Mayors join
Obama's 'welcoming' parade for immigrants Critics
say it's about creating new Democrat voters, by Leo Hohmann, 5/6/15
For the millions of immigrants and refugees who might feel
unwelcome in Georgia, Texas, Alabama and any other state not on board with
President Obama’s plans to “build welcoming communities” for “new Americans,”
Mayor Kasim Reed has a message: Come to Atlanta.
Reed became the nation’s fourth mayor to embrace the White
House push to roll out the welcome mat for new immigrants and refugees and
remove barriers to citizenship. Critics say the program has little to do with
creating new citizens and everything to do with creating new Democrat voters.
On April 23 Reed signed an agreement with U.S. Citizenship
and Immigration Services (USCIS) making Atlanta a “welcoming city,” following
similar deals signed by mayors Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, Eric Garcetti of Los
Angeles and Karl Dean of Nashville.
“The truth of the matter is a lot of
our foreign-born population lives in rural areas in the region and so I am
telling those folks, I think you are better off being inside the city limits,”
Reed told
the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“And if other folks don’t want to stand up and welcome you, why are you there?”
Reed blasted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who is leading a group
of 25 other states, including Georgia, in suing to stop Obama’s plans to shield
from deportation millions of illegal immigrants. The states argue Obama’s
executive actions amount to an unconstitutional end-run around Congress.
Reed told the AJC those governors and mayors who don’t
welcome refugees and immigrants will eventually be seen as having been “on the
wrong side of history” and “they’re also on the wrong side of the economy.”
Reed has done a lot of work leading up to last month’s
signing of the deal with the federal government. City spokeswoman Melissa
Mullinax told WND that Reed began working with Welcoming America more than a
year ago.
Welcoming America is headed by David Lubell, a close
associate of President Obama who met with the president when he announced his
executive amnesty plans in Nashville last November. Lubell’s group was hatched
in 2010 with $150,000 in seed money from billionaire George Soros and is now
flush with federal grants.
According to city documents, Reed
agreed on Sept. 17, 2014, to implement a list
of 20 recommendations from the Welcoming Atlanta Working
Group, an outgrowth of Lubell’s national Welcoming America. Number 10 on the
list was to open “citizenship corners” at local libraries and to “conduct voter
registration drives and outreach at City of Atlanta festivals.”
Number one on the list was to “Create an Office of
Multicultural Affairs with a Director who is part of the Mayor’s executive
team.” That director, Monica Fuentes, did not return WND’s calls Wednesday.
Cecilia Muñoz, a former National Council of La Raza
executive who now heads up Obama’s Task Force on New Americans, immediately
fired off a tweet congratulating Reed for joining the partnership. Congrats to
Mayor @KasimReed & @USCIS for supporting #NewAmericans and increasing
access to citizenship in ATL!
While Atlanta, Nashville, Chicago and L.A. have signed
formal partnerships with the federal government to turn refugees and immigrants
into “new Americans,” dozens of other city mayors work informally toward the
same goal with a group called the Partnership for a New American Economy.
But some mayors have pushed back, including those in
Manchester, New Hampshire; Amarillo, Texas; Lynn and Springfield,
Massachusetts; and Athens, Georgia. These mayors have sought to stop or slow
the flow of refugees to their cities because they are becoming a drain on
public services, especially schools. It is also becoming more difficult to find
jobs for the refugees, some mayors say.
Amarillo has received more foreign refugees per capita than
any city in Texas, perhaps in the country. They come from Iraq, Somalia,
Myanmar and other places. The school system has students that speak more than
60 languages and the E-911 center has had to be prepared for emergency calls in
Arabic and Burmese. Many found work in the meat packing plants, but those
plants aren’t hiring like they once did.
“We’ve raised some red flags and
said this isn’t good for some entities in the city or for the refugees
themselves,” Mayor Paul Harpole told
the Texas Tribune.
A voter registration program
Chris Farrell, director of research at Judicial Watch, the
Washington, D.C.-based government watchdog, said he’s skeptical of the
politically correct “welcoming” efforts.
“They’re not concerned about what’s necessarily good for
their particular city. What they’re concerned about is redistribution of wealth
and power, and enrolling as many to the voter rolls as possible,” Farrell told
WND. “It’s about entitlement, dependency and more broadly it’s about voter
registration drives. Because what Mr. Obama promised when he talked to Joe the
Plumber was fundamental transformation, and he’s very deliberate and he’s
keeping good to his word.”
Farrell believes the new Americans are being used to make
political hay. “They are not necessarily new Americans, they’re new arrivals,
some legal, some illegals, others administratively waived into the country,” he
said. “This is social engineering writ large.”
As part of the agreement with the feds, Reed will use
Atlanta’s public “offices, libraries, recreation centers and other facilities”
as stations for helping immigrants and refugees become naturalized citizens.
Librarians will be trained to help guide the immigrants and refugees along the
path of citizenship. Cities signing these deals also agree to provide space for
immigrant services on city websites and give air time on public access
channels.
The
agreement encourages programs that help
immigrant populations become more engaged politically, referring to “full civic
participation” and making immigrants “aware of citizenship rights.”
The city also agrees to allow the federal USCIS to track and
measure the success of its programs to naturalize new citizens.
Nashville creates ‘Little Kurdistan’
The city of Nashville, like Atlanta, has become a haven for
foreign-born residents.
A local activist who opposes new settlements of refugees in
Tennessee and asked not to be identified, told WND the city has received
thousands of Kurdish and Somali refugees over the past 15 years and most have
not assimilated, living in “enclaves.”
“They call Nashville ‘Little Kurdistan,’” she said. “We have
the largest Kurdish community in the U.S. thanks to refugee resettlement.
They’re mostly Sunni, and most of the Islamic activism has come out of the
Kurdish community here.”
Like the mayors in Chicago, Atlanta and L.A., Nashville
Mayor Karl Dean has created a special high-level office, the New Americans
Advisory Council, to advise him on how to integrate the growing population of
foreign-born residents.
Planting seed communities in smaller cities
Nashville’s foray into the immigrant welcoming business
began in earnest when it agreed to join a pilot program funded by a federal
grant to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 2001. Nashville joined Portland,
Oregon, and Lowell, Massachusetts, as the three experimental testing grounds.
That experiment, called Building
the New American Community Initiative,
contained a mission that became the model for transforming the demographics of
cities of all sizes across the U.S.
“The whole point of this grant if you look in retrospect
what they were trying to do, is expand the resettlements outside of the
traditional gateway cities of L.A., New York, Houston, Boston, Miami and
Chicago and plant new seeds throughout the country,” the Nashville activist
said.
“They roped in the Chamber of Commerce, which took this
federal grant,” she added. “And one of the outgrowths of this twisted thinking
is to very quickly get the refugees invested in local government and forming
coalitions within their communities.”
The BNAC initiative’s executive
summary talks about creating economic and
social change through increasing levels of immigration and refugee resettlement
which would spread more broadly throughout the nation.
“The 1990s was an extraordinary
decade in terms of the number, origins and cultural diversity of migrants who
arrived in the United States.
“Immigration’s influence on the
social, economic and political institutions of the nation has matched these
demographic changes, and there is every indication that refugees and immigrants
will continue to be a major force for change in the years to come. The
influence of newcomers and their children on local communities, as well as the
ways in which communities affect newcomers’ integration trajectories, lies at
the heart of many social and economic changes in American society.
The summary also refers to the “importance of voting” and
getting refugees and immigrants to “participate as partners with public
agencies” while helping “craft policies” that change the community.
“One of the major goals of the BNAC Initiative was to
educate policymakers about newcomer communities and their integration
experiences in localities, as well as to bring refugee and immigrant voices to
the table on a range of policy issues. This has been one of the most successful
aspects of the Initiative, with newcomers not only learning about the American
electoral system and the importance of voting, but also participating as
partners with public agencies in the coalitions. In practical terms, refugee
and immigrant organizations played a direct role in crafting policies and
programs that directly influence their communities as well as the receiving
community.”
“So they took this grant in 2001 and everyone was really
sort of asleep at the wheel as far as what was happening in Tennessee,”
according to the activist.
Brian Mosely, a reporter for the
Times-Gazette in Shelbyville, Tennessee, woke up the sleeping masses with a
bombshell series
of articles from 2008 to 2012 about the
problems Bedford County was experiencing with the influx of Somali refugees,
most of whom went to work in a Tyson meatpacking plant. Many of the problems
had to do with culture clashes, crime and costs. When Tyson dropped the Labor
Day holiday in favor of the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Fitr, the town exploded
in controversy as the local union rep described the backlash to the holiday as
“bigotry.”
Then there was an article in the Wall Street Journal about
how the refugees were being bused in to the meat plant and replacing native
workers. “There were contradictory reports of refugee contractors with Catholic
Charities driving refugees in to get the jobs,” said the local activist. “They
lied to cover this up”.
Nashville then launched another effort called Alignment
Nashville that aimed to align all public services “in a way that catered to new
Americans and made sure they knew about all the goodies they could get through
the city,” she said.
The list of mayors signing on to Obama’s strategy to create
voter-eligible “new Americans” is likely to keep growing.
For an indication of how many mayors
across the U.S. hold views similar to Atlanta’s Reed and Nashville’s Dean, one
only need peruse the membership rolls of the Partnership
for a New American Economy. This group
consists of Chambers of Commerce in cooperation with major investment bankers
like Rockefeller Group International, Goldman Sachs and Brown Brothers Harriman
along with dozens of U.S. mayors, from big and small cities and belonging to
both major parties. The group claims that immigrants and refugees are highly entrepreneurial
and strengthen a city’s economy.
A recent study
by the Congressional Research Office
discovered quite the opposite. It found 74.2 percent of refugees brought to the
U.S. through the United Nations refugee program end up on federal food stamps,
while 23 percent live in public housing.
The ‘Dirty Dozen’ mayors?
In October 2014, after thousands of
unaccompanied alien children crossed the U.S. southern border from Central
America, Lubell’s Welcoming America honored 12 mayors it said had the
compassion to welcome the children into their cities. Refugee
Resettlement Watch blogger Ann Corcoran called them
the “dirty dozen.” Most are also members of the Partnership for a New American
Economy.
- Mayor Kasim Reed, Atlanta
- Mayor Martin J. Walsh, Boston
- Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Chicago
- Mayor Stephen Benjamin, Columbia, S.C.
- Mayor Michael Hancock, Denver
- Mayor Eric Garcetti, Los Angeles
- County Executive Isiah Leggett, Montgomery County, Md.
- Mayor Michael Nutter, Philadelphia
- Mayor William Peduto, Pittsburgh
- Mayor Daniel Bianchi, Pittsfield, Mass.
- Mayor Edward Murray, Seattle
- Mayor Francis Slay, St. Louis
- Mayor Jonathan Rothschild, Tucson, Ariz.
Other cities and counties that have pledged their support to
Lubell’s Welcoming America include: Allegheny County, Pennsylvania
(including Pittsburgh); Austin, Texas; Baltimore, Maryland; Boise, Idaho;
Chicago, Illinois; Columbus, Ohio; Dayton, Ohio; Dodge City, Kansas; High
Point, North Carolina; Lincoln, Nebraska; Louisville, Kentucky; MaComb County,
Michigan; Montgomery County, Maryland; Nashville, Tennessee; New York, New
York; Oakley, California; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; San Francisco,
California; St. Louis, Missouri (city); St. Louis, Missouri (county); and
Sterling Heights, Michigan.
Source:http://www.wnd.com/2015/05/mayors-join-obamas-welcoming-parade-for-immigrants/
Comments
Unemployed US citizens who are Black
and Hispanic have the most to lose if excessive immigration increases. When
will they show up to complain to these Mayors ?
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party
Leader
No comments:
Post a Comment