NRI marries sister to get Green Card

Washington, Oct 28:

The grand jury indictment, which cites multiple counts of conspiracy, fraud and misuse of visas, was unsealed on Tuesday in a local US District Court naming Harbans Kaur Hothi, 51, and her husband, Paramjit Singh Taggar, 44, along with his brother, Gurdeep Singh Atwal, 43, and sister, Pritam Kaur, 35, as defendants.

While both Hothi and Taggar are naturalized US citizens, the brother, Atwal, who lives in Fresno, and the sister, Kaur, who lives in San Jose, had been on a fast-track program for US citizenship when the alleged fraud was uncovered, according to a Fresno Bee report.

Assistant US Attorney David L Gappa, who is prosecuting the case, said the normal waiting period to immigrate to America from India for a brother or sister of a US citizen is 13 years. There is no waiting period for a spouse.

The indictment accuses the couple of lying about the marriages in order to have them immediately immigrate to the US from India, the report said.

According to the indictment, Hothi and Taggar were married in 1983 and divorced in January 1994. But they continued to live as husband and wife.

Investigators said the couple agreed to divorce in order to enter "into sham marriages" with Atwal and Kaur. (PTI)

Kuwait wants 4,700 Pakistani workers

ISLAMABAD, OCT 28:  Kuwait has asked the Overseas Employment Corporation (OEC) to send it 4,700 Pakistani workers, said the federal minister for Labor and Overseas Pakistanis, Ghulam Sarwar Khan, at a press conference on Tuesday.

“This is the biggest demand from Kuwait in the last decade. Another employer from Kuwait has asked for 470 drivers,” he said.

Mr Khan said that other countries had demanded 1,125 workers and the positions would be advertised soon. He said that another demand from Korea, Libya and Malaysia for more than 655 workers is in the pipeline. “The agreement with the Korean employer is to be signed on November 2.”

An employer from Libya is considering queries from the OEC to select 200 workers from Pakistan.

The Malaysian government is planning to formulate a policy to import Pakistani workers and had made three requests for 155 workers.

Muslim vote is anti-Bush, not pro-Kerry

Washington, Oct 27: The American Muslim vote is going overwhelmingly to Kerry though he has done little, if anything, to earn it.

Kerry has made no effort to woo the Muslim vote to date, although it is now widely known and reported that the Muslim-American community is going to vote for him, 10 to 1. “It is not so much for Kerry who has just ignored us and who has taken a hard position on the Middle East, not qualitatively different from that of President Bush, but because we consider Bush and his administration to be dead set against Muslims. He has made war on Muslim countries and the treatment meted out to the Muslim community in America itself since 9/11 has been discriminatory, if not racist” one Muslim political activist told this correspondent.

New York Times columnist William Safire, one of the leading apologists for Israel and all causes Israeli, wrote on Monday, “You have to give credit to Arab-Americans, and to the overlapping category of American Muslims, for knowing what side they are on in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - and for voting for those they believe would address their concerns.

Four years ago, they voted almost two to one for George W Bush, thinking he would act like his father. Today, according to the Zogby poll, American Muslim voters are going 10 to 1 in the opposite political direction - for John Kerry over Bush. Not only do they see Bush’s Patriot Act as discriminatory, most of these Americans dislike the president’s unwavering support of Israel -including his backing of Ariel Sharon’s security fence and the diplomatic isolation of Yasir Arafat.”

Safire noted that “this stunning reversal of opinion” within a growing voting bloc is having an impact. For example, about a half million Arab-Americans live in Michigan, according to the Arab American Institute; most have turned strongly anti-Bush. That’s why pollsters are counting Michigan, with its 17 electoral votes, as “leaning toward Kerry.” He notes that in the last election, 20 percent of the American Jewish vote went to Bush, but this time he was going to receive no more than 20 percent of that 20 percent. This was despite the fact that this “President has firmly backed Israel’s vigorous self-defense - and time and again vetoed or denounced lopsided UN votes to ostracize Israel - 8 out of 10 Jewish American voters will still vote as a bloc to oust him.”

Safire argued that most Jewish Americans quite properly base their vote on issues like social justice, civil liberty, economic fairness and not primarily on what may be good for Israel.

Most Arab-Americans and US Muslims, as is their right, disparage Sharon’s Gaza plan. But in getting out of Gaza, the national interests of the US and Israel are in accord, he added, and urged American Jews to go for Bush rather than Kerry who, he implied, was “most likely to help gain a secure peace in the Middle East.”

Another report appearing in the Washington Post on Monday also stressed that Muslims were going to vote in large numbers for Kerry, when they voted for Bush in election 2000. Absar Chowdhury from Bangladesh said he would vote for Kerry next week because President Bush has disappointed him in several ways. In particular, Chowdhury cited an erosion of civil liberties, including the continuing use of secret evidence, and the war in Iraq, which has left thousands of Iraqis and more than 1,100 Americans dead.

Chowdhury, the report noted, “is emblematic of a dramatic switch among Muslim voters. Four years ago, 42 percent of them voted for Bush. But in this year’s race, they are expected to vote overwhelmingly for his Democratic opponent, with one recent poll showing 76 percent of the Muslim vote going to Kerry and 7 percent to Bush. ‘For American Muslims, there has been a sea change in political alignment and outlook since 9/11,’ said Zahid H Bukhari, director of Georgetown University’s Project MAPS, a long-term research project on American Muslims, which commissioned Zogby International to conduct the recent poll. ‘No matter what Bush says to Muslims right now, it doesn’t matter because he’s broken so much trust with our community,’ said Nabil Yousef, 21, of Arlington, a Georgetown University senior who started a Muslim website in August.”

Mukit Hossain, another Muslim, told the Post, “Voter registration is in the 90 percent range, and I would be very surprised if almost 80 percent of those people don’t come out to vote.” He said his committee counted about 10,000 newly registered Muslim voters in the Washington area in recent months: 1,000 in the District, 4,000 in Maryland and 5,000 in Virginia. He pointed out that this had brought the number of registered Muslim voters to 3,700 in the District and 48,000 in Virginia, with no statewide figure available in Maryland.

According to one estimate, there are at least 700,000 registered Muslim voters nationwide, but little hard data from independent sources are available. African Americans, who make up about 30 percent of the Muslim American population, traditionally vote Democratic by an overwhelming margin. But Democrat Al Gore received the votes of only 55 percent of African American Muslims in 2000, and Bush drew votes from 49 percent of South Asian Muslims and 54 percent of Arab Muslims in that election, according to Georgetown’s Bukhari. Polls also show a move away from Bush among the country’s 1.7 million to 2 million registered Arab-American voters, 46 percent of whom voted Republican in 2000. Three-quarters of the US electorate is Christian, and they have similar concerns as Muslims on racial profiling, the war in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to pollster John Zogby, head of Zogby International.

Among Arab Americans, “the issues of civil liberties and racial profiling tend to impact Muslims and immigrants more,” Zogby said. “But it is still cited as a problem - less acute but still a problem - among Christians and American-born” Arabs. The anticipated swing to Kerry could be crucial in some battleground states with significant Muslim and Arab populations, analysts said.

The Washington Post report said that Florida, where Bush won by 537 votes in 2000, has 120,717 registered Muslim voters, according to an analysis of state voter rolls by Hossain’s Muslim American Political Action Committee and the District-based Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation.

In addition, the Arab American Institute in Washington estimates a likely turnout of 515,000 Arab American voters in four key states: 235,000 in Michigan, 120,000 in Florida, 85,000 in Ohio and 75,000 in Pennsylvania. In a September survey of 502 Arab American voters in those states, 49 percent said they intended to vote for Kerry, and 31.5 percent said they would support Bush. (Daily Times)