This is another in my series of inquiries about why it is our responsibility to take ‘refugees’ off the hands of governments where those asylum seekers (supposed refugees) are that country’s problem.
(Is Israel taking any of our illegal aliens/asylum seekers?)
See my recent post on Russia, here. Or, see the dumb deal with Australia, here. And, I have been writing about this issue for years as it relates to Malta, here.
This morning I want to know why we took 38 ‘refugees’ from Israel in the first 5 months of FY17. Whoever they are, they are not our problem?
(For background on the problems Israel has with illegal aliens, especially from Africa over the years, go to our category ‘Israel and refugees’ by clicking here).
This is the Refugee Processing Center data from Wrapsnet:
One more thing President Trump’s State Department could do, is to stop using refugees in deals with other countries, something I testified about several times here (see #7).
Day: March 13, 2017
In the past year, 600,000 Afghans have returned home, so why are we bringing more to the US?
PBS has a report from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees which says that hundreds of thousands of those who fled Afghanistan over the last 30 years are returning home. The UNHCR is looking for western governments to give more money to Afghanistan to soften the blow on the economy there as this many people return.
When I checked Wrapsnet to see how many we were bringing to America, I was surprised to see our ‘refugee’ intake from Afghanistan increasing, not decreasing.
First see what the PBS Newshour is reporting, here:
For years, Afghans have fled the violence in their country, seeking asylum in Europe or elsewhere in the Middle East. But over the past year, about 600,000 Afghans have crossed the border back into Afghanistan, coming from Pakistan, Iran and Europe when they are denied asylum.
Human Rights Watch says Pakistan is using a UN incentive program that gives refugee families a cash grant of $400 to voluntarily return home as a way to pressure Afghans to go back to Afghanistan.
[….]
United Nations High Commission for Refugees spokeswoman Ariane Rummery said at a press briefing last month the organization is concerned that the pace of those returning is outstripping the country’s ability to accept them. She urged donor countries to follow through on their pledges to support the Afghan government.
So how many are we taking and where are they going?
(I want to know why we are taking any!)
Checking Wrapsnet going back to FY03 (because prior to that we can’t get good data) up until today, this is what I learned.
From FY03-FY13 we admitted on average 674 Afghans (small compared to the massive numbers of Iraqis, Somalis and now Syrians we have brought). In FY09, our lowest year, we admitted 349 from Afghanistan.
In FY14 the number started to pick up and we admitted 753 Afghans.
FY15 was 910.
FY16 jumped to 2,737 and in the first five plus months this fiscal year we admitted 1,008.
The total number was 12,824 and 97% were Muslims of various stripes. 6,537 were Sunnis and 4,531 were Shiites (once again admitting both sides of the religious divide!).
Here is where they were placed since FY03:
For more on refugees from Afghanistan, click here.
Could there be racial bigotry among practitioners of the religion of peace?
Fighting a war on two fronts! Some Muslims believe “we shouldn’t talk about anti-blackness within the community, because we’re under siege by Islamophobes. This is not the right time to air internal laundry.”
(Kameelah Rashad, University of Pennsylvania)
Yup, you know it is true! Or, why would Somali Muslims, for example, want to build their own mosques in a community where the Arab Muslims already had one?
Also, according to The Atlantic there is a split between immigrant Muslims (many black) and the long-established (well-off) Arabs in America. The tension within the ‘community’ burst in to full-flower, we are told, at a December Muslim conference in Toronto.
The article is a bit disjointed (or maybe it is me!). Or, could that be because the author can’t quite present the politically-incorrect information in a straightforward manner?
[BTW, when you have a few minutes look around at the many historical reports about how light-skinned Arab Muslims enslaved Africans for over a thousand years.]
Here are a few snips of Emma Green’s article at The Atlantic (emphasis is mine):
Muslim Americans Are United by Trump—and Divided by Race
When weary Muslims gathered in Toronto in December for an annual retreat, marking the end of a tumultuous U.S. election year, they probably didn’t expect the event to turn into a referendum on racial tensions within the American Muslim community. But it did.
[….]
Even though slightly less than one-third of American Muslims are black, according to Pew Research Center, American Muslims are most often represented in the media as Arab or South Asian immigrants. The distinction between the African-American Muslim experience and that of their immigrant co-religionists has long been a source of racial tension in the Muslim community, but since the election, things have gotten both better and worse. While some Muslims seem to be paying more attention to racism because of Donald Trump, others fear that any sign of internal division is dangerous for Muslims in a time of increased hostility.
While the Toronto conference was upsetting, Evans [Ubaydullah Evans, the executive director of the American Learning Institute for Muslims, who is black] said, he doesn’t think it’s representative of the biggest racial problems in the American Muslim community. White racism toward black people is “not the kind of racism that circumscribes my life as an American Muslim,” he told me. “It’s the social racism I experience from people of Arab descent, of Southeast Asian descent. This is the racism no one is talking about.” [Wait! I thought only white Europeans could be racists! Arabs too?—ed]
[….]
The wave of immigration that shaped today’s American Muslim population began in the 1960s, after Congress lifted previous race-based restrictions on immigration. In many ways, this surge was directly connected to the work of black Muslims and others involved in the civil-rights movement: The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 allowed far greater numbers of people from Asia and Africa to emigrate to the U.S. As of 2014, an estimated 61 percent of Muslims were immigrants, according to Pew, and another 17 percent were the children of immigrants. Many of the perceived racial tensions among Muslims come from conflicts between these immigrant communities and non-immigrants, who are often black.
[….]
“Immigrant Muslims had a convenient comfort zone,” said Omar Suleiman, an imam based in Dallas with a large online following. As each new immigrant community established its own mosques and community centers, portions of the Muslim American population became segregated by ethnicity and income.
For non-black Muslims who grew up in the suburbs, attended private schools, and rarely encountered black Muslims in their mosques, it’s easy “to internalize many of the poisonous notions about the black community that … diminish the pain of those communities,” he said.
“I think a lot of African American Muslims see a hypocrisy sometimes with immigrant Muslims,” said Saba Maroof, a Muslim psychiatrist with a South Asian background who lives in Michigan. “We say that Muslims are all equal in the eyes of God, that racism doesn’t exist in Islam.” And yet, cases of overt racism aren’t uncommon, like when South Asian or Arab immigrant parents don’t want their kids to marry black Muslims. “That happened in my family,” she said.
[….]
Some Muslims believe “we shouldn’t talk about anti-blackness within the community, because we’re under siege by Islamophobes. This is not the right time to air internal laundry,” Rashad [Kameelah Rashad, a black Muslim chaplain at the University of Pennsylvania] said. But “if I have to contend with anti-Muslim bigotry outside of the Muslim community, and within my own community, I’m having to push back on anti-black racism, I’m kind of fighting a war on two fronts.”
There is much more, continue reading here.
Melting pot myth exploded!
So, not only do we have a lack of assimilation among the many ethnic and religious groups we are admitting to the US, we obviously have it within Islam in America too!