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.