Refugee Resettlement Watch’s year in review

Happy New Year to one and all! 

I can’t believe RRW will be six years old this year!  Time flies when you are having fun!  I don’t know that much has changed with the refugee program/legal immigration (from our point of view!) in the last five years, but you surely are more informed.   I’m looking forward to many more years ahead as a blogger (assuming our free speech isn’t killed in the next four years) and might even write a book about why this program needs to be reformed or completely abolished.

WordPress kindly sent us a review for 2012 (it is the first time I’ve seen this) and here are some facts they reported about RRW:

~ We had about a quarter of a million visitors this year.  The largest numbers were referred to us by facebook. (But, sorry folks I haven’t figured out how to use our facebook page effectively.  Others of you must be kindly putting our links on facebook—thanks!).

We had visitors from 193 countries.  The largest numbers (since Feb. 2012 when wordpress began keeping these stats) were, of course, from the US, Canada and the UK.  But rounding out the top ten were Australia, India, Sweden, Malaysia, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, and Germany (in that order).

~  We posted 458 new posts and increased our overall number of posts to 4,417.

Here are the top posts of all time (NO!  this is not Somali Watch, but it sure looks like it based on which posts are the most viewed!):

1. Although not a post per se, our fact sheets were number one!  (26,240 views).  We need to update this for you!

2. How did we get so many Somali refugees—the numbers are telling  September 2008 (23,602 views)

3. Asylum seekers head for Israel    January 2009 (12,693 views)

4. Muslim immigration killing Sweden  March 2009 (10,967 views)

5. Why so many Somalis in Minneapolis?  January 2011  (10,959 views)

6.  Somali Migration to Maine: it’s the welfare magnet, stupid   November 2009 (7,185 views)

7. State Department:  Possibly tens of thousands of Somalis in the US illegally   November 2008 (5,394 views)

8. Holy Cow! Now 40 young Somalis are missing in Minnesota  November 2008  (5,149 views)

9. How many refugees and from what countries  May 2008 (4,760 views)

10. Canada refugee problems and programs March 2008  (3,790 views)

You also might want to keep an eye on the TOP POSTS (see right hand sidebar) every day.  It is very interesting to see what readers find most interesting on a daily basis.

We still have work to do!  In addition to updating our fact sheet, our blog roll needs review and updating, and some of the pages need to be deleted or kept up, but I must admit it is much more fun simply to bring you the news almost every day while that ‘housekeeping’ type of work is so boring!

Thanks for reading Refugee Resettlement Watch, don’t get discouraged, keep sending us story ideas, and have a Happy New Year!

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