Letters page
Welcome to the OFIR Letters and Op-Eds section. Here you can read Letters to the Editor and Op-Eds that have been published in various newspapers and news sources.
There was a time, not so long ago, when immigrants to America had to demonstrate their ability to be self-sufficient. Some required sponsors who pledged to take care of the immigrant they were sponsoring so they wouldn’t become a public charge, a burden on the taxpayer.
They used to get stopped and checked for communicable diseases on Ellis Island in New York and Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, but…
Well, that was in a galaxy far, far away, apparently....
....You can now naturalize and become an American citizen even if you can’t afford the minimal $685 fee.
And, the fee waiver is not limited to those who want to naturalize.
U.S.C.I.S, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, now offers a fee waiver for those seeking Temporary Protected Status, TPS....
...So, Yemenis, or anybody who says they resided in Yemen, can now apply for TPS. As we say in the immigration reform movement, “Nothing in the world is as permanent as the term ‘temporary’ when applied to immigration status.”
“…people without nationality who last habitually resided in Yemen…” (emphasis added)
Now, some readers are probably searching their memory asking themselves, “Yemen? Isn’t that were Al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) is located?”
...So, we can now exercise appropriate sarcasm and modify the poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty, “Give me your tired, your poor, your militants yearning to bring the jihad without paying a fee.”
Oh, yeah, if you can’t read English, then the helpful U.S. government has also provided the TPS fee waiver announcement in Arabic.
The numbers of migrants fleeing turmoil and poverty around the world are rising astronomically. There are 20 million refugees flooding the world today, The New York Times reports, and one in four is Syrian. Europe is besieged and beginning to turn them back.
President Obama has decreed that we will take 10,000 Syrian refugees this year, and possibly more will come. A group of refugees, reportedly including one or more Syrians, arrived this month in Oregon, and is being resettled in Salem.
Considering the vast new scale of refugees, what is the best policy for assisting them?
As Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies says: “... the goal of refugee assistance is not to make us feel good. It is to assist as many people as possible with the resources available. And resettling a relative handful of them here to help us bask in our own righteousness means we are sacrificing the much larger number who could have been helped with the same resources.”
The United Nations organizes and operates refuges in the Middle East, in places which are near the countries in turmoil. Caring for refugees near their own countries is less expensive and also has the advantage of facilitating their return home when stability is restored. The United States contributes to maintenance of these safe areas, and could contribute more.
It’s very expensive and counterproductive to bring refugees to the U.S. Beyond questions of cost, it is also dangerous now because the screening processes for refugees are wholly inadequate, as revealed in an examination of procedures by the Center for Immigration Studies, and as reported to Congress by the director of the FBI.
Terrible disasters have happened here recently caused by Middle Eastern citizens or immigrants. In a BBC Radio 4 documentary series, “A New Life in Europe,” a Syrian man, head of a family attempting to enter Europe, speaks bitterly of Germany’s accepting some refugee claimants while he and his family are back in the Middle East after failing twice to reach their European destination and be accepted: “If they would close the door, people would try to help themselves here. ... We would change our plan, we wouldn’t have to keep trying and waiting for another boat. We would look for a better life somewhere else. They are throwing a piece of bread tied to a string, and they just keep pulling it away from you.”
Oregon and other states can determine to what extent they wish to cooperate with the president in his refugee programs. U.S. citizens should tell their legislators and the president to stop all refugee admissions at this time except for the very few whose identity and peaceful purposes can be unequivocally proven, such as certain translators working for U.S. embassies or our military forces. Instead, help the U.N. maintain safe areas for refugees near their own countries.
Elizabeth Van Staaveren of McMinnville is a longtime member of Oregonians for Immigration Reform.
Stephen Maly, vice-president of WorldMontana, continues beating the drums to bring Syrian refugees to Montana (“Refugee resettlement in Montana revisited,” IR, Jan. 17). He should know better. People familiar with U.S. refugee-resettlement programs do know better.
One central fact these people know is that refugee resettlement has become a business — big business. Instead of sacrificial charity undertaken by compassionate souls, resettlement now involves high-dollar collaboration between the U.S. government and nine national non-governmental organizations, including Lutheran Immigrant and Refugee Services, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and International Rescue Committee.
Far from being donation-driven religious or civic charities, such organizations are dominantly federal contractors, running their refugee operations primarily — often above 90 percent — with government largesse. As refugee-policy expert Don Barnett wrote recently in the Washington Times, six-figure executive salaries “are the norm at the roughly 350 organizations affiliated with the nine major contractors. There are additional hundreds of supporting NGOs — most started and staffed by refugees and recent immigrants — soaking up grants from every agency of government except NASA.”
A regional example is Colorado’s Lutheran Family Services Rocky Mountains, which covers refugee resettlement in Montana. According to their annual reports, refugee services consumed about $5.1 million of their 2013 fiscal year’s $13.4-million budget. Meanwhile, about $10.9 million of their $14.1 million revenue for that period came from government grants and contracts. According to their 2013 IRS tax return, the actual benefits — both cash and in-kind — bestowed by LFSRM upon the 1,362 refugees (and asylees) they served amounted to $2 million. This implies that $3.1 million went for refugee-program overhead, including the $122,595 total compensation to program vice president James Horan.
It’s unclear from the news reports about Maly’s refugees proposal whether WorldMontana, with its modest annual budgets of about $125,000, has ambitions to jump on this taxpayer-funded gravy train.
Montanans dubious about Maly’s ambitions have additional reasons for skepticism. An important aspect of these programs in cities nationwide is that, once they’ve agreed to accept a few refugees, the cities’ officials lose their say in the process, despite a legal requirement that the State Department’s resettlement bureaucrats consult regularly with state and local authorities about the targeted cities’ capabilities. Then their cities get inundated with needy people.
In 2013, for example, Domenic Sarno, the Democratic mayor of Springfield, Massachusetts, wrote to the State Department asking for cessation of the influx of refugees being dumped — that word is appropriate — on his city of 155,000 by three resettlement contractors. Interviewed by the local newspaper, Sarno explained, “We have done more than our fair share. It’s not fair to the refugees or Springfield. I have to draw the line. The number of refugee children who have little to no English language skills has overwhelmed the very limited interpretation capabilities of our public schools, and funding that was intended for use in assisting existing pupils.” But nearly a year later, Mayor Sarno was still pleading for that moratorium.
It’s similar in Amarillo, Texas, so burdened with Mideast refugees that the mayor and a city commissioner are struggling to halt further resettlement there. News reporting says that the city of about 200,000 currently fields 911 calls in 42 different languages. And echoing the Massachusetts mayor, Mayor Paul Harpole said, “We have 660 (refugee) kids who don’t speak English, and the U.S. Department of Education says they have to be at grade level within one year. It’s a ludicrous requirement — they don’t even know how to use the bathroom.”
Then there’s the point that Syrian refugees are nearly 100 percent Muslims. A marker of Maly’s naivete — or ignorance — is his assertion that “fruitful coexistence (between Muslims and Christians) is as old as our republic.”
He has things exactly backwards: In 1786, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams met in London with Tripoli’s ambassador to ask why the Barbary pirates were plundering U.S. merchant ships in the Mediterranean and enslaving the ships’ passengers and crews, as the young American nation had done the Barbary states no harm. Replied the ambassador, as reported by Jefferson, “It was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave; and that every Mussulman who was slain in this warfare was sure to go to paradise.” Thus Jefferson and Adams were confronted by what contemporary Europeans knew: Islam is the West’s historic, mortal enemy.
And in The River War (1899), Winston Churchill noted, "No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science … the civilization of modern Europe might fall."
For a few Westerners, memories remain fresh: Serbian-born historian Serge Trifkovic recounted to me growing up in a society with a vivid collective recall of the centuries of Muslim rule in the Balkans, summarizing that Islam is “a totalitarian ideology incompatible with the fundamental values of the West — and all other civilized societies, India, China, and Japan included.”
Thus Montanans who acquaint themselves with the abundant facts and accessible history will likely oppose WorldMontana’s attempt to resettle Syrian refugees here.
In 2013 Rep. Vic Gilliam (R-Silverton/Hubbard) spearheaded the failed attempt to put driver cards in the hands of people in our country illegally. Now, he’s at it again.
Gilliam ignored the objections of his own constituents, who voted over three to one against issuing driver cards to illegal immigrants.
But Rep. Gilliam, in his Jan. 27 editorial “Immigration reform, not discrimination, is needed” (see Page A7 of Jan. 27 edition), casts an even wider net, implying that nearly a million Oregon voters who defeated the driver card law, including members of the Oregon House Republican Caucus and members of Oregonians for Immigration Reform, are racist for wanting our immigration laws enforced and for lawmakers to put American citizens first.
Foreign nationals work in Oregon illegally, often using a stolen identity or Social Security number to do so. They steal jobs from low skill, entry-level workers (especially teens, veterans, minorities and legal immigrants) their children overwhelm our schools, and their ever increasing numbers threaten our natural environment.
Unfortunately, as an elected official sworn to uphold the laws of this country, Gilliam seems to think it’s best, instead, to embrace the wishes of those that disregard our laws by coming here illegally.
Rep. Gilliam stated, “Largely as a result of a failed federal immigration policy, we have undocumented workers in our state who are proven hard-working citizens and trusted friends.” Undocumented workers are now citizens? According to Gilliam they are.
I’ve got news for you Vic: Our immigration policy has not failed; it’s simply not enforced!
Elected officials like you have compounded the problem. I blame lawmakers that pick and choose which laws to enforce and which laws they and their deep pocketed donors choose to ignore for their own benefit.
Rep Gilliam, you were elected to protect and serve your constituents, not foreign nationals illegally present in our state.
Latin America's Zika virus is the latest undocumented immigrant to hit our shores, but have no fear. Self-appointed Zika Warrior Prince Charles Schumer has declared that he is here to stop it.
The New York Democrat has a "three-point plan" of attack to build a "firewall" that will prevent an outbreak of the mosquito-borne illness from spreading across our mainland. He's armed with big charts and jabby index fingers, too. Allons!
Five cases of the Zika virus have been identified in the Empire State alone. The CDC says a total of 31 Americans in 11 states, including Florida, and Washington, D.C., have been identified as carriers who brought the miserable disease in from abroad.
The feds' don't worry-be-happy health bureaucrats emphasize that these are "isolated" incidents...
But on Tuesday, Dallas County, Texas, reported the first case in a resident based here in the continental U.S. who contracted the condition "through sexual contact...
When people in Washington tell you not to worry, be alarmed.
I know I'm not the only one who sniggered at the spectacle of the Senate's leading Gang of Eight immigration expansionists now playing Chicken Little about global communicable diseases.
Newsflash: The sky has already fallen. The barn door can't — or rather, won't — be closed by those scrambling in front of the cameras to grab headlines about the latest panic du jour. The fundamental policy dissonance is lost on tin-eared Schumer: While he makes theatrical grand gestures to stop foreign viruses from entering through the front porch, he and his amnesty-promoting pals in both parties have left the side and back entries swinging wide open for illegal immigration.
People from Central and South America, ground zero for Zika and other infectious diseases including tuberculosis, dengue, Chagas, Chikungunya and schistosomiasis, make up nearly 15 percent of the illegal immigrant population in the U.S....
The Democrat-manufactured border surge ushered in a resurgence of tropical diseases across the Southwest. Meanwhile, laborers here illegally and amnestied migrants who have never been screened for disease obtained Obama work permits to hold low-wage jobs in places like Chipotle, which shut down scores of its restaurants over the past three months after two separate E. coli outbreaks.
Now comes news from Texas governor Greg Abbott and Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, that the Obama Department of Homeland Security plans to cut back aerial monitoring of the southern border by 50 percent....
"From October to December of 2015," the paper reported, "about 10,560 unaccompanied minors entered Texas illegally through the Rio Grande Valley sector of the U.S. Border Patrol. That marks a 115 percent increase over the same time frame in 2014." With spring just around the corner, those numbers will swell again.
And the illegal immigrant border surge will only be strengthened (and public health risks increased) if Obama gives in to left-wing immigrant groups lobbying the White House to extend "Temporary Protected Status" en masse to upwards of 750,000 Central Americans purportedly fleeing violence in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
TPS is a special amnesty program originally intended as a short-term humanitarian program. As usual, "temporary" means permanent..... Their "temporary" status has been renewed more than a dozen times since the Clinton administration first bestowed it.
One of the biggest champions of the fraud-riddled, illegal immigration-incentivizing TPS program? Chicken Little Chuckie Schumer.
The Beltway posturing of open-borders engineers is enough to make you sick.
We have an immigration policy and procedures to ensure that those who want to settle in our country are qualified. Those who are not, sneak across our borders.
They are called illegal immigrants. Wrong, they are invaders.
These folks come across our southern borders from Mexico and Latin America. If they make it, they hit the jackpot with free food, lodging, health care and subsistence — things they cannot always get in their own country.
They are a liability and must be stopped. They should be denied any benefits, rounded up and shipped back home. We should also put up an impenetrable wall similar to the Berlin Wall that was very effective.
Trump says he will do these things and I believe he will.
If we are serious about our security, then we must do these things. If these invaders can sneak in, so can ISIS.
After reading the Jan. 21 article, “A call for community to welcome refugees,” I am very concerned with the direction the federal and state of Oregon governments are heading.
There are several questions that need to be answered before proceeding with accepting additional refugees.
— Are these people properly and thoroughly vetted? Please remember the San Bernardino 14.
— Are the government officials vetting these people willing to sign an affidavit swearing the vetted refugees will not violate our laws?
— Why are tax dollars supporting refugees while our veterans and military people are not provided needed care? Please remember the reasoning Wounded Warrior Project and others exist.
— Using tax dollars to support refugees while not paying the $18.9 trillion national debt is a fool’s folly.
Michelle McKinley’s Jan. 23 polemic against Rep. Peter Defazio’s failure to support his Democratic colleagues’ protest against immigration raids was something I’d expect from a professor at the University of Oregon, where the left reigns supreme (“DeFazio should back halt to immigration raids”).
McKinley said DeFazio “has a responsibility as a representative of the U.S. government to ensure that these individuals [illegal immigrants] are given due process protections.”
First and foremost, DeFazio is a representative of those who elected him, not the “U.S. government.”
Second, his primary responsibility — as is true for all members of Congress — is to represent American citizens, not foreign nationals.
Unlike most of his Democratic colleagues, DeFazio recognizes that, at least some of the time. He should be commended for that, not condemned.
Would somebody in the “open borders” crowd please explain to America’s working class and poor how continuing to allow the flood of foreigners into our country, both legal and illegal, helps the working class and poor?
Would they also please explain how bringing in tens of thousands of Muslim “refugees” from countries that hate us is going to enhance our security?
Thanks to DeFazio — and shame on his colleagues, who have forgotten their primary duty.
Your recent article about the $10,000 grant from the Oregon Community Foundation to the farmworkers union (PCUN) (See “$10,000 grant awarded to PCUN Farmworker Service Center” on Page A3 of the Jan. 20 edition) displayed a typical journalistic favouritism toward illegal aliens and an indifference toward citizens.
PCUN is basically a union for illegal aliens. Yet you listed various contacts for those interested in getting services from the OCF without mentioning whether taxpayers are funding this organization.
I think we have a right to know if we are supplying the $8.5 million that the OCF has distributed all over the state.
If we are paying for grants to lawbreakers, I’d rather re-route it to help American homeless youth and veterans. Lawbreakers chose to put themselves in a “vulnerable” position by voluntarily breaking our immigration laws. Our own poor didn’t.
Multiculturalism is a farce, pushed by progressives to eventually eliminate any remaining power held by folks who believe in the Constitution, the ideals of the Founding Fathers, the history of the most successful country in world history and the greatness of America.
Multiculturalism doesn’t work — evidence is all around the world. All you have to do is ignore the mainstream media (especially the Statesman Journal) and do your own research.
Look at all the European countries that welcomed, with open arms, millions of these “refugees” from Middle Eastern countries. They stay within their own groups, don’t work, refuse to learn the host country’s culture and language. Then they go about working to change the host country into the culture of the countries they came from.
So when anyone voices concern about bringing hundreds of thousands of these folks into our country, those opposing this influx are called hatemongers, nativists, sexist racists and bigots, to name a few.
Americans are not like Europeans. We will not sit by and watch this happen in America. We are not like other cultures. We will not escape to other countries when conflict in our own country happens. We will stay and fight for our country. Won’t we?
