Month: November 2007

Brookings: Refugees are spreading out from traditional “gateway cities”

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

At the September forum in Hagerstown, MD someone asked representatives of the US State Dept. about an apparent policy to spread refugees out to small and middle-sized American cities and away from the traditional “gateway cities.”  We have heard, but cannot confirm, that this was a directive of the Clinton Administration.  Early in the meeting the question was brushed aside, but later the State Dept. spokeswoman admitted that the social services in traditional immigrant receiving cities had become over-taxed.

Thanks to the Jacksonville article yesterday, we now know that The Brookings Institution actually reported on this trend back in April.  Check out their report by going to this page at Brookings and then download the document entitled, “Refugee Resettlement in Metropolitan America.” 

Some interesting findings come as no surprise:

*  Little is known about refugee resettlement at the metropolitan level. 

*  Unlike other immigrants refugees have access to considerable federal, state and local support.

*  Sometimes the placement of too many refugees in one area has overwhelmed local communities and stirred tension.  (Ed: No, really!)

On this last point, the government officials and volag employees made the people in Hagerstown (see the website VDARE yesterday for more on our city) feel that they were residents in the only city in the country that had concerns.  That is the part that makes me want to scream.  Why can’t these officials just admit it and say, yes, there are problems but we try our best to resolve them.  Instead they acted shocked, like this had never happened before and therefore there was something terribly wrong with us!

Now, back to Brookings.  You gotta have a look at this report.  As expected, the top three original “gateway cities” were New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.    But, I was interested in the eleven top cities that had the largest refugee populations as a percentage of the foreign born in the city calculated from figures up to the year 2000.   They are:

Utica-Rome, NY   (See our earlier post on Utica here.)

Fargo-Moorhead, ND-MN

Erie, PA

Binghamton, NY

Spokane, WA

Portland, ME

Lincoln, NE

Waterloo-Cedar Falls, IA

Burlington, VT

Manchester, NH

Des Moines, IA

I’ll bet that none of these cities had any advance warning or opportunity to plan ahead for the rapid expansion of social services for the needy required of refugee resettlement sites.  

Note on November 23rd:  Here is a better report on the Brooking Report at the Migration Information Source.

Jacksonville, FL refugee: why are we here?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The Burmese refugee quoted in the Florida Times-Union today asked the 64 thousand dollar question:  Why Jacksonsville?  Indeed, why Utica, NY, or Manchester, NH, or Erie, PA, or Emporia, KS?  

But what Thaw Ray, 34, doesn’t know is why, of all the cities where the federal government’s refugee resettlement program could have sent him, he ended up in Jacksonville.

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It’s a question that thousands of refugees from Afghanistan to Zaire could be asking themselves, local and national refugee experts said.

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The answer is partly speculation and partly a complex calculus of politics involving the United Nations, about 20 other host nations, the U.S. State Department and a group of 10 nonprofit refugee resettlement agencies. Employment, housing and climate factor in, as does a diversity that helps make the First Coast one of the most welcoming places for refugees from around the world.

_____

“It’s … a hit-and-miss kind of thing,” said Patricia Madrid, director of refugee resettlement for Catholic Charities in Jacksonville.

It’s hit or miss alright, or that’s how it appears to those of us asking that question.   There appears to be absolutely no rhyme or reason for the resettlement of refugees in this city or that, because there is apparently a total lack of leadership from the Federal government on this critical community-changing program. 

 In my opinion the program is simply run on the ‘Squack factor’—the what?  You know, the city that is silent is “welcoming” and the city that squacks is “unwelcoming”.    That is how the decision is made, or so it appears, because we have no other evidence that there is any advance planning and analysis.

Having exhausted the original gateway cities, the volags (voluntary agencies) are scurrying around the country bringing refugees here and there, hoping to “hit” on a “welcoming” place.   I’ll reiterate my recommended reform:  We need an ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL IMPACT STATEMENT prepared in advance of refugees being resettled in any community.   The way it is now, it appears that the Volags are running this show to the detriment of  both community harmony and the well-being of refugees.

Iraqis to Columbus, Ohio

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Columbus, Ohio has received its first family of Iraqi refugees according to the Columbus Dispatch today.   Sameer, a 37-year-old Sunni Muslim doctor has brought his entire family including his wife, kids, two brothers-in-law in their 20’s and an elderly father-in-law.   The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, one of the top ten volags, played a major role in resettling this family through their local affiliate Us Together (could find no information on this non-profit group).

Read the whole article here.   I bet the mainstream media won’t be reporting the final line in the story.

If the Americans pull out [of Iraq] now, Sameer said, “there will be a slaughter.”

The 2005 Office of Refugee Resettlement report to Congress says this of Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society:

HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, is the national and worldwide arm of the organized American Jewish community for the rescue, relocation and resettlement of refugees and migrants.

Appendix A of the same report says that Ohio has been the destination for 31,409 refugees between 1983 and 2005.

Iraq refugees, no leadership from Bush Administration

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

If you watch or listen to Glen Beck, a kind of crazy but right-on-the-mark talk show host, he often says this issue or that issue “will make blood shoot from your eyes.”    Well, this is one of those issues for me.   Every day (all day!) there are stories from every corner about Iraqi refugees.  Stories are generated by the United Nations, the volags (voluntary agencies), Washington DC think tanks, Senators such as Ted Kennedy, concerned Christian groups,  DC conservative pro-Muslim insiders(yes!) and of course, the mainstream media.   Most of them say we are very bad for not bringing a million or so here now.  Other stories give bits and pieces of “facts” that make anyone trying to follow this want to tear one’s hair out (while blood is shooting from one’s eyes).

Just yesterday the Washington Post featured yet another frontpage story entitled “Iraqis with ties to US cross borders into despair” which laments that 100,000 Iraqis who worked for the US government (or anyone obliquely connected to the US) at one time or another are trying to get into the US and describes the pace of resettlement as “glacial”.   The article focuses on well-educated, once prosperous Iraqis.   But, just a week ago the Post reported on the first Iraqis arriving in cities like Phoenix, Arizona indicating that those educated Iraqis are not too happy.

Before they arrived here, the refugees said they were told by U.N. representatives that they could get jobs based on their professional qualifications. But they said they have now been told that they should work as hotel housekeepers, an occupation many of them have refused because they deem it degrading.

Then we have the Associated Press reporting that in the month of October 46,000 Iraqis returned home as the violence subsides in their homeland.    One of my questions is, are we going to bring thousands and thousands of the best and brightest Iraqis to America to clean motels when it might be better for them and Iraq to be taken care of  (by us if necessary) where they are until they return to rebuild Iraq?

I cite the above to illustrate the confusion generated by an apparent lack of government policy on this very critical issue.

Bottomline,  we have no leadership in the Bush Administration on this, which allows all these special interests with their own sets of facts to wage a monstrous public relations battle in search of public consensus.  No, I take that back,  it won’t be public consensus, in this leadership vacuum the winner of the debate will be the biggest and loudest bully on the subject.    The Bush Administration should send a balanced fact-finding mission to look for the truth on the ground in the Middle East and convene a conferance on the Iraqi Refugee situation by bringing the best and brightest (without an agenda)  together in a public forum to craft a coherant strategy.

If you have the fortitude, read through our entire Iraqi refugee coverage here and you will understand why this is a “blood shooting from the eyes” subject.

Is refugee resettlement modern slavery?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

What follows is a comment that jumped out at me as I read through the recent comments on the situation in Emporia, KS.   We keep hearing bits and pieces from around the country about unhappy refugees who thought they would enter the good life in America through jobs for which they were trained or well-suited and instead are washing dishes in Florida hotels, or cleaning motels in Arizona, or still worse, packing meat in the Midwest.

As an aside, I have a Chinese friend, an attractive brilliant woman, who had run a company in China, but wanted to live in a free country.  She is now working in a convience store unable to break into any suitable work because she doesn’t have American credentials which she can’t get without attending American colleges which she can’t afford because she works in a convience store.

Here a person identified as only “create” had this to say about Emporia:

I have just finished watching the movie, “Amazing Grace” just out on DVD.

This is the true story of William Wilberforce and his quest to end British slave trade. As I watched this film, I began to put it all in terms of what is going on here in Emporia and other cities all over this country. This isn’t the fault of the Somali people, not hardly. This is the fault of Big Business like Tyson. The Somali people have been victimized by Tyson and other companies like it, just as their African ancestors were victimized by the Big Business Planters of the 18th century. And this is no different than the same kind of slavery going on today, only it’s legal because the Somali people fit into the category of refugees.

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In addition, Big Business is victimizing cities like Emporia too as they make their deals with labor contractors like Catholic Charities who are complicit in this entire sham and should also be held accountable as they milk the federal and state funds belonging to the tax payers themselves.

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The Office of Refugee Resettlement is also complicit in the legal slave trade. The more I research, the more I realize what is really going on beneath our very noses. So many have been willing to look and study and become informed; however, so many have allowed their bigotry to guide their reactions; so many have looked away, shielding their eyes as well as their faces; and so many have chosen to simply accuse others of racism — they too are complicit. You know what? I’m sick of all this. Not enough to stop, but just plain sick.

See our post on Louisville, KY here.  Is this the “sacrificial generation” that an official in that city called its Somali refugees?

Also, please reread our interview with Chris Coen, Friends of Refugees here.