As Dems turn their backs on a screwed up Iowa caucus and head to New Hampshire, Bernie Sanders, for one, is tapping into the immigrant/refugee community there for new socialist voters.
How One Campaign Is Organizing An Often-Overlooked N.H. Voting Bloc: Immigrants and Refugees
At first, the scene at the Manchester field office for the Bernie Sanders campaign looked pretty typical: Volunteers milled around after a presentation from campaign higher-ups, fielding invitations to sign up for canvassing shifts from campaign staffers armed with clipboards.
Suraj Budathoki, Bhutanese refugee, constituency director for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in New Hampshire.
But in one corner of the room, a smaller group huddled together, listening intently to field organizer Susmik Lama, who was delivering a parallel set of instructions for the final weeks of the campaign — in Nepali.
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While the pace of refugee resettlement has slowed in recent years, New Hampshire is still home to thousands of refugees and immigrants — including a large population hailing from Himalayan nations like Bhutan and Nepal.
Just so you know!
In 2006, the Bush Administration told the UN that we will take 60,000 over 5 yearsof the displaced ‘Bhutanese’(really people of Nepali origin) living in UN camps in Nepal. We had no national interest in the squabble between Bhutan and Nepal, nor did we have any wars going on in that region of the world!
As of today, according to the Refugee Processing Center, we have admitted 96,174 Bhutanese people to the US since Bush said 60,000 max.
Over 10,000 were placed in Pennsylvania, the top state for their resettlement. NH ‘welcomed’ over 2,000.
They are here now, voting the Republicans out of office whenever and wherever they can!
NHPR continues:
Refugees and immigrants can vote in U.S. elections after applying for U.S. citizenship, but engaging with these communities has — until now — been an afterthought for many local campaigns.
Suraj Budathoki, a former Bhutanese refugee who now works for the Sanders campaign, has made it his mission to change that.
“The Democratic Party thinks that votes of immigrants and refugees are sure votes for them; that’s a mistake,” he said. “They don’t tend to go to those people. They think that they’re going to come to them, vote for them. But they never go to their community and talk to them.”
