Yesterday I told you about the ‘adjustment’ going on with the large number of Burmese refugees arriving to work at Tyson’s Foods in Garden City, KS. Also, we had just heard how many Burmese have been resettled in recent years around the world—50,000. So I thought it would be a good idea to check the numbers for the US. So here is a rundown of where we stand. Most of these numbers can be found by following the links here. However, 2008 and 2009 numbers are not published, but we have them.
I only went back to 2002.
2002: 128
2003: 200
2004: 1054
2005: 1447
2006: 1323
2007: 9776
2008: 18,139
2009 (until the end of April): 8149
That comes to 40,216 Burmese refugees that we took of the 50,000 worldwide so far. Small potatos I suppose when you consider how many Somali Muslims* we have taken.
I don’t know what the magic total number planned for the Burmese is, but former Bush head of Population, Refugees and Migration, Ellen Sauerbrey, committed the US to resettling 60,000 Bhutanese (really Nepalis) over 5 years in addition to the apparent infinite number of Burmese. Most Burmese and Bhutanese are NOT Muslim, although some Muslims are hidden among the Burmese. Both groups are thus less demanding.
I envision a scenario where the big companies, like the meat packers, who use immigrant labor to keep wages low, lobbying the State Department and telling them: these Somalis aren’t working out so well, bring us some other cheap laborers—ones who are more grateful and thus more malleable.
* The US State Department has admitted over 80,000 Somali refugees to the US in the last 25 years and then last year had to suspend family reunification because widespread immigration fraud was revealed through DNA testing.