Your tax dollars!
That is right—that is exactly where the mayor and citizens of Manchester and New Hampshire generally need to go to get a moratorium on refugee resettlement. And, you gotta pound them! And in turn, they need to pound the US State Department. Here they are (where the pounding begins!).
And, it wouldn’t hurt either to get the Republican Presidential candidates on record on this as well! This is truly a states rights issue if there ever was one. Tennessee recognized that when its legislature passed (and the governor signed) its ‘Refugee Absorptive Capacity Act‘ last May.
Here is the whole Union Leader editorial from yesterday (they don’t keep things on-line long at the paper, I don’t want this to disappear). Mayor Gatsas wants to know where the money is going!
Manchester Mayor Ted Gatsas is making some headway in his effort to hold the refugee-charitable-complex accountable to the taxpayers. He could make more if he got additional help from New Hampshire’s top elected officials.
At Gatsas’ request, the governor and Executive Council voted to table for two weeks four federal contracts to charities that resettle and provide services to refugees in New Hampshire. The charities are the International Institute of New England and Lutheran Social Services. The tabling was done to give Gatsas more time to find out from the charities and from federal officials how the money is being spent.
Gatsas wants to know this because refugees are imposing a burden on city services, and the mayor has concluded that the city cannot afford to accept the hundreds of new refugees-in-need of services the International Institute and Washington plan to bring to Manchester. Though he has explained this to the institute and the federal government, which work together to move refugees here from overseas, they refuse to give the city a breather by settling refugees elsewhere for a while.
The council’s move buys Gatsas a few weeks, which is not a lot of time, considering that this continual influx of poor people who need public aid has been a problem in the city for more than a decade. It would help if the state’s congressional delegation would make a dedicated — and public — effort to help Gatsas solve this problem.
It’s not anti-immigrant, anti-refugee or anti-charity to back the mayor’s call for a temporary stay on refugee resettlement in the city. It’s pro-taxpayer. No one is asking that the city be off-limits to people from other countries who need a new start. All Gatsas wants is some time for the city to make sure that those who are already here can support themselves before the next group arrives.
Many other city leaders (not necessarily the elected ones who seem too chicken generally) have asked for the same right, but no one so doggedly as Gatsas.
New readers: Type ‘Manchester’ into our search function for several years of background on the problems there.