint was on an IED in Iraq—yet he was admitted as a refugee. One would think that young Iraqi men would get more extensive examination, but appropriate caution was not used in this case.
● Ali Abdi, a Somali refugee and “leader” among local Bantus, raped a 9-year-old girl in Burlington, Vermont, for which he was sentenced to 20 years to life. The rape victim was reportedly “ostracized” in the community, indicating she was a Somali as well. Females are routinely disrespected in Somali culture, as evidenced by the stoning to death of a 13-year-old rape victim in that country, as reported by the BBC in 2008.
● Girls are apparently scorned in Liberian culture as well, judging by the 2009 gang rape of an eight-year-old in Phoenix by four Liberian refugee boys, aged 9-14. The victim was placed in child protective services because the Liberian parents felt shamed by her being raped and didn’t want her back.
Some may argue that there are criminals in every large group and it is unfair to blame refugee policy for this mayhem. On the contrary, the preceding cases indicate a willful ignorance about the limited ability of normal humans to adjust to a different culture. All foreigners bring the baggage of their home societies, and criminal diversity is simply not acceptable to American values.
It is a very bad public policy to import psychologically damaged or dangerous people and deposit them into a culture which they may find objectionable according to their traditional beliefs or religion. Many Muslims regard women as sub-human beings who must submit to men. It is no kindness to admit primitive people whose only skills are herding and fire-building into a highly complex, twenty-first century culture. Endangering Americans to pursue a misguided do-gooder agenda is a wrong use of government power.
The refugee program is made to sound noble and humanitarian on the surface, but what often happens is that a trade is going on: the U.S. agrees to accept some members of an unwanted tribe from a foreign country and, in return, the nation in question does something that Washington desires.
As a result, Washington takes on the interior tribal problems of countries around the world. The United States has become the dumping ground for people inconveniently located, where majority populations don’t want them, such as Nepalis in Bhutan, Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, and Somalis in Kenya, to name a few. The State Department may believe that removing troublesome diversity from foreign nations is helpful in diplomacy, but the agency is not entitled to crush American communities by its arrogant wheeling and dealing.
Plus, the more diverse the refugees, the more they require expensive expert help, provided by or siphoned through the resettlement organizations that offer a high level of job security. Indeed, the resettlement professionals appear to prefer backwards people, the sort who have never seen a light switch before.
This country belongs to its people. The United States is not a flophouse for the unhappy of the world, desirous of financial assistance. No sane person writes a check to a charity when his own family is in serious straits. In the same way, Washington must look to the well-being of its own citizenry instead of focusing on worldwide handouts.
The refugee program is poorly administered and endangers American citizens. It should be ended for the good of the nation.n May, the State Department held a meeting in Washington, concerning the nation’s refugee program and invited refugee resettlement workers and anyone else who knew about it to comment. The gathering was a rare opportunity for concerned citizens to speak up about a policy that has minimal oversight and is known to be loaded with fraud. Normally a low-key event for Refugee Industrial Complex insiders, the website: http://RefugeeResettlementWatch.wordpress.com alerted readers that they could attend the May 15 meeting in Washington or send written opinions to be distributed among those present.
The refugee program should get a lot more scrutiny, since it recklessly embraces the most extreme edges of diversity. It’s quite a stretch to believe that a Somali tribesman whose skills are suitable to a hunter-gatherer society might someday be a useful citizen of the U.S., but the resettlement industry promotes their presence. Importing guaranteed welfare cases is no way to run a country that is nearly $17 trillion in the hole.
At a time when the wages of low-skilled workers are pushed ever lower by a flooded labor market, the refugee program adds to the pain of America’s poorest workers. Some meatpacking companies have turned to the refugee population for workers to avoid the problems associated with illegal aliens. For example, a Tyson meatpacking plant in Columbus Junction, Iowa, has attracted 400 Burmese refugees to reside in the town, which had 1,900 residents according the 2010 Census.
National security should be a bigger concern after the Boston Marathon bombing, an attack which demonstrated once again that Washington sees importing extreme diversity as more important than protecting public safety. U.S. authorities had been warned by their Russian counterparts that Tamarlan Tsarnaev had become dangerously Islamized after his visit home to Dagestan, but a cursory investigation convinced the FBI agents that he was no problem. The Tsarnaev family entered in 2002 and was allowed to stay on the basis of a “well-founded fear of persecution.” Yet a few years later, the parents moved back to Dagestan, so the “persecution” appears more like fraud, and America’s ability and seriousness about keeping out bad guys looks lame.
At the same time, understanding has been building in some quarters that the refugee program is perilously open. Senator Rand Paul has recognized that rubber-stamping sketchy foreigners can be a bad idea. In May 2011, two Iraqi refugees, Waad Ramadan Alwan and Mohanad Shareef Hammadi, were arrested in Paul’s home state of Kentucky and accused by the FBI of plotting to send weapons and money to al Qaeda in Iraq. In January of 2013, Hammadi was sentenced to life in prison, while Alwan received a lesser term of 40 years for helping the prosecution.
As a result of the case, the Department of Homeland Security ordered the security checks of the 58,000 Iraqi refugees already settled in the U.S.
Senator Paul voiced the opinion during a 2011 hearing that there were too many refugees and asylum seekers to be screened adequately, remarking “I don’t fault you for missing the needle in the haystack. You’ve got to make the haystack smaller.”
Interestingly, the House Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence held a hearing on December 4 titled “Terrorist Exploitation of Refugee Programs” (which can be watched on C-SPAN). As Chairman Patrick Meehan noted in his opening statement, “According to press reports this past February, intelligence indicates that the threat posed by refugees with ties to al Qaeda is much broader than was previously believed.”
Following are my comments regarding the Refugee Admissions Program, now and going forward. This memo was written for the May 15 State Department refugee meeting.
§ § § §
It is incomprehensible to many citizens like myself that Washington continues to admit tens of thousands of unskilled, illiterate third-world refugees during a jobs depression of four-plus years duration when more than 20 million Americans are jobless.
In addition, numerous refugees come from violent backgrounds, which bodes poorly for their assimilation into this country and whether they will present a danger to the citizens who are forced to deal with them. Aside from those who have not personally experienced violence, tribal people like Somalis have been a stupendous failure at acculturation, leaving a trail of gang crime, sexual assault, and support for jihad in the homeland.
For example, the refugee industry and media have sung the praises of the Lost Boys of Sudan and their heroic trek across Africa, some number of whom ended up in the United States. It is hard to criticize such a heart-warming story, but an estimated 80 to 90 percent of Lost Boys suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, according to a 2008 report in the Arizona Republic (“Stress issues still plague ‘Lost Boys’ of Sudan”).
It’s a sad result, but not unexpected to anyone familiar with the effects of war trauma on children.
Abused or traumatized children often grow into violent, disturbed adults. It’s basic psychology that no one questions, except in the immigration/refugee milieu. War-affected kids commonly experience anger and post-traumatic stress disorder as they grow older. Those symptoms may be expressed in crime and violence.
It’s hugely irresponsible of refugee agencies to deposit these human time bombs into American communities with no psychological counseling and expect everything will work out somehow. It doesn’t, and only a fool would expect a positive result. The neighborhood schools do not have the resources to cope with deep-seated trauma, but they are stuck with severely troubled refugee kids in addition to the citizen children who should be their primary focus.
In addition to psychologically damaged individuals, it is inappropriate to import people whose cultural norms include behaviors which our society considers criminal. Those include polygamy, female genital mutilation, honor killing, bride kidnapping, animal sacrifice, child marriage, and other repellant practices. America is not enriched by diversity of this sort.
Immigration is a very stressful enterprise even under the best of circumstances. Establishing oneself economically in a new country while also trying to adjust to an unfamiliar culture can be very difficult. The possibility of failure is real. When the new resident cannot meet his own possibly unrealistic goals of success, violence may occur.
Following are some examples of real harm done to (mostly) Americans by a refugee policy based on extremist multiculturalism which is fundamentally flawed as an ideology and execution vis-à-vis refugee policy. All cultures are not equal, and not all foreigners assimilate, because their home culture remains dominant, or they simply do not want to become Americans.
● A young Sudanese, Gareng Deng, murdered Marilyn Bethell in 2005 in Aurora, Illinois. As a child in war-torn Sudan, he witnessed atrocities and genocide. He came with his family to America, where he participated in increasingly violent crimes, culminating in the murder of Bethell, 47, a substance abuse counselor.
● In Roanoke, Virginia, three refugees — Luke Musa Elbino (age 19, from Sudan), Joshua Kasongo (19, from Rwanda), and Mohammed Hussein Guhad (19, from Somalia) — decided they could make some money by kidnapping wives of wealthy American men and holding them for ransom. Kidnapping has been a popular criminal activity in chaotic Somalia and may have been an inspiration for the young African men. Their attempt to kidnap the wife of a dental insurance company CEO quickly fell apart when they failed to force their way into the home and police arrested them soon thereafter. All three were students with no previous sign of maladjustment.
● Sulejman Talovic, an 18-year-old refugee from Bosnia, killed six people at a Salt Lake City mall in an apparent act of jihad against non-Muslims in 2007. He was shot and killed by an off-duty policeman at the crime scene.
● Somali refugee Said Biyad was settled with his wife and four kids in Louisville by Catholic Charities. In 2006, he beat and raped his wife, then slit the throats of his children, the oldest of whom was eight. He was found guilty of the crime and sentenced to life without parole in 2011.
● Ali Mohamad Mohamud, a refugee from Somalia residing in Buffalo, beat his 10-year-old stepson to death for not doing his homework, striking him more than 70 times with a rolling pin. The 40-year-old stepdad worked as a security guard at the local newspaper, where he got positive reviews from the reporters.
● Ethiopian refugee Ahmed Sule sexually assaulted a legally blind 84-year-old man weak from cancer. At sentencing in 2011, Sule’s lawyer said she had hoped the judge would cut the criminal some slack in prison time because he grew up in Ethiopia while it was in a state of conflict, saying he was psychologically damaged. Perhaps so: but why then does the government inflict persons like him on the unsuspecting American public?
● Iraqi refugees Waad Ramadan Alwan and Mohanad Shareef Hammadi (mentioned above) used their location in the United States to provide material support for jihadists in their homeland. They are poster boys for poor vetting, because Alwan was a soldier in the Iraqi army who fought against Americans as a sniper and bomb maker. In fact, his fingerprint was on an IED in Iraq—yet he was admitted as a refugee. One would think that young Iraqi men would get more extensive examination, but appropriate caution was not used in this case.
● Ali Abdi, a Somali refugee and “leader” among local Bantus, raped a 9-year-old girl in Burlington, Vermont, for which he was sentenced to 20 years to life. The rape victim was reportedly “ostracized” in the community, indicating she was a Somali as well. Females are routinely disrespected in Somali culture, as evidenced by the stoning to death of a 13-year-old rape victim in that country, as reported by the BBC in 2008.
● Girls are apparently scorned in Liberian culture as well, judging by the 2009 gang rape of an eight-year-old in Phoenix by four Liberian refugee boys, aged 9-14. The victim was placed in child protective services because the Liberian parents felt shamed by her being raped and didn’t want her back.
Some may argue that there are criminals in every large group and it is unfair to blame refugee policy for this mayhem. On the contrary, the preceding cases indicate a willful ignorance about the limited ability of normal humans to adjust to a different culture. All foreigners bring the baggage of their home societies, and criminal diversity is simply not acceptable to American values.
It is a very bad public policy to import psychologically damaged or dangerous people and deposit them into a culture which they may find objectionable according to their traditional beliefs or religion. Many Muslims regard women as sub-human beings who must submit to men. It is no kindness to admit primitive people whose only skills are herding and fire-building into a highly complex, twenty-first century culture. Endangering Americans to pursue a misguided do-gooder agenda is a wrong use of government power.
The refugee program is made to sound noble and humanitarian on the surface, but what often happens is that a trade is going on: the U.S. agrees to accept some members of an unwanted tribe from a foreign country and, in return, the nation in question does something that Washington desires.
As a result, Washington takes on the interior tribal problems of countries around the world. The United States has become the dumping ground for people inconveniently located, where majority populations don’t want them, such as Nepalis in Bhutan, Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, and Somalis in Kenya, to name a few. The State Department may believe that removing troublesome diversity from foreign nations is helpful in diplomacy, but the agency is not entitled to crush American communities by its arrogant wheeling and dealing.
Plus, the more diverse the refugees, the more they require expensive expert help, provided by or siphoned through the resettlement organizations that offer a high level of job security. Indeed, the resettlement professionals appear to prefer backwards people, the sort who have never seen a light switch before.
This country belongs to its people. The United States is not a flophouse for the unhappy of the world, desirous of financial assistance. No sane person writes a check to a charity when his own family is in serious straits. In the same way, Washington must look to the well-being of its own citizenry instead of focusing on worldwide handouts.
The refugee program is poorly administered and endangers American citizens. It should be ended for the good of the nation.