Update (a few hours later): At the end of this post I encouraged readers to visit this article in USA Today and read some of the hard hitting comments. Seems that USA Toady (as I’ve been told it is occasionally called) has decided to yank the comment thread. Unbelievable the lengths the mainstream media will go to cover up controversy on this sacred cow issue.
Wow, Boise must really have the immigrant welcome sign out. We’ve written about Boise and its growing Muslim population on many previous occasions, but this lengthy USA Today article is loaded with interesting information.
For that matter, “most New Yorkers don’t know where Idaho is,” says Boise Mayor David Bieter, who says his city, whose population is 92% white, has “a good history of assimilation and accommodation.”
I wonder if Mayor Bieter ever heard of Imam Yahya Hendi’s prediction of 30 Muslim mayors by 2015.
Leslye Boban agrees. She says that when she moved to Boise from Miami two years ago to open an office of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), one of three resettlement agencies here, all she knew about Idaho was “potatoes and white supremacists,” a reference to neo-Nazis who briefly were prominent in the state’s northern panhandle in the 1990s. What she found was “a really open community that for the most part has really embraced its refugees.”
Since 1975, Idaho has absorbed 12,000 refugees from 40 countries. In a sign of the impact refugees from largely Muslim nations are making, there now are three mosques in Boise and at least five hookah bars where people smoke traditional water pipes.
Boise is one of 350 cities that have volunteered to take in refugees since the fall of Saigon in 1975, Reeves says. In just eight months that year, the United States admitted 131,000 Vietnamese refugees.
Now that last is absolute bull …. Three hundred fifty cities have not “volunteered” to take refugees. No one asks the cities. These non-profit groups just merrily bring refugees to cities hoping no one will notice and when the population of refugees is high enough (because no one has complained), they deem the city “welcoming.” Then for cities like Boise, there is no turning back.
Read further and think about the fact that representatives of ten NGO’s (volags) are sitting around a table each week figuring out where they can get away with dropping off more refugees. And, I don’t say ‘dropping off’ lightly. This blog is filled with stories about refugees being left uncared for by these groups that are contracted by you, the taxpayer, and then the refugees are left high and dry.
Workers at 10 private resettlement agencies meet every Wednesday morning in Arlington, Va., to pick the future homes of refugees waiting in the Middle East. They weigh family size, job skills, living costs and housing availability. The newcomers are free to go elsewhere besides their assigned cities, but most initially go where they are placed to qualify for up to eight months of government support.
The agencies take care not to cluster many refugees in towns that might be culturally or economically unprepared to absorb them. The aim is to avoid tensions like those that arose after anti-Muslim protesters threw a pig’s head into a Somali mosque in Lewiston, Maine.
Agencies do their best to find the right place, but “there’s a fair amount of movement in the first year to 18 months,” says Terry Rusch of the State Department’s Office of Refugee Admissions.
Then this:
Rare hateful rhetoric aside, there is tension here among some locals regarding the newcomers. “They come here too easy, all the out-of-the-country people,” says Chet Wilemon, 62, a construction worker. As for the Iraqis, “How do we know that they’re not building up their own terrorist communities here?”
There is always a slight mention of the tensions in the city, but reporters like this one, make it sound as if concerns are only coming from crackpots and the KKK.
Be sure to read all the comments on this article at USA Today.
Reforms needed: As I have said on other occasions, refugee resettlement policy needs to be reformed. The first step is a process at the federal level to require an economic and social impact study prepared for each city that is “volunteering” to take refugees. The process would include public meetings so the citizens would have an opportunity to discuss in an open forum whether refugees will be a net plus or net minus for their city.