I’m sure this is happening everywhere, so it is all the more reason to continue the suspension of new refugee arrivals that was supposed to have been liftedthis week by the US State Department.
No jobs for newly arrived refugees and no one to give them instructions in person as to where to get signed up for their taxpayer-funded ‘services.’
Nonprofits Retool to Serve Refugees Struggling During COVID-19 Shutdown
Refugees who arrived in the Bay Area around the time shelter-in-place orders were issued, as well as those who have been her for an extended period, are struggling to stay afloat, organizations who serve them said.
The most recent arrivals are simply trying to establish themselves, whereas others are unaware of services available to them, are being led astray by misinformation on social media or are faced with a rekindling of the trauma they thought they had left behind.
Given the shutdown of many businesses, new arrivals are less likely to find jobs.***
Without employment, refugees have less access to health insurance and more need for income assistance. Lacking income to buy cars, newly arrived refugees must rely on drastically curtailed bus and rail service to do essential tasks like shop for groceries or get to the hospital. New arrivals without existing community connections can then end up extremely isolated.
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….the system of refugee resettlement in the United States is based on rapidly finding employment. “You are looking at a substantial pool of individuals who may not be able to pay for rent and their needs even if they were working,” said Blythe Raphael, who heads the refugee services program at Jewish Family and Community Services East Bay.“Those families we’re watching carefully and trying to find assistance.” [This organization is asubcontractor of HIAS.—ed]
Multiple organizations that serve refugees have shifted gears, reorganized and launched new services to ensure they can meet this population’s needs during the global COVID-19 pandemic.
The stay-at-home order was issued just after several families arrived in the area from Aghanistan, forcing Raphael’s East Bay organization to retool for remote work at the same time it was delivering assistance. “As all services were closing to in-person interviews, we had to really review our model in order for us to make the service connections for all of our new arrivals and for our case managers to be able to serve people with essential course services,” Raphael said.
In other words, it is hard to get new refugees signed up for their various welfare programs and other services when so much is closed.
These groups have had to quickly adjust to the shelter-in-place order, and are themselves vulnerable to the economic fallout, so they need as much public support as they can get, said advocates. “Small organizations are going to suffer a lot from this economic crash that’s going to happen,” said Zand (Leva Zand, development director of the Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants in Oakland).
***One of those jobs that refugees are hired to do is slaughterhouse work. And, now comes news that meat plants are having to close due to the number of workers getting sick with COVID-19. See here.
I’m looking every day for official word from the US State Department about whether refugees will again be streaming to America after the UN/IOM shut down refugee travel in mid-March.
However, as I pointed out here a few days agoin a post that went viral, refugees have still been coming in, the spigot was never entirely closed.
But, today was the originally designated day for the flow to resume and I am seeing nothing by way of a public announcement one way or another.
You can be sure that the US State Department must have already notified their “partners” (aka paid contractors).
We will work with our implementing partners to plan for a resumption of refugee arrivals on or after April 7.
How about letting the public know, after all, we pay for it all one way or another.
And, if they are opening the refugee spigot, we need to know if tests for COVID-19 are being given before the refugee boards a near empty plane for Anytown, USA.
More people who are unemployed, hungry and in need of health care coming to America—what could go wrong!
If you are looking at that headline and saying, so what, consider this….
We are still admitting Special Immigrant Visaholders from Afghanistan to the US—821 in March— but the average is over 1,200 for each of the six months in this fiscal year. (Go to the Refugee Processing Centerto see where I get the SIV numbers.)
Are they being tested, or required to quarantine as they are being flown into the US RIGHT NOW?
Here is the news that caught my eye this morning. Read this and then I have a question.
Hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees flee from Iran’s hot zone, spreading the coronavirus
Mahdi Noori, a young Afghan refugee in Iran, was left jobless when the factory where he’d worked cutting stone was shut down because of the coronavirus outbreak. He had no money, was afraid of contracting the virus and had no options. So he headed home.
At one point, 15,000 a day were crossing back into Afghanistan!
He joined a large migration of some 200,000 Afghans and counting who have been flowing home across the border for weeks — from a country that is one of the world’s biggest epicenters of the pandemic to an impoverished homeland that is woefully unprepared to deal with it.
At the border, Noori lined up with thousands of other returning refugees earlier this month, crowded together waiting to cross. “I saw women and children on the border, and I was thinking, What if they get infected now, here?” the 20-year-old told The Associated Press.
The NYT reported in mid March that Afghans returning from India had temps taken, but that is not happening at the border of Iran and Afghanistan. And then, as we all know now, fevers do not appear in a large number of those infected. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/world/asia/afghanistan-coronavirus.html
The massive influx of returnees, who are going back untested and unmonitored to cities, towns and villages around the country, threatens to create a greater outbreak in Afghanistan that could overwhelm its health infrastructure wrecked by decades of war.
So far, Afghan authorities have confirmed 273 cases*** of the new coronavirus, more than 210 of them in people who returned from Iran. Four deaths have been recorded.
Afghan Health Minister Ferozudin Feroz says the virus has already spread because of the returnees. “If the cases increase, then it will be out of control and we will need help,” he said.
He and other Afghan officials expressed concern that Iran would push out the more than 1 million Afghans working illegally in the country. Iran has already barred entry from Afghanistan, preventing any who left from coming back. Iran has had more than 58,000 coronavirus cases and more than 3,600 deaths.
***This morning (4/7) Worldometer has Iran at 62,589 cases and Afghanistan has 423.
Suppose we are good American citizens and self-isolate and manage to flatten that magical curve in the next two weeks or so, what is to stop another outbreak beginning say in May or June as we bring in refugees from countries who are weeks behind us and have not yet flattened their curve (if that is even possible in Afghanistan)?
Check out that NYT storyabout how sick, infected Afghans are escaping hospitals to go home.
Actually my question applies to any country in the world that has not yet been widely infected.
We clean up the US and then import new cases from parts of the world that are late to the game, and end up with new pockets in states that thought they were through the worst.
Top ‘welcoming’ states for these special refugees from Afghanistan are California, Georgia, Maryland, New York, Texas, Virginia and Washington.
Ed Morrissey writing atHot Air reports on how the COVID-19 hysteria could spell the end of the European Union as countries rediscover the need for BORDERS!
Trip down memory lane!
He also reminds us how the beginning of the end came when Hillary/Obama and various EU governments joined forces to bring down Gaddafi in Libya in 2011 which opened the flood gates for African migrants by the hundreds of thousands to descend on the continent.
European Leaders Lament: Coronavirus Might Just Kill The EU Too
If the European Union now finds itself in “mortal danger,” it’s only because it’s faced its first truly mortal threat. The Washington Post reports that European leaders have begun to warn that unilateral actions by its members — most recently Hungary but also core members France and Germany— will undo their decades-long experiment in continental unity.The raising of borders and the imposition of trade barriers in the coronavirus pandemic has all but sidelined Brussels in the crisis, and there’s little indication that EU members are interested in anything but their own domestic political standing.
[….]
In other words, Europe has rediscovered why borders matter and why government works best on the principle of subsidiarity. The borders lesson got taught the hard way, as I wrote two-plus weeks ago, after Europe and the US precipitated a massive refugee crisis by decapitating the Qaddafi regime in Libya. The flood of refugees from there and Syria created cultural dislocation throughout the Schengen Zone, provoking the Brexit push in the UK and setting the stage for their current disunity.
Remember this! We wrote about Hillary’s role extensively at the time and over the years since as the invasion of Europe progressed. See here.
It should come as no shock that Germans expect the German government to prioritize Germans in an existential crisis rather than a super-national quasi-governing body. Nor should it shock anyone that the same is true for the French, the Italians, and so on. That doesn’t mean that they can’t work cooperatively to approach common interests and problems, but that in a crisis, they’re responsible to their own citizens first and foremost.
In mid March we reported that the UN’s International Organization for Migration had halted refugee travel due to the virus crisis, so imagine my surprise this morning when I checked the data for the last two weeks of March and learned we admitted 221 regular refugees and 373 Special Immigrant Visas from Afghanistan in those two weeks.
For the entire month of March we admitted 1,110 regular refugees and 844 SIVs mostly from Afghanistan that are treated just like refugees except some can choose where they want to live in the US.
So we can’t safely fly, but nearly 2,000 ‘refugees’ were being flown into the US during March.
The refugee admissions program is scheduled (so far) to resume this week after April 7th, but it never really stopped!
Here is where the 1,110 were placed in March:
Top ten ‘welcoming’ states are: TX, OH, NY, IL, WA, KY, MA, CA, MO, and TN.
Now see this map (below) for where the 221 regular refugees were placed since the supposed suspension of travel. They must have been transported across America on near empty flights.
The vast majority of the arrivals in the last two weeks are from the DR Congo (161). See my post about how many we have now taken since Obama agreed to take tens of thousands of Congolese. We are way past 50,000 but they are still coming!
More unemployed and more hungry mouths to feed as America suffers…..
We are still admitting Special Immigrant Visa holders from Afghanistan to the US—821 in March— but the average is over 1,200 for each of the six months in this fiscal year. (Go to the 
