Your tax dollars:
There is nothing new about this story, a non-profit religious organization got a $200,000 federal grant to educate a specific group of refugees (what no Burmese welcome here? Special treatment for Somalis?). After reading the following lines, I wonder what sort of return we get for our money.
He [Hassan Muya a Somali immigrant who runs the program] said about 10 have been placed in jobs since the program started, and “they’re all doing good.”
About 40 Bantu have been taking part in the program, Muya said. He estimated there are about 1,600 Bantu living in Louisville.
The program is funded by a $200,000 grant to Catholic Charities from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement.
The article doesn’t say for how long the grant money will last, but it doesn’t look to me that in 5 months we have gotten much for our buck—10 people employed, at what sort of work? I wonder if Catholic Charities needs to account in the end for its accomplishments. And, I always wonder if there is such an American citizen labor shortage to warrant taxpayer spending to train foreign workers.
We’ve written on several occasions about Louisville. I especially recommend the post I titled: “Is big business driving immigration?” This is the one about a Wall Street Journal article that discusses how great all this cheap labor is for Louisville and where a city official refers to the first generation of Somali Bantu as the “sacrificial generation”.