Update October 23, 2016: 9,020 were admitted according to the Refugee Processing Center.
Update October 21, 2015: 8,858 were admitted in FY2015, here.
Update October 26, 2014: The final tally for FY2014 is 9,000!
Update September 7, 2014: Found it! FY2013 Somali admissions to the US–7,600!
Update August 29th, 2014: Finally got around to updating the stats at least for FY 2011 and 2012 (see below). Couldn’t find 2013 but will keep looking. We are nearly doubling the numbers of Somalis admitted this fiscal year (2014). As of July 31, we have admitted 7,326 Somalis to your towns and cities.
Update August 28th, 2014: I need to update the recent years. The numbers stayed low for a number of years because family reunification had been closed to Somalis for years due to the huge fraud uncovered by the State Department in 2008, but Somali resettlement to America is on the rise again.
Update November 13th, 2010: This post continues to be one of the most visited posts at RRW. I have just now updated the numbers for FY 2010 below which ended on September 30th.
I finally got around to something I’ve been promising to do for weeks (months!) and that is go over all the records of Somali resettlement numbers.
I do want to remind readers that these numbers are only for the Refugee Resettlement Program of the US State Department. We just had a commenter to another post suggesting that the numbers are much larger then the government statistics indicate for immigration to the US. I don’t doubt that. But, again, these are the numbers that the Office of Refugee Resettlement must present to Congress each year for that special category “refugees.”
Much to my surprise, the numbers (and patterns) for Somali refugees admitted to the US are even more shocking then I had originally guessed.
Also, in my last post, I quoted the reporter as saying that the Somalis began arriving in Minneapolis in the late 70’s. Well, maybe there were a handful, but the largest numbers have arrived here AFTER 9/11!
The Refugee Act of 1980 presumably required the Office of Refugee Resettlement to begin reporting to Congress annually. The first table I looked at lumped all numbers from 1983-1993. In those 10 years, 4413 Somalis were admitted as refugees.
Then here we go:
1983-93: 4,413
1994: 3,508
1995: 2,524
1996: 6,440
1997: 4,948
1998: 2,952
1999: 4,321
2000: 6,002
2001: 4,940
2002: 242 (Guesses why this is so low? 9/11 freaked everyone out!)
2003: 1,708
O.K. so in 2003 we had admitted a total of 42,017 Somalis to the US. In those 20 years each Somali family was having on average 6 children.
Continuing (are you sitting down?):
2004: 12,814
2005: 10,101
2006: 10,330
2007: 6,958
2008: 2,523
2009: 4,189 (on the rise again even though family reunification is suspended still!)
2010: 4,884
2011: 3,161
2012: 4,921
2013: 7,600
2014: 9,000
2015: 8,858
We have reported to you before that the number is so low (relatively low!) for 2008 because DNA testing in Africa showed that the refugee program was corrupt through and through and those thousands coming in as “family” were lying.
We have admitted 83,991 Somali Shariah-supporting immigrants to the US in 25 years [as of when I first wrote this post—ed] More then half, 43,682, came since September 11th!
Who was responsible and why? I don’t know. I do know that African resettlement was not a priority until, according to a report by Heidi Boas which I mentioned here last year, the Congressional Black Caucus got involved:
Anyway, I am getting away from my story. According to Heidi Boas* in her lengthy 2007 paper entitled, “The New Face of America’s Refugees: African Refugee Resettlement to the United States:”
….several of the individuals interviewed for this paper identified the Congressional Black Caucus as one of the most influential groups advocating over the past decade for increased African refugee resettlement to the United States.
I also think that in addition to political reasons that the Black Caucus had for boosting minority voter numbers, that big businesses, like these meatpackers we have been talking about, have been working with friends in the State Department and the Department of Health and Human Services as if those agencies were their employment services.
Do you ever wonder if the Congressional Black Caucus members know what they did to our own American blacks because these immigrants are pushing them out of jobs now?
I know who could answer all of our questions about how and why we took militant Muslims in such great numbers into the US: Terry Rusch, Director of the Office of Admissions, US State Department could tell us, if she was willing. [Editors note, Rusch has since retired.]
If you would like to check numbers yourself, the best thing I can do is send you to this post as a starting place. I got these numbers at so many different Office of Refugee Resettlement Annual reports to Congress that it is too cumbersome to put all those links in here. However, you should be able to use the links I just mentioned and sort it out—you will also find it interesting to see from what countries we are admitting refugees and to what states they are going.