Springfield, MA mayor tells State Department NO! to more refugees

08/14/2013 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update August 27th: Mayor Sarno holds press conference with disgruntled Somali, here.

Update August 15th: More media coverage of the Mayor’s letter and response, here , here and here.

Update: Lutherans respond to criticism, here.

Reader ‘pungentpeppers’ alerts us to a new “pocket of resistance” to refugee resettlement and it’s in the ‘Peoples’ Republic of Massachusetts’ of all places!

Democrat Mayor Sarno hopefully has the fortitude to stand up to the criticism that will come his way from the Open Borders/Religious Left lobby!
Photo: The Republican

Here is the stunning news. I say stunning because very few Mayors or local elected officials have the guts to do what Mayor Sarno has done. There have been a few others, most notably Mayor Gatsas from Manchester, NH, but most local officials believe they have no recourse against the federal government and the contractors—in this case Catholic Charities, Lutheran Social Services and Jewish Family Services—and just have to take it!

Most also fear the political ramifications of being labelled a “racist” for saying they are overloaded.

One reform we should all be pushing for is to legally enable cities and states to say NO to the feds!

Note to the Mayor: I see you supported Ed Markey for the US Senate, you need to ask his office for help!

The State Department ( Office Population Refugees and Migration) is very aware that they have a problem finding “welcoming” communities for the growing number of refugees AND asylees they are trying to place. Earlier this summer we learned they and the Office of Refugee Resettlement were having secret pow-wows (ORR did not answer several requests from me to learn of the location of the July “placement” meeting) to jointly agree on what communities might be welcoming. This is what I learned in June (see Lancaster meeting):

….apparently in light of failed attempts to get new seed communities established, the feds are having ORR-PRM joint quarterly placement meetings. The next one will be in July. Before any new site is opened (usually because some contractor thinks it would be a good place), ORR-PRM will visit the site together and decide if it will be “welcoming.”

By the way, when you read the whole Springfield story, note that one contractor says they aren’t resettling so many in Springfield directly, but are spreading them out throughout the county—this is one of their tricks when they start getting heat.

From The Republican (emphasis is mine). We have seen this before—refugees placed in slums!

SPRINGFIELD — Mayor Domenic J. Sarno on Tuesday urged federal officials to stop the flow of refugees into Springfield, saying the influx has become “a pressing issue of public safety.”

Sarno, in a letter to the U.S. State Department, said Springfield has “a long and successful history” of taking in refugees, but the growing numbers have led to his concern “for the safety of both our citizens and the refugees themselves.”

Many of the refugees are being placed in substandard housing, and are placing burdens on the Code Enforcement, Police and School departments, Sarno said.

The Police Department has reported an increase in fraud, robbery and property crimes committed against refugees, Sarno said. In addition, the refugees are placing a strain on the school system, coming from around the world,*** he said.

In his petition, Sarno said he has become aware of “some startling facts” from reports he has received from city departments. That has included housing with “significant life safety violations” of the state building and sanitary codes that have included “rampant insect and vermin infestations, the absence of any smoke detectors,” and illegal wiring, broken doors, and blocked exits, he said.

“The fact that refugees are being placed into properties containing the reprehensible conditions, cited above, is compelling evidence that local agencies are not employing people with the necessary qualifications to conduct adequate safety and habitability inspections for potential settlement units, and are not properly utilizing the funding being provided by the Federal Government,” Sarno said.

Sarno’s four-page letter was sent to Barbara Day, chief of domestic resettlement, refuge admissions for the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.

“We have done more than our fair share,” Sarno said Tuesday in an interview. “It’s not fair to the refugees or Springfield.”

“I have to draw the line,” Sarno said. “The number of refugee children who have little to no English language skills has overwhelmed the very limited interpretation capabilities of our public schools, and funding that was intended for use in assisting existing pupils.”

The mayor and some of his department heads met in July with organizations involved in the refugee resettlement efforts — Catholic Charities, Lutheran Social Services and the Jewish Family Services.

Read on to hear what Jewish Family Services said about shifting refugees to the county. There was no comment from the Catholics or the Lutherans.

***I don’t have time to do a thorough analysis, but you can go here and check out Springfield, Massachusetts’ numbers (or your town’s numbers) and the nationality of its/your resettled refugees. Open the file entitled: Arrivals by Destination City by Nationality by FY as of July 31, 2013.

The numbers do not represent those who might have come to a town or city as ‘secondary migrants’ (refugees resettled elsewhere but who have gone to certain cities to be with their own kind of people).

Springfield has “welcomed” 1,712 refugees since 2001 from the following countries:

Afghanistan
Azerbaijan
Belarus
Bhutan
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Burma
Burundi
Dem. Rep. Congo
Eritrea
Estonia
Ethiopia
Iran
Iraq
Kazakhstan
Kyrgyzstan
Latvia
Liberia
Moldova
Russia
Rwanda
Sierra Leone
Somalia
Sudan
Syria
Ukraine
Uzbekistan
Vietnam

An afterthought: I wonder does the Mayor know that the Refugee Resettlement Program run by the State Department was the brainchild of former Mass. Senator Ted Kennedy?

Somalis lead the world in practice of female genital mutilation

08/05/2013 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Cutting tools on display in a room in Lunsar, Sierra Leone [Grace Harmon/Plan International]

Isn’t diversity beautiful!

Here is news of a new report on this disgusting, degrading, barbaric practice that you know they are not leaving behind when they migrate to the West.

From All Africa. The UN does something useful here:

Mogadishu — Approximately 6.5 million Somali girls and women have undergone female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) — otherwise known as female circumcision — according to a new report by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

Although support for the practice is waning, the report indicates that 98% of Somali women between 15 and 49 have been cut or mutilated — the highest per capita percentage in the world.

In addition, the report states that female circumcision is higher among Somalis even in countries where the practice is less common.

Read it all.

We reported back in March that the practice was increasing in the US, here.

Photo: The photo is from another report on FGM in June, here. Looks like there is less and less interest in defending the procedure in a nod to ‘cultural relativism’ that seemed to be a trend gaining favor a few years ago. And, from a practical standpoint, why should Westerners be expected to pay for the mental and physical health problems stemming from FGM when Somalis are resettled in the US.

Excessively high Bhutanese suicide rate in US comes up in alerts again

07/10/2013 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I think this is probably the same report we have mentioned previously, but since we have so many new readers lately and a lot of recent news on Bhutanese (Nepalese) refugees, it’s best to repeat it rather than to have some readers not know about it.

For several reasons, mostly joblessness and family stress over money, Bhutanese refugees are killing themselves at higher rates than most people in the world. Tell me again why we are going to legalize 11 million illegal aliens and bring in more immigrants when legal refugees can’t find work? And, why are resettlement agencies actually lobbying for more job competition for their own refugees?

From the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) for the week of July 5, 2013:

During the period February 2009–February 2012, the Office of Refugee Resettlement of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported 16 suicides among the approximately 57,000 Bhutanese refugees who had resettled in the United States since 2008. In 2012, the office requested assistance from CDC and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health’s Refugee Health Technical Assistance Center to identify risk factors that might be associated with suicidal ideation among Bhutanese refugees. In collaboration with the Massachusetts refugee health center, CDC conducted a survey of randomly selected Bhutanese refugees in four U.S. states with large populations of resettled refugees*. The results indicated significant associations between ever having expressed suicidal ideation and current self-reported symptoms of mental health disorder (e.g., anxiety, depression, or posttraumatic stress disorder) and postmigration difficulties (e.g., family conflict or inability to find work). The findings highlight the need for development of culturally appropriate community-based interventions for suicide prevention and standard procedures for monitoring and reporting suicides and suicide attempts in the Bhutanese refugee population.

They killed themselves in Nepal at a pretty high rate too (must be something in their culture, or, LOL! in their genetic makeup?)

….the annual suicide rate among Bhutanese refugees resettled in the United States was calculated by investigators as 21.5 per 100,000; the age-adjusted suicide rate using the U.S. 2000 population as the standard was 24.4 per 100,000. Both estimates were higher than the estimated annual global suicide rate for all persons of 16.0 per 100,000 (1) and the annual suicide rate for U.S. residents of 12.4 per 100,000 (2), but were similar to the prearrival suicide rate in Bhutanese refugee camps in Nepal of 20.7 per 100,000 (3).

*The four states are these: Arizona, Georgia, New York, and Texas. But, since we have brought nearly 70,000 Bhutanese to the US, there are many other resettlement states experiencing challenges with joblessness and just plain overload of George Bush’s refugees. Yesterday, we heard from Bhutanese in Manchester, NH, here.

Photo: There are many more photos of Bhutanese refugees in Atlanta, here, along with a story about them.

Short takes: refugees around the world, diseases, rapes, suicides, trafficking etc.

07/05/2013 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I’ve got such a backlog of stories to post, I’ve decided to do a compendium of sorts to catch up.

Rohingya men demand justice in Thailand. AFP photo

~Syrian refugee camp in Iraqi Kurdistan, overloaded and unsanitary conditions may lead to disease

Here is the story at Relief Web:

DOMIZ CAMP, 3 July 2013 (IRIN) – On a hot June afternoon, 27-year-old Gharib Mohammed stands outside his tent at this camp for Syrian refugees in Iraq, shovel in hand.

Sewage and garbage have blocked the small stream that runs the length of his dusty avenue and the smell has entered his tent.

~Center for Disease Control has a report on the high Bhutanese refugee suicide rate in the US. Looks like not much new beyond what we have already reported.

From February 2009 to February 2012, the US Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) reported 16 suicides among Bhutanese refugees in the United States. This number far surpasses the number of suicides reported to ORR among any other refugee community in the United States, yielding a suicide rate that is twice as high as that in the general United States population.

**~In Egypt, Egyptian men think they can get Syrian refugee brides cheaply, from The Star:**

Men across the region are now seeking Syrian brides. In Turkey and Jordan, where refugee camps pepper the landscape, the desperation of the Syrians is far easier to spot as rich Persian Gulf men scour the camps to buy brides living in tents. Rape, child brides and temporary marriages are prevalent.

[….]

But in Cairo, where there are no camps, the dashed dreams of both Egyptians and Syrians in the post-Arab Spring world meet on more equal terms.

Egyptian men, now poorer as the economy founders, find hope in the desperate Syrians, who can’t live in their own nation because a war that once promised revolutionary change has brought devastation and forced flight instead.

[….]

Some Muslim clerics have urged Egyptian men to marry Syrian women as an act of charity, and there are even rumours that top members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the secretive religious society through which Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi rose to prominence, have taken Syrian women as second wives. [LOL! I bet this practice came to a screeching halt in the last few days!—ed]

**~In Thailand a policeman was charged with helping Rohingya man rape Rohingya woman, from AFP where the story is used to once again blame the Buddhists in Burma.**

BANGKOK — A policeman has been charged with trafficking after a Rohingya woman was allegedly lured from a shelter in southern Thailand and subsequently raped by a man from the refugee Muslim minority, police told AFP Friday.

It is believed to be the first time a Thai official has been charged with trafficking of Rohingya boat people, despite probes into alleged people smuggling by authorities including the army.

[….]

The woman was allegedly raped repeatedly by the Rohingya man, believed to have worked as a translator at the shelter, who has been charged for the assault.

US Catholic Bishops would like the US to take more Rohingya (and Syrians!) to your towns, here.

**~Woman (Mexican national) charged in US with trafficking child from El Salvador into the US, from the Brownsville Herald:**

Another child is heading to the Office of Refugee Resettlement and a woman is accused of trying to smuggle the undocumented girl into the country, according to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection news release.

Mirtha Veronica Nava-Martinez, 38, is accused of inducing an undocumented child to enter the U.S. illegally for financial gain, a criminal complaint revealed.

Pandemic panic: MERS at Mecca

07/04/2013 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update July 5th: WHO to convene emergency talks on MERS, Tuesday (here). Only second ever of such emergency talks. Hat tip: Drudge

“Belgian medics have warned Muslims not to travel to Mecca, because the Hajj threatens to spread the virus worldwide.”

I’m wondering if every local US health department should be alerted in case Muslims from the US come in contact with the disease as they travel to the Hajj.

There has been another death of a Middle Eastern man in the UK from the mystery disease known to the health community, and soon to the world, as MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome). Here is the story from the UK Telegraph, hat tip: Always on Watch via twitter:

A man being treated in a London hospital for a lethal ‘Sars-like’ Middle Eastern virus has died.

This May 23rd graphic is already outdated—77 cases now with 43 deaths!

The man, a Qatari national, had been admitted to a private clinic in London in September, before being transferred to the specialist centre at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital.

He was diagnosed as suffering from the Mers virus – Middle East Respiratory Syndrome – which has affected 77 people worldwide, with 43 deaths.

“Guy’s and St Thomas’ can confirm that the patient with severe respiratory illness due to novel coronavirus (MERS-nCV) sadly died on Friday 28 June, after his condition deteriorated, despite every effort and full supportive treatment,” said Robin Wilkinson, a spokesman for the hospital.

The death of the Qatari man brings to three the number of victims who have died in the UK.

Warnings to be issued in advance of Hajj pilgrimage:

Known cases of the illness have quadrupled since April, and it is deadlier than Sars, which killed 774 people in 2003. SARS killed one in ten affected people; Mers has proved fatal in 65 per cent of cases.

The majority of the cases have been in Saudi Arabia, or in patients who have recently travelled to the region.

But with the annual Hajj pilgrimage due in October, and an estimated three million people travelling to Mecca, concerns are mounting that the deadly virus could spread swiftly.

“We need to get the facts clear and get the appropriate advice to all your countries where your pilgrims want to go to Mecca,” said Margaret Chan, head of the World Health Organisation, in May. “It is something quite urgent.”

[….]

Cases have been reported in Jordan, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Britain, France, Italy, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia – the country with the most confirmed infections.

Visit our ‘health issues’ category for our previous coverage of MERS and other diseases and ailments that follow immigrants around the world.