The refugee industry is everywhere these days claiming that one of the most important reasons to import hundreds of thousands of refugees is that they revitalize crumbling cities.
We need refugees to save dying cities!
In fact,. as I write this US refugee resettlement contractors, hoping topressure Donald Trumpto set a high ceiling for refugee admissions for FY2020 (which begins October 1 of this year), are hammering the big lie—refugees save dying cities.
Bashing Trump….
Here is just one example, the Washington Post recently published an opinion piece by two leaders of World Relief(one of nine federally-funded refugee contractors) claiming just that and saying the Trump is hurting cities by reducing the numbers of impoverished refugees being admitted to the US.
But, get this, the New York Times ,in an extensive expose in August, tells us that yes, Bill Clinton’s Bosniansdid bring some economic revitalization to St. Louis, but it didn’t last. The primary reason for the unfolding failure—Democrat-run cities are crime infested. (There has been no Republican mayor in St. Louis since 1949.)
‘It’s Not the Same’: Why War Refugees Who Helped Revive St. Louis Are Leaving
[Article opens with some economic success stories. BTW, a large number of Bosnians are Muslims.]
For St. Louis, a city that had bled population for decades — it had about 400,000 residents in 1990, down from more than 800,000 in the 1950s — the influx of what was estimated to be the largest population of Bosnians outside Bosnia seemed to work magic. For the first time in generations, the urban narrative of abandoned houses, stagnant business and vanishing people appeared to be changing.
But it didn’t last.
Today, St. Louis, like some other Midwestern cities, is battling a new round of contraction, with a stagnant economy, challenged schools and one of the highest murder rates in the country. And over the past few years, the people who fled brutal violence and concentration camps in their homeland and created Little Bosnia have been fleeing again, to the suburbs.
The beginning of the end for the Bosnian community of St. Louis and the melting pot myth was the murder of a Bosnian young man by a gang of thugs. See my 2014 post about the murder.
Black and Hispanic teens sentenced to long prison terms for Begic’s murder. The NYT never mentions who the killers were.
A deadly hammer attack in Bevo Mill — in which Zemir Begic, a young Bosnian man out with his fiancée, was killed by four teenagers — shook the community in 2014. Bosnians marched in the streets, arguing that the police had not done enough to keep the neighborhood safe.
[….]
Similar stories have been playing out in American cities since the Baby Boom decades of the 20th century, and have proven hard to reverse. After mass flights to the suburbs, even heavy investment in urban centers, with shiny new business districts and rapidly changing downtowns, have often failed to help cities, particularly in the Midwest, replace the residents they had lost.
In St. Louis the process has been particularly painful, because the people who were fleeing were the very ones who had been seen as saviors.
[….]
At its peak in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Bosnian population, including American-born Bosnians, reached about 70,000 in the city of St. Louis and the surrounding county, according to the International Institute of St. Louis, a charitable agency that sponsors many of the region’s refugees. Now, with some Bosnians having left the state entirely, the agency estimates that the figure is less than 50,000.
The International Institute of St. Louis is a subcontractor of the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI), but you can bet USCRI is still peddling the myth that refugees will save dying cities—maybe for a few years in the case of industrious Bosnians, but it won’t happen at all with extremely impoverished Africans.
140 Million ‘climate refugees’ will need new homes by 2050, says the World Bank!
This has been coming for a long time.
Longtime readers may remember that I have a whole category on so-called ‘Climate refugees’ here at RRW. (Go here for over 50 previous posts on the topic.)
But now comes news that Democrat candidate for President, Julian Castro, wants to make it legally possible for hundreds of thousands of migrants (millions!) on the move around the world to claim refugee status due to changing weather patterns.
Battle over the word “refugee.”
Although Vox doesn’t say too much about it in this story, know that there is not uniformity among Progressive activists on the subject.
The ‘humanitarian’ wing of the refugee industry fears that the world’s persecuted might be drowned by the hundreds of thousands of third worlders who might claim asylum in the first world because the weather changed in their home country.
Julian Castro’s climate change plan would recognize a new class of refugees
Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro’s climate plan, released Tuesday, calls for the US to create a new category of refugees to welcome people displaced by the warming planet.
The US only accepts refugees who have been targeted based on their race, religion, nationality, politics or affiliation with certain social groups. As climate change threatens everything from crop production to coastal cities, tens of millions of migrants are expected to be pushed out of areas that will no longer be habitable in the coming decades.
The World Bank estimates more than 140 million migrants will be displaced as a result of climate change by 2050. Castro’s plan is meant to address that growing crisis. But other experts worry it will come at a cost for people who are fleeing persecution in their home countries.
Migrants displaced by climate change have no formal rights in the US and internationally. While 164 countries signed a United Nations agreement in 2018 to work together to resettle those migrants, the pact is not legally enforceable and depends on voluntary participation.
The US and its international partners, however, are running out of time to determine how they will support such migrants. [Says who!—ed]
Glaciers are melting and sea levels are rising, flooding low-level coastal areas where migrants have already started to flee. Increasing global temperatures have led to the desertification of farmland just as growing populations demand higher food production, making the terrain unlivable. Droughts cause local conflict over control of water resources and are the biggest killer among weather-related catastrophes, according to the UN.
Castro’s plan acknowledges that the existing criteria for refugees in the US may cover some migrants who have been persecuted in “climate-driven conflicts,” but ultimately, he says it’s not enough. The US must be proactive and “cannot wait for climate change to destabilize a society before providing assistance,” he writes.
[….]
Most of the Democratic presidential candidates call for the US to prepare for mass migration as a result of the climate crisis, but none have gone so far as Castro in proposing to create a whole new category of refugees.
“I feel hurt by the fact that a specific demographic at Wellstone has been taken away from us.”
(Aimee Fearing, former Wellstone principal)
When I read this storyat Minnesota Public Radio I couldn’t help but think about buggy whips. You know the expression about how as times change, so too do industries when the demand for certain commodities disappears.
But, the big difference is that with government programs, those benefiting certain people personally (with jobs etc.), instead of dying a natural death, taxpayer dollars are found to keep the government equivalent of the buggy whip industry alive.
At one time Wellstone High School, a special school for immigrants, was 65% Somali, today it is 30%, and those benefiting from the refugee industry generally in Minnesota are crying the blues.
As refugee admissions hit record low, one Minneapolis school fights to adapt
[Big opening section featuring a Somali success story to appeal to readers’ emotions before launching into the difficulties ahead for a special school for special people.]
For nearly two decades now, Wellstone has served as a training ground for hundreds of young refugee and immigrant students, many of whom grew up to be economists, health professionals and engineers — even as its population has fluctuated with each stroke of a presidential pen that expanded or reduced refugee admissions to the United States.
In recent years, though, not many people like Mah are entering the country because of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration and the sharp reduction in refugee admissions. As a result, Wellstone is bracing for one of the lowest student enrollment years in its history.
But it’s not just Wellstone that’s witnessing the ripple effect of the dwindling number of refugees entering the country. Refugee-serving agencies in Minnesota have also seen a dramatic decline in the number of refugees coming to their doorsteps for resettlement services.
Here it is—they must keep the infrastructure alive—another way of saying that they must keep the taxpayer dollars flowing their way!
Former Principal Aimee Fearing
To keep the infrastructure alive, Wellstone and service agencies are finding new ways to adapt to the changing refugee-services landscape — by shifting resources and tapping into new demographics.
Donald Trump is to blame….
After he took office in 2017, the president followed through with many of his promises. For example, he barred people from certain predominantly Muslim nations, including Somalia, from entering the U.S. and reduced refugee admissions to the lowest level since the program was created in 1980.
Those restrictions have affected the refugee stream to Minnesota, which for years has been one of the top states for refugee resettlement. More than 3,000 primary refugees arrived in Minnesota in 2016, but only 1,000 came in 2017, and 660 last year, according to figures from the Minnesota Department of Human Services.
The dramatic reduction in refugee admissions will be felt this school year at Wellstone, where the student population has dropped from 400 four years ago to 180 now, according to school counselor Ali Kofiro.
[….]
Though the students at the school have come from all over the world, including East Africa, Southeast Asia, Central America and Mexico, Somalis typically were the majority. In 2015 and 2016, for instance, 65 percent of the students were Somalis. Today, that number is less than 30 percent.
“I feel hurt by the fact that a specific demographic at Wellstone has been taken away from us,” said Aimee Fearing, former Wellstone principal who now serves as the executive director of K-12 academic programming at Minneapolis Public Schools.
For Deqa Muhidin, an ESL teacher at Wellstone, the shrinking number of refugee arrivals hangs as a question mark over the future of the school. “Our school’s future will definitely be up in the air,” said Muhidin. “And my role will definitely be up in the air.”
[….]
The reduction in refugee admissions is also affecting nonprofit organizations and resettlement agencies that often rely on serving refugees to get funding.
Continue reading here. It is a long article, but useful especially for Minnesotans as it goes on to discuss the refugee contractors operating in the state and how they are adjusting (or not!) to the loss of much federal funding.
Endnote: One wonders about assimilation if the immigrant kids are kept separate and treated as special people in their own special school.
Citing Japan, Israel and Denmark, Ann Coulter muses, hereat The Hill about why some countries aren’t being widely blasted as “racist” for not welcoming masses of Middle Easterners and Africans to their tiny bits of the world.
But, we are expected to open the flood gates to America!
Ann Coulter: Can’t America have a little self-respect on immigration?
Couldn’t America have a little self-respect? Japan, Denmark and Israel do.
A must read!
Year after year, for decades, America has accepted more refugees than the rest of the world combined. No country we admire does anything close to this.
Score one for Donald Trump: In 2017, after he became president, our refugee admissions finally dipped slightly below “more than every other country in the world combined.” Go USA!
These aren’t immigrants the host country specifically wanted. We’re not saying, “You know, this country could use some people who know how to restore 17th-century woodwork” or “Wow, this guy and his wife are both neurosurgeons!” Refugee admissions to America are so reckless that this country has taken in Iraqis who deployed IEDs against our own troops and, in at least one case, one of the perpetrators — not victims — of the Rwandan genocide.
[….]
The New York Timesexplained Japan’s highly restrictive immigration policies as proceeding from “a desire to preserve their culture, a goal echoed by some conservative groups in the United States.” (Duh.)
And National Geographic clarified that Japan’s policy was simply a matter of the Japanese preferring “a racially unique and homogenous society.”
Luckily for the Japanese, they aren’t white, so this utterly logical, natural position on immigration didn’t trigger “white nationalist” alarm bells in our mainstream media.
I’m delighted to be able to say, see all of my posts going back nearly a dozen years on Japan,IsraelandDenmark.
You will learn that those three countries do get a lot of criticism for their restrictive refugee policies, but mostly from the international Leftists and the UN.
Endnote: If you are a new reader see ‘About’at the top of the page!
I’m so excited to report that RRW has been reconstructed after it was removed without notice by my previous host—WordPress.com—two months ago.
After working on informing and educating readers here in the US and around the world about issues related to refugee resettlement for nearly 12 years, you can imagine what a blow it was to find that the Speech Police had managed to apparently pressureWordPress.com into unceremoniously dumping my work and of course censoring me!
With the help of a compatriot, because I sure wasn’t capable of putting nearly 9,000 posts back into some usable format, welcome to the new RRW!
If you are a new reader, or even a long-time reader! and want to know more about how I came to be obsessed with seeing the US Refugee Admissions Program either abolished or reformed, see my ‘About’ at the top of the page.
The good news is that all the posts are here and the links back to previous posts have been reconfigured and should all be working. The categories work, as do the archives (see right hand sidebar).
More good news is that the Search function works great! Use the Search window in the upper right hand sidebar hereat my new site. Type in a few key words and see what I’ve posted on that subject over the years. (LOL! I suggest that you don’t use one key word such as ‘Somalis’ or be prepared for hours of reading.)
And, the best news is that I plan to post here from time to time because there is increasingly a lot of news on refugees that I have been posting at my other blog—Frauds, Crooks and Criminals(see all posts relating to refugees at ‘Frauds and Crooks’ by clickinghere.)
The bad news is that WordPress.com did not send me my subscribers or most my photos/graphs/charts etc. So you will see a photo caption in many posts, but no photo.
More bad news is that at least so far there is no e-mail subscription capability here that I know of. So therefore, please book mark my new urlwhich ishttps://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/ and visit often!
***Update*** Subscriptions are now possible! See here.
And, one more thing, there is no opportunity to comment at the moment.
***Update*** Comments are now being accepted after moderation. But, please see rules of the road for commenting byclicking here.
And, as for Twitter, (@RefugeeWatcher) I rarely post there or even visit because I got so disgusted with them messing with my account, but I continue to be grateful to all of you who post my material from time to time.
Welcome back!
Yours truly,
Ann Corcoran
(p.s. This post will be visible here on the front page for a few weeks.)
I’m so excited to report that RRW has been reconstructed after it was removed without notice by my previous host—WordPress.com—two months ago.