First there was the ‘Barack Obama is a radical muslim in disguise’ email.. now this gem of a ‘poem’ and accompanying incendiary text about how ‘refugees’ come to America to steal all of our welfare dollars, which they use to.. get this.. buy our overpriced housing with! HAHAHA!!

Seriously people, this is racist dis-information if ever there was such a thing. The authors have (somewhat cleverly) conflated immigration with refugee asylum to invoke anger/fear. What disturbs me most is that good and kind people will spread it around via email, which speaks, methinks, to the level of paranoia in this country toward garden variety immigrants (pun intended) that has been fostered by the war-mongers that be. I mean, who knows, those Mexicans working the farm down the street could be terrorists.

For the record a refugee must meet the following definition:

According to the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, a refugee is a person who:

“Owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of their nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail him/herself of the protection of that country.”

I just saw this ‘poem’ the other day on the interweb, so seeing it again in my inbox made me wonder where it came from. Googling the title and searching on the first couplet, I found this ‘poem’ on the following sites:

liberalscum.com

stormfront white nationalist community

north american hunting club

Just the kind of sites that I would expect to be spreading this type of ‘good-natured’ hate speech to the masses. I also noticed that various versions circulate in the UK and Canada (just replace America, and the various institutional references with the appropriate countries & agencies).

The idea that ‘refugees’, of all people, are depleting our national wealth through unemployment, welfare and SSI programs just doesn’t ring true (What’s that you say, honest-to-goodness white Americans take advantage of the welfare system? - nah!).

There is also a little issue of a certain war the US started recently, which has created a fair number of these vile refugees:

Number of Iraqi refugees displaced as a result of the Iraqi War: 4,200,000

Number of Iraqi refugees accepted into the US 2003 - early 2007: 466

Data courtesy of refugeesinternational.org

Update: I found the origins of this nonsense email on snopes. It started in Canada, not the US, and still was a bunch of nonsense. The ‘poem’ part was added later. File under: don’t believe everything you read on the internet.

 

Tags: spam, refugees, racism, Iraq+War, JP+Oliva

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