Your tax dollars:
I’ve mentioned this problem before—-Bhutanese refugees committing suicide when they get here. I don’t suppose these are large numbers in the overall scheme of things, but this piece from the Refugee Health Technical Assistance Center points to one more hidden cost of the refugee resettlement program.
I was at immigration meetings all weekend and was asked many times, how do we figure the cost of all this? You basically can’t because it isn’t just the cost of some volag like Catholic Charities resettling a bunch of refugees in your cities and what they get from the federal taxpayer to do that, but there are all the costs to the local community that are never tallied; plus the volags get all sorts of federal grants—things like “Healthy Marriage initiative grants” to teach refugees, what else, how to have healthy marriages.
So you can be sure we are paying for this too (suicide prevention) for those who have been ripped from their cultural moorings and cannot cope with the joys of multicultural America.
From the Refugee Health Technical Assistance Center:
In response to reports of suicides among Bhutanese and other refugees resettled in the U.S., RHTAC has sought to develop resources and tools that are consistent with our goal of improving the health and well being of newly arrived refugees by providing technical assistance focused on refugee health and mental health to refugee-serving organizations.
You can read the whole list of initiatives but this is one of my favorites:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), at the request of the ORR[Office of Refugee Resettlement in the Dept. of Health and Human Services] and in collaboration with RHTAC, has developed an investigational framework to increase our understanding of risks for suicide, belongingness and burdensomeness, and Bhutanese community resilience.