This article has been sitting around in my list of potential posts since August 3rd.  I’ve started to post on it several times, but didn’t want to get into a big dissertation on how refugee resettlement in Hagerstown inspired the creation of this blog, but decided when I saw the article published at another site that I really needed to get my energy up to write about it.

The story in the Hagerstown Herald Mail is your standard, immigrants are struggling but doing well, people are nice to them, but Hagerstown is “unwelcoming” because citizens ran out of town the Virginia Council of Churches—that’s the agency that had been resettling refugees to the city two to three years ago.   The “unwelcoming” attitude came in the wake of an unfortunate incident, we are told.

When they came to Hagerstown, a Virginia Council of Churches office in Hagerstown helped refugees resettle. That office closed in 2007, its officials citing an “unwelcoming” community after an incident brought to light the presence of a group of refugees in Hagerstown.

In October 2006, some residents and government officials discovered that refugees were being resettled locally after a Burundian woman experienced a severe case of morning sickness on West Franklin Street, where the refugees were living.

Because the woman’s translator was unavailable, authorities thought she and other refugees possibly had a communicable disease. Hazmat units were sent to the area, and the 12 African refugees were quarantined briefly.

This is a very simplistic description of what happened.    This incident served only to force the Herald Mail to report to the public in a front page story that refugees were quietly being resettled by an agency from out of state.    Some of us initially just wanted to know how the program worked, who decided which cities would get refugees, did local government have any say in the matter, who would employ the refugees, what services would they receive etc.  Here is a post I wrote in September 2007 in which I tell readers the questions I asked the Herald Mail to research and report on and they refused.

So some of us asked for a public meeting and got it.   The US State Department sent a couple of top people, Maryland sent its refugee people, and Church World Service, the contractor of Virginia Council of Churches, and VCC all attended and spent the evening dodging questions and talking down to us.

I thought about this yesterday because the contentious Townhall meeting with Senator Cardin on health care reform was held in the same theater at Hagerstown Community College and it occurred to me that the source of many peoples’ anger yesterday and two years ago is that citizens have had it with being dictated to from elite ‘smart people’ from Washington.  It wasn’t the refugees people were angry at two years ago, it was the big-government bureaucrats and their religious left minions (cheered on by editors of the Herald Mail) shoving a federal program down our throats that was so maddening to many of the residents of Washington County.

When Washington comes to town, we just want good and open government, not sneaky government!

And, finally what the Herald Mail and Virginia Council of Churches don’t tell you is that somehow VCC was screwing up badly here (the woman in the hazmat incident above was located in the worst building in the worst neighborhood in town, why?).   VCC was shut down from the top and sent back to Virginia by the US State Department and their bosses at Church World Service!  Calling us “unwelcoming” as a parting shot was just to advance their political agenda.

You can read all about the lead-up to, and aftermath of, that September 2007 meeting in our category on the subject, here.

It was this refugee debacle in Hagerstown, MD that inspired the creation of Refugee Resettlement Watch.   We want to be sure other citizens know how this federal program works and why it needs to be reformed.

See Part II to see what prompted me to finally get around to mentioning this article.