The answer is no, but there isn’t any reason it shouldn’t. It is only about 75 miles from the state’s largest resettlement site—Milwaukee. (Any town within a hundred miles of a federal contractor’s office is fair game).
Janesville, Wisconsin is Speaker Paul Ryan’s hometown and a reader asked me recently, that since he is so gung-ho for refugees to come to America, does he have them where he lives?
Maybe a few have moved from other resettlement cities in Wisconsin—Milwaukee or Oshkosh, but there is no federally funded resettlement office there.
Since I checked the data for our inquisitive reader, here are a few facts about the numbers going to Wisconsin.
I started my search in the fall of 2008 (just as Obama was being elected) and ended the first of May.
Wisconsin ‘welcomed’ 7,143 in those nearly 8 years. That is a small number compared to the the big states like Texas which resettles that many in one year.
In Ryan’s 1st District, none went to Janesville, but a tiny number, about 30 went to Waukesha, just outside of Milwaukee. Only a handful went to Racine.
Of the 7,143 who went to the state of Wisconsin, the breakdown is as follows: Burmese (4,029), Iraqis (1,083) and Somalis (811), in addition to smaller numbers of many other ethnic groups.
According to the Washington Post the impact on his family might not be so great anyway since his kids all attend private Catholic School.
Schools are where ‘welcoming’ towns first experience the cultural and economic pressure a few years after opening their doors to the UN/US State Department Refugee Admissions Program.
What? No mosque, no interfaith group as we learned about this morning in Charleston, WV pushing for Syrians to be seeded into Janesville?
So, why not Janesville? Maybe there is a cheese factory nearby in need of cheap immigrant laborers?
Endnote: Republican Paul Nehlen is hoping to upset Ryan in the upcoming primary there on August 9th.
