No surprise of course, but I thought my Texas readers might like to know.
If you missed it the other day, see my post about the numbers for fiscal year 2018 that just closed on September 30th.
Texas was the number one resettlement state in the nation in FY18.
From Houston Public Media:
Texas Sees Major Cuts in Refugees from Iraq, Syria in 2018
Texas welcomed 67 percent fewer refugees in fiscal year 2018 than in 2017, down to 1,697 people from 4,768.
Some of the starkest drops in refugee arrivals were from Iraq, Iran and Syria, majority Muslim countries.
Iraqi refugee resettlement dropped from 949 to 25 in Texas. The number of Syrian refugees went from 455 to just one in fiscal year 2018.
Sobia Siddiqui, communications coordinator for the Council on American-Islamic Relations Texas Chapter, said the cuts are discriminatory.
“Our president ran his campaign and one of his strongest and most vocal points is that he called for a ban on all Muslims,” said Siddiqui.
She said there are refugee families in Houston who can’t be reunited with family members facing dangerous situations abroad because of the ban.
“There’s a lot of anxiety and uncertainty about if people will be able to have their families rejoin them back here in the United States or even in Houston,” said Dan Stoecker, CEO of The Alliance, which offers refugee services in Houston.
The Alliance is a subcontractor of the Ethiopian Community Development Council, the smallest, and likely most vulnerable to a federal budget cut, of the nine refugee contractors that monopolize all resettlement to the US.
In 2016, I excitedly reported that the State of Texas withdrew from the US Refugee Admissions Program, but you can see that without a follow-up legal challenge by the state it was a meaningless move. The contractors now run the program in the state!