I see lots of readers have been accessing our “your state” page today and yesterday. So sorry, that I have not worked on that in awhile. Time is limited and the breaking news every day is so interesting that it’s hard to make myself work on the page. I’ll try harder in the future. In the meantime, please e-mail me at Ann@vigilantfreedom.com and I’ll help you get started researching your state.
Day: March 8, 2008
Rohingyas: Burmese Muslims headed our way
Actually that was a misleading headline to get your attention! I don’t know if they are coming yet, but from here to Australia they are making their pitch and beating the drums.
After we wrote about the Rohingya here (please go back and read this if you haven’t seen it before). We received a letter from a Mr. Zafar Ahmead, Pres. of the Myanmar [Burma] Ethnic Rohingyas Human Rights Organization Malaysia, which said among other things:
We are further frustrated as The UNHCR and International Communities are fully aware of our situation in Malaysia but there are no serious action taken. We are hoping for permanent solution to our serious situation. We have the rights to live like other people. We are hoping that the Third Countries will give us place in their countries for resettlement. We are frustrated as very few of us get resettlement in the Third Countries. We are hoping that the UNHCR and The Third countries will not looking at our religion before making decision whether to take us or not.
Just today we see in the Burma Times that the UN is now responding to the drumbeats from Rohingya activists and organized a meeting earlier this past week in Australia.
Kensington, Australia: Speakers at a seminar, held on March 5, said that the Rohingyas are both stateless and refugees. The seminar was on “Launch a report and film on Rohingya Refugee in Bangladesh.” organized by UNHCR. It was held at the Council Chancellor Hall, Chancellery Ground Floor, University of New South Wales , Kensington, Auatralia in the morning, said Abdus Samat, the secretary of Burmese Rohingya Community in Auatralia, or BRCA in Australia .
This is how it works. An advocacy group hounds the UN, then the UN (which doesn’t require much hounding) will hound western countries and before you know it, we will have Burmese Rohingya Muslims, adversaries of Burmese Karen Christians, in places like Waterbury, CT, or Fort Wayne, IN or your home town.
Somehow those in the Refugee resettlement business must have a crazy notion that since America has been dubbed a melting pot, all these centuries old animosities will be magically left behind when we bring old enemies together here.
Utah getting more money and new bureaucracy for refugees
Thanks to the efforts and advocacy of Gov. Huntsman, Utah has a new refugee office and money to run it (and a new board too).
The office needed to be created, DePaulis [director of Utah department of community and culture] said, because of “structural gaps and barriers to successful refugee resettlement.” The former Refugee Working Group was funded with federal money and was overseen by the state’s Department of Workforce Services. The funding was never enough, Brown [head of the new office] said, and the creation of the office will facilitate cooperation with state and county leaders without losing the federal money or disrupting the program’s position under Workforce Services.
Read the rest of the story here.
See our previous posts on Utah here and here. Note that it appears the direct resettlement numbers have gone down in Utah but there are more and more refugees coming, so I suspect that Salt Lake City is “welcoming” and they are getting secondary migration.