Thanks to everyone who has sent me one version or another of this story about calls for refugee resettlement moratoriums in Springfield, Mass, Lewiston, Maine, and Manchester, NH.*** Regular readers here know the problems in those three New England cities well, so it is not news to us.
However….
What is news is that the news (mainstream media) is actually paying attention and making connections! I don’t know which came first, the Fox News story (Fox does credit AP), or the AP story.
But, I’m thrilled to see the word “moratorium” used other than on the pages of RRW!
I haven’t enough time to analyze the articles for you, so please read them! There is one thing that caught my eye, however, that needs to be mentioned. The US State Department and its contractors choose resettlement cities with virtually no input from the locals (elected or otherwise), any reference to “stakeholders” usually means only FRIENDLY stakeholders (for the record, I hate that word)!
Once they have established a seed community of certain ethnic groups they then throw up their hands and say—what can we do? Families must be reunited and we can’t stop refugees from moving where there are ethnic enclaves of their kind of people. You see their cop-out in these stories when State Department spokesman Daniel Langenkamp says this:
Such requests [for a moratorium—ed] are rare, said Daniel Langenkamp, a department spokesman.
“We make every effort to work with local officials and other stakeholders to ensure the resettlement of refugees is acceptable,” he said. [If everything went so well there would never have been a RRW!—ed]
The Department, he said, does not place refugees unless an area is equipped to handle them. [LOL!–ed] The government’s work with refugees in Springfield is mostly about family reunification, and it cannot keep families from moving there if they are placed elsewhere, he said.
He doesn’t mention that other locales have asked for moratoriums as well. I’m thinking of other “pockets of resistance” like Clarkston, Georgia and Amarillo, TX among others.
Note to any city contemplating “welcoming” refugees, remember this! Once a seed community is established, the extended family comes, and there is no stopping it! Any elected official calling for a slow-down or outright moratorium will be demonized!
See my ten reasons why a MORATORIUM is needed! —all the more important now that the border is being overwhelmed with mostly teenaged boys seeking “asylum.”
*** Search RRW for each of those three cities and find dozens of posts (spanning several years) on problems in each.