Chickenlooper - Colorado will accept Syrian refugees

A gas station owner near me is a Muslim. He's been here for decades. His kids were all born here and are now adults. He's always been a nice guy. But recently, he has gone off on some pretty scary anti-American rants. Turns out, the dude HATES us even though he's pretended to be friendly all these years.

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Originally Posted by Otterbatcat

.... but I will give up on believing in this country....seriously.

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It's the government you'll give up on. IMO, this COUNTRY is and always will be the idea of America...what it was originally intended to be. Not what the government has perverted, warped and wants you to think is our country.

America is an idea so clearly written out by our Founders and I will never give up believing in that. The Feds? Now that's something to give up believing in...

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Originally Posted by hollohas

A gas station owner near me is a Muslim. He's been here for decades. His kids were all born here and are now adults. He's always been a nice guy. But recently, he has gone off on some pretty scary anti-American rants. Turns out, the dude HATES us even though he's pretended to be friendly all these years.

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There are literally thousands of stories about non Muslims who had Muslim friends in countries where Islam took over who ended up being turned on by their long time friends. Many of them have played out recently in Syria and Iraq with the rise of ISIS being a signal that the time for "The Islam of Peace" to end and "The Islam of War" to begin and when it does its like a switch is flipped in these people's heads.


I work for MacVan Map Company and several years ago we had a couple of middle eastern men show up at our retail store with a rental truck looking for a map of the roads around Cheyenne Mountain. The guy working the counter (who is now an El Paso county Sheriff deputy) told them we didn't have what they were looking for and when they left he called the FBI. Never found out what they were up to.

Theres a mosque one block from me. Another 3 blocks away

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Originally Posted by Irving

I'm inferring that for whatever reason, their date of birth has been changed to January 1st of whatever year for their documents when they came here. I don't know how, or why, but it seems pretty suspicious to me. If anyone has info on where I can report that kind of info, I will.

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It's not a big secret and the organization that you would report it to, U.S. State Department, assigned them the birthday of Jan 1. There is no conspiracy. There is no connection between State Department assigned birthdays and the propensity for violence.

http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.s...ppy.html<br />

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Originally Posted by kidicarus13

It's not a big secret and the organization that you would report it to, U.S. State Department, assigned them the birthday of Jan 1. There is no conspiracy. There is no connection between State Department assigned birthdays and the propensity for violence.

http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2011/01/on_new_years_day_wish_a_happy.html

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Thank you, that makes me feel better. I didn't think it was a government conspiracy, truth be told, I only found out about it minutes before I posted, so I hadn't really developed much of any thought, but it seemed strange to me for sure. Also, I wasn't trying to infer that certain birthdays have anything to do with violence. However, knowing how many people come here and start transport companies, and having had at least one guy get tagged for terrorism charges puts me on edge in general. I'll calm down now.

EDIT: I can't get your link to load.

Why not assign them their real birthday? The people don't know it?

EDIT: link doesn't show anything about this topic.

That's my assumption, but I don't know. My wife has her real birthday.

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Originally Posted by GilpinGuy

Why not assign them their real birthday? The people don't know it?

EDIT: link doesn't show anything about this topic.

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Lots of links get posted that require an account/login. No thanks.

My phone never links correctly. Here is the article:

But Deng didn’t know what to say in speech class, when his classmates surprised him with balloons, cake, a new necktie and a song, “Happy Birthday to You.”

The teacher started, then stopped, the extra part that goes, “How old are you now?”

Deng does not know how old he is. He does not know the day he was born in southern Sudan.

That is not enough for the U.S. government, which accepted Deng as a refugee in 2000. The State Department assigned Jan. 1, 1980, as Deng’s official date of birth — a necessity for filling out so much paperwork. His friends, family and many other Lost Boys who sought refuge in the U.S. have the same, government-issued birthday.

So do 200,000 other refugees from places where there is no new candle to mark that they have survived another year, only the treasured fact that they are alive.

Jan. 1 is full of blessings and some confusion for thousands of people who fled famine and war and found a new land of opportunity in a place where people have a custom of throwing annual parties for themselves.

Deng’s classmates decided he needed a party after he told them in a class speech that he had never celebrated a birthday. It is not part of Sudanese culture.

“If it was me, I would freak out,” classmate Kristina Miranovic said. “It’s like your specific holiday. Even though there were other people born on that day, there is only one of you.”

Esperance Muhimpundu, a Fowler High School student, came to the U.S. from Burundi with her uncle at age 13. As she grew older, she wanted to know why she had the same birthday as her uncle, sister and three aunts. So she asked her parents, still in Burundi, to go to the hospital and look up her real birthday. Now, when friends try to give her gifts Jan. 1, she tells them to come to her birthday party Jan. 30.

A Fowler classmate who came from Somalia celebrates two birth dates. She said she was born Feb. 24, but the U.S. assigned Jan. 1 as her birthday because she did not have a birth certificate.

The Department of State has been assigning Jan. 1 birthdays to refugees since the Vietnam War.

There is no formal regulation that sets that date, but staff members at oversees centers assign Jan. 1 birthdays to refugees who do not know or cannot prove their actual dates of birth. State Department officials are not sure why Jan. 1 was chosen, but suspect it could be so new citizens can have the earliest possible access to rights, such as voting and receiving Social Security benefits, that are earned at certain ages in America.

Of the 2.9 million refugees who have resettled in the United States, about 202,000 have Jan. 1 as a birthday. That includes people who were assigned that date and those who volunteered New Year’s Day as their real birthdays.

This year, about 13 percent of the 71,000 new refugees have Jan. 1 birth dates, according to the state department.

Haji Adan refers to Jan. 1 as his “date of birth,” as if it is just another line to fill out on a government form.

Today is also the date of birth for his wife and most of his friends, who will call and wish each other a happy day on Facebook.

But they all know today is not their birthday.

When Adan was a child, a civil war broke out in Somalia. A militia attacked his Bantu village, and he walked for five days with other boys who had been separated from their parents. After a long journey through a refugee camp in Kenya, the United States accepted him as a refugee, and he came to live in Syracuse.

Adan knows he was born on a Wednesday during a drought year and that he is 28 years old.

It is strange to Adan that grown adults would go around telling everyone it is their birthday, although he now puts it on Facebook, too.

“Most of the families do not celebrate for so many reasons, one is that they know they were not born on Jan. 1, but it was given to them,” Adan said, adding, “It is not offensive. It is an opportunity. They know they are going to a country where they will have a new life.”

There are some unintended consequences. It can be frustrating to school-age refugees who are set apart in class because they all have the same “birthdays.” Sometimes all the students in an English-as-a-second-language class will share a birthday.

“Other kids will make fun of them,” he said. “Some kids are smart, and they will stand up and explain why they were given Jan. 1.”

Adan told a story about a recent trip to visit an uncle in Canada. He drove over the border with four friends, all refugees from Somalia.

As expected, they were asked to pull over at the border for questioning. It was enough that a Somalian-born teen had just been arrested in Portland on charges that he tried to blow up a car bomb at a Christmas tree lighting ceremony.

And now, there are five young Somalians at the border and they all have the same birth date, on New Year’s Day.

“What do you mean, how do you end up knowing each other? Why are you all traveling in one car?,” Adan said the border patrol agents asked. “We ended up telling them that it was a resettlement process and all of us were given Jan. 1.”

The agents took their pictures and let them go, Adan said.

Another time, he said, local police pulled him over for talking on his cell phone while driving. The officers laughed at the birth date on his drivers’ license, and Adan thought he was in real trouble. Then, the officers asked him to promise to tell all of his “Jan. 1 friends” to stop talking on their phones in the car.

“He said, ‘You guys who have Jan. 1 have a problem with phones,’” Adan said. “I said, I can’t be responsible for everyone, but I will tell them.”
The American-born children of refugees know their own birth dates, and they insist that their parents celebrate.

“To make my kids happy, when the date of their birth is coming up, I go to Wegmans and buy a cake and some cookies, so they can share with their classmates,” Adan said.

After Deng celebrated his first birthday in the OCC classroom, he said he would celebrate his son’s birthday from then on.

Deng was nervous when he stood in front of the class with his first birthday cake, presents and a card. He said he would keep the card for the rest of his life and pass it on to his son. He blew out the candle and cut his first cake, once down the middle and once across, into four big pieces. He did not want to tear the wrapping paper on his gift.

Thinking about the day he was born made him remember his mother, who gave birth to eight babies with no medical care, then died in war. Celebrating his first birthday is an achievement he said he would accept on behalf of every Lost Boy who came to America.

“This is one of the very good things that Americans have,” he said. “You reward yourself and the people who bore you.”

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Thanks for posting. I can't ever get things to work from my phone either.