We probably have at least twice as many Somalis of ethnic descent living in the US as the federal government is telling us!
This little article caught my eye yesterday, so I went back this morning to look at numbers I have recorded for years.
From Orangeville.com about Minnesota Somali numbers, with this line at the end:
The 2015 American Community Survey says almost one-third of the more than 129,000 people in the United States reporting Somali ancestry lived in Minnesota.
129,000! No way!
This is what we know: Back in 2008, I laboriously poured over data provided by the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement’s annual reports to Congress and wrote this post about the numbers. (We did not have access to Wrapsnet at the time). Each year after that I updated the post with the Somalis we admitted to the US—through only the Refugee Admissions Program.
Through FY16 we admitted 136,376 Somali ‘refugees’!
That number does not include all the Somalis who got in to the US through other means including the Diversity Visa Lottery, those who received student visas and disappeared into the American woodwork, are here protected by Temporary Protected Status, or who came across one of our borders and applied for asylum (or simply disappeared) over the last 3 decades.
And, in order for there to be only 129,000 people of Somali ancestry here it would require us to believe some who came to the US left the country, that a whole heck of a lot of them died while they weren’t having babies for nearly 35 years! It is nuts!
When the government does census counts do they rely completely on who is willing to answer surveys, or do they make some attempt to look at government-held numbers about those who entered the country? Apparently they rely on Somalis willing to tell them something!
In addition to the 136,376 through FY16, we have admitted 4,478 in the last 4 months and 19 days.
And, we pick up Somalis all over the world, and I can assure you that vetting the wandering Somalis is impossible.
Here is where that 4,478 were placed since October 1, 2016 (according to Wrapsnet):
The top five states ‘welcoming’ Somalis since October 1, 2016 are Minnesota (609), New York (397), Ohio (306), Kentucky (283) and Arizona (276). Virtually all Somalis are Muslims.
And, of all the ethnic groups entering the US right now, Somalis (I believe) lead the pack in the number of terrorist attacks or attempted terrorist attacks, or who have been arrested and convicted of helping to support jihadists in some form or another.