By Donald A. Collins | 25 June 2013
Church and State
Catholic Charities apparently proved its true view of immigrants recently. It seems to want more of them, but not bright ones, especially ones who can speak English, as exemplified by the firing of a volunteer teacher named Mark Krikorian, whose family has a long and recent immigrant history. Reminds one of the old macho saw, “Keep women barefoot and pregnant!”
As the June 18th Washington Post story tells us, “Hours after the Washington Post profile of anti-immigration activist Mark Krikorian hit doorsteps Tuesday, he got fired — from a volunteer job.”
That initial WAPO used a very unflattering photo of him, told about his glass eye (he called it a “fake” which implies something about him and his work I presume) and generally tried to make him appear to be a loose cannon, despite the fine reputation for solid scholarship from his agency, The Center for Immigration Studies.
The WAPO piece continues,
Catholic Charities informed Krikorian that he can no longer teach its civics classes for green card-holders seeking to pass the citizenship test after he brought a Post reporter to his classroom last week without prior approval.
But the group’s leaders maintain that Krikorian also crossed a line by politicizing his charitable work, as they saw it: Volunteers are barred from discussing their political views on the job, and while Krikorian didn’t appear to do so with his students, “he was clearly facilitating a profile of himself in which he was expressing political viewpoints,” said Michael J. Donohue, a spokesman for the Catholic Diocese of Arlington.
I wonder if Donahue is in any way related to William A. Donahue, President of the Catholic League, who makes legendary public attacks on anyone who might suggest a plausible alternative to being Catholic and or failing to kneel to Vatican teachings?
Anyway, the trigger for Krikorian’s firing was a detailed June 17th Post story about him, which afforded the Post, who reporting for year has been consistently open border, never met an immigrant it could not defend, obviously was using him to discuss the current push for another major immigration amnesty (called Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR) by advocates–S.744) when 24 million Americans are either unemployed, underemployed or stopped looking for work. President Obama’s recent comments indicating he will not reappoint Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, likely because of this job creation problem, really shows both the folly of this CIR push and the growing failure of the cheap labor business/ethno-religious juggernaut to convince most Americans that we need to transform the face of our country without a vote, a reasonable legislative approach or any care for our children and grandchildren.
The lame PR excuse for Catholic Charities rapid removal of Krikorian from his volunteer effort to help new immigrants gain English language skills was “Whether he intended to do so or not, that’s what he did. He used the people we believe he was legitimately trying to help as a backdrop in a story in which he was making political arguments.”
The Post piece goes on to say,
Krikorian — who, as director of the Center for Immigration Studies, advocates policies that would staunch the flow of immigrants to the U.S. — told us he was stunned by his dismissal. When he emailed a Catholic Charities manager — admittedly at the last minute — if he could bring our colleague Manuel Roig-Franzia to the classroom, he was told in a response the next day that it was no problem.
“If you did a story about someone on the other side of the debate, I guarantee you this call would not have been made,” Krikorian said. “The pro-immigration folks were really ticked off.” While he maintains that Catholic Charities staff knew where he worked, Donohue said they did not know before the story ran.
So what if the CC’s Mr. Donahue didn’t know? Isn’t trying to make new LEGAL immigrants have a better chance to make good citizens, to earn a better living, to fully partake in the American Dream?
If these newcomers can better read English, they might find out that the RCC program against modern birth control, gay marriage, and the appointment of female priests might not quite fit their idea of a good religion. Or after the recent pedophile scandals, a place to send their children.
As Mr. Krikorian noted above, how biased the mass media and the RCC can be on the issue of real immigration reform. The Gang of Eight’s massive bill for CIR, S.744, has no real safeguards for keeping our needed flow of immigrants legal and within a reasonable range of need for employable people, as our vast unemployed citizens proves.
All along Vdare has done a superb job of putting forth those anti S.744 facts, but the special interests who for decades have driven our nation to its present sad state care not about anything but their own selfish interests. Goodbye America the Beautiful.
Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC., has spent over 40 years working for women’s reproductive health as a board member and/or officer of numerous family planning organizations including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Guttmacher Institute, Family Health International and Ipas. Yale under graduate, NYU MBA. He is the author of From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013.
From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013
By Donald A. Collins
Publisher: Church and State Press (July 30, 2014)
ASIN: B00MA40TVE
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Immigration with Mark Krikorian
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