Here is a story, your usual puff piece, about how refugees from all cultures are melting into one big happy community in one neighborhood in Tuscson, or are they?
The reporter at the Tucson Citizen is quick to tell us how fabulous everything is in this “welcoming” city.
They come from around the globe, making a home in the heart of Tucson.
In the past decade, about 2,000 newly arrived refugees have settled in midtown Tucson, looking to start a new life free from violence, persecution and poverty.
[….]
Families from Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa and other nations live side by side in apartment complexes, settled there by agencies that assist refugees.
The reporter goes on to tell us that the problem the refugees are having is economic, jobs are scarce (same old story) and then gives us this bit of information. I don’t know what she is talking about. I’ve never heard of the US Resettlement Project with 18 months of financial help.
Refugees do get assistance from the U.S. Resettlement Project. But the 18 months of financial help they used to get has been cut to one month.
Nonetheless, she goes on to quote Ken Briggs, executive director of the International Rescue Committee in Tucson as saying that even though hundreds of refugees can’t find work and pay bills, and there is a “little teasing” among kids, Tucson is a “welcoming” city. Tucson is also a “preferred community” according to the US State Department.
But for the most part, “the Tucson community has been welcoming to refugees,” he said.
So, if you have read this far you are thinking that is so nice, diversity works, everything is peachy in Tucson. Almost universally these puff-piece articles end with a hint that maybe it’s not all sweetness and light in cities with refugees put together in a utopian melting pot experiment that our political leftwing dreams about. Does the reporter get qualms about not balancing the story?
She (Becky Noel, a community service officer with the Tucson Police Department) said some refugee teens get picked on by gang kids. Sometimes they fight back by forming their own gangs.
“But I’ve had more issues with one refugee group not liking another,” she said.
She said refugees with different religious and political views can end up living in the same apartment building, and sometimes have to be separated.
Go back now and visit this post , and this one, from last fall about unhappy Iraqi refugees in Tucson.
Everything is not peachy in Tucson but it’s not politically correct to say that—-the melting pot myth must be perpetuated at all costs.