Here is some news from Lancaster, PA. Church World Service is bringing 50 Iraqi refugees such as the Sunni Muslim in this article to the hometown of the plain folk. Church World Service is one of the top ten volags contracted by the US State Department to resettle refugees.
Previously the Virginia Council of Churches, a government subcontractor of Church World Service, had brought Meshketian Turks (Muslims who had been living in Russia) to Lancaster, something went wrong there and the resettlement was stopped. We think it was some crime issue, but we never did find out. That failed resettlement resulted in our receiving the Meshketians in Hagerstown.
Here then is the news from Lancaster today:
“[Omar] is one of the first Iraqis we’ve resettled,” McGeehan [Church World Service employee] said. “Many more are going to be coming.”
CWS is a cooperative Christian ministry that provides relief with mentorships, living arrangements and English education courses to refugees in more than 80 countries.
About 50 more Iraqi refugees will be resettled by the group in the Lancaster area by the end of 2008, McGeehan said.
From now until September 30th you will see one story after another about hundreds of refugees arriving in the US. The Presidential Determination for this fiscal year set the ceiling at 80,000 refugees and the agencies will scramble from now until the end of September to bring in as many as possible. As a matter of fact, in Hagerstown at this time last summer I attended a meeting in which some of the county agency heads (such as the health department) expressed how difficult it was to process refugees in large groups at this time of year when school was starting and everyone was swamped. It fell on deaf ears.