Only the people living there will decide….
Update August 1st: More here on the cancellation of the opportunity for citizens to learn what refugee resettlement might mean for their towns.
Update July 29th: Public meeting cancelled—no surprise! Read all about it here. Keep this information below if your town becomes a target!
Forget what you hear about local communities having no say, whether tiny historic Dover or surrounding towns will become new resettlement sites for Africans, Asians and Middle Easterners will all depend on the turnout and the questions asked (and answers given!) at an upcoming public meeting scheduled for Dover city hall August 13th, 7 p.m.
The US State Department, the Office of Refugee Resettlement (in HHS) (yes, the same agency moving the illegal alien children around the country) and their contractors and subcontractors are running into “pockets of resistance” in already overloaded communities around the country and are out scouting for new fresh territory (like Athens, GA as well).
The federal government likes to intimidate (bully!) communities with this notion that they decide (from Washington) where to move the literally over one hundred thousand “refugees” entering the US every year, but they won’t move them to new communities where its citizens demand answers to the all important questions: Who pays for all of this? Where will they work? Who is going to pay for all the children’s education? Do we have enough low-cost subsidized housing for our own people? What other social services will they require? How many foreign language interpreters are available in our criminal justice system? Can our health department handle a flood of mental health problems and communicable diseases? (HIV-AIDS and TB cases are admitted to the US in the refugee program) When will it stop?
In answer to that last question, it won’t! Once a seed community is established the contractors are paid by the head to bring in the family members. At that point, if some in your community raise a warning flag, they will be called racists, xenophobes and bigots—and just plain cruel to oppose reuniting the poor families.
If you don’t believe me about that–that it will never end—just ask the Mayors of Lewiston, Maine, Manchester, NH, Amarillo, Texas, Lynn, Massachusetts and Springfield, Massachusetts.
Before I go any further, here is the news I heard yesterday: First from The Granite Grok (3,000 to go to Dover!), a New Hampshire blog (hat tip: Richard) and then here in Foster’s Daily Democrat (hat tip: Joanne).
To prepare for this public meeting (you have 18 days!). This is what I would do (in no particular order):
* Call the mayors in those other New England towns where the community wants the flow stopped. Maybe one or two would even come to your public meeting! And, by the way, some elected officials in Dover or surrounding towns must have quietly suggested that the community would be open to this resettlement site. Find out if that is so, and identify them.
* Learn everything you can about the federal government’s refugee program (start with our fact sheet). Local taxpayers are definitely on the hook for most “services” needed by refugees after the first 8 months.
* Review the questions we wanted answered in Hagerstown, MD in 2007. We, in rural Maryland, were to be a new site, but the State Department killed the plan after the public meeting. As I said then, and still say, if the refugee plan for your community is a good one, they should be able to sell it to Dover by answering all the questions citizens have!
Blogger Skip Murphy has some questions to ask as well!
* In your research you will learn that the State Department is trying to resettle 50,000 Congolese (announced May 2013) 2,630 so far this fiscal year , but they won’t just resettle Congolese to Dover and surrounding towns. You will get a mix of Muslims and other religions/cultures among Iraqis, Somalis, Burmese and Bhutanese (just naming the top four right now) making the language problems even greater for your school system.
* Learn all you can about the supposed non-profit contractors. Know that there is a ‘pocket of resistance’ in Manchester and that since Dover is less than 100 miles from Manchester, it is now targeted for the overflow. (100 miles is a magic number for the State Department reuniting families).
By the way, the contractor identified in the Foster’s Daily Democrat article—Organization for Refugees and Immigrant Success—began in 2005 as the Somali Bantu Community Association funded by the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement. This is your typical George Soros strategy to spin off other small groups with new names both to confuse people and to make it look like there is a huge movement.
History of ORIS
The Somali Bantu Community Association (SBCA) was a non-profit organization formed in 2005 by a group of Somali Bantu refugees living in the United States. The group, which was funded by the US Department of Refugee Resettlement, assisted refugees in integrating into American culture. In 2011, SBCA reformed as the Organization for Refugee and Immigrant Success (ORIS), expanding the original mission, as well as increasing and diversifying the staff and board members. Today, our ten-person staff represents six countries and speaks twenty languages.
ORIS has no Form 990’s on file with guidestar, but here are their government grants (you have to type their name in the search window). Here are their other funders. I’m guessing they are also affiliated with one of the big federal contractors, but don’t have the time to do the research at the moment (but you do!).
* This is an important election year and you have some hot races in NH—make this an election-year issue for sure in the US Senate race!
* In advance! Learn about the format of the meeting and study the Delphi Technique! It is a public meeting strategy that government agencies (and the Left!) use to direct the outcome of a meeting to a goal they have predetermined. Be ready to defeat any meeting strategy you identify. And, film the meeting!!!
You need to make sure someone is there for the US government (preferably the US State Department) or you won’t get all your answers. And, this is really important, and I can’t emphasize it enough—do your research ahead of time so they can’t give you a snow-job!
* Set up a blog or facebook page (right now!) to share what you learn with your fellow citizens. The feds don’t like publicity! Letters to the editor help too!
And, I’m sure you can think of a few more things to do—but mostly stay calm and stick to the economic and social facts involved with importing poverty (from anywhere!) to your town.
You will have some hotheads, but don’t worry about them, you gotta have them in any political controversy.
The religious LEFT activists will show up with their hotheads too, to call anyone who questions them racists, ignore them.
Here is what fellow RRW writer Judy said in that 2007 post on the Delphi Technique:
…..those who raise questions like the ones on this blog — questions of health, culture, money, resources, policy, etc. — will be cast as the enemies of everything good and noble. But our questions are valid ones, and we want to make sure they are answered, no matter what is done to make us look bad.
Check out our categories, this post definitely falls in the “community destabilization” category because that is what is happening here and across the country—the open-borders (anti-borders!) Left and the federal bureaucracy are in the business of bringing instability to unsuspecting American towns and cities (ala Saul Alinsky, Cloward and Piven).