Editor: From time to time we post comments from readers that you might have missed where they were posted at a particular post. As regular readers know, I have been nagging you all to become more involved with what your Washington reps are doing because frankly, if the US Refugee Admissions Program is going to be trashed or reformed, it will be Congress that must do it (or it will be Congress’ Appropriations process that could slow it).
Trump can stop it in the short term, but it will take Congress to make the necessary longterm changes while Trump is in office. (We will be watching what he does in the first 30 days on this issue!)
I know you have little faith in Congress, but you must keep the pressure on!
In myprevious post, I reported on Rep. Brian Babin’s interview with Fox News.
Rep. Babin will need help in Congress.
Our reader, FloridaBuff, suggests becoming a Heritage Sentinel. The Heritage Foundation is playing a huge role in the Trump transition. Although because it is a jobs issue it should be a top concern, immigration/refugees is not a major priority for them. So, I did just sign up.
From FloridaBuff:
Ann – I agree with your recommendation to speak to Congress members. Another thing to do is encourage members to join the Heritage Action organization which now has 17,000 plus national conservative members focused on grassroots communications with Congress. You learn a lot about the process, and I personally have posted refugee issues on their internal member forum. It is free, and a great way to learn how Congress works. Every Monday they have a nationwide teleconference for a half hour at 5:30pm to discuss current issues. The only negative is that the issues selected are by Heritage Action (a spinoff of Heritage Foundation) thus Refugee Resettlement has never been on the priority list (yet). But learning how Congress works is valuable and you can apply that to your own discussions with your local Congress members. I recommend readers go and sign up for the Heritage Action Sentinel program at: http://heritageaction.com/
For more comments worth noting, click here. And for all of our recent posts on Congress see the tag ‘Where is Congress.’
December 28, 2016
You must watch Rep. Brian Babin of Texas skillfully deflect Fox News’ Ed Henry’s efforts to sucker him into some Christmas season mumbo jumbo about separating out and helping the good refugees coming in from the Syrian conflict. After you watch, send this video far and wide!(It only had 24 views early this morning).
Henry is sitting in for Tucker Carlson. It is too bad Carlson himself wasn’t there for this interview, because of anyone on Fox, Tucker ‘gets it’ about Muslim migration to Europe and to America.
Pay special attention around the 2:00 minute mark where Henry begins with something like: ‘you do want to help’ (something like that). Watch Henry’s face! And, don’t miss Rep. Babin calling on Donald Trump to “honor his promises!” (watch beginning around 3:45 for that comment).
(If the youtube video below doesn’t play for you, you can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHQw16iSc1M )
Stop Obama’s Trojan Horse!
See our Rep. Brian Babin archive by clicking here. The bill Babin mentions in the interview is one that Speaker Paul Ryan and the Republican leadership never allowed to come up for a vote. It effectively died with this past Congress. New bills will be submitted beginning in January.
You must read this book!
We previously mentioned the recently released blockbuster bookthat describes how after 9/11, the Bush Administration’s efforts to keep us safe yielded results and informed us about what the Islamists are working toward.
It is nothing short of world domination by Islam.
We need to believe what they say! (But even to the end of his Presidency, I’m not sure Bush believed them.)
I’m planning to give you some snippets going forward about what the interrogators learned from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who we have previously reportedspent informative years among us as a college student in North Carolina (read Richard Miniter’s Mastermind).
This is the second important point (for me) which I want to share from author James Mitchell (the first we reported earlier, that they would eventually overcome us through immigration and out-breeding us):
Lesson! When the Department of State welcomes an ethnic group to America expect the resettlement to be larger and longer than they initially said it would be.
We have followed the process of cleaning out UNHCR camps in Nepal of Bhutanese refugees ever since the Bush Administration said: ‘come on in’ we well take 60,000. This resettlement was planned to last for five years (as we now approach ten!). I suspect it was UNHCR Antonio Guterres (now Secretary General of the UN) who talked the Bush State Department in to this!
***Update*** More news here: UN says the movement of over 100,000 third worlders to first world countries was a great success.
The so-called “Bhutanese” are people of Nepali ethnicity that were pushed out of Bhutan when the Bhutanese government basically said, we want Bhutan for Bhutanese and you Nepali people who have moved in here for decades need to leave. To learn more about what happened, check out wikipedia, here.
When we began posting on this group of mostly Hindu people back in 2007, most did not want to be resettled anywhere but back in Bhutan. And, obviously Nepal wasn’t welcoming their kinsmen home.
So, how did this become our problem?
Why did the US decide to resettle tens of thousands and scatter them around America? Frankly, with our economic muscle certainly we could have prevailed on either Bhutan or Nepal to work this out! Or, did we simply acquiesce to pressure from the United Nations? And, was the refugee industry looking for more paying clients and big business looking for cheap labor?
So here we are almost ten years in. We said we would resettle 60,000 and so I checked Wrapsnet.org (2007 to December 15, 2016) to see exactly how many we have taken since 2007. The answer is 91,713! But according to this article in the Katmandu Post we will be closing the program in 2017 (I guess to make more room for the Muslim Syrians, Iraqis and Somalis).
For ambitious readers, visit our archive on the Bhutanese by clicking here. Some have done well in America, but for years they had an extremely high suicide rate that worried the resettlement industry. One of many morals to this story is that when the US State Department gives you a number that will be resettled, expect the resettlement to be much larger and much longer than they said it would be!
Many forced to choose resettlement against their will!
Here is the story from before Christmas from theKatmandu Post(notice that many are still holding out hope that they will go home to Bhutan):
Dec 15, 2016- More than 100,000 Bhutanese refugees have been resettled in various countries under the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugee (UNHCR) third country resettlement programme. But some the remaining refugees in eastern Tarai are still putting their feet down for repatriation.
Around 2,000 of the remaining 11,000 refugees, put up at various camps in Jhapa and Morang, are refusing the third country resettlement and willing to return their own homeland in Bhutan, according to a source at the UNHCR. The repatriation campaign has come closer to end after the UN body’s resettlement programme. The repatriation campaign has been weakened as the leaders spearheading repatriation themselves opted for third country resettlement. And the majority of the remaining refugees are also in resettlement process, giving up hope of repatriation.
Bhampa Rai, Balaram Poudel, among other refugee leaders, are still campaigning for repatriation, though. They blamed the government of Nepal for its failure to take any initiatives for their cause. “Nepal could neither convince Bhutan to take back refugees nor pressure the international community over the issue,” said Rai, claiming that hundreds of refugees had been forced to choose third country resettlement against their will.
[….]
According to the UNHCR, 107,000 refugees are already resettled in various host countries, including the US, Australia and Canada. Another batch of around 9,000 refugees are in the process of resettlement, officials at the UNHCR said.
The UNHCR’s third country resettlement programme will come to an end in 2017.
So where are they in America? (Or, at least where were they originally resettled). Map is from Wrapsnet.org. States cut off in my screenshot are Hawaii (0), Alaska (148) and Florida (671)
Here are the top ten states where the Bhutanese were resettled: Inds stands for Individuals. One of the things I’ve always wondered about is this: The UN was so anxious to close these camps (to deny these people a ‘right of return’) while they never had any interest in resettling the Palestinians around the Arab world, but has kept the Palestinian camps (really cities) open for over 60 years. I’m actually not wondering. I really do know the answer! It was (and is) to keep a thorn in Israel’s side.
Update December 29, 2016: Michael Leahy at Breitbart has a good piece on Montana herealso.
This is an Associated Press story that ran on Christmas day so not sure how many of you saw it.
For background, Montana had a small refugee program many years ago, but up until this year it was alone with Wyoming in not having one at all. That changed in 2016 as Missoula ‘welcomed’ its first African and Middle Eastern refugees. I traveled to the state this summer and can attest to the sentiment outlined in this story. S.K. Rossi, advocacy and policy director for the ACLU of Montana: “It’s pretty widely known that this is going to be a hard year…” Photo: https://www.aclumontana.org/en/about/staff
For new readers you might like to see our Montana archive, here.
From AP at The Seattle Times:
HELENA, Mont. (AP) — The push to restrict refugee resettlements and immigration in the U.S. that figured so prominently in Donald Trump’s election is now headed to states that are preparing to convene their legislative sessions early next year, immigration advocates said.
In Montana, which took in just nine refugee families from January to early December, about a dozen bill requests related to refugees, immigration and terrorism have been filed ahead of next month’s session. The measures include requiring resettlement agencies to carry insurance that would defray the cost of prosecuting refugees who commit violent crimes and allowing towns and cities to request a moratorium on resettlements in their communities.
Refugee rights advocates say those measures are a sign of what is to come as the anti-refugee rhetoric that featured prominently in the presidential election spills over to statehouses and local governments.
“It’s pretty widely known that this is going to be a hard year for those of us who are seeking to protect the rights of refugees and immigrants,” said S.K. Rossi, advocacy and policy director for the ACLU of Montana.
The president-elect campaigned onbuilding a border wall with Mexico to stop illegal immigration, deporting immigrants who are in the nation illegally and halting the resettlement of refugees to strengthen the federal program that vets them.
[….]
“It absolutely does not end with the presidential election,” McKenzie [Michele McKenzie, deputy director of the Minneapolis organization The Advocates for Human Rights] said. “It’s a national strategy by a small but organized group of anti-immigration advocates and anti-refugee advocates.”
[….]
“We need to get serious,” said Nancy Ballance, a Republican state representative from Ravalli County.
Ballance said refugees are a “gigantic issue” in her southwestern Montana county, just south of the liberal college city of Missoula. “People expect to see some legislation brought,” she said.
It is pretty clear that legally state legislators can’t do much to change the US Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP), but here we have the ACLU lobbyist making the crucial point about efforts in the Montana (yours too!) legislature.
“Filing this and making it a public conversation automatically undermines the refugee process,” Rossi said.
“They can’t legally undermine the process, but they can socially undermine the process.”
You have a right to ask questions and demand that your elected officials at all levels of government be transparent, and consider your economic worries and your safety concerns when the federal government targets your communities. Efforts like these in the Montana legislature are important to help create controversy because the ultimate goal is for the controversy to ‘trickle up’ to Congress and to the new Trump Administration. There is no doubt that the USRAP must be trashed or reformed, but that pressure must come from the states (and local governments) to Washington. Politicians hate noise and so it is your job as grassroots activists to make political noise!
To that end, since Montana’s lone House member is likely going to the Trump Interior Department, it is critical that you, in Montana, make the selection of his replacement a referendum on the refugee program. See The Hill (scroll down to Rep. Zinke).
Endnote: I am off to jury duty, be back later!
