Two years before I started writing RRW, Utica, NY was dubbed the ‘town that loves refugees’ by the United Nations. They even had some propaganda show they took on the road to embarrass other cities into ‘welcoming’ refugees just as Utica had!
Now (11 years later) Utica has all sorts of problems.
Here in January 2015 we reported on the school system there suing the state of New York for more money. Why? Refugee overload!
The school system can’t handle the numbers of refugees who speak over 40 languages in their schools.
From the Wall Street Journal:
Utica officials are grappling with high poverty rates, rising enrollment and big deficits.
Now, just a week or so ago, the school system lost a lawsuit filed by six refugee teenagers who claim they weren’t permitted to attend high school there.
Here is what the NY Times said about the case (by the way, typical of mainstream media reports on refugees, the NYT implies that the refugees simply made their way to Utica from the third world without explaining that the city was targeted as a resettlement site by the federal government and its contractors***!):
The Utica City School District settled a lawsuit on Thursday over its treatment of young refugees, who, the suit charged, were being excluded from the city’s lone high school because of their age and because they did not speak English.
The lawsuit, filed last year on behalf of six refugees by the New York Civil Liberties Union and Legal Services of Central New York, claimed that Utica shunted refugees who were older than 16 into lesser alternatives to high school, like a G.E.D. program only for English-language learners. New York law provides the right to a free public education until age 21.
Similar allegations, that refugee children are being excluded from public schools, have been leveled at districts elsewhere around the state and across the country.
Utica, in central New York, has become a magnet in recent years for those escaping persecution in their home countries. Today, nearly one out of six city residents is a refugee, according to the Civil Liberties Union.
Message to towns considering welcoming refugees—They do not bring economic boom times! Refugees bring poverty and social and cultural strife!
Special treatment for special people!
Further confirming that Utica has a problem with refugee overload, the White House has singled out Utica’s refugee teen population for $2 million worth of summer jobs! What about American kids who need summer jobs?
From Syracuse.com:
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Utica is among 11 communities nationwide that will share $21 million in grants for summer jobs programs aimed at helping disadvantaged youth, the White House and U.S. Department of Labor said Monday.
Utica will receive almost $2 million to help 400 students in the city’s refugee population receive summer work experience and part-time jobs the rest of the year, White House officials said.
Again, think about the BIG LIE that refugees will help your struggling city. They won’t! The only money they will bring in to your town is the money Washington throws the city through myriad welfare programs—food stamps, medicaid, section 8 housing, and now funding for summer jobs. Washington doesn’t grow money on trees! The taxpayers of America are propping up refugee saturated cities!
If you live in newly targeted refugee placement cities—Rutland, VT, Reno, NV, Missoula, MT and Ithaca, NY (and more!)—think long and hard if you want to be like Utica, NY some day!
Click here for our Utica archive.
*** The resettlement contractor in Utica is the Mohawk Valley Resource Center and that is a subcontractor of Baltimore-based Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (one of the US State Department’s top nine refugee contractors).