That is what the Manchester Union Leaderis reporting. I’m thinking 90,000 Syrians is way high especially in the age of Trump. Nevertheless, here is the story. It is not clear to me (maybe it is to you!) what the motion before the mayor and council would actually do, so I’ll just stick to reporting on the stunning numbers that supposedly came from the FBI.
Alderman Keith Hirschmann originally proposed the motion, saying the board would empower Mayor Ted Gatsas in any efforts to stop a potential influx of 500 refugees from Syria.
Manchester Police Chief Nick Willard said he got the numbers from the FBI. BTW, Republican Senator Ayotte, to Willard’s right in this photo, lost her Senate seat. For our purposes it didn’t matter, because I have not seen her lift a finger to slow the Refugee Admissions Program (too close to Senators McCain and Graham?)
That figure came from Manchester Police Chief Nick Willard, who said he was told by members of the FBI that 500 Syrian refugees could be headed to New Hampshire.
“I was told during discussions with the FBI that 90,000 Syrian refugees are headed to the U.S., and 500 of them will be headed to New Hampshire,” said Willard.
Willard said he had no further information about the expected influx, including when or where in the state the refugees would be headed.
The motion was defeated.
Here is what one of our long time readers told the Union Leader, a sentiment shared by many in cities and states across America!
Jeannine Richardson said Friday, November 18, 2016 at 8:21 pm
Those who voted to host more refugees better find a way to house our homeless first and look into the burden on our schools, Medicaid, subsidized housing and job marker [market] for people with no skills before thinking this is a good idea for Manchester. Last family we hosted (like that PC term) are receiving $1200 in food stamps per month while we have soup kichens [kitchens] and religious groups having to feed American citizens in Manchester.
– See more at: http://www.unionleader.com/article/20151118/NEWS0606/151119198#sthash.Cz5PiKjA.dpuf
We have a huge archive on Manchester where the mayor worked for years to try to slow the flow to the refugee overloaded city.
And, if you hadn’t noticed, New Hampshire is turning (politically) blue and I maintain much of that has to do with the influx of refugees and immigrants to the state.
Easily one of my greatest concerns about the whole resettlement process in the United States, is how can there be such widely divergent views on whether refugees have brought a “robust” economy and multicultural nirvana to a community, or not! Read the 2005 UN propaganda report used to entice (embarrass) other cities into ‘welcoming’ refugees. http://www.unhcr.org/publications/refugeemag/426f4c772/refugees-magazine-issue-138-town-loves-refugees.html Is there no real investigative journalist willing to go to Utica, spend a little time, talk to everyone involved and report an accurate story about what has happened in the ‘Town that Loves Refugees’(according to a 2005 United Nations propaganda campaign).
This is one more in those warm and fuzzy stories about how everything is copacetic in Utica. Of course the election of Donald Trump is the news hook for a reporter to once again tell the ‘good’ news about rebuilding cities with refugees.
Take a side trip now to Politico’s county by county breakdown and see that Trump actually won most of New York state including Oneida County (Utica) by a large margin. Presumably Trump’s views on refugees and immigration are in line with the largest numbers of voters in most of the state. Surely if the ‘good’ news on Utica was true after 11 years of beating that drum, the citizens there should all be on the side of more refugees. They apparently are not!
Back to Utica and yet another account of how refugees have supposedly brought boom times to the struggling city.
From the Gloucester Times:
UTICA — More than anywhere else in New York, this city in the Mohawk Valley has embraced people fleeing strife-torn countries.
[….]
But, now, Donald Trump’s election as president is stoking fear among refugees and their advocates, given his anti-immigrant rhetoric and focus on curtailing immigration.
A wall proposed for the Mexican border was a rhetorical fixture of Trump’s campaign, and he’s called refugees a “Trojan horse” whose ranks are infiltrated by “terrorists.”
“It is concerning to us,” said Shelly Callahan, director of the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees, which coordinates the resettlement of newcomers here. [Mohawk Valley Resource Center is a subcontractor of primary federal resettlement contractor Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service—ed]
[….]
Over the past three decades, Utica has rolled out the welcome mat to an estimated 16,000 refugees.
Here we go again with Chobani Yogurt changing America to supply its labor needs (with the help of a fake ‘charity’):
In Utica, foreign-born people and their children account for about a quarter of the city’s population of 62,000, earning it the United Nations’ distinction as “the town that loves refugees.”
Refugees represent a new pool of immigrant labor, which Callahan said has been a major asset for regional businesses looking to expand or simply trying to fill jobs shunned by workers already living here.
In some cases, businesses that hire refugees are targeted.
One upstate employer that has taken on some refugees living in Utica, the Chobani yogurt plant in Chenango County, has been sharply criticized in recent weeks by a right-wing, pro-Trump website, Breitbart, for hiring Muslim immigrants.
Those reports have unleashed racist rants against Chobani and its founder, Turkish immigrant Hamdi Ulukaya.
[….]
Democrat Assemblyman Anthony Brinidisi: we have “robust” small business growth. But would someone please do a real unbiased economic and social impact study about Utica. LOL! I should do a post just on their favorite words, robust is near the top of the list. Everything from business start-ups to security screening is robust!
In the last decades of the 20th century, Utica shed more than 20,000 jobs with the closings of two nearby General Electric plants, Griffiss Air Force Base in nearby Rome and a Lockheed Martin plant.
Its population of 100,410 people in 1910 had shriveled to 60,000 by 2010.
“Without them, we would have a city with less population, less cultural diversity and not as robust in terms of small business growth as it has been over the past couple of decades,” Brindisi said in an interview.
More here.
I have all sorts of questions and suspect that some economic growth (if it does exist) may well be that federal welfare dollars (remember when Nancy Pelosi famously said food stamps boost the economy!) are flowing to Utica with the refugees which is not real growth but just a redistribution of wealth from one group of taxpayers elsewhere to supply social services for the refugee flood to Utica.
And, here is why I’m posting this story:
There is not one bit of anything negative in here about what changes have been brought to Utica that are not welcome. Reporter Joe Mahoneymust not know how to google! (And, this is why local newspapers are going belly-up! The NYT too!) Where is the mention of how the school system there had to sue the state for more money to manage all the kids in the school system?
You know what! Go back and look again at how red New York state is, here. Someone in New York should be writing a blog about the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program and pulling all this together!
Every time a federal resettlement contractor arrives in a new site and attempts to convince local taxpayers that the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program is a federal program that won’t cost local and state taxpayers anything, beware. Editor’s note: I was in Washington, DC yesterday for business and pleasure so only just now posted good comments from readers to my posts of Thursday. Sorry for the delay.
This op-ed at Chicago Monitorby Megan Waden has a few interesting nuggets I want you to see, and this final line sums up exactly why I do what I do and thus I agree whole-heartedly with its author:
When engaging in policy discussions to address the refugee admissions process, presenting a more comprehensive picture of the security clearance process and the resources provided throughout resettlement is critical.
My role at RRW for the last nearly 10 years has been to present a “more comprehensive picture” of how resettlement works and who is paying for it.
The writer begins by giving the refugee industry’s talking points about security screening, but you need to know that for the Syrian resettlement, the Obama Administration has reduced screening time down to 3 months. Megan is a graduate of the University of St Andrews, UK where she studied Human Geography. She volunteers with Heartland Alliance and the Pan African Association’s refugee resettlement programs in Chicago. In the future she hopes to pursue a Graduate Degree in Refugee Studies.
Then in this next section, I was stunned, flabbergasted, to see how much Illinois taxpayers have been ponying-up for refugee and immigrant “services.” You need to find out how much your state is spending. And, this below doesn’t even mention the cost of welfare payments and the cost of educating the kids!
(Editor: I split this paragraph in to segments for easier reading):
Agencies funded at the state level remain particularly vulnerable to the budget impasse in Illinois. The impasse has led to cuts for several services including the Immigrant Family Resource Program, which “assists immigrants in determining whether they are eligible for public benefits and enables the state to meet federally mandated language-access obligations***”. [They have a whole agency which determines if refugees/immigrants are eligible for welfare!—ed]
Funding was also cut for The New Americans Initiative, ending the program’s ‘citizenship application assistance and outreach’. Over 200 employees were laid off in the Refugee and Immigrant Services sector, as an additional 100 positions remain severely at risk. [Illinois had 300 employees doing this!—ed]
The Director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, Breandan Magee, has quoted over 102,000 clients this year as going without services as a result of these funding cuts.Non-state funded groups like the Syrian Community Network in Chicago, who provide resettlement services for Syrian refugees, try to fill that gap in state funding. But they have to rely on community donations to fund their training and other programs.
More here.
The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights is an activist group promoting open borders which we have mentioned often over the years. Click hereto see those posts.
***This reference to “federally mandated language-access obligations” is about a Clinton era EXECUTIVE ORDER that Bush could have rescinded but didn’t. Trump? It says that you, local and state taxpayers, must provide at your expense interpreters whenever refugees/immigrants have problems with any institution receiving federal funding for medical care, school systems, criminal justice system, etc. About the photo: Ahhhh! there is a degree in Refugee Studies! Will they hire me to be a guest lecturer?
