There are few jobs and Iraqi refugees especially are not staying quiet about the conditions in which they are living, yet we are on target to reach the ceiling permitted for refugee resettlement this year. President Bush set the admissions ceiling for 2009 at 80,000 and seven months in we are already at 36,702. Normally the refugee admission numbers increase dramatically in the last half of the year. For contrast note that at this time (end of April) in 2008 we had admitted 23,072.
We have a major recession, jobs are not available, refugee agencies are closing their doors and we keep the spigot wide open. You would almost think someone wanted the system to implode.
To answer some readers questions here are the top six sending countries:
Iraq: 9581
Burma: 8149
Bhutan (Nepalese): 6651
Iran: 3093
Cuba: 2672 (I thought the Obama Administration regards Cuba as a lovely place to live)
Somalia: 2232 (see my post earlier this morning on this, here)
After that the numbers drop off into the hundreds or less for myriad countries. I thought some other interesting numbers were: Russia (305), Ukraine (330), Vietnam (693), Afghanistan (228), and Palestine (10). I put this last in here to point out that NO we are not bringing large numbers of Palestinians right now.