Since I was on the subject of refugee health and university professors in my last post, here is a story from Canada (one of few stories not discussing Islamic terrorism and immigration!).
By the way, if you didn’t know, the US refugee program admits refugees with HIV and we supply their meds in your local health departments. I had forgotten, but we have a fairly large archive on HIV and refugees, click hereto learn more.
Renu Mandhane, the program director International Human Rights Program at the U of Toronto: Canada should provide asylum and medical care to HIV positive refugees.
Canadian refugee and resettlement policies are negatively affecting would-be refugee claimants abroad who have HIV or are at high risk of contracting the virus, a University of Toronto program has alleged.
The International Human Rights Program at the university’s faculty of law is launching a research project to advocate for changes on the immigration policy that has created the “designated countries of origin” list.
[….]
“Having HIV when you’re a refugee living in a camp bordering Syria is potentially a death sentence,” she said. “Canada can play an important role in the global fight against HIV by providing asylum to people affected or at high risk, and provide them with access to medical treatment.”
The research project will focus on Mexico and Syria as case studies. Syria is not on the list of countries deemed to be safe, but there are many refugees on its borders that need equal attention due to the vulnerability surrounding them, said Mandhane.
[….]
The program, which recently got a $75,000 grant from Elton John AIDS Foundation, is expected to conduct field research this summer and come up with the findings next fall.
See our Canada category here, and our Health issues category here.
There really isn’t much new and exciting in this story, but I’m posting it because I was interested in the small number of refugees going to Vermont, after all, Vermont’s senior Senator Patrick Leahy has, over the years, been a big pusher for more refugees and more stuff for them.
UVM psychology professor Karen Fondacaro will be busy with her Bhutanese torture victims. Here with co-founder of NESTT (New England Survivors of Torture and Trauma). http://www.uvm.edu/~psych/?Page=news/NESTT_walk_2010.html
We have had many many reports of Bhutanese (really Nepali people) who were living in UN camps on the edge of Nepal until we took 80,000 of them to America in the last 6 years or so and who are now in the US in need of mental health programs. See our Bhutanese archivewith many posts on the high suicide rate among this group of refugees, some want to go home. (BTW, Reader CW recently suggested a the creation of a ‘Repatriation Fund’for any refugee, unhappy with America, to be allowed to go home.)
From Kentucky.com (I wondered if a Kentucky publication reported this story as a hint to start mental health counseling in KY for its burgeoning refugee population):
BURLINGTON, Vt. — The scars Ajuda Thapa carries today are emotional — the product of years living in fear, being forced from her home in Bhutan and enduring the murder of her husband during 19 stateless years before she arrived in Vermont as a refugee.
Like many others like her here, she’s helping ease the emotional trauma she suffered through a special program at the University of Vermont for the region’s refugees.
[….]
But the safety she has now didn’t do anything for the anxiety, depression and lingering emotional scars that threatened to turn her into a recluse hiding in her home. So her doctor referred her to Connecting Cultures, a program at the University of Vermont that has helped ease the emotional trauma of hundreds of others like her.
Thapa regularly attends meetings where she talks about what she experienced.
“It helps a lot to get relief from that kind of mental pain,” said Thapa, an ethnic Nepali who became stateless after leaving Bhutan in 1992.
Here are some numbers for Vermont:
Connecting Cultures organizers have found that about 65 percent of the estimated 7,000 refugees living in greater Burlington from more than two dozen countries had suffered some form of torture. [Dr. Fondacaro will be very busy!]
[….]
Thapa has struggled to deal with the emotional trauma that comes with the nearly two decades of fear and loss she experienced after being forced from her home. She is one of an estimated 1,300 Bhutanese refugees who have been resettled in Vermont, the largest single refugee nationality in the state.
Those are paltry numbers compared to many other states…
There surely needs to be a national campaign to persuade Vermonters to be more “welcoming” and to accept more refugees there, after all that would only be fair!
ORR Director Eskinder Negash has penned his last ‘Year in Review’ at the federal agency’s website.
Negash, a former refugee, came to the federal job from his previous employment as a federal ‘non-profit’ contractor. I’m guessing he will be replaced with yet another contractor moving from grant recipient to becoming the giver of federal grants and contracts. Photo: http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2014/07/top-obama-official-defends-open-borders-tells-conference-jesus-was-a-refugee/
According to Ryan Lovelace writing at National Review Online, Negash resigned his job on the eve of a Congressional hearing on the placement of Unaccompanied Alien Children in the wake of the border surge this past summer.
Here is how Negash’s letter introducing the ‘Year in Review’ begins. [This will be the first of several posts on the review that I plan to write, starting with this one about the “children.”–ed]
Dear colleagues and friends,
In FY2014, the United States welcomed refugees from 67 countries across the globe, and for the second year in a row, the highest admissions were from refugees from Iraq and Burma, accounting for more than 56,000 (81%) of all arrivals. Iraqi refugees continued to suffer from secondary displacement—and in some cases, tertiary displacement—as the civil war in Syria rages on.
For the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), two thousand fourteen was a historic year, with a mass influx of unaccompanied children from Central America that totaled close to 58,000 children by year’s end—more than twice the number received in FY2013, and nearly the sum of the previous five years combined.
This influx of children expanded the overall population served by ORR and its partners to approximately 185,000 new arrivals in Fiscal Year 2014, comprised of refugees and asylees, Special Immigrant Visa holders, Cuban/Haitian Entrants and Parolees, victims of Human Trafficking, and Unaccompanied Children (UC). [See Negash’s previous ‘Year in Review’and note that we are up 40,000 or so “served” by ORR—ed]
From the more detailed report for 2014 (emphasis is mine):
Unaccompanied Children
In FY2014, the unanticipated rate and referral numbers of Unaccompanied Children (UC) surpassed program planning, physical capacity and staffing, and stretched funding authorization at an historic rate for the United States. In total, ORR placed 57,496 children in 124 facilities across 15 states. In May and June alone, ORR received 19,628 children for placement, representing 34% of the annual total for FY2014.
During the height of the summer influx, ORR coordinated with the Department of Defense (DoD) to utilize three DoD installations (Fort Sill in OK, Port Hueneme Naval Base in Ventura, CA, and Joint Base San Antonio (Lackland) in San Antonio, TX). ORR and its partners worked tirelessly throughout the summer influx, addressing emergent medical issues and implementing protocols to prevent backlogs in placements, to ensure that the children received appropriate medical screening and care. Faced with unprecedented numbers of children arriving at DHS border patrol stations faster than space could be found in the network to accommodate them, the team worked tirelessly and creatively around the clock to clear the backlogs at over-crowded border patrol stations, and move the children quickly and safely into appropriate shelter beds. ORR is grateful for the assistance of HHS, DHS, and the White House, and most importantly, to the Department of Defense which was instrumental in helping ORR attend to the critical protection needs of the children, by providing temporary shelter on the three bases.
In simple numbers,
~two-thirds of children referred to ORR in FY2014 were male
~21% were 12 years of age or younger [79% are teens—ed]
~96% of all referrals came from three countries: Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala
~Overall bed capacity increased by more than 70%
Looking ahead to FY2015, it is difficult to project how many children may arrive, but ORR staff and partners are working diligentlyto create surge capacity and medical plans; continue streamlining program policies and procedures; reform post-release and home study services; ensure adequate staffing and oversight, and remain flexible to accommodate seasonal patterns of referrals that are subject to change at any time.
Look for future posts on the ‘Review.’
Go here for all of our posts going back several years on ‘unaccompanied minors.’ By the way, first they were ‘unaccompanied minors,’ then ‘unaccompanied alien minors,’ then they became ‘unaccompanied alien children,’ and finally now ‘unaccompanied children’ as the political correctness police dropped the word “alien.” They are decidedly NOT refugees which is what Obama and the contractors are working really hard to make you believe.
It is Monday morning and one of the first things I did was look for news about how today’s anti-Islamification march by PEGIDA was shaping up. I’m such a cynic and so this news from NBC yesterday seems (to me) like a very easy way for Chancellor Angela Merkel to shut up those pesky demonstrators—just claim that the government is shutting it down for the ‘Right-wings’ own good (ironically to save their lives from Islamic terrorists or their Left-wing enablers).
Last week 25,000 turned out in Dresden, the highest number so far! Photo: http://www.thelocal.de/20150113/inside-dresdens-pegida-march
Actually when you think about it, if Islamic terrorists should (God forbid) kill organizers of the anti-Muslim immigration movement, the civil war might come sooner than it surely will later.
German authorities canceled a march by the anti-Islam PEGIDA movement in Dresden due to a “concrete threat” against the group’s weekly gathering, officials said Sunday.
PEGIDA — or “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West” — drew 25,000 people at its last rally in eastern Germany. While some of the PEGIDA protesters are believed to be right-wing extremists, the majority are not believed to be. The group’s protests, fueled by fears that the country could be overrun by Muslims and other immigrants, have alarmed German officials.
Dresden Police said in a statement Monday that it had received information relating to a “concrete danger” in connection with PEGIDA’s weekly rally and that it was banning the demonstration and public gatherings in the city for Monday.
“Attackers were called on to intermix with the PEGIDA demonstrators in order to commit a killing of single members of the PEGIDA organizing team,” Dresden police president Dieter Kroll said in a statement. “We have to act on the assumption that there is an immediate danger to the lives of all participants in the demonstration.”
What do you bet another threat is called in next week!
Go here for all of our previous coverage of Dresden. Our extensive archive going back several years on Germany’s immigration mess is here.
Click here for more on the ‘Invasion of Europe’ generally.
On Friday’s broadcast of his HBO political talk show, comedian Bill Maher channeled Breitbart News on the threat that radical Islam poses to European countries, along with the dangers sharia law represents to Western freedoms.
What follows is a discussion, including about the recent controversy surrounding terror expert Steve Emerson’s exaggeration on Fox Newsabout the Muslim population level in Birmingham, England.
Maher cited these facts, then said, “Sometimes in a melting pot, people don’t melt.”
Maher went on to say, “I don’t want to live in a world where we can’t wear a mini skirt walking down the street… You don’t have to be a right-wing nut to worry” about radical Muslim threats.
“We know that there are some Muslims who want to take over” and eliminate our culture and laws, Maher concluded.
Muslim population levels
On that Birmingham Muslim population question (Maher says Birmingham is 25% Muslim, I’ve seen 20%)…. Last month I wrote an extensive paper (yet to be published) on the refugee program and Muslim immigration and during my research I concluded that the Muslim population of a city or a country only needed to get to about 3% before the Islamic supremacists became emboldened and began to push their sharia compliance agenda.
What I realized also is that we really do not have a good handle on how many Muslims are permanent residents of the United States. Someone must do a very serious and thorough analysis soon!
We are probably around 1% as a country with pockets higher than 3%. Pew (in 2010) said France was at 7.5%, but all of the recent estimates I’ve seen put their Muslim population at 10%.
