If you are following the refugee resettlement program closely you should occasionally visit the Refugee Processing Center for the data the US State Department is willing to allow the public to see.
They have taken away from public view one data table that we previously found interesting and that was the information on which nationalities were resettled in which city. That was very useful and they surely still track those numbers but are only available to special people who have a pass code to get in. Likewise they track the religions of refugees but again only friends of the refugee program are allowed to see those.
Before I get to those useful tables that you can still access, I noticed one more way to keep you in the dark. One table that you might think would be useful and which I initially directed readers to in my previous post (removed now) is one in which it lists which refugees went to which state, BUT, on closer examination, it is useless! Why? Because it only shows the processing country and the US state to which the refugee was resettled. Processing countries are virtually meaningless!
We don’t process refugees directly from Somalia yet we took in 9,000 Somalis in FY 2014 from all over the world apparently. If you do look at that data table, check out Minnesota to see what I mean—they list no Somalis going to MN last year (2014), but we know they did (see data table from Minnesota listing 977 Somalis arriving there as of August 31), we just don’t know how many were processed in Kenya, in Malta, in Thailand etc.
Go here for all the data tables available to the public, some updated for September 30th, and some, as of this writing, only updated to August 31. Don’t delay because these soon disappear down a black hole.
Somalis move up to the number three slot for the most number of refugees we resettled in FY2014.
(See all of the numbers for Somali resettlement we have compiled over the last 30 years, here).
Top five nationalities of refugees resettled in US in FY 2014 (from this map):
1) Iraq (19,769) the largest percentage will be Muslim
2) Burma (14,598) most will be Christians, other minority religions and some Muslims (update: a larger number than I originally assumed)
3) Somalia (9,000) Muslims (almost up to George Bush levels!)
4) Bhutan/Nepal (8,434) most will be Hindu, Buddhist, a few Christians
5) D.R. Congo (4,540) mostly Christians (update: some Muslims among them)
Remember we learned the other day that the Bhutan resettlement would soon end and be replaced by Syrian refugees who will be majority Muslim.
Top ten states receiving refugees in FY 2014 (I took these off the map so check it for me!):
1) Texas (7,211)
2) California (6,110)
3) New York (4,079)
4) Michigan (4,000)
5) Florida (3,519)
6) Arizona (2,963)
7) Ohio (2,812)
8) Pennsylvania (2,743)
9) Georgia (2,693)
10) Illinois (2,578)
North Carolina and Washington state are not far behind.
We have archived this information in two categories here at RRW: Refugee Statistics and Where to find information.
Just a reminder to states (like Wyoming!) and cities which will “welcome” refugees in FY2015, you will not get refugees just from certain countries, but will get a smattering from a wide variety of countries which will make it even more difficult to deal with the language problems in the schools, the health department and the criminal justice system. See the language stats by going here and clicking on ‘top ten languages.’