Harrisonburg, VA welcoming Iraqi refugees

Of course we have already heard that Iraqis, unhappy in Virginia, have recently returned to the Middle East.   Undaunted by the facts, however, puff pieces continue to be written in what I can only conclude is a continued campaign to tell the public that everything is peachy with refugee resettlement in this miserable economy.

A couple of things in this ho-hum news story prompted me to write about it, especially this first line .

The U.S. State Department decides where to place refugees.

I don’t believe the State Department is putting push-pins in a map and deciding that your city is the next “welcoming” city.   The volags, the non-profit federal contractors seem to be the driving force.  It is they, unelected and unaccountable to the taxpayer, deciding where refugees will go, or at least that is how it has been in our experience.  Once a community is targeted by a volag (see Top Ten here), the only way any community can say “no” is if citizens make a lot of noise (elected officials will run and hide).   Or, if the resettlement agency (one of the hundreds of subcontractors to the Top Ten) screws up in some way, and THEN the State Department steps in (see Waterbury, CT agency closed here).

“They’re looking for existing resources in [the] community. They’re looking for the ethnic community in place, also affordability of housing, and availability of employment,” says Sokolyuk [Director of a refugee agency that is unnamed in this article].

All those factors have come together to make Harrisonburg an appealing places to send Iraqi refugees in particular.

In the last three months of 2008, 32 Iraqi refugees came to Harrisonburg. Already this year, that number has nearly doubled.

What makes Harrisonburg a good place to relocate Iraqi refugees when Fredericksburg (maybe 70 miles away) was not?

Then this:

The resettlement office has to offer assistance to refugees for about a month. Funds are limited.

“I mean, how much can you do within 30 days? That’s all they require from us,” says Sokolyuk.

He says it used to be easier for refugees to get a job in that time frame. Now, it’s closer to three to four months.

Assistance for only one month???    That is absolutely not true.  Yes, they get a stipend toward their first month’s rent from the State Department, but the resettlement agency is responsible for them for 6-8 months depending on what programs that agency has signed up for with the Office of Refugee Resettlement in the Dept. of Health and Human Services.*  The variety in the programs remains a mystery to me.  Even after the agency is no longer responsible, refugees are eligible for many government welfare programs including food stamps.

* By the way, there is little continuity from program to program, so one family of refugees in a community, resettled by one agency, can be getting a whole lot more or less than another family resettled by another agency which causes much confusion, anger and resentment within refugee communities.

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