I’ll be leaving today for a ten day visit to various family members in the west.
It is going to be a challenge to not write a post for those ten days. It might be the longest stretch in 11 years that I won’t have helped to educate my devoted readers about the US Refugee Admissions Program and related migration issues here and abroad.
Even when I did my 2016 (6,000 mile) roadtrip to visit towns struggling with refugees, I managed to post along the way. However, right now I haven’t a decent laptop in good working order. So, maybe that is a message that I need to take a break.
But, I want to leave you with somethings to read! (9,275 posts to choose from!).
So, let me tell you what is available here at RRW especially for new readers, but also for longtime readers who need a refresher.
On the header here at RRW you will find a link to Frequently Asked Questions, check it out! It isn’t completely up to date, but you might find something useful there.
I also have a category entitled ‘Where to find information’ with hundreds of posts about reports, documents, research etc. You might want to look down the categories drop-down in the left hand column and see if there are any categories of information that interest you. I recommend ‘crimes’ and ‘health issues.’
I have a few Youtube videos available here, if you have never seen them. You might also want to see the talk I gave in May of 2015 in Iowa (that is the day I had an opportunity to speak with candidate Donald Trump solidifying my support for his candidacy).
By the way, RRW has a very good search function. Simply type a key word or words in to the search window (upper left hand column) and it will lead you to posts on that topic. I recommend you begin by typing your state name and see what I have said about it on previous occasions over the years.
Pivotal posts!
Here are some pivotal posts we wrote in early years. They aren’t so much brilliant revelations as they are posts about news that became important for my thinking about the issue of refugees in America.
In 2007, I was frustrated with my local newspaper—the Hagerstown Herald Mail—which refused to investigate when refugees began arriving quietly in our rural county with the help of the Virginia Council of Churches. Citizens were first concerned about news that the refugees were being neglected and wanted to know the facts. I asked a reporter at the paper to help find the answers to a series of question.
You can read those questions here, they are pretty reasonable and still relevant today, but the paper was not interested in answering them. I began writing this blog as a response to the paper’s lack of interest in finding facts.
We had a public meeting and ultimately the US State Department closed the program in Hagerstown, here. The Virginia Council of Churches said we were an “unwelcoming” community just because we wanted all the facts put on the table!
Another important revelation occurred over the next two months, when blog partner Judy reported here and here about how so many refugees in Ft. Wayne, Indiana had to be treated for TB that it was busting the county’s health department budget.
What the heck? We aren’t screening out people with TB!
Early on, I found out the program was pretty much controlled by nine non-profit groups funded with millions of tax payer dollars—-this wasn’t about heartfelt private charity. We were paying for it at the same time we were being kept in the dark about how the program operates.
Then came revelations about lies….
In 2008 we learned that thousands of Somalis had gotten in to the US fraudulently, see here. Family reunification was closed for Somalis and some other Africans as a result. It stayed closed for years.
Not long after, in 2009, we began to see reports that Somali ‘youths’ raised in America (on your dime!) were secretly leaving the country to join the Jihadists in Africa, see here.
By that time in 2009, I was hooked on the issue. I was appalled at the secrecy of the program generally. Why are local citizens kept in the dark as refugees are moved to unsuspecting towns and cities? How were they getting in to the US with communicable diseases, and what is going on in Muslim ‘communities’ where those refugee kids we raised preferred jihad to a good life in America?
Bottomline, as I said, I was hooked at that point and since the mainstream media wasn’t eager to find and report answers, I figured it was up to me.
Eleven years have flown by!
I won’t be completely absent…..
While I am away I’ll be tweeting (see my twitter feed in the right hand column here at the blog). I have over 14,000 followers, but twitter seems intent on keeping my numbers stagnant. Every time I add about a hundred, they wipe them out in the coming days!
My partner on facebook will continue to post there at our facebook page, here.
If I come across access to a computer in my travels and something exciting happens with refugees, I will try to post, but no promises.
Oh, and since I moderate comments, your comments might not show up for days, but will try to get them up eventually.
Thanks, as always, for reading Refugee Resettlement Watch! Be back on July 30th!