Sacramento Iraqis have mental problems; no psychiatric treatment readily available

This is not the first time that we have written about Iraqi refugee mental health problems (and I suspect it won’t be the last).

So far, this fiscal year (2013) we have “welcomed” 11,066 Iraqis.  If the Sacramento percentages of suffering delicate Iraqis is representative then we have just admitted:

6,528 cases of insomnia

4,869 depressed people

4,537 people with headaches

4,205 fearful people

…all in need of mental health professionals to help them cope, so that they can find jobs.

LOL!  I bet the percentages of Americans reading this post who are experiencing sleeplessness, depression, headaches and fear are at about the same percentage as the Iraqis as we contemplate what the US State Department and the resettlement contractors are doing to America and how the heck we are going to pay for all of this!

Here is the story from California Health Line:

Many of the 2,700 Iraqi refugees living in the Sacramento area have experienced symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder but struggle to obtain mental health care services, according to a report by the UC-Davis Health System Clinical and Translational Science Center, the Sacramento Bee reports.

The report was conducted with the help of Opening Doors,* a refugee resettlement agency, and the Mesopotamia Organization, an Iraqi self-help agency.

Report Findings

The report analyzed the number of Iraqi refugees experiencing PTSD symptoms and found that:

59% of refugees reported experiencing insomnia;
44% of refugees reported experiencing depression;
41% of refugees reported experiencing headaches; and
38% of refugees reported experiencing fear (Magagnini, Sacramento Bee, 6/3).

Obamacare to the rescue?  Don’t count on it!

According to the report:

65% of refugees reported experiencing long waits for treatment of symptoms;
74% of refugees said needed services were not covered by their health insurance; and
82% of refugees said that the U.S. health care system moved too slowly (UC-Davis report, May 2013).

The Iraqi unemployment rate in the US is at about 67%.   Who knew it was because they have so many mental health problems.

He ( Sarmed Ibrahim) added that the lack of medical treatment is affecting Iraqi refugees’ ability to obtain jobs.

Just a reminder, California takes the most refugees of any state, so its only going to get worse for Medi-Cal.

* Opening Doors is a Sacramento refugee resettlement agency.  Its most recent Form 990 is here.  Out of a revenue stream of $636,186, government grants (taxpayer dollars) supplied $595,700 of their income.

Bowling Green, KY a growing Muslim community, the result of refugee resettlement

Someone needs to tell Senator Rand Paul what is happening in his home town.

A mosque in Bowling Green. Saudi money?

Here is a gushy, politically correct, story (entitled: Growing Diversity) on the huge Muslim population in Bowling Green, but not one word about those Iraqi refugee terrorists convicted there last year.

From the Bowling Green Daily News (hat tip: Robin).    By the way, the Bosnian migration was a Bill Clinton project.  He wanted to help his meatpacking friends get some cheap refugee laborers.  I’m guessing he sold out America in exchange for some campaign cash from meatpacking giants.

But, you can bet that Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was perfectly fine with it, or Kentucky wouldn’t be as high as it is on the list of states “welcoming” refugees.  The Bush State Department contributed also to the demographic change we see today.

Daily News:

When Sulejman Hasanovic moved to Bowling Green 15 years ago from Bosnia, he recalls the few Muslims who lived in the community at the time meeting in homes to worship.

Now, Bowling Green has two mosques and an estimated 7,000 Muslims, who make up about 10 percent of the city’s population. They have emigrated from as many as 23 countries, including Burma, Iraq and Russia.

Even with such a presence, Hasanovic still meets people who aren’t aware of Bowling Green’s Muslim population.

“It’s a big shock for them. They’re like, ‘Oh, you’re here,’ ” he said. “But after 15 years, I think people are getting used to us here.”

Thank USCRI!  That is the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants one of the primary resettlement contractors working in Bowling Green.  And, coincidentally that contractor is run by the woman, Lavinia Limon, who was Bill Clinton’s director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement during the initial Bosnian importation.  Back to the story:

A growing Muslim population

As they have in Bowling Green, Muslims have become part of the national fabric, with about 2.5 million living in the U.S., said Lawrence Snyder, associate religious studies professor at WKU. Bowling Green has one of the highest percentages of Muslims in the state, and it’s rare for a city of its size to have two mosques.

“For the most part, they have been welcomed without much backlash,” Snyder said. “I think that says a lot about the nature of our community.”

The large growth of Bowling Green’s Muslim community occurred in a relatively short amount of time because the city is seen as a good place for refugees to resettle and a lot of those refugees happen to be Muslim, Snyder said.

“In some ways it’s just kind of a quirk of history,” he said.

What the heck—a quirk of history! 

Snyder wants you to believe these Muslim refugees “found their way” to Bowling Green ’cause from a continent away they heard Bowling Green was lovely.  Bowling Green was targeted by the US State Department and its resettlement contractors.  The US State Department planned this demographic change! Maybe someday we will know why!

The rise of Muslim immigrants is not limited to Bowling Green, but is a trend across the nation as well.

Compared to 20 years ago, a smaller percentage of new U.S. green card recipients are coming from Europe and the Americas and a growing number are coming from Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, according to a report from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

In 2012, Muslims made up about 10 percent of new legal immigrants to the U.S., compared to 5 percent in 1992, according to the report.    [This is the study we told you about here.—ed]

To learn more about what “diversity” has brought to Bowling Green, we have an entire lengthy archive on this Kentucky city.  I think we first became aware of problems in Bowling Green in April 2008 when a Bosnian teen would-be robber was shot and killed by a homeowner.  The homeowner was exonerated.

The photo is from this blog which has photos from other mosques in Kentucky as well.

I’m AnnC@refugeewatcher on twitter. Please tweet this and also follow me!

Senator Rand Paul: ‘Immigration reform’ must include improved security measures

Paul: Refugee program deserves more scrutiny!

After reading the opening paragraphs of Paul’s op-ed in the Washington Times today, one might think Kentucky Senator Rand Paul has been reading RRW!  All of the cases he cites have been reported on these pages!

A recent Quinnipiac poll in Iowa puts Paul only 4 points behind Hillary while Rubio gets trounced by her 48% to 37%. Politico

Fazliddin Kurbanov is from Uzbekistan, a Central Asian country that borders Afghanistan. This month, Mr. Kurbanov was arrested in Boise, Idaho, charged with teaching people how to build bombs that could be used to target public transportation. He is accused of conspiring with the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which the United States recognizes as a terrorist organization. Mr. Kurbanov was here legally, admitted as a refugee in 2009.

Last year, in Aurora, Colo., Jamshid Muhtorov was arrested and charged with providing material support to the Islamic Jihad Union, which the United States recognizes as a terrorist organization. Like Mr. Kurbanov, Mr. Muhtorov is from Uzbekistan and was also here legally as a refugee.

In 2011, in my hometown of Bowling Green, Ky., Waad Ramadan Alwan and Mohanad Shareef Hammadi were arrested and accused of supporting efforts to kill American troops in Iraq. Both men are from Iraq. Both were also here legally as refugees.

The Bowling Green Daily News reported that these Iraqi refugees “slipped through the vetting process that allowed both of them political asylum in the United States.” Apparently, Mr. Kurbanov and Mr. Muhtorov “slipped through” as well.

Read on.  Then this:

I condemn government inefficiency and incompetence often. The targets for criticism are endless. In the repeating patterns from these refugee and visa cases, however, we see potentially dangerous scenarios in which we cannot afford any excuses.

[….]

These questions are crucial as Congress continues to debate immigration reform, in which vital national security concerns must be addressed. Our visa and refugee programs deserve far more monitoring and scrutiny, and there is something desperately wrong with a “vetting process” that makes so many repeated mistakes.

Instead of fixing the problems, the so-called ‘comprehensive immigration reform bill’ (S.744) weakens security measures already in place but doing poorly!   Most efforts to strengthen security failed in the Senate Judiciary Committee mark-up largely due to heavy lobbying by refugee resettlement contractors who object to anything that slows the flow of refugees into the US (and slows the flow of taxpayer dollars into their coffers!).

Paul concludes by laying down a marker for Harry Reid.  The question then becomes is this a recommendation by Paul or a demand; and will he follow through by holding up the Gang of Eight plus Grover bill *when it reaches the Senate floor?

“I respectfully request that the Senate consider the following two conditions as part of the comprehensive immigration-reform debate: One, the Senate needs a thorough examination of the facts in Massachusetts to see if legislation is necessary to prevent a similar situation in the future. Two, national security protections must be rolled into comprehensive immigration reform to make sure the federal government does everything it can to prevent immigrants with malicious intent from using our immigration system to gain entry into the United States in order to commit future acts of terror.”

The Politico Iowa poll story is here.

*Senator Paul, if you are reading this, please stay away from Grover Norquist!

I’m AnnC@refugeewatcher on twitter. Please tweet this and also follow me!

More on Sweden: NYT can’t figure out why the “youths” are so angry

After yesterday, one of the best days ever at RRW with over 6,000 visitors (nearly 10,000 in three days) from around the world to our post about Swedes fighting back against the immigrant gangs in Stockholm, here, I thought I should look around to see if the mainstream media was mentioning any of this.

There isn’t much in the American press.  Has anyone seen any mention of Swedish immigrant riots on Fox News?

However, a couple of days ago the New York Times was scratching its proverbial head to try to figure out why the immigrants to the “welcoming” social welfare capital of the world were so “unhappy.”  The article was laughable as it wondered about how “welcoming” Sweden could have gone wrong—must be racism, must be the recent cut in welfare, must be a shortage of jobs, racism of course—but one word was completely missing from the piece (two actually).  The ‘I’ word and ‘M’ word could not be found.  Like “Voldemort” in Harry Potter, “Islam” and “Muslim” are words never to be spoken in stories like this one.

Like the evil character in Harry Potter (He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named) aka Lord Voldemort, Islam Must-Not-Be-Named!

NYT:

STOCKHOLM — Eva Bromster, an elementary school principal, was jolted awake by a telephone call late Thursday night. “Your school is burning,” her boss, the director of the local education department, told her.

Ms. Bromster rushed to the school, in the mostly immigrant district of Tensta, north of Stockholm, and found one room gutted by fire and another filled with ankle-deep water after firefighters had doused the flames. It was the second fire at the school in three days.

In Stockholm and other towns and cities last week, bands made up mostly of young immigrants set buildings and cars ablaze in a spasm of destructive rage rarely seen in a country proud of its normally tranquil, law-abiding ways.

Ms. Bromster went on to speculate for the NYT that those immigrants burning schools must be “unhappy.”

Perhaps readers of the NYT are expected to know their world history and geography and know without being told that if the immigrants are from Somalia, Iraq and Syria, most will be Muslims!

The riots, now subsiding, have produced less damage than the earlier ones in Paris and London, which also involved mostly immigrants. But the unrest has shaken Sweden, which has a reputation for welcoming immigrants and asylum seekers, including those fleeing violence in countries like Iraq, Somalia and Syria, and regularly ranks in surveys as one of the world’s happiest places.

Gee, it can’t all be about poverty, they have a world-famous welfare system in Sweden.  The Left cannot let go of the idea they have pushed for decades that Islamic Jihad is related to poverty.  If not poverty it must be racism.

While the violence was concentrated in relatively poor districts, most of their residents have been shielded from dire poverty by a welfare system that is one of the world’s most expansive, despite recent cutbacks.

[….]

The left, which dominated Swedish politics for decades and devised the cradle-to-grave welfare system, has blamed reduced state benefits and a modest shift toward the privatization of public services for the unrest, pointing to an erosion of the country’s tolerant, egalitarian ethos.

Racism 24/7 in Sweden says Iraqi who has been given much:

Husby, Mr. Khamisi said, “looks nice on the outside, but inside it is not nice.” A first-year law student at Stockholm University who did not join in the rioting, Mr. Khamisi acknowledged that “Sweden has given me opportunities I didn’t have in Iraq,” but “I’m not treated the same as a white guy.”

“I feel discrimination all the time,” he said.   [Maybe there is some connection to years of immigrant crime and Muslim-perpetrated violence in cities such as Malmo?—ed]

What a shock! Sweden’s “anti-immigrant” party gaining strength:

The recent violence has been a boon to the Swedish Democrats, the anti-immigration party. Opinion polls suggest the party is gaining in popularity, partly because of the indignation many Swedes feel about being called racists after accepting so many refugees. Immigrants and the Swedish-born children of immigrants make up about 15 percent of the population, and last year Sweden nearly doubled the number of asylum seekers it took in and became Europe’s primary destination for refugees from Syria.

And, one more thing, the NYT had the audacity to suggest it was older immigrants, no mention of the Swedes, who went out on the streets to try to get the “youths” to go home.

We have seen all this coming for the past five years, see our Sweden archives here.  One story from last fall, still makes me laugh.  The Swedish government purchased a rural mansion in which to house Muslim refugees and they protested against living there saying it was full of ghosts—see Tundra Tabloids for the story on the ungrateful “youths.”

I’m AnnC@refugeewatcher on twitter. Please tweet this and also follow me!

Senator Rand Paul: Why are we bringing so many Iraqis to the US?

From the editor:   for all those arriving here, be sure to see Senator Grassley amendment to S. 744 here.

Didn’t we give Iraq a democratically elected government Paul went on to say!  Yup!

Maybe Rand Paul needs to ask his pal Grover Norquist those questions.***

Below is a story I missed last month (again in the wake of the Boston Chechen refugee terrorist act).

And, if Paul keeps this up I will have to withdraw my criticism of  him here when he was kissing-up to the Gang of Eight plus Grover bill.

Tell Senator Paul to keep his distance from Open Borders Muslim sympathizer Grover Norquist. AP Photo

The snarky HuffPo article does mention that two Iraqi refugee terrorists were convicted in Kentucky, but there is another problem with importing the high number of Iraqis.  Iraqis are not finding work (unemployment rate is 67%) and they are heavily supported by welfare (95% are receiving food stamps).  Some are so unhappy that they have returned to the Middle East.

The HuffPo reports the number of Iraqi refugees entering the US through 2012 (64,174), but so far in FY2013 we have already imported 11,066 which means we will top 20,000 this year alone!  Some may be Christians but a large percentage will be Muslims!

The Huffington Post back in April:

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) expressed concern Tuesday morning about Iraqi refugees who might be coming to the United States to commit acts of terrorism.

Speaking about immigration on “The Dennis Miller Show,” Paul said that the United States needs to reexamine its asylum-granting policies and specifically mentioned the number of refugees fleeing Iraq, a country still dealing with intense violence years after the U.S. invasion in 2003.

“We’ve exempted [Paul must mean ‘resettled’—ed] 60,000 Iraqis in the last three years. My question is, for one, are any of them intending to do us harm? And two, we won the war in Iraq — why would they be running from a democratic government?” Rand asked an agreeable Miller.

According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the United States has admitted 64,174 Iraqi refugees since 2007…

[….]

In 2011, Paul sounded off about background checks on Iraqis seeking refuge after two Iraqi refugees in Kentucky were charged with conspiring to send weapons and supplies to al Qaeda operatives in Iraq. The two men were successfully thwarted by an FBI sting operation. One was sentenced to serve a life term in federal prison; the other to a 40-year term.

***In 2007, long before the War in Iraq was over Grover Norquist and “conservative” buddy David Keene were pushing for the US to bring in Iraqis.  They,along with Ted Kennedy, said we broke it (Iraq), so the only way to fix it is to “welcome” tens of thousands to the US.

Readers, thanks to the help of a reader from Kentucky, Robin, we have identified Rachel Bovard as the staff person in Senator Paul’s office who is working the immigration issue for the Senator.  I dropped a letter off to her last Wednesday when I was in DC for the State Department hearings asking that the Senator investigate the Refugee Resettlement Program.   Please contact her by phone or e-mail and encourage the Senator to keep asking questions and to oppose S.744 which will make it easier for more refugees and asylum seekers to come to America.

And, while you are at it, warn her about what Rep. Frank Wolf revealed about Grover Norquist on the House floor, here in October of 2011, Wolf:  You can never say again that you didn’t know!

Send her the link to my post too!

Rachel Bovard, Policy Advisor to Senator Rand Paul, phone 202-224-4343 or e-mail: Rachel_Bovard@paul.senate.gov