LOL! That does not mean 50,000 have gone to South Dakota! It means that 50,000 people of Nepali descent have left camps in Nepal to resettle in the West over the last 4 years. The US has taken 42,000 thus far and has promised to take 60,000 total.
To new readers: In 2007 the Bush Administration Asst. Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration, Ellen Sauerbrey, gave the green light for the US to resettle 60,000 Bhutanese (really Nepalese) to the US over 5 years. Remember there is a Republican Open Borders faction whose members are convinced that we need a continuing stream of cheap immigrant labor. (By the way, the Left’s latest bogeyman, Grover Norquist, is all for amnesty and open borders. I think some of these Republicans also believe that they will get the immigrant voters for their party if they advocate for amnesty.)
The story with the Bhutanese is that they really aren’t Bhutanese but Nepalese who went to live in neighboring Bhutan, many at the beginning of the twentieth century, but then Bhutan had a resurgence of ethnic nationalism and wanted Bhutan for the Bhutanese and drove out the ‘foreigners.’ Nepal, a stable country, didn’t want to take its ethnic people back so they have lived in camps for upwards of 20 years. It is those people we are now resettling into our miserable economy.
Here is the news from the UNHCR:
KATHMANDU, Nepal, August 17 (UNHCR) – Jai Prasad Sunuwar flew to South Dakota in the United States earlier this month, becoming the 50,000th refugee originating from Bhutan to be resettled from Nepal under a programme launched four years ago by UNHCR and its partners.
[….]
Under one of UNHCR’s largest resettlement programmes, more than 42,000 of the refugees have begun new lives in the United States. Others have left camps in eastern Nepal for resettlement in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. They had come to Nepal during the early 1990s, fleeing ethnic tensions in Bhutan.
[….]
When the resettlement programme began in November 2007 there were almost 110,000 refugees from Bhutan residing in seven camps in eastern Nepal, three of which have since been closed. Of those remaining in the camps, some 47,000 have expressed an interest in resettlement.
By the way, when this wholesale redistribution of people and their culture to different parts of the world began there was a faction of the refugee population trying to stop the resettlement because they were holding out hope that continued pressure on Bhutan would result in that country relenting and letting them return. Instead the US stepped in to help remove the pressure from Bhutan. I’m not a big fan of Presidential candidate Ron Paul, but he would probably recommend staying out of other countries’ domestic issues that have NOTHING to do with our national security!
What do you bet we are going to end up taking more than the 60,000 Ellen Sauerbrey promised?
We have written a lot on the Bhutanese, just type that word into our search function for our archives on the subject.