For those of you in cities and states contemplating whether to ‘welcome’ refugees, remember this: Once you have set up a program, there is no stopping it. The federal government looks to see if your community has a particular ethnic group growing and you then will get more of them. (Obviously, even if you have had a terror attack as St. Cloud did!)
LOL! The feds want the refugees to be with their own folks, their own kind of people (never mind that that seems a bit racist to me!).
Since I was having fun with numbers, see my previous post about how Somalis are being resettled at the fastest rate in US history, I thought I would have a look at where the 334 Somalis were resettled in Minnesota in the last 2 months. So, here we go (Wrapsnet.org). Top two in red.
Burnsville (3)
Chaska (1)
Fairbault (1) typo?
Faribault (29)
Inver Grove Heights (6)
Mankato (4)
Marshall (11)
Minneapolis (164)
North Mankato (2)
Owatonna (2)
Rochester (15)
St. Cloud (57)
St. Joseph (1)
St. Paul (26)
Waite Park (1)
Willmar (11)
Many Somalis find work in meatpacking plants (which are luring them to the state!). When I made my summer swing to visit many meatpacking/manufacturing towns overrun with refugees, I stopped at a rest stop near Rochester, MN and I was shocked to see Muslim women praying on the lawn of the rest stop in the middle of lovely farm country stretching from Wisconsin to Minnesota. I said to myself, I guess I am in Minnesota and my East Coast neighbors would not believe this!
One more thing, this story floating around over the last few days says Minnesota will get 2,500 total refugees this year (we assume they are using the standard fiscal year as we do). At the rate of Somalis we are reporting here, that means that just over 2,000 of the 2,500 would be Somali. (If Trump doesn’t step in on January 21 and cut off the flow from Islamic terror-linked countries.)
By the way, most of our Somali refugees come through Kenya so I hope Trump’s people aren’t blindsided by that! Somalis are Somalis wherever in the world we find them.
***Update*** I just remembered this post I wrote in 2015 when I looked back for ten years at all the towns in Minnesota seeded with Somalis, click here.