01:39 Remembering a great blog. (Where did Ann Corcoran go?)
07:03 Refugee numbers: a paradox. (System overload.)
16:52 The Welcome Corps. (A new dimension to chain migration.)
22:49 Our antiwhite military. (Air Force the worst.)
28:54 Narrative reinforcement fails. (People are catching on.)
37:00 Adams and the burbs. (Scofflaws not wanted in Long Island.)
38:50 Senator Feinstein at 89. (It works for the Deep State.)
40:04 Baltimore sues car makers. (Too easy to steal.)
40:44 Corruption in Ukraine! (You could ask Hunter.)
41:57 China and Russia: a new book. (Coincidence, I swear.)
43:17 Signoff. (With Mozart.)
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! That was a fragment of Franz Joseph Haydn's Derbyshire March No. 1 and this is your equitably genial host John Derbyshire with some commentary on the week's news.
From my front door to midtown Manhattan is a one-hour trip on the Long Island Railroad, so I don't venture into the city without some good reason. This week I made two trips: one on Tuesday evening for a private dinner party, another on Wednesday to an event organized by the Center for Immigration Studies, a talk by one of their staffers.
Thanks to Mark Krikorian and his colleagues for that latter event. The venue was one of the city's big, superbly furnished old clubhouses, indoor Manhattan at its best. The company was congenial, the finger-food was first class. There was food for thought, too — enough for a couple of Radio Derb segments.
02 — Remembering a great blog. The topic of that CIS talk was refugees. The refugee issue is of course one aspect of our immigration policy, and we've run plenty of commentary on it here at VDARE.com across the years. Refugees haven't been much talked about recently, however, because the Biden Rush of illegal aliens flooding in over our southern border has monopolized our attention.
The refugee issue merits attention, though. It's one area of immigration policy where humane considerations do carry some weight, especially in situations like Southeast Asia in the 1970s or Afghanistan currently where the refugees are a by-product of U.S. foreign policy.
So sure, there is a valid moral case for admitting refugees; but when it comes to deciding how many, from where, selected by what criteria, the refugee issue quickly descends into politics. The Eric Hoffer Principle comes into play and refugee resettlement turns into a cash racket.
Once I started thinking about it in those terms the name Ann Corcoran came to mind. For many years — starting in 2007 — this lady ran a blog called Refugee Resettlement Watch offering news, analysis, and spirited commentary on the refugee rackets from a national conservative point of view. In 2015 she published a book which you can buy at Amazon, title Refugee Resettlement and the Hijra to America.
Ann Corcoran contributed to VDARE.com. If you click on the "Writers" tab at the top of our main page you'll see her listed there among the rest of us. Her contributions were, I think, all cross-postings from her blog, Refugee Resettlement Watch.
The last item she posted at VDARE, also a cross-posting from her blog, is dated February 14th last year, 2022. At that point Ann stopped posting. Nothing on her blog, nothing at VDARE.com.
That was fourteen months ago. Why did Ann stop posting? I asked the speaker at Wednesday evening's CIS event. The speaker wasn't sure, but she'd heard that Ann had fallen into despair after Biden won the presidency, and had just given up when it was clear he was going to throw open the border.
That's not implausible. All of us working for rational immigration laws strictly enforced, we've all encountered the demon Despair a couple of times. We argue, we expose, we write books and give talks year after year — in the case of VDARE.com, actually decade after decade — trying to make our case, and things just get steadily worse. It's frustrating.
I checked with the boss here, Peter Brimelow, to see if he'd heard anything different. Peter had Ann's email address in his files, so he just asked her. She replied that the blog had been taking too much of her time; she wanted to concentrate on her family business.
That's a pity. Refugee Resettlement Watch was a fun blog: serious and well-researched, properly indignant about the inconvenience and social disorder imposed on working-class and middle-class Americans by the refugee rackets and their enablers, prompting wider, more general reflections on the rottenness of our nation's politics.
I haven't written or spoken much on the refugee resettlement issue myself, but Ann's critical approach needs to be kept alive. I'll try to keep it in mind and bring news stories to your attention as they come up.
03 — Refugee numbers: a paradox. Here's a funny thing about current refugee resettlement. With the Biden administration's open-door policies in effect, you might suppose that the number of refugees admitted for resettlement here has ballooned along with all other immigration categories.
Wrong! So far this fiscal year 2023 — remember that fiscal 2023 started last October 1st — just a bit more than 18,000 refugees have been admitted for resettlement, compared with numbers in the 50, 60, or 70 thousands for much of this century so far.
All right, but we're only halfway through the fiscal year. How about the last complete fiscal year: fiscal 2022, from October '21 to last September. Total admitted: 25½ thousand.
That's only a tad more than the number for fiscal 2018 when Donald Trump was president the entire fiscal year. It's actually fewer than in fiscal 2019, another entirely Trump year.
Say what? Biden admitted fewer refugees in Fiscal 2022 than Trump did in fiscal 2019? Incredible, huh?
Here's something even more incredible: that low number under Biden for 2022 was way, wa-a-a-ay lower than the ceiling. Let me explain about the ceiling.
Under federal law — precisely, the 1980 Refugee Act — the President can set an annual ceiling for refugee resettlement numbers. The Act actually says "the President, in consultation with Congress," but the ceiling number is basically in the President's gift.
Here, expressed in thousands, are the ceiling numbers each year set by President Trump: 50, 45, 30, 18. Here are the ceiling numbers, also in thousands, set so far by Biden: 62½, 125, 125.
You getting this? Biden's only admitting for resettlement around twenty percent of the number he's allowed to by the ceiling he set. Trump was never that stingy. At his stingiest, fiscal 2018, Trump admitted half the ceiling number.
So what's going on here? What's going on is system overload. Quote from my Wednesday evening speaker, writing at the CIS website last October, quote:
The border crisis and its illegal crossings, along with other new entrants in need of processing and assistance, such as Afghan and Ukrainian parolees, are overwhelming the system and diverting federal resources away from refugees in need of resettlement.
End quote.
That word "parolees" needs explaining. The 1952 Immigration Act allowed the administration to give entry rights to particular people on a case-by-case basis even when that person didn't meet any of the criteria for legal entry. That's parole.
The ink was hardly dry on the 1952 Act before administrations started abusing their parole authority to let in favored groups for settlement — Hungarians fleeing after the 1956 uprising, for example.
That tradition of abusing parole has continued right down to the present day in spite of occasional efforts by Congress to restrain it. Hence the phrase " Afghan and Ukrainian parolees" in that quote I just gave you. Yes, they're coming in on parole, hundreds of thousands of them.
And for administrative purposes that is totally separate from the formal refugee resettlement machinery. That machinery is worked by the State Department in co-ordination with the UNHCR, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the refugee arm of the United Nations.
The UNHCR manages refugee issues worldwide. It decides who is a legitimate refugee and which of three categories each refugee falls into.
Category 3 seems to be around ten percent of total refugees. That's the pool that UNHCR hands off to our State Department to choose refugees for resettlement here.
So there's a formal, international process behind our refugee resettlement policy. The lucky refugees accepted for resettlement here get a few initial weeks of support from the federal government, after which they are handed off to those VOLAGs that Ann Corcoran wrote about so scathingly: the voluntary agencies with reassuringly churchy-sounding names — Episcopal Migration Ministries, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, Church World Service, and the rest, all of them of course sucking powerfully on the federal teat — to be precise, on the State Department budget. That's the Eric Hoffer prediction I referred to earlier.
Once settled here the refugee has the right to work and to get a Green Card; then, after five years in the country, to apply for citizenship.
That's all much too cumbersome and limited for the Biden administration's purposes. Just granting mass parole to everyone who shows up is easier. What with the Afghans, the Ukrainians, and the floods of illegal entrants across our southern border, however, the number of parolees is overwhelming the entire system, leaving insufficient resources for the proper refugee resettlement program.
That's why Ol' Joe is admitting so many fewer refugees than the ceiling allows him to. He's actually admitting far more — hundreds of thousands more — just not through the formal State Department-plus-UNHCR refugee program. For the parolees it works out just the same: federal aid, work permits, green cards.
04 — The Welcome Corps. The Biden administration hasn't been content to just bypass the formal refugee resettlement process, thay have also undermined it.
The key phrase here is: Welcome Corps. That's "welcome" as in "Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome" [clip]. Then "corps" spelt c-o-r-p-s, like in "Marine Corps."
The Welcome Corps was launched back in January this year by our Secretary of State Antony Blinken. So what is it?
First, a quick recap of the refugee resettlement program.
Candidates for resettlement as refugees in the U.S.A. are identified by the UNHCR. Our State Department, with one eye on the ceiling number set by the President, taps some subset of the UNHCR recommendations, admits them for settlement in this country, and supports them for the first few weeks they're here.
Then State hands the refugees off to those VOLAGS with the churchy names. They get work permits and Green Cards, and in the fulness of time apply for citizenship.
The Welcome Corps liberalizes all that. Instead of UNHCR and the State Department picking refugees for settlement, private persons and groups of private persons can pick them.
That doesn't mean a complete privatization of the process. Lots of taxpayer money will still be spent on refugees. The privatization is partial, in two key areas: (1) selecting refugees, and (2) those initial weeks of support before the VOLAGs take over. The sponsoring person or private group has to fund the initial 90 days, that's all.
Notice how carefully I've been saying "private person," not "private citizen" in reference to those sponsoring refugees. A worriesome feature of this Welcome Corps — a problematic feature, if you don't mind some woke jargon — is that you don't need to be a citizen to sponsor someone for refugee status. You only need to be a legal resident with a Green Card — a Resident Alien, as it used to say on my own Green Card.
Do you have to be a U.S. citizen to serve in the Marine Corps? I forget. Whatever: you don't have to be a citizen to serve in the Welcome Corps. You can in fact be a refugee yourself, a Welcome Corps beneficiary, once you've gotten your Green Card after a few months in the country.
So the Welcome Corps basically adds a whole new dimension of chain migration to our immigration system. Ahmed, Kofi, or José gets here on a Welcome Corps sponsorship; acquires a Green Card; declares his buddy Mohammed, Kwesi, or Jorge — someone utterly unknown to UNHCR or the State Department — to be a refugee; and sponsors him for settlement.
You're bound to suspect that the Welcome Corps adds something else to our immigration system: lots of new opportunities for graft and corruption. Secretary Blinken, in his January announcement of the program, gushed about, quote:
harnessing the energy and talents of Americans from all walks of life desiring to serve as private sponsors — ranging from members of faith and civic groups, veterans, diaspora communities, businesses, colleges and universities, and more.
End quote.
Prior to hearing about the Welcome Corps I would never have believed that our federal government could do anything to make the immigration system worse than it was up to mid-January. To further wreck something already totally wrecked requires a special kind of genius, evil genius. Well done, lads.
05 — Our antiwhite military. So what is the next target for the wrecking crew? Could it be the military?
I don't think it could. Why not? Because our nation's armed forces have in fact already been comprehensively wrecked.
The demolition work was well under way fourteen years ago when, after a Muslim army officer murdered thirteen of his colleagues at Fort Hood in Texas, U.S. Army Chief of Staff George Casey famously whimpered that, quote: "As horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that's worse." End quote.
That same title, U.S. Army Chief of Staff, was held a few years later by General Mark Milley, who has since then ascended even further to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest position not merely in the Army but in the entire armed forces of our country.
It seems to have been Milley who approved the inclusion of Critical Race Theory in the study curriculum at West Point because, he told the House Armed Services Committee, quote: "I want to understand white rage — and I'm white." End quote.
The Navy is just as bad. One of its four-star admirals is a guy in a dress — that's old news.
Newer news, from earlier this month, is that Yeoman 2nd Class Joshua Kelley, who identifies as "non-binary" and puts on a wig and a dress to perform onstage as Harpy Daniels, Yeoman Kelley was picked to be the service's first "digital ambassador," in hopes that his sexual ambiguity would attract more Gen Z recruits.
This kind of thing isn't so surprising in the Navy. Winston Churchill, more than a hundred years ago, listed the traditions of the British Navy as "rum, sodomy, and the lash," and that was in line of descent from a much older formula on the same subject: "rum, bum, and tobacco."
Buggery on board the battleships aside, I don't have much of a feel for how antiwhite the Navy is. We've run some past articles on the topic — on, for example, Barack Obama's hopes to correct the appalling whiteness of the Navy SEALs; but senior Navy staff don't seem to air their opinions on race as freely as do officers in the other services.
The real Heart of Wokeness in the U.S. military today seems to be the Air Force. The current Chief of Staff of that service, since June 2020, is Charles Quinton Brown Jr., a black man.
A year after Brown's appointment Daniel Greenfield over at the Front Page Magazine website posted a blistering account of antiwhite rantings by senior Air Force personnel like Chief Master Sergeant Kaleth Wright, the Air Force's top enlisted leader.
Sample from Greenfield's article, beginning with a quote from Wright, quote:
[Inner quote.] "My heart starts racing like most other Black men in America when I see those blue lights behind me … You don't know the anxiety, the despair, the heartache, the fear, the rage and the disappointment that comes with living in this country … every single day." [End inner quote.]
It made you wonder why Wright hadn't left America for somewhere safer like Cuba.
End quote.
Air Force Chief of Staff Charles Quinton Brown Jr. is totally on board, or on runway, with such sentiments.
Now we hear that President Biden has tapped Brown to replace Mark Milley as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when Milley steps down this October. If you thought white-guy antiwhite guilt was inappropriate in a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, wait till you see black-guy antiwhite paranoia.
Of course, before he can take up that position, Brown's appointment first has to be approved by the U.S. Senate. Given his track record of racist raving, as partially documented in Daniel Greenfield's article, senators might reject him, right? [Laughs.] Yeah, right.
06 — Narrative reinforcement fails. Last week I mentioned the case of Daniel Penny, the young white man who subdued a shrieking, threatening black lunatic in a New York subway carriage. The lunatic died, although there is nothing to suggest that Penny intended him to.
Manhattan's black communist District Attorney Alvin Bragg, I noted, bypassed the grand jury process that would heve been normal in such a case and had Penny arrested and charged with manslaughter in the second degree.
That's all in accordance with the quadruple justice system I spelled out for you back in January last year. One of my email correspondents, I told you, had offered the opinion, which I thought and still think is correct, that we now have four different systems of criminal justice.
It may be wishful thinking on my part, but I believe I see signs of a general awakening to this among white Americans.
Here's one of those signs. Supporters of Daniel Penny have so far contributed 2.6 million dollars to a fund set up to cover his legal expenses. A fund set up by the dead guy's family, I guess to cover his funeral expenses, was not quite $150,000 when I looked just now.
Those are two different funding sites, by the way. The dead guy's fundraiser is at GoFundMe, which only allows funding for causes that are regime-compliant. Daniel Penny's fund is at GiveSendGo, a different funding site that allows support for cases the ruling class disapproves of, like the Brunswick Three who were so savagely railroaded in the Ahmaud Arbery case last year.
What Daniel Penny's chances are in our quadruple justice system, especially in front of a Manhattan judge and jury, I hesitate to predict. I wish him all the luck in the world anyway. He acted on behalf of normal people and civilized public spaces with, I am sure, no homicidal intent.
This week's attempt at Narrative Reinforcement fell flat on its face almost immediately.
This arose from an incident last Friday, May 12th, also in Manhattan. A young female physician assistant, who is six months pregnant, left her 12-hour shift and headed to a nearby Citi Bike station. These are racks of bicycles you can free from their docking station and pay for using your smartphone.
She did that and started to pull a bike out, intending to ride it home. Five young blacks closed in on her, one of them filming the whole incident. Another one pushed the bike back into the docking station and manhandled the woman, all the time yelling that it was his bike, that he'd paid for it and that she was trying to steal from him. The woman, plainly terrified, started yelling for help.
The video went viral and the young lady became a hate figure on antiwhite social media — a "Karen." Black race racketeer Benjamin Crump [ker-ching ] posted a tweet saying, quote:
This is unacceptable! A white woman was caught on camera attempting to STEAL a Citi Bike from a young Black man in NYC. She grossly tried to weaponize her tears to paint this man as a threat. This is EXACTLY the type of behavior that has endangered so many Black men in the past!
End quote.
Crump has since, of course, deleted that tweet.
That one's comparatively civilized, though. Try this one, quote:
The fact that she's a nurse … She's probably neglected and killed so many minorities.
End quote.
The young woman's employers at Bellevue Hospital of course believed the Crump version. They placed her on leave pending a review of the incident.
Before Alvin Bragg could show up to put the lady under arrest, she got herself a lawyer and produced receipts proving it was she who'd paid for the bike.
The incredible and alarming thing here is that so many people believed the black kids' story. They believed — or, for social reasons, pretended to believe — that a young white woman visibly pregnant would get aggressive with a platoon of young blacks.
I guess if you have internalized the narrative — the great, the eternal, the most lovingly cherished American narrative — the narrative of meek, soulful, helpless, babyfaced young blacks groaning pitifully under the heel of White Supremacy, I guess it makes sense.
The story has now faded into the cosmic microwave background. So far as I know, no-one has apologized to the young lady.
07 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: Just a follow-up to last week's coverage of New York City Mayor Eric Adams at war with the city suburbs over transporting illegal aliens to suburban hotels.
Nassau County, the first suburban county east of the city, has already made itself heard. Quote from Bruce Blakeman, the Republican County Executive, quote: "We are not a sanctuary county," end quote.
The next county further east, Suffolk County, is the one I live in. Our County Executive, Steve Bellone, claims he doesn't know of any plans to relocate border-jumpers here.
However, the Town Supervisor of the town of Riverhead, further east than I am, contradicted him, telling a local news station that Mayor Eric Adams sent out an advisory communication to all housing facilities in Suffolk County to accept the scofflaws, and that the city would pay for their housing.
The Town Supervisor has declared a state of emergency, banning hotels, motels, and shelters in her town from accepting any illegals.
So who knows? Adams is a weasel and he'll do what he can to get his way. If it comes to street fighting out here, I'm locked & loaded.
Item: Did you see those pictures of Senator Dianne Feinstein being wheeled around the Capitol? Hoo-ee.
Eighty-nine years old … impaired vision … shingles … brain swelling … facial paralysis … This is a working U.S. Senator?
And this is her sixth term! Why on earth does anyone vote for her? Oh right: this is California.
For important decision-making positions like U.S. Senator and … oh … President, there need to be limitations based on health and mental ability. It's disgraceful to have these drooling old dementia patients in charge of our national affairs.
Disgraceful, yeah, but mighty convenient for the Deep State operators. Can't we do anything to get our republic back on the rails?
Item: Here's one for the file labeled "You Can't Make This Up." The city of Baltimore is suing two Korean car manufacturers for making cars that are too easy to steal.
I can't improve on this comment at a Twitter thread about the story. Quote:
We are just about to the point where burglars and muggers will start suing their victims because they turned out to possess nothing worth stealing.
End quote.
Item: I've been telling you since the war between Ukraine and Russia started that it's being fought between the world's two most corrupt white nations.
Well, here you go. This is from Kyle Becker's blog, May 17th, quote:
Following recent revelations of extensive corruption within the Supreme Court, Ukrainian prosecutors have taken into custody the head of the country's highest judicial body. Although the official's identity was not revealed, local media reports indicated that Chief Justice Vsevolod Kniaziev had been detained in connection with a $3 million bribe. Reuters was unable to reach Mr. Kniaziev for comment.
End quote.
Perhaps Reuters could ask Hunter Biden for a comment. He's pretty well connected in Ukraine, isn't he?
Item: Finally, a book recommendation.
Back in mid-April I had a couple of long segments about the history of relations between Russia and China.
I did not know — was completely unaware until a friend alerted me — that just a few days after that podcast was to be the publication date for a new book by China expert Philip Snow, title "China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and Concord."
My podcast was April 14th; the book came out April 25th. It was sheer coincidence, I swear.
I ordered a copy and it arrived midweek. I'm not far into it yet; I'll give a full report in my monthly diary when I've finished & digested the book. It's not light reading: 527 pages of text, then 45 pages of endnotes.
So far I'm enjoying it, though. If the topic interests you, by all means give the book a try.
08 — Signoff. That's all I have for you this week, listeners. Thank you for listening, and the usual apologies for being so far behind with my email.
To play us out, here's a little snippet of Mozart. It's instrumental, no voices; but if you're an opera fan you'll recognize it as the tune to a duet in The Magic Flute.
I'm afraid I have no idea who's working the strings here; I found the snippet lodged in one of my sound files when cleaning up my data the other day. It's lovely, and a shame to waste it; that's all.
There will be more from Radio Derb next week.
[Music clip: Unknown performers, the tune to Mozart's Bei Männern welche Liebe fühlen]
