Category: Christian refugees

Utah Burmese family still grieving for murdered daughter

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is an update of a tragic story we wrote about last April.  The Christian family of murdered 7-year-old Hser Ner Moo is still grieving.   But, I haven’t seen a word written recently about the investigation of the fellow Burmese refugee who was arrested and charged with that brutal rape and murder.

Here the reporter for the Salt Lake City Tribune (in the series I mentioned yesterday) tells how difficult a time the family had when they arrived in the US, demonstrating once again that the federal contractors are not doing their jobs for which they are being paid by us, the taxpayer. 

Thank goodness there were citizens in the community who could help them.

Shortly after their arrival in Utah in August last year, they were hungry and couldn’t find their resettlement caseworker. Today, they laugh remembering the man – who they called Mr. Tomorrow, because he never seemed to follow through on his promises.
“We didn’t know how long it would be for Mr. Tomorrow to bring us [things] right now,” Cartoon Wah said.

Within weeks, the family met Carrie Pender, a refugee specialist for the Granite School District, who had stopped by their apartment to help enroll their children. They soon asked her for help getting food – they told her they did not have food stamps yet. She bought them groceries.

She also took them to the Department of Motor Vehicles to help them get Utah identification cards, needed to open a bank account. No one had ever connected their phone, another task Pender took on.

As the temperatures dropped, the family grew cold at night. It was an LDS service missionary assigned to their family, Paul Van Dyke, who brought them blankets and winter coats. It was also Van Dyke who found jobs for Cartoon Wah and two of his sons at Deseret Industries, and helped them sign up for English.

“I think [resettlement agencies] . . . they do the best they can,” Van Dyke said. “What we’ve found is that usually [refugees] could go for weeks before their caseworker can get back to them.”

It is the same old story from one end of the country to the other.

State Department pulling out of Michigan

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

John McCain isn’t the only one pulling out of Michigan. Gregg Krupa of the Detroit Times reports:

Michigan’s economy is so bad that the State Department is sending fewer Iraqi refugees to the area because of concerns that their future would not be bright.

After a request by relief workers, the policy of bringing Iraqis to metro Detroit if relatives or friends live in the area was changed to allow only those with immediate family to settle here, according to the State Department.

“The State Department has taken the measure of things and decided it would be better to send them somewhere else, where they might be self-sufficient, instead of coming to Michigan, because the economy is very bad here, and we have the highest unemployment in the country,” Belmin Pinjic of Lutheran Social Services of Michigan said.

But the Detroit area is the United States’s Little Iraq.

Michigan is home to 35 percent of all Iraqi-born residents of the United States, according to the Census Bureau.

The vast majority of them live in metro Detroit, where the Iraqi Muslim community numbers perhaps 12,000 and there are about 90,000 to 105,000 Chaldeans — Iraqi Catholics — according to sources in those communities.

 That is the largest population of Chaldeans outside of Iraq.

But the government can’t keep Iraqis from moving to the Detroit metro area, any more than the McCain campaign’s official decision can stop the unofficial campaign in Michigan.

Joseph Kassab, executive director of the Chaldean Federation of American, said he raised the issue with officials from the State Department.

“I explained to them that no matter what you do, if those people are sent somewhere else, they will end up here, no matter what you do,” Kassab said. “If they don’t have kin or relatives, they are still coming to metro Detroit because our people like to live together, and we support each other.

“We have people who own businesses who are willing to come forward, and they are doing that now to help them, to provide jobs until they are settled.”

The Chaldeans already had a settled community before the Iraq war, so they act like normal immigrants to America, welcoming their own and taking care of them.

…the Chaldean Federation is organizing a job fair and will begin providing some automobiles to the refugees with low-cost loans and easy payment terms.

Relief workers say the lack of public transportation in metro Detroit is often the most difficult barrier to resettlement, because it affects the housing, employment and education of the refugees.

Pay attention to this next paragraph.

“The refugees are doing well and prospering,” Kassab said. “We are extending our arms to them. The only problem is the transportation issue, and we are preparing a program so they will have cars.”

“We” are preparing a program. Not the government. Not the refugee agencies. The refugees’ countrymen. That’s not to say the refugees don’t take government aid. But real people who care about them make sure they are housed and fed and given the means to work. Many Chaldeans are small-businessmen, as in store owners. That’s also similar to previous immigrant groups, and that provides a path for newcomers as they can work in businesses owned by their countrymen.

I repeat from the article: The Chaldeans are Christians. They’re here to live their lives and prosper, not to change America.

Grand Island whiplash: now Cubans are coming

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I feel like I’m getting whiplash trying to follow all the happenings in Grand Island, NE as the conflicts surrounding the Swift meatpacking plant firings, and now hirings, continue.   We learned yesterday that about 150 Somali workers had either quit or been fired over the issue of accommodating Muslim demands for break times that would disrupt other workers.

Now, according to the Grand Island Independent  Swift is bringing in the Cubans. 

Earlier this week, Dan Hoppes, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local No. 22, said JBS Swift & Co. needed all its employees to keep the local plant working because of tight labor supplies.

But with some employees quitting because of this week’s protests and counterprotests over the issue of how — or whether — break times at JBS Swift should be altered, the company is bringing a new ethnic group to Grand Island.

Kris Burling, director of English language learners for the Grand Island public schools, said GIPS migrant recruiter Suyapa Gonzalez was told by her contact person at Swift that Cuban families would soon be arriving in Grand Island.  [Do you have a “migrant recruiter” working in your local school system?]

Burling said Gonzalez was told a few Cuban fathers have already arrived in Grand Island in advance of their families but have not started working at Swift. Gonzalez also was told that perhaps eight to 10 families would be arriving in town this week.

According to databases at the Office of Refugee Resettlement we brought 60,144 Cuban refugees to the US from 1983 to 2005.  In 2006 we resettled 3142.  In 2007 the figure was 2923 and for FY 2008 we had brought 3749 Cubans through the end of August.  That’s a total of just about 70,000 Cubans to the Somalis total so far of 83,000.

It appears that Swift was able to call up someone (in the federal government? in the volags?) and order up Cubans, just adds more evidence to my theory that the federal government is the employment service for big businesses.  

 How many of you knew we were still bringing Cubans to the US?

Meatpackers recruit refugees, no, you are kidding!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update September 15th:   Chris Coen of Friends of Refugees, who legitimately watches out for the well-being of refugees by keeping an eye on volags (non-profit government contractors), the State Department, and others in the refugee resettlement industry, left the following comment to this Chicago article:

Has anyone asked why 17 refugees are living crammed into a three-bedroom apartment in Chicago’s North Side? Although Dr. Ed Silverman who heads Illinois’s Bureau of Refugee and Immigrant Services claims not to like Tyson recruiting Burmese to leave Chicago, what is he doing to help refugees in Chicago find jobs that can support their families? Does he have any concern for refugees living in squalid, cramped conditions? It has been my experience that Dr. Silverman advocates for as many refugees as he can get into Chicago irrespective of the number of jobs that can support them, or the complete lack of appropriately sized and affordable apartments in Chicago that are available for these families. Christopher Coen Friends of Refugees Minneapolis FORefugees@hotmail.com

Learn more about how Friends of Refugees came into existence—in Chicago of all places here.

 

Here is an article from Chicago about how meatpackers across the country are now recruiting refugees.  If you have been following this blog for the last year, you are probably scratching your head and wondering why this is news.  

The differance in this story though is that Tyson’s, and others probably, are now recruiting Burmese Karen Christian workers (no religious accommodation demands!)  and some refugee resettlement advocates are expressing concern for the well-being of those newest refugees desparate for work.

A lot of the meat and poultry on U.S. dinner tables is cut and packaged by undocumented immigrants. But federal enforcement is shaking things up. Many packinghouses are turning to a different pool of cheap laborers. These workers have immigration papers. They’re war refugees. In Chicago, Arkansas-based Tyson Foods has been recruiting Burmese refugees to work in plants as far away as Kansas. The Burmese desperately need jobs. But it’s not clear they know what they’re getting in to.

Read the whole story, which by the way mentions meatpackers first recruiting Somalis and Bosnians, and consider that we are bringing one and a half million immigrants into the US each year, so no wonder unemployment is climbing.  It is the elephant in the living room that neither Presidential campaign acknowledges.

Violence against Sudanese refugees in Maine is growing

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update September 11th:  More on the murder of this Christian Sudanese man

Portland, Maine has the largest population of mostly Christian refugees from the Sudan in the US according to various news accounts, but recently that community has been the focus of violent crime activity. 

Here is an article just yesterday about another murder of a Sudanese man, a long-time resident, in that city:

PORTLAND, Maine—City officials sought Tuesday to reassure members of the Sudanese community who said they no longer feel safe following the fatal shooting of a hospital security officer whose family came from Sudan to Portland in 1995.

Representatives of the Sudanese Community Association of Maine met with the mayor, city manager and police chief after delivering a letter that stated its members are living in fear following a number of violent acts targeting Sudanese people.

Sudanese residents feel let down by the lack of communication that has “created fear in supposedly our new home of hope,” the letter said.

James Angelo Okot, 27, was gunned down early Sunday in the parking lot of Mercy Hospital. Police were searching for two assailants.

Read on, he was not the first to die.

To learn about the Islamization of Sudan and the reason why many Christian Sudanese came to to the US  go here.