As of March 31, we were 6 months into the 2016 fiscal year which began on Oct. 1, 2015.
Since you all were interested in the Syrian numbers so far I thought I should update you on the Somali migration to America. But, first check out my post of September 2008 where I chronicled over 30 years of Somali resettlement to America. Notice that the highest resettlement years occurred in the Bush Administration.
I want to make the point again—once the UN and the US State Department get rolling on a specific ethnic group, the flow into America continues for decades! A reporter asked me the other day: if we blow up a place, aren’t we responsible for the people? We didn’t blow up Somalia, so why are we responsible for their mass importation to America?
As of the end of 2015 we have admitted 127,337 Somalis through the Refugee Admissions Program. This figure does not include successful asylum seekers or those in the US illegally. Do we continue taking Somalis for decades to come?
This year FY2016 we are on target for 9,000!
Checking the State Department data, I see we admitted 4,521 Somalis in the first half of FY2016. Here is where they went:
Here are the top ten states for Somali Muslim resettlement:
Minnesota (563)***
New York (410)
Arizona (301)
Ohio (292)
Texas (276)
Pennsylvania (222)
Washington (214)
Massachusetts (211)
Missouri (204)
California (176)
*** If you are thinking a much higher number is coming to Minnesota, you are probably right. If you go to page 16 in a recent ORR “Key Indicators,” you will see that Minnesota, by a whopping margin (thousands!), gets the most ‘secondary migrants.’ That means that when resettled elsewhere, the Somalis are almost immediately high-tailing it to MN to be with their own kind of people.