Month: June 2008

Oops! Fake refugee gets into US

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

How can that be!    We are told over and over that refugees entering the US are thoroughly screened in advance and that refugees are not a security risk.  But here is a short news account from Nepal that dispels that idea.  

Imagine the surprise of the family to learn that someone using Dad’s identity has already been resettled in the US, and he isn’t even Bhutanese.  We are supposedly resettling 60,000 Bhutanese from these camps over the next couple of years.   But, oh well, these things happen says the IOM (International Organization of Migration).

Oh, one more thing, just a reminder that we do not pick our refugees they are chosen for us by the likes of the United Nations and the IOM (whoever the heck they are!).  See an earlier post warning about this—fakes in the Bhutanese camps.

Association of Press Freedom Activists (APFA) Bhutan has said a non-Bhutanese refugee has been resettled in United States, using fake identity as a Bhutanese refugee from Beldangi 2 camp in Jhapa district.

According to a statement by the association, a non-Bhutanese has been sent to US after completing resettlement process at the International Organization of Migration (IOM) in the name of Padam Lal Poudel, 52, from Beldangi 2, Sector D/2 Hut No 24.

The association quoted a family member of Poudel as saying, “The inquiry section of IOM confirmed that someone matching my father’s information has
already got resettled in the US.”

The matter came to light after Poudel’s son inquired at the IOM to know why his father’s resettlement process had been delayed while other families whose interviews began at IOM along his family already left Nepal.

He was informed by the people at IOM reception that there are many such cases.

There were media reports saying some non-Bhutanese have been making efforts to go US under disguise.

APFA said IOM offices in Damak and Kathmandu, UNHCR office in Kathmandu and UN embassy in Kathmandu denied talking on the issue.

The association demanded that original identity of the person being resettled be made public by the concerned agencies – date of his departure from Nepal, place where he has been resettled along with photo – and urged IOM, UNHCR and US embassy to take precautionary measures to ensure that non-Bhutanese are not be resettled.

Note to volags, I guess you are keeping an eye out for a fake Padam Lal Poudel and you will turn him in when you find him.

See all of our previous coverage of the Bhutanese refugee issue.

World Refugee numbers rising, sort of

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

June 20th is World Refugee Day, so you are probably seeing an up tick in the number of news articles about refugees this week.  Here is one from the International Herald Tribune that says numbers of refugees are rising.

Oh, but you could look at it this way, the numbers are down since a high of almost 18 million during Bill Clinton’s Bosnian war.      Holy cow!   I suppose you could then say that the Clinton era Balkan war produced more refugees than the Iraq War—how can that be?

The number of refugees fleeing to other countries to escape conflict and persecution rose in 2007 for the second year as factors from climate change to overly scarce resources threatened to increase the flow, the United Nations refugee agency warned Tuesday.

A total of 11.4 million refugees were under the care of the agency, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, in 2007, including about 400,000 experiencing conflict in their home countries, the agency said. The total for 2006 was 9.9 million.

The total was modest compared with the 17.8 million refugees in 1992 at the time of the Balkan wars, but after a steady drop from 2001 to 2005 it represents a worrying trend, the relief agency said.

“We are now faced with a complex mix of global challenges that could threaten even more forced displacement in the future,” António Guterres, the high commissioner, said in a statement. “They range from multiple new conflict-related emergencies in world hot spots to bad governance, climate-induced environmental degradation that increases competition for scarce resources and extreme price hikes that have hit the poor the hardest and are generating instability in many places.”

The number of people displaced by conflict but remaining in their countries also rose in 2007, to 26 million, the agency said, citing statistics provided by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, a private organization based in Geneva.

Lest you start feeling good about the refugees coming to the West, the UN wants to dispel any notion you have about doing good.     We western countries are bad, bad, bad because we don’t allow the millions in (to deplete our resources), and now the developing nations are getting stingy too.

The latest statistics contradicted a number of misconceptions about the impact and distribution of refugee patterns, officials said, starting with the notion that Western countries admit most fugitives from conflict.

Instead, 80 percent of refugees remain in developing countries in the immediate vicinity of their own country, the UN agency said.

Pakistan accepted more than 2 million refugees and Syria 1.5 million in 2007. The United States sheltered 281,000, the statistics showed. Only a tiny proportion find resettlement in third countries: about 49,900 people in 2007 and 821,000 in the decade ending in 2007.

Developing countries are increasingly unwilling to shoulder the refugee burden and are imposing stricter criteria for acceptance.

“It’s becoming a more and more inhospitable world for refugees,” said William Spindler, an agency spokesman.

 Someone asked me recently why I thought things were changing and increasingly we see stories other than “puff pieces” about refugees and as I said previously, I think part of the reason is that the guilt trip works less and less frequently these days! 

Are Rohingya refugees already here?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Talks continued today between the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Gutteres, and representatives of the government of Bangladesh about how to resolve the Rohingya “crisis” according to this report in a publication from the Rohingya Youth Development Forum.

These few lines caught my eye indicating that the US has already admitted Burmese Muslims perhaps mixed in with the Burmese Christian Karen people. 

The UN high commissioner for refugees also mentioned that the UN refugee agency is in talks with several countries that are interested to allow Rohingyas into their countries for ‘resettlement’.

“We don’t think the resettlement programme is sufficiently developed and we will be advocating in relation to other countries to increase the quotas of Rohingyas in the future,” Guterres said.

Canada by far accepted the highest number of Rohingya refugees, with countries such as the United States, Britain, Australia and the Scandinavian countries also high on the list. However, the number of ‘resettled’ Rohingyas still remains low.

See our category “Rohingya Reports” here for all the background on this controversy.

International Institute of New Hampshire screws up

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Add the International Institute of New Hampshire to the list of subcontractors of the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI) not taking care of refugees.   I know I said this before (in my Akron post), but I really couldn’t believe my eyes to see the complaints leveled against this volag in Manchester, NH and how similar they are to complaints in Waterbury, CT and Akron, OH.   The Union Leader says:

Even so, Sanderson’s [longtime director of the Institute] departure follows an approximate four-month period in which community refugee advocates brought concerns about refugee resettlement in Manchester to the institute’s Boston headquarters and U.S. Sen. John E. Sununu, who relayed them to the U.S. State Department, his spokesman said.

Sununu, R-N.H., said his office is reviewing how many federal funds go toward settling refugees in New Hampshire and how it is spent.

“Are the right resources being allocated to housing, to health care, to education?” Sununu asked during a recent visit to Manchester.

Dear US State Department, why is the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants even one of the top ten refugee resettlement government contractors?  Is it because USCRI President Limon has come through the government/NGO revolving door?

Advocates said they raised other issues since late winter: poor quality, insect-infested housing; the institute’s alleged unwillingness to forge cooperative relationships with civic and church groups and volunteers whom refugees often turn to for help; questions about how federal funds allotted each refugee are split between the refugee and resettlement agency; and Manchester’s capacity to absorb more refugees.

Manchester sounds exactly like Waterbury.  Most puzzling to me is why do these International Institute’s not seek enough help from churches and apparently even turn volunteers off.  We have been advocating a reform of the program that would put more responsibility for resettlement on volunteer churches and other groups, not less! 

Baines [former mayor, Robert Baines] was mayor in 2004 when the city succeeded in getting a three-month moratorium imposed on refugee resettlement after Manchester became overwhelmed with an unexpected influx of mostly Africans, including 34 children who became lead poisoned. Baines attributed most of the problems to the state’s other refugee resettlement agency, the Concord-based Lutheran Social Services of Northern New England, which he said brought refugees to Manchester without notifying school, health and other city officials.

Since then, the state’s largest city — which historically has absorbed most of the state’s refugees — has suggested other communities share in taking in refugees. 

That is no surprise.  We are hearing that everywhere?   Why us?  Why so many to our city?  It is simply because you let the program take root in the first place and at one point some leaders in your city were perceived as “welcoming”.  And, anyone who squawked too loud was silenced with charges that they were racist, xenophobic and uncharitable.

Based on some hardhitting comments to the Union Leader, the city isn’t so “welcoming” any more.  Here are just two:

While the citizens of this state and this country continue to get strangled by rising prices and a devalued dollar, we are forced to be a host to people without basic means of support. This is done against our will and without a vote. Therefore every employee of the International Institute as well as Lutheran Social Services and Catholic Charaties should be identified and then mandated to pay for every refugee that is settled here. They should also be mandated to serve the prison term each refugee recieves for any crimes commited. Then you would see how fast this BS would stop.
– John S., Manchester, NH 

Whether you’re a hard-nosed conservative or a bleeding-heart liberal, the bottom line is this: the will of the people must dictate political action. If a majority of residents are in favor of these programs, do it. If a majority are against, you don’t do it. Too often in this country, people like Bracy, Benedict-Drew and Sununu act without the slightest regard for the will of the majority of the community’s residents/voters.
– Matt, Manchester

John and Matt have hit the nail on the head.  If the volags (supposedly volunteer resettlement agencies) had to use their own funds (and not the taxpayers funds), resettlement would be slowed to a manageable level.  Also, we have contended from the earliest days of this blog that communities should be given all the facts and then the community should decide if they want refugees in the first place, or at some point should be able to say they have enough for now.

You know the old saying, “the buck stops here,”  well this buck stops with the US State Department and USCRI whose pres., Lavinia Limon , gets a few of those bucks herself ($195,000 annual salary courtesy of the US Taxpayer). 

Read about Waterbury, CT here and Akron, OH here. 

Life in a refugee camp: A politically correct version of dress-up

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

When my kids were little they dressed up as 18th century youngsters at a children’s museum and learned how to cook and do other chores just as a child in early America might have had to do.   Today’s multicultural kids have the opportunity to play refugee for a day and receive diversity training at a new museum exhibit in Las Vegas (and soon to visit your city, if you are lucky). 

Here is most of the article on “Torn from Home” with no further comment from me:

The question posed to children entering the replica refugee camp at Lied Discovery Children’s Museum is tough: “If you were forced to leave your home, what would you take with you?”

Well, there’s the iPod, the cell phone, the Hannah Montana bed sheets, the Xbox, the skateboard, some snacks, a blanket, maybe an action figure and definitely some batteries for your gadgets.

Not really. Not when you have miles to walk, borders to cross, land mines to avoid and shelter to seek.

Once at the camp, you’re given a bracelet to prove you belong there, but also as a measuring tool to determine if you’re starving. So, welcome. Pump some water into the jugs you’re given and build a shelter with the tarp. The mosquito net? That’s to prevent malaria, which along with cholera and violence is common in the filthy camps. But there’s the medic tent should you get sick. Oh, no weapons allowed.

“Torn From Home: My Life as a Refugee,” a well-crafted, well-sourced, costly exhibit opening Saturday at the children’s museum, is on an entirely different emotional and intellectual plane from “Cool Moves! Artistry of Motion” and “Clifford the Big Red Dog.”

In fact, parents might find it easier explaining a fictional red puppy with a growth problem than the displacement of entire families and communities.

But this $700,000 exhibit, sponsored by philanthropist Pam Omidyar, who lives in Henderson with her husband, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, signifies a change at the 18-year-old institution where diversity and meatier issues are being integrated with children’s books, life at the supermarket and the physics of tornadoes.

“We’re looking to bring messages to the community that are not part of the norm in the exhibit world,” says Linda Quinn, executive director of Lied Discovery Children’s Museum, who has raised more than $2 million for the museum since arriving two years ago. “Hopefully when that child leaves, they walk out and ask Mom and Dad, ‘Why is it like that?’ ”

The exhibit is not as grim as it might seem. The displays, designed to get children fully engaged — even wanting to be aware — are spectacular.

There are posters of land mines near the camp’s check-in desk, but no formal discussion of them. This exhibit is merely to raise awareness of people displaced from their countries out of fear of persecution because of race, religion or social and political conflict. The average time in a camp is seven years. Some refugees can’t go home and are settled in a third country. Many countries don’t want them. Some countries can’t take them.

The issue isn’t completely removed from the local community. Catholic Charities of Southern Nevada reports that since January 2003, its Migration and Refugee Service has helped resettle more than 5,000 refugees in Southern Nevada. In fact, the recorded voices behind photo displays of resettled refugee children, including those from Colombia, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, are those of local children who spoke for resettled refugee children in other cities.

“This is a story that needs to be told and rarely are refugee stories told from child to child,” says exhibit curator Elaine Bole, who has worked with refugees since 1993 in the former Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Uganda and Iraq. She’s also worked for the U.N. High Commission for Refugees and World Vision. “Kids are going to realize, ‘Oh, that’s what a refugee is.’ Where that leads will be manifested in different ways.”

“Torn From Home” was developed by Lied Discovery Children’s Museum and will tour nationally. It was initiated by Pam Omidyar, who had contacted Bole some time ago requesting tarps and other materials to use as a way to explain the plight of refugees to children. After presenting a small exhibit at a school, Omidyar contacted the children’s museum about presenting a larger exhibit. Working with Quinn and Omidyar, Bole created “Torn From Home” with exhibit developer Stacey Mann.

Equipment and supplies were provided by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees; the World Food Programme; Save the Children; and Doctors Without Borders, which has a similar outdoor traveling exhibit.