Your tax dollars:
There is nothing we haven’t already reported in this story from the Journal-Gazette in Ft. Wayne, IN about how the Obama Administration has doubled the federal funding to the government contractors who resettle refugees in your town or city. However, I’m bringing the story to your attention, just to inform readers that this kind of puff-piece story will be appearing in your local paper too if you live in one of those refugee overloaded cities.*
Mu Nu rushed outside Friday morning to help social-service workers haul a couch up the steps of his decidedly American foursquare home.
Furniture is on a long checklist of needs for newly arrived refugees such as Mu Nu and his family, needs local social-service agencies have struggled for years to meet with limited federal dollars.
Now, prompted in part by a visit to Fort Wayne by a U.S. State Department official, the one-time grant for newly arrived refugees will double.
The money is funneled through local agencies to help refugees with basic needs for their first few months in the U.S., and the individual amount will increase from $900 to $1,800.
Eric Schwartz, assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration, visited Fort Wayne, Chicago and Minneapolis-St. Paul in September.
“What I saw was both heartening and dismaying,” Schwartz wrote in a message on his Web site.
Read it all.
* By the way, Ft. Wayne is apparently so overloaded and tensions are running so high among the citizens (and between the myriad ethnic groups brought to the city by contractors) that it has been chosen by the Center for the Prevention of Hate Violence as one of four cities they have set their sites on as targets for their ‘be nice to immigrants’ message.
Update February 17th: Additional commentary on this story from Ft. Wayne can be found at Friends of Refugees, here.