Arkansas, like West Virginia and Montana, has received very few refugees over the years, but all that will change with the Dept. of State’s (DOS) approval of a new resettlement agency that will ‘welcome’ 100 refugees beginning next month.
All of the new sites*** are needed because Obama has ‘determined’ that the US will admit a huge increase (to 110,000) in the number of refugees admitted to your towns and cities in FY2017.
The Obama DOS is on a crash program now to get as many placed in your towns as they can by Inauguration Day in January (in case Trump is elected) and place as many in the pipeline as they can making it more difficult for a new administration to put the breaks on.
There is only one entity that could slow the flow and they can do it next month and that is Congress (if there is a will)! Congress (not Obama!) has the ultimate power to DEFUND the large increase in the number of refugees coming in. These contractors, like this new one in Northwest Arkansas have virtually zero money of their own!
The story, here, and below demonstrates how impotent Arkansas’s governor is to do anything to stop the migration to the state.
From KATV Little Rock:
NORTHWEST ARKANSAS (TALK BUSINESS & POLITICS) — The questions surrounding refugees from the Middle East and other parts of the world will soon come to Arkansas as Canopy Northwest Arkansas works to bring 100 or more refugees from around the world to the region.
[….]
In response to news publicity about the global refugee crisis, concerned residents in Northwest Arkansas (NWA) began meeting in January and formed Canopy Northwest Arkansas, a 501(c)3 non-profit with the mission of settling refugees in NWA.
“We consulted with refugee agencies operating nationally and we learned that there’s a need for new communities to open up to refugees. So we started looking into what it might look like for refugees to come to NWA and what we found is that our community has an incredible capacity to welcome refugees and help them really thrive here,” said Emily Linn, director of Canopy Northwest Arkansas.
Linn cited the growing economy in NWA as a reason refugees would do well.
Here comes the poultry industry! Surely, the Chamber of Commerce is not far behind. (I always wonder if they tell the incoming refugees that they are going to a meat or poultry plant town).
“We have great jobs for folks who don’t even speak English, for example, in the manufacturing or poultry processing industry or agriculture. We also have great jobs and we have a need for people to come and work in very high skilled jobs,” she said. “For instance, we have a brand new hospital opening up in Springdale, Arkansas Children’s and the Washington Regional Hospital is growing and expanding, and there’s a need for very highly educated individuals as well, and so we have this wide variety of employment options.”
I keep seeing this nonsense about skilled labor in the refugee flow. It is bogus. If there are doctors and engineers etc. in the flow they must become re certified in the US which is a long and expensive process. The closest any refugee doctor will get to a hospital is scrubbing the floors at night.
Canopy is a subcontractor of LIRS (see my previous post this morning, here).
Canopy Northwest Arkansas partners with the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS), one of nine national resettlement agencies that contract with the State Department to run the refugee resettlement program. LIRS is the agency that will assign refugees to Canopy after the refugees go through an extensive screening process, sometimes lasting more than two years.
Continue reading here. I see no evidence, at least in this story, that there is any pocket of resistance in Northwest Arkansas.
***Here are some of the new sites we have learned about in recent weeks being set up to accommodate, among other ethnic groups, a large number of Syrian Sunni Muslims. We heard that there are 47 of these new target sites:
Asheville, NC
Rutland, VT
Reno, NV
Ithaca, NY
Missoula, MT
Aberdeen, SD
Charleston, WV
Fayetteville, AR
Blacksburg, VA
Pittsfield, MA
Northhampton, MA
Flint, MI
Bloomington, IN
Traverse City, MI
Watertown, NY (maybe)
I just created a new ‘tag’ and I should have done it a long time ago, will try to keep it up going forward—New resettlement sites. For new readers, here is the old list of sites. Apparently the feds are not updating the list because they likely don’t want you to know where all of the new offices are located. Secrecy is the watchword of refugee resettlement in America!