Additional Update: See our lead story today about Somali gang murders in Minneapolis here.
Update September 27th: Part II of this story at the Fort Morgan Times about Somalis in that Colorado town is simply a recitation of refugee resettlement agency spin. However, it ends with the following lines. The Somalis have given Ft. Morgan a thumbs up:
Agencies receive feedback from Somalis and other refugees and federal monitors review it in order to make sure they are self-sufficient, Stein said.
Most of the feedback about Fort Morgan has been positive, he said.
“Fort Morgan has done a lot of good work,” Stein said. [More Somalis will soon be on the way. Did you know that Lewiston, ME has around 7000?]
Here we go again! Another American city struggling with the flow of refugees to their neighborhoods. This article, thanks to Blulitespecial for sending it, could be from Emporia, KS, Shelbyville, TN, Fort Wayne, IN, Grand Island, NE, nearby Greeley, CO, or even our county seat Hagerstown, MD.
There is so much in this article that this will be a long dissection, and I won’t even scratch the surface so read it all here.
There was a forum this week in Ft. Morgan, CO to discuss rumors about refugees coming to town in a big way. The article begins jokingly:
A rumor that 1,000 Somali refugees and 1,000 Iraqi refugees would descend on Fort Morgan is not true.
This tone, probably used by the advocates of resettlement, is to tell the reader that even by suggesting such large numbers those doing it are alarmists and nuts.
I am here to tell you that is not a joke! You will have thousands of refugees in the next few years unless the residents of Ft. Morgan and the elected leadership in that city say right now they want it stopped or controlled. You, the citizens and elected officials can decide how much you can handle. There are over 5000 refugees in Ft. Wayne, IN because that city never said NO! We first heard about Ft. Wayne last September because the health department couldn’t handle the large numbers of refugees with HIV, TB and other health problems.
This is not true!
When they are selected for resettlement in the U.S., they go to major cities which are chosen for the ability to house them and offer services, he said to a crowd of representatives from local agencies.
The large gateway cities do still get some refugees, but there is a concerted effort by the US State Department and the volags (supposedly voluntary organizations) contracted to resettle refugees to get them spread across America. What the volags do is sit around a table in Washington and pick cities, literally in a hit or miss fashion, looking for “welcoming” cities that offer low-skilled employment opportunities. They bring in a couple hundred refugees quietly and see how the city reacts.
In our Maryland county, the residents demanded to know what was going on. A year ago in September, we had a “forum” for the whole community and the State Department representatives and the volags did not answer peoples’ questions adequately, citizens were still angry, and the resettlement was shut down within two weeks after the forum.
Then this statement requires a response:
It can be a lot tougher when refugees show up without those kinds of support systems, which has meant that Fort Morgan had to react rather than be prepared, Horan [director Lutheran Family Services] said.
Yes, we can’t control where people go when they get to America. These resettlement agencies don’t even have to know where anyone they resettle is after only three months. However, in the case of Greeley and Ft. Morgan, the federal government knew in advance that they were going to be resettling more refugees in this part of Colorado to supply Cargill and Swift with meatpacking labor. Incidentally, some of the flow to Ft. Morgan now is the Somalis fired in Greeley.
I first discussed this back in July of 2007. Here is the article from the Greeley Tribune announcing the arrival of the Lutheran Family Services office. They shouldn’t have been “unprepared” because someone at the state level and at the federal level knew it (the flood of refugees) was coming because the federal government funded the volag (Lutheran Family Services) office which opened last summer. Here is more of what I said about the collusion between the meatpackers and the feds.
Then this outfit, One Morgan County, funded by the Colorado taxpayer, has been in the soup for awhile:
One of the reasons for the forum was to educate people on the culture and situation of Somalis and other Africans who are in Fort Morgan, said Brenda Zion, coordinator of OneMorgan County.
I wrote about a meeting they had this past August with federal officials from the Office of Refugee Resettlement who came to Ft. Morgan to mediate, and it sure sounded like problems were brewing.
Below is the sort of thing the volags promoting more refugees will say to guilt-trip other cities. If the city should balk, then the residents are labelled “unwelcoming.” My city of Hagerstown, MD was labelled “unwelcoming” as the Virginia Council of Churches packed up and left. Emporia, KS where Tyson’s closed its plant and moved its Somalis elsewhere, is also an “unwelcoming” city.
If you are a “welcoming” city you will be used to guilt-trip other cities.
Nonetheless, Morgan County has been open, welcoming and willing to work to receive the newcomers — a fact Horan cites to other communities he works with, he said.
This is turning into an opus. Bottomline, the citizens of Ft. Morgan can make the decision about more refugees or not. But, if you decide to let the federal government send more to your “Mayberry like streets” at least know what you are getting into.
Learn about Shelbyville, TN, Emporia, KS, Ft. Wayne, IN, Greeley, CO and Grand Island, NE and go into this with eyes wide open. Bt the way, in Grand Island violence is on the rise between the Somalis and the Sudanese refugees in that city.
Just one more thing. The reason you are not hearing about these on-going refugee hot spots in the mainstream media is that they don’t want Americans to know that everything in their multicultural dream world is not going so beautifully.
There are a few media bright spots however in the smaller papers. In Tennessee, reporter Brian Mosely, won his state’s top investigative reporting prize for his series on Somali refugees in Shelbyville, TN and the struggle the citizens there are having.