Here is an article from Aurora, IL. It starts out with the usual heartwarming template story about a struggling but happy refugee family and all the wonderful help they are gettting from World Relief, the resettlement agency. But, as you read down through the lengthy story, a picture of a city trying to cope with a rapid influx of low skilled people who speak virtually no English begins to emerge.
The first place the trouble is obvious is almost always the school system. Teachers are overloaded as it is and when a group of students arrive unexpectedly (it is always unexpectedly) everyone is scrambling to figure out how to handle the costs and the stress of it all. Local taxpayers are forced to cough up the money for what basically is an unfunded mandate by the Federal government.
A local alderman stated in one simple sentence what so many are saying in cities large and small:
“God bless these people,” he said, “but at what point, Aurora has to ask, how much can we handle?”
It doesn’t have to be this way. These local elected officials can just say ‘no’, we can’t handle anymore. There is no federal law that says they must absorb an infinite number of refugees just because some volag (NON-GOVERNMENT agency) arrives in town and tells them they must. Just because the US State Department brings refugees into the country and contracts (pays) these volags to resettle them, I repeat, does not give the Volag authority over the local elected governmental bodies.
The more refugees a city takes, the more they will get.
Reforms needed:
The refugee resettlement program must be reformed. I suggest an economic and social impact study to be done in advance of refugees being resettled in a particular community. The report would periodically be updated and elected officials could then monitor the capacity of their city/county to handle a specific number of low-skilled workers who do not speak English and need welfare to supplement meager incomes.
Oh, one more thing, I would get rid of the volags. Let government agencies, accountable to taxpayers, run the resettlement. Those agencies can still go out and find local churches and other groups to help with the volunteer work. Based on local experience, most of these volags are doing rotten jobs finding volunteers anyway.