Tag: New Americans

Immigrants Wail and Moan: Won’t Be Able to Vote this Year

~ Ann Corcoran ~ 1 Comment

And, that is because the Chinese virus has slowed all government functions including those at the USCIS!

From Roll Call:

Citizenship delays may keep many immigrants from fall vote

Pandemic postpones naturalization interviews and ceremonies, adding to a backlog already worsened by budget woes

(I’m going to start my snips with these few paragraphs at the end of this story because it infuriated me!  If we have so much racial injustice and discrimination here, then just go home to India!)

Reeti Ghosh, an immigrant from India, started her naturalization process more than a year ago. She looked forward to finally voting, which she viewed as an opportunity to speak up about the racial injustice she witnessed in the country and even discriminatory behavior she felt locally, in her New Jersey community.

She was scheduled to take her civics test in April, but the pandemic canceled the appointment. Despite repeated attempts by her lawyer to reschedule, she has yet to hear back from USCIS with a new date.

“I really feel frustrated and honestly I can’t wait for this process to be done and over with,” she said. “It’s just the uncertainty. It is like a time bomb ticking. … You’re just really waiting for things to happen and just waiting there for no real reason.”

So boo-hoo, wait until the next election or go home and ‘fix’ India’s discrimination!

Now here is more of the story:

When Juliana Ximenes Coutinho Dias submitted her naturalization application last December, the possibility of finally becoming a U.S. citizen and getting to vote in the country she has called home for the past six years electrified the Brazil native.

But then the coronavirus pandemic hit. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which adjudicates immigration benefits and visas, shut down its field offices. It also postponed naturalization interviews and ceremonies, adding to a backlog worsened by budget woes and threatening to prevent hundreds of thousands of would-be citizens from registering in time to vote this November.

[….]

Hetlage [USCIS spokesman Dan Hetlage ]said the agency is on pace to naturalize approximately 600,000 new citizens by the end of the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. But that’s nearly 30 percent lower than the previous year when 834,000 new citizens were sworn in, the highest number in 11 years, according to USCIS.

[….]

Naturalizations tend to spike in an election year and drop right after. Before the pandemic, the National Partnership of New Americans, a coalition of state, federal and local organizations that help new citizens register to vote, estimated that 860,000 people were scheduled to become U.S. citizens by the end of the year.

More than 23 million U.S. citizens who were born abroad could be part of the overall electorate this fall, according to a Pew Research Center analysis released earlier this year. That’s about 1 in 10 Americans, a record high.

In fact, the number of new citizens since the last election alone exceeds Trump’s margin of victory in Florida, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Michigan combined, and has made up substantial portions of the growth in each state’s eligible voters since 2016.

More here.

See that I have a tag for the National Partnership for New Americans.

Fraud Rampant in Chinese Virus Unemployment Handout; Those Darn Nigerians Again!

~ Ann Corcoran

Here is some news from a week ago that I would have missed completely except for the sharp eyes of ‘Meanymom.’

From the Foundation for Economic Education:

Runaway Fraud Plagues the Massive Unemployment Program Congress Is About to Extend, Report Finds

The debate over expanded unemployment benefits has proven particularly fractious, given that the $2 trillion CARES Act Congress passed in March set up a broken economic system where nearly 70 percent of the unemployed can get paid more in benefits while staying home than they would make by going back to work. Yet as important as the ramifications of this distorted big government labor policy are, one largely overlooked consequence of the massive expansion of unemployment is skyrocketing fraud and abuse.

A new report from the fiscally conservative Foundation for Government Accountability exposes the stunning extent to which fraud has corrupted the hastily-crafted unemployment expansion.

FGA Senior Research Fellow Josh Waters found that fraud will consume more taxpayer dollars under this expansion than the entire unemployment program paid out in 2019.

Remember that the unemployment system was already very wasteful before COVID-19, with roughly 10 percent of payments being made in error in 2019. Waters explains that even generously assuming this fraud rate remains constant—it will likely be worse this year due to system overload and COVID-19 chaos—his calculations show a whopping $26 billion will be lost to fraud as a result of this expansion.

“As states try to respond to the historic increase in claims due to shutdowns and layoffs, the $600 bonus payments are making it very lucrative for fraudsters who know many states probably lack the staffing and resources to combat fraud while the systems are overloaded with an unprecedented amount of claims,” Waters writes.

The FGA report documents how this fraud is playing out at the state level:

Mississippi is estimated to have paid out at least $76 million in improper payments so far, and the governor warns the state has been “attacked with false claims”

Washington State was hit by Nigerian scammers and is estimated to have paid out at least $650 million improperly

Oklahoma already reports 65,000 fraudulent unemployment claims and has likely paid out tens of millions improperly

Arizona estimates that its fraud rate has doubled since the expansion and that nearly 10 percent of benefits being paid out are fraudulent

Needless to say, the reference to Nigerian scammers snapped me to attention.

What is that all about?

Here is the story from May:

The Nigerian Fraudsters Ripping Off the Unemployment System

As millions of people around the United States scrambled in recent weeks to collect unemployment benefits and disbursements through the federal Cares Act, officials warned about the looming threat of Covid-19-related scams online. Now they’re here.

On Thursday, the Secret Service issued an alert about a massive operation to file fraudulent unemployment claims in states around the country, like Washington and Massachusetts. Officials attributed the activity to Nigerian scammers and said millions of dollars had already been stolen. New research is now shedding light on one of the actors tied to the scams—and the other pandemic hustles they have going.

The email security firm Agari today will release findings that an actor within the Nigerian cybercriminal group Scattered Canary is filing fraudulent unemployment claims and receiving benefits from multiple states, while also receiving Cares payouts from the Internal Revenue Service. So far this has netted hundreds of thousands of dollars in scam payments. Regular unemployment, the extra $600 per week that out-of-work Americans can claim during the pandemic, plus the one-time $1,200 payment eligible adults are receiving under the Cares Act are all vulnerable targets for cybercriminals. In the midst of a pandemic and critical economic downturn, though, the theft of those benefits could have particularly dire consequences.

The Secret Service warns that hundreds of millions of dollars could be lost to such scams just as states are running out of money to fund unemployment on their own.

More here.

Oh goody, Washington state recovered some of its losses.

But, it wasn’t only Washington state where the Nigerians were busy ripping us off.  According to CBS News, seven states experienced attacks.

 

See my file on Nigerians!

P.S. How is your prepping going?  There is an excellent chapter about situational awareness in the book I mentioned in this post recently.

New American Africans Believe they are Superior to Native Born African-Americans (who knew!)

~ Ann Corcoran ~ 3 Comments

Over the years, while writing at Refugee Resettlement Watch, an article would come my way that hinted at the problems within the African “community”  between the new African immigrants and our own African-Americans.

(Resettlement contractors loved to place the new Africans in predominantly African-American neighborhoods with, I suppose, the naive notion that since they are all blacks they would love and embrace each other!)

If there were tensions, it was always just hinted (or immediately swept under the rug if a reporter dared mention it) and I suspect that is because it goes against the narrative—how is it possible for a black immigrant to be bigoted against another black person?

Everyone knows only white people can be racists and bigots, right?

Much to my surprise here is an opinion piece at MinnPost published a few days ago by second generation Ethiopian immigrant Eskender A. Yousuf.

It took me a few minutes of reading and rereading to understand that he is basically saying that the new immigrant Africans look upon African-Americans, who have been here for generations, as riff-raff, inferior to the real Africans newly arrived.

What is going on, two big admissions in the space of a week about problems in the Minnesota immigrant “community.”

Don’t miss my post at RRW about how Somali culture dictates that women can be treated with abuse.

Police outside of Minneapolis South High in 2013. “The recent brawl at South High School in Minneapolis is said to have, at least partially, been caused by friction between Somali and African American communities.” https://www.mprnews.org/story/2013/02/25/daily-circuit-south-high-somali-african-american-tension

A call to address anti-Blackness within African immigrant communities

“I was on a recent conference call helping an organization put a statement together and this Sudanese brother says, ‘I don’t understand this Black Lives Matter stuff, I have never felt racism in this country.’

You know, I’m just letting people have it now … we [African-Americans] can sniff out anti-Blackness right when we step in the room, wherever we are. … I have never felt welcomed or comfortable in any African immigrant establishment in Minnesota.”

These words come from a recent conversation I had with a close connection of mine.

Eskender A. Yousuf.  I’m guessing the Leftists in MN are not too happy with Mr. Yousuf’s admission!

This was nothing short of our regular conversations and check-ins; however, this time it felt different. With the wake of the current racial uprisings, it provoked me to publicly call attention this issue.

As a second-generation Ethiopian immigrant who is ethnically Oromo, I was born and raised in the Twin Cities. I never imagined that the place I call home would become the epicenter of historic racial uprisings and protests that sparked a fire across the world.

Stood in solidarity

Amongst the sea of protesters that stood in solidarity in the streets of Minneapolis in the wake of George Floyd’s death were 1.5 and second-generation African immigrants (1.5 generation immigrants refer to those who came to America before they reached 12 years old; second-generation immigrants refer to those who were born in America).

Minneapolis, in fact, is home to a diverse population of racially Black individuals and a large fraction of them are African immigrants and refugees. We have the largest population of Somali immigrants, a vast number of Ethiopians, as well as immigrants from other African countries like Eritrea, Sudan, Liberia, and Nigeria. While African immigrant communities showed up in large numbers to protest police brutality and racial injustices, an oft-neglected nuance is the prevalence of anti-Blackness within these very communities.

The support for the Black Lives Matter movement from the African immigrant community demands that we address and correct the racist practices within our own community that are often left unquestioned.

For us to truly support the call for racial injustice, we must take the step eradicate anti-Blackness within our own communities.

Growing up in the Twin Cities, I have witnessed countless anti-Black sentiments, expressions, attitudes, and practices from close relatives and community members. Some examples include: looking down on marrying African-Americans, addressing and treating African-Americans and their communities by negative racialized stereotypes (i.e. lazy, not hardworking, criminals) and our perpetual disassociation with the African-American community in order to distinctly identify ourselves as African immigrants and not “Black/African-American.”

This identification process has been heavily documented and proved as a mechanism for us to distance ourselves from African-American communities for various reasons, including social stratification.

I didn’t want to post the whole thing, but there is more good stuff, so continue reading here.

Wouldn’t it be great if the politically incorrect Mr. Yousuf and the Sudanese “brother” he quotes made it to cable TV news.  I can dream can’t I!

Down the Memory Hole: Story about Mt. Holyoke Professor nearly Killing Fellow Professor has Disappeared

~ Ann Corcoran ~ 2 Comments

How many stories have I posted here at Frauds and Crooks over the last year and a half about crooks, criminals and murderers that have completely disappeared from the news because the alleged criminal doesn’t fit the medias’ spin on who could possibly be a criminal and who can’t.

When Japanese-born (new American!) art professor Rie Hachiyanagi nearly beat to death a fellow female professor at the exclusive Massachusetts college Mt Holyoke, the story made an initial splash in local and state media (never made it to the big time that I ever saw).  I reported it here in January.

But, when reader Cathy recently checked to see what ever happened to the story, she found only a piece at Town and Country published in early April and now poof! the story is gone!

I’ve been thinking that I do need to go back and check on crimes I’ve previously posted and see just how many of those that do not fit the Left’s favorite propaganda have just disappeared as if they never happened.

Wikipedia has this description of the “memory hole,” a place where inconvenient or embarrassing information goes to die.

LOL! It is where Brennan, Clapper, Comey and Peter Strzok assumed their corrupt dealings would go once Hillary was elected.

A memory hole is any mechanism for the deliberate alteration or disappearance of inconvenient or embarrassing documents, photographs, transcripts or other records, such as from a website or other archive, particularly as part of an attempt to give the impression that something never happened.[1][2] The concept was first popularized by George Orwell’s 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the Party’s Ministry of Truth systematically re-created all potentially embarrassing historical documents, in effect, re-writing all of history to match the often-changing state propaganda. These changes were complete and undetectable.

I’m making a new category entitled ‘Down the Memory Hole’ and this is my first installment….

Obsession and Assault: The Violent Crime That Rocked Mount Holyoke

In the early morning hours of Christmas Eve last year, the Massachusetts state police were dispatched to the home of a longtime professor at Mount Holyoke College. When the on-duty trooper arrived at the home in Leverett, not far from the college, he found a horrific scene: the professor alive but severely wounded, covered in her own blood. As details of the night began to leak out in the weeks that followed, students returned to campus, but without the feeling of lightness and possibility that normally accompanies a new semester at one of America’s prettiest and most prestigious schools.

So much for diversity is strength! Art Professor Rie Hachiyanagi arrested in violent attack at all the women’s college which brags that it is an “inclusive community of students, faculty, and staff in an environment of mutual respect in which all thrive and contribute to the flourishing of others.”

Instead, there was an almost palpable feeling that something was not right here, and perhaps hasn’t been for some time. Because there was a single fact about the incident that was now widely known: The person charged with committing the violence was another one of their beloved professors.

By March, Rie Hachiyanagi, 48, had been sitting in a cell at the Franklin County House of Correction for months, having been denied bail in late February.

[….]

Mount Holyoke quickly distanced itself from Hachiyanagi, emphasizing that the attack occurred during winter recess and off campus, and that the alleged perpetrator has been placed on administrative leave and is banned from campus. The college produced no representatives to speak about Hachiyanagi. There seemed to be a hope that if no one uttered her name she would vanish that much ­sooner—a ghastly figment of the past.

[….]

Judge Mark D. Mason decided to hold Hachiya­nagi without bail, and she will await trial from the county jail. Her next court date, a pretrial conference, is scheduled for April 22.

 

There is much, much more here.

Maybe you can find out what happened at that April 22nd pretrial conference, but I couldn’t!

Massachusetts Man, Egyptian National, Charged in Sexual Exploitation of a Minor Case

~ Ann Corcoran ~ 4 Comments

Okay, this is a pretty straightforward story about an Egyptian who made his way to Texas allegedly to take advantage of a minor and he got caught.

Ho hum…

…but is he also the bagel guy (with the same name) from the same town in Massachusetts—Winchester?  Does anyone know?

From and ICE press release:

Unlawfully present Egyptian national charged with child exploitation-related offenses against South Texas minor

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas – An Egyptian national who is illegally present in the U.S. was indicted Monday on several charges related to the alleged exploitation of a South Texas minor.

U.S. Immigration and Custom’s Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations in Corpus Christi, Texas, conducted the investigation along with the George West (Texas) Police Department, Live Oak County (Texas) Sheriff’s Office and Texas Department of Public Safety.

Ehab Sadeek, 47, who resides in Winchester, Massachusetts, was indicted June 29 by a Corpus Christi grand jury on charges of online solicitation of a minor, travel with intent to engage in illicit sexual conduct and transfer of obscene materials to a minor.He was initially charged by criminal complaint and made an initial appearance before U.S. Magistrate Judge Julie K. Hampton. At that time, the court found probable cause that he committed the alleged offenses and ordered him into custody. He will appear again in federal court in the near future on the indictment.

The charges allege Sadeek used interstate and foreign commerce to knowingly persuade, induce, entice and coerce a minor victim in Live Oak County (Texas) to engage in sexual activity. From May 7 to May 26, Sadeek allegedly transferred obscene material to the same victim, knowing she was less than 16 years of age. According to the allegations, Sadeek traveled from Massachusetts to Texas with the intent to commit sexual offenses.

Now here is the news from ten years ago about a bagel maker who threatened to boil his daughter in the bagel kettle.  He has the same name and would be 47 years old today.  But who knows maybe (coincidentally) there are a whole passel of Ehab Sadeeks in Winchester, Mass!

From 2010 in the Boston Herald:

Staties probe possible threats against juror, lawyer

State police are investigating possible threats against a juror and a defense attorney in the case of a Muslim bagel-maker acquitted of charges he plotted to boil his teenage daughter alive in an industrial kettle.

The probe was launched yesterday to determine whether the threats warrant criminal charges.

[….]

Sadeek, 37, an Egyptian national and owner of Bagel Land in Winchester, was found not guilty March 22 of more than a dozen charges stemming from his 15-year-old daughter’s claim that he beat her, held her down with a knife and threatened to toss her in his company’s bagel boiler for dating an 18-year-old boy.

Prosecutors argued the girl’s mother fled back to Egypt in 2008 to escape her husband, and that Sadeek violated a restraining order meant to protect his daughter.

Sadeek remains in custody, pending a hearing on his immigration status.

If it is the same ‘new American’ then I guess he didn’t remain in custody for too long!

If you live in Winchester, Mass. and know if the Texas alleged Egyptian perv is the same guy as the Bagel Land Egyptian, let me know!