I missed this back in December, it’s a very useful graphic at the Baltimore Sun showing where the 15,000 Iraqis we have brought to the US have been resettled. Check it out here. Note that the top resettlement states for Iraqis are California, Michigan, Arizona, Texas and Illinois.
No Iraqis were resettled in Montana and Wyoming (possibly other small states in the east as well, it’s just that the graphic is not clear). This reminds me. Montana takes only a handful of refugees while Wyoming has completely opted out of the refugee resettlement program. I have been trying to find out for over a year how Wyoming got out, but no one will tell me. Apparently a state can get out!
We are told over and over again that refugees are resettled where there is the best chance for them to find work and become independent. That is not true. They are resettled in a willy-nilly fashion by the non-profit government contractors depending on where they have offices that need to keep government funds coming in.
Look at this list of states experiencing the highest unemployment rates and note that many are also the states where the Iraqis are being resettled. California and Michigan are in the top 4 states with the most unemployment and they are the top two Iraqi refugee resettlement states. Now does that make any sense?
Just a reminder we have written about Iraqi refugees who cannot find work and are unhappy enough to make it into a news story, these are the states we have identified where recent Iraqi arrivals are not finding jobs. No correlation it seems between the states with the worst unemployment figures—there are just no jobs anywhere for refugees:
The fifteen states we have written about so far that have no jobs for Iraqi refugees are Arizona, Maryland, New Hampshire,Virginia, New York, Michigan, Ohio, Georgia, Idaho, Connecticut, New Mexico, California, North Carolina, Utah and Washington.
And yet the refugee pushers(!) are asking for as many as a 100,000 Iraqis to be resettled this fiscal year (summary here). But, now that Obama has opened the welfare spigot in the bailout bill, I guess the sky is the limit.
Endnote: I wonder if anyone has correlated the immigrant numbers in a state with the state’s economic distress. We know for instance that California has huge immigrant numbers and is also the state in the most dire economic situation. Does anyone know if there is such a study?