Day: June 14, 2011

Your tax dollars help refugees open businesses

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

One of the most frequent questions we get here is:  How are these refugees getting money to open businesses in my city, when Americans are having a tough time getting loans?

Well, one way is through the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s Microenterprise Program.  That is where your tax dollars are funneled to a federal contractor who in turn gets to be the big shot (and probably keeps a little of the money for administrative purposes) and doles out your money to upstart businesses where the refugee has little credit and few personal assets.

Here is the description by Director of ORR Eskinder Negash (of the revolving door) in the Director’s message to Congress in the finally released ORR annual report to Congress for 2008 (they still are behind and owe Congress reports for 2009 and 2010):

ORR’s Microenterprise Program helped recently arrived refugees who possessed few personal assets and who lacked credit history to start, expand, or sustain a small business. ORR funded 17 grantees nationwide for a total of $3,680,000 to help refugees start various businesses, including ethnic restaurants, child care, taxicab and limo services, and cleaning companies. In FY 2008, more than 3,400 refugees were served in the Microenterprise Program, which assisted 681 businesses. Of those, 261 were new business starts, 320 were expansions of existing businesses, and 100 represented strengthening or stabilization of existing businesses. The above businesses created 605 jobs that were taken by other low income refugees.

I was going to tell you more, but I am out of time today.  Go to pages 38 and 39 in the Annual Report and see how much money was given out and to which groups for Microenterprise loans.

Pakistan police cracking down on Afghan refugee crime at Mansehra camp

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I saw this little news story and it rang a bell—isn’t Church World Service (funded with government contract money) a big operator at this camp?

Here is the news story that caught my eye—Pakistanis aren’t too thrilled with the refugees from Afghanistan.

MANSEHRA: The district police will launch a crackdown against Afghan refugees involved in crime. The decision was taken at the monthly crime meeting of the Police Department held here on Monday. Senior Superintendent of Police (Investigation) Khalid Khan Tanoli, who chaired the meeting, asked the police officers to provide foolproof security to the foreigners and non-governmental organisations carrying out development projects and social work.

The police officer noted that timber smuggling was on the rise in the district and illegal saw machines were the main cause behind it. He said every police station should constitute a team to take action against the timber smugglers and outlaws involved in crime and staying at the Afghan refugee camps.

Looks like it’s Church World Service helping the Afghan refugees with their woodworking skills, here.   And, here is more on the US government contractor, Church World Service, in Pakistan.  Refugees are being trained to return home to Afghanistan (someday soon, hopefully! since the government in Afghanistan wants us out, and most Americans want us out too!):

In 1996 the Mansehra program recognized that it needed to look forward to the day its clients would return to Afghanistan. One of its goals was to prepare the refugees for their return and give them as much knowledge as possible on matters that affect their health.

New readers should know that Church World Service is one of eleven major federal “refugee” contractors, here.   Check out their most recent financial statement here and note that they received over $35 million from you (taxpayers) last year.  But, they aren’t just spending your money in Pakistan, they are busy bringing refugees to your cities and towns as well.

Bhutanese add to the ethnic hodge-podge that is Nashville

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We’ve written so much about refugees in Nashville, TN that we have a whole category on the city, here.

Now we see the Bhutanese are arriving to seek  food and hotel industry jobs in the home of country music.  I wonder if they are replacing the Somalis in that work in Tennessee?

The Tennessean (a paper that advocates for Open Borders):

Tek Nepal was among the first 15,000 Bhutanese resettled across the United States after years of living in refugee camps.

Nepal arrived in California in 2008. It was expensive. It was hard to adapt without friends and relatives.
Then, family in Nashville sold him on this city, and he moved here in 2010.

“We were looking for job opportunities,” Nepal said. “In a lot of ways, Nashville was like our climate and it fit our culture. We like it here.”

Nashville’s Bhutanese community, which has grown to about 1,000 people, celebrated its first cultural festival on Sunday.

I suspect the Somalis weren’t working out too well for places like the Loews Vanderbilt Hotel (we were there), and we reported recently that meatpackers seemed to be going for more docile refugees like the Burmese (and now Bhutanese).

Historically, Middle Tennessee has been a resettlement destination for many refugees, including Cubans, Kurds, Sudanese, Somalis and Ethiopians.

The Bhutanese are the latest wave of resettled refugees in Middle Tennessee. The group has found jobs in the food and hotel industries.

Several readers at the Tennessean article wanted to know about this assertion that “historically” Nashville has been a resettlement destination.  They don’t understand that an aggressive government contractor (Catholic Charities and Holly Johnson in this case) working closely with the US State Department can quickly turn a city into an ethnic hodge-podge.   Maybe they don’t know how Nashville became the Kurdish gang capital of the US!

I love it how news stories about refugees always make it sound like the refugees just magically appeared (started to arrive) in a given city.  Rarely do they report that (blank) federal refugee contractor was paid to bring the refugees to their city without much if any consultation with local governments.

The Bhutanese started arriving here in 2008 after the U.S. State Department announced that 60,000* people would be resettled over several years.

Atlanta has the largest Bhutanese community, estimated at 10,000.

Thanks to some serious activists and a leading Tennessee Senator, a new bill was signed into law in Tennessee just this month that will begin to address the problems of lack of notification and consultation with local governments when Catholic Charities and the feds bring future refugees to Tennessee.

* The number is expected to go over 60,000.  The ‘Bhutanese’ are really from Nepal originally and were expelled from Bhutan as that country was experiencing a surge in ethnic nationalism and wanted to keep Bhutan for the ethnic Bhutanese people.  The refugees we are resettling are ethnic Nepali people which the country of Nepal refused to repatriate.  So, we are helping them with their little problem of clearing out refugee camps in Nepal.  Bush Asst. Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration Ellen Sauerbrey is credited with this plan, here, in 2007.

Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies writing at National Review Online (citing RRW) on the Bhutanese “refugee” issue had this to say in 2009:

The State Department is using resettlement to serve a transnational human-rights agenda that has nothing to do with promoting our vital national interests. In effect, our foreign-policy elite views the actual United States as a sort of hinterland where they can dump their overseas problems.

[…..]

Refugee resettlement should be reserved only for the most desperate persecuted people in the world, who face imminent death if they stay where they are and will never have anywhere else to go. If they think about it at all, this is what ordinary Americans think the refugee program is doing already, but it isn’t.