Tag Archives: Refugee

27 Iraqi Christians face deportation, as Obama welcomes 200,000 Syrian Muslims

He's better at golf than foreign policy
He’s better at golf than foreign policy

Story from Christian Today.

Excerpt:

A small group of Iraqi Christians persecuted in their homeland are wondering why they are being deported from the U.S. while the Obama administration is trying its best to justify giving asylum to thousands of Muslim refugees from Syria.

A total of 27 Chaldean Christians who have been driven from their homeland by Al Qaeda and ISIS militants managed to enter the U.S. from Mexico in April and May this year, Fox News reported.

The Chaldeans are trying to join the thriving Iraqi Christian community in and around San Diego, California, but now they face an uncertain future as their applications for religious asylum have been rejected by U.S. authorities allegedly due to “technicalities.”

“These are families who were split up because of religious persecution, and now the government – which we love – is preventing them from being reunited,” said Fr. Michael Bazzi, of St. Peter Chaldean Catholic Cathedral, in El Cajon, California. “We wonder why, for thousands of Muslims, the door is open to America, yet Christians are not allowed to come.”

The Chaldeans are among tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of Christians from Iraq and Syria who have been displaced by fighting in their respective countries and persecuted by Al Qaeda, Islamic State (ISIS) and even the Iraqi government, the Fox News report said.

[…]Moreover, supporters said the Chaldean Christians will not be a burden to the U.S. government since they have family members in San Diego willing to take them in. San Diego is home to one of the largest Chaldean populations in the U.S.Republicans and Christian leaders say persecuted Christians should be afforded extra protection.

“If the particular security threat you are concerned about is jihadist terror, there are no Christian jihadist terrorists,” said Andrew McCarthy, the former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. “But for the purpose of asylum analysis, the question is likelihood of persecution. There is no question that Christians face more persecution in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East than Muslims do. We should acknowledge that Christians are being subjected to genocide and take steps to protect them,” he told Fox News.

They’re not going to be dependent, they don’t support abortion and gay marriage, they’re not going to engage in terrorism, so that means they are not the kind of immigrant we want.

Meanwhile, regarding Clown President’s comments that most of his refugees are Muslim women and children, and so are harmless, we have these facts to counter his rhetoric:

[…]French police launched a raid on an apartment associated with the Paris attacks, resulting in the death of a female jihadist inside the flat.

Her name was Hasna Aitboulahcen, and what we know about her so far illustrates exactly what is so dangerous about the virulent ideology that is attacking Western civilization.

Hasna was not exactly your stereotypical portrait of a terrorist. Her friends and family described her as a “party girl” who drank alcohol and had multiple boyfriends. As the Washington Post reports:

“We saw her quite often and we called her ‘The Cowgirl’ because she was always wearing a large hat,” one neighbor said. She rarely visited the mosque, and her brother told authorities that he had not once seen her open up a Koran, CNN reports …

Lately, she had taken to calling herself a jihad fanatic. Last June, she posted a photo of herself in a niqab with the caption (using French shorthand): “I will soon go to syria [sic] inchallah [God willing] soon I will leave for turkey.”

That an “outgoing French girl” can turn quickly into a violent jihadist who apparently aided in the Paris attacks tells us how powerful and unpredictable the ideology can be — drawing in not just angry, young and underprivileged Middle Eastern men, but also Parisian girls who were thought to have “loved life.”

President Obama was hardly on stronger ground when he mocked Americans for concerns about even children coming from Syria. The perpetrators of one of the most famous recent terror attacks on U.S. soil, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — Islamist terrorists who set off bombs at the Boston Marathon in 2013 — came to the United States as child asylum seekers. A relatively normal childhood in America did not prevent them from being radicalized.

Why doesn’t Obama know these things? Because his worldview only allows him to think that one religion can be terrorist: Christianity. He cannot imagine that the real villains really are evil. Perhaps that’s why the number of deaths due to terrorism has more than QUADRUPLED since we exchanged the hawkish George W. Bush for the anti-American defeatist Barack Obama in 2009. America can be a force for good in the world, when we are fund and deploy our military to deter aggression. Obama’s priorities have been cutting the military and turning victories into defeats by retreating.

Are Christians who use other people’s money to help others “generous”?

Gross public debt, Democrats control spending in 2007
Gross public debt, Democrats control spending in 2007

Normal Americans who work for a living know that you cannot be generous with someone else’s money – you have to earn your own money and give your own money away if you want to be “generous”. And this is actually what the Bible says – be generous to others with your own money. There is no support in the Bible for discharging your obligations to people in need by having a secular leftist government subsidize their abortions, etc. But many Christians escape the need to be generous with their own money by voting for the secular government to take someone else’s money. This way, they can have the feelings of being generous without having to make the sacrifice themselves.

So here are my points in response to this “stolen valor” view of generosity, which seems to be so popular with dependent professors and dependent pastors who do not work in the private sector.

First, illegal immigration and refugee asylum typically costs us money, since unskilled immigrants and asylum’d refugees do not typically pay as much in taxes as they using in taxpayer-funded benefits.

Evidence:

  • Under current law, all unlawful immigrant households together have an aggregate annual deficit of around $54.5 billion.
  • In the interim phase (roughly the first 13 years after amnesty), the aggregate annual deficit would fall to $43.4 billion.
  • At the end of the interim phase, former unlawful immigrant households would become fully eligible for means-tested welfare and health care benefits under the Affordable Care Act. The aggregate annual deficit would soar to around $106 billion.
  • In the retirement phase, the annual aggregate deficit would be around $160 billion. It would slowly decline as former unlawful immigrants gradually expire.

These costs would have to be borne by already overburdened U.S. taxpayers. (All figures are in 2010 dollars.)

Meanwhile, the same people who want big government to help the poor probably do not even realize that the national debt has doubled under Obama to $20 trillion, as of January 2017. Now do the people who want to give away all these benefits via big government intend to pay for it with their own money as the Bible says? No, they intend to pass the costs onto generations yet unborn via the national debt. They want to feel generous themselves, but with someone else’s money. There is a word for that – we call that slavery. It turns out that big government Christians really are in favor of slavery. They want to force the next generation to work tomorrow, so that they can feel generous today.

Government not serious about protecting the public

Second, we know that big government cannot be trusted to deport criminals, because we saw that on display in the Kate Steinle affair, where an illegal immigrant who had many prior convictions was released to commit worse crimes. If you think that illegal immgrants get deported after committing serious crimes, you really need to reconsider how trustworthy government is about border security.

For example, Senate Democrats blocked a bill to crack down on sanctuary cities.  Although amnesty and asylum for refugees sounds good, it relies on big government being serious about enforcing the law, and protecting the public. During the Obama administration, we have seen the Snowden leak, the Clinton private e-mail server which was hacked by foreign governments, the Benghazi coverup, the arms smuggling to drug cartels by the ATF, the China hack, the wikileaks leak by gay private Bradley Manning who got a taxpayer funded sex change, etc.

Previously, we saw how the parents of the Boston bombers were granted asylum as Chechen refugees. That was a failure of national security. And the FBI has already explained that our procedures for vetting refugees is inadequate. The refugees, by the way, are selected by the United Nations and a Muslim organization affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. So it’s just wishful thinking to think that this is a priority for the government. And recall that about 5 seconds after Obama bragged about how he had “contained” ISIS (Islamic State), the Paris attack happened. Democrats do not care about national security, so we cannot trust them to vet refugees. The people who want Syrian refugees to come in are depending on big government to take national security seriously. But we have zero evidence that they can do that.

Here’s Hillary Clinton:

Hillary Clinton focused on her real enemy – Americans who disagree with her – in a campaign speech on Thursday.
In a statement her own campaign Tweeted out as her marquee comment, Clinton declared: “Let’s be clear: Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.”

The UK Daily Mail describes Clinton as “reading her speech at a brisk clip from a teleprompter at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City,” but slowing down to mock Republicans over the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism,” which “Republicans often accuse President Barack Obama of purposefully avoiding.”

The Daily Mail cheekily notes that Clinton “referred repeatedly to ‘radical jihadism’ as a global scourge, but didn’t explain how the concept of jihadism is consistent with the notion that adherents of the world’s second largest religion are wholly uninvolved.”

Remember, this is the person who sent and received classified e-mails on a private unsecure email server, and blamed a terrorist attack on a YouTube video – for political gain. And it’s people like her who are promising us that they are serious about deporting illegal immigrants who commit crimes, and vetting refugees who are coming from Muslim countries.

What I have found in asking people who want amnesty and asylum for refugees is that they are incredibly uninformed about things like the national debt, the costs, the risks, etc. I don’t see why people trust the government to enforce border security law, deport lawbreakers, and vet refugees carefully. I think people who clown around advocating for policies based on their feelings and a misreading of the Bible need to be more cautious and humble. You don’t know how the world works, so shut your ignorant mouths before you get more people killed, and pass more debt onto the next generation. If you want to do something for refugees, do it yourself. If you want to do something for the poor in other countries, do it with your own money.

Refugee system discriminates against Christians

Muslim populations in Europe
Muslim populations in Europe

Let’s start with the Washington Times.

They write:

Less than 3 percent of the Syrian refugees admitted to the United States so far are Christian and 96 percent are Muslim, the result of a referral system that Republican Sen. Tom Cotton says “unintentionally discriminates” against Christians.

[…]Figures from the State Department Refugee Processing Center updated Monday showed that 96 percent of the Syrian refugees accepted so far are Muslim, while less than 3 percent are Christian. The other 33 identified as belonging to smaller religious faiths or said they had no religion.

[…]The current system relies on referrals from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Syria’s population in 2011 was 90 percent Muslim and 10 percent Christian, CNS said.

So, the population as a whole is 90% Muslim, 10% Christian, but the refugees we’ve accepted are 96% and 3% Christian. And this is despite the facts that Chistians are being treated far less well in Muslim-dominated countries like Syria. What accounts for this discrepancy?

Well, it turns out that the Obama administration is working with a system that favors Muslim immigrants over Christian immigrants.

CNS News explains:

According to Patrick Sookhdeo, international director of Barnabas Fund, a charity campaigning to help rescue Christians from Syria, Christians fleeting ISIS “seldom go to the main refugee camps in neighboring countries because they are marginalized, abused, and at serious risk of violence in these Muslim-majority shelters.”

Sookhdeo says Western governments “must understand that vulnerable Christians are being overlooked in rescue program that take only those in the camps to safety. Fully aware of the victimization that is likely to await them in refugee camps, Iraqi and Syrian believers are mainly taking shelter in schools, churches, and apartments, or with relatives where possible.”

As a result, some refugee advocates say Western diplomatic missions should work through churches in urban areas in the countries neighboring Syria, to offer refuge for vulnerable Christians.

The Republicans are trying to do something about this, as usual:

In September Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, introduced a bill that would give Congress an up-or-down vote on Obama’s plan to resettle 10,000 Syrian refugees – and would also require the administration, when considering applicants from Syria and Iraq, to prioritize the resettlement of “persecuted” religious minorities.

So, in order to get after the Christian refugees, the Obama administration would have to go and find them in churches, schools, etc. But they seem content to just let the United Nations pick refugees from these camps that are hostile to Christian refugees.

Is government competent at security checks?

Well, maybe the system we have for security-checking Muslims is so good that we can take lots of them in, and no harm done. That’s what Obama is telling us. Is he right?

Not so much:

The administration argues that it’s conducting interviews with Syrians at camps in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon. But without security forces on the ground in Syria who can verify details, there is no way to back-check a refugee’s story to see if he is telling the truth and is, in fact, not a security threat.

Even when we had people on the ground in Iraq to screen refugees, terrorists got through the safety net.

In 2011, for instance, two Kentucky immigrants who had been resettled as Iraqi refugees were busted for trying to buy stinger missiles for al-Qaida.

It turned out that their fingerprints matched those linked to roadside bombs in Iraq. It was a major red flag that should have barred their entry, but U.S. screeners failed to take note. And the terrorists slipped into the U.S.

The administration’s vetting process for the massive influx of Syrian refugees is completely unreliable, admits the FBI official in charge of such security background checks.

“It’s not even close to being under control,” warned assistant FBI director Michael Steinbach.

We should not be believing the man who promised us that we could keep our doctor, keep our health plans, and that our health insurance premiums would go down $2,500. He is either lying, or he feel comfortable speaking confidently about matters where he is not competent to know whether what he is saying is actually true. Either way, we should not be believing him willy-nilly.