First Group of 2020 Refugees Arrive: IOM Says 600 in the Last Week

As you know by now the President’s cap for refugee admissions for FY2020 is 18,000 and you also should know that none arrived in October (the first month of the fiscal year) because President Trump had waited a month to sign the order.

Well, here they come!  Who are they? And where did they go?

The International Organization for Migration (IOM), a branch of the United Nations that takes care of doling out the plane tickets American taxpayers pay for, is reporting 600 in the first wave.

IOM Welcomes First US Bound Refugees Resettled in FY 2020

Washington DC – More than 600 refugees landed in the United States this week, marking the first arrivals of US fiscal year 2020. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) welcomed the refugees who come from a variety of countries.

[….]

IOM works closely with the US Department of State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration to provide case processing support, pre-departure health assessments and cultural orientation, as well as transportation support for refugees.

A group of 25 Congolese refugees were the first to arrive on Tuesday morning at Washington Dulles International Airport before continuing to their final destinations. Due to ongoing violence, the families fled to neighbouring Rwanda where they remained in limbo for years. [And, remind me why this is our problem!—-ed]

Almost half of the refugees resettled in the US in fiscal year 2019 were from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Several others arriving this week are also Congolese.

What is so maddening about the Congolese wholesale movement to America is that Obama told the UN in 2013 that we would take 50,000 over five years and we are now almost at 60,000 and they are still coming. 

I bet the deep staters at the US State Department never told the Trump people there was supposed to be a limit on the Congolese!

So it is no surprise that when I checked the data at the Refugee Processing Center I see that 226 of the 563 refugees admitted in the last week are DR Congolese!

I suspect the discrepancy in the numbers reported by IOM and the RPC is that IOM has shipped off 600 (maybe), but the State Dept. data base isn’t up to the minute and shows that we admitted 563 refugees from the first of November to today.

Because I don’t plan to report every month about who came and where they went, I’m going to give you a tutorial on finding out yourself!

Go here. 

Click on ‘reports’ in the right hand corner.

Then click on ‘Interactive reporting’ (there are useful data in the other categories), but for today’s lesson it is ‘Interactive reporting’ that you want.

You will get a screen that looks like this:

For the first exercise I picked the first choice:  MAP.

A screen opens that asks for your start date and the last date. I chose November 1 to today, the 9th.  It asks for nationalities and provides a drop- down (I chose all) and I chose for sort order ‘number of individuals.’

And presto, I got this map (below) to show where 563 refugees were placed between November 1 and today.  On the page after the map I can see the numerical breakdown for all of the states that ‘welcomed’ refugees over the last week.

As usual Texas is numero uno!

(Reminder! These are just refugees admitted through the US Refugee Admissions Program, not unaccompanied alien children, not Special Immigrant Visa holders, and not asylum seekers!)

 

 

Now go back to the first screen and see your other choices for searches.  You can find out which ethnic groups were placed in which cities in your state.

When choosing parameters for the ‘arrivals by destination’ search, choose ‘fiscal year’ and ‘destination.’  Just for fun I did Minnesota.  Here are the ‘new Minnesotans’ that arrived this week.

You can find out the religions of refugees arriving (although not by state). And you can even find how many kids are coming (cost to your schools!) and how many senior citizens will be coming to collect their SSI.

I’ve never been able to find out which contractors settled which refugees.  It might be there somewhere and if you find it let me know!

Here is what I did learn for the whole batch this week:

Of the 563 we brought in as ‘new Americans’ ….

226 are from the DR Congo

Moldova 56

Afghanistan 40

Ukraine 38

Syria 32

Burma 27

Liberia 26

Somalia 26

Eritrea 18

Iraq 18

Sudan 15

Plus smaller numbers from many other countries.

Of the 563, 154 (27%) belong to one or another Muslim sect. I was surprised to learn that a small number of the DR Congolese are Muslims.  There is no Muslim ban!

Now you too can do this yourself and I recommend that you do it at least monthly and see who is coming to a town near you!

(Have fun, play around with it!)

For serious students of the refugee program, this post is filed in two categories here at RRW: ‘Where to find information’ and ‘Refugee statistics’. All categories are in a drop-down on the right hand side bar at RRW, here.