Check it out here!   Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who fled Iraq since the 1970s (they were fleeing Saddam Hussein!) are returning to Iraq.  Of course one of the reasons given in this post is that Syria is no longer stable and many had gone to that neighboring country.  BTW, just a reminder none had gone to rich Muslim Saudi Arabia because the Saudis have a border fence and refuse to take in refugees.

So according to this article, things have improved in Iraq and other neighboring countries are more unstable.  But, many are returning because the economic situation elsewhere isn’t so hot.  And, then some are force-ably returned by certain European countries where they have failed to make their case for asylum (that means those governments didn’t believe their story of persecution or they deemed them threats to the country).

It’s a good article with lots of numbers and charts, however it’s missing one thing I’m looking for—how many have returned to Iraq from the US after we have spent boatloads of money resettling them.  We’ve had stories of returnees who are disgusted because they thought they were walking into mansion-like homes and good jobs only to be placed in city slums and offered menial labor which they thought was beneath them.

Just two points I want to make from Musings on Iraq, but be sure to read the whole thing.

Returning for financial reasons:

A third factor is that Iraq has become more stable in the last couple years. There is still daily violence, but it is more targeted and political in nature, meaning that many Iraqis no longer personally face it on a day-to-day basis. That has been a major pull for internally displaced Iraqis to decide to try to go back to their homes, or at least their original provinces. Finally, some Iraqis have been away from home for years, and fled under duress because of the fighting. Many of those have struggled to restart new lives in their host countries, and are now returning to Iraq for financial reasons.

The number of returnees has been huge for the last three years and we didn’t hear boo about this in the mainstream media.  Where is Matthew Lee of AP?*

Earlier in 2011 it looked like the number of Iraqis coming back had stagnated. In the last few months there has been a considerable upsurge however, which makes it look like more people will return this year than last. This is still not up to the numbers seen in 2008 and 2009 when over 200,000 returns were recorded annually, but the figures are encouraging. The problem as ever is what will these people face when they go back. The lack of government and outside support is limited, and the job, housing, and service situation within Iraq is poor.

*  Lee is the Associated Press reporter who like clock work at the end of each month (when the numbers came in from the State Department) in the waning days of the Bush Administration wrote chiding articles throwing the blame to that bad old George Bush that we weren’t bringing Iraqis fast enough (because it was all our fault).  He needs now to write a story about the Iraqi terror suspects who got in, and about those who are thumbing their noses at our generosity and going home after we’ve resettled them at huge taxpayer expense.

All of our extensive coverage on Iraqi refugees can be found in our category by that title (506 previous posts).

We’ve reported this on several previous occasions, but here we have Eric Schwartz, Asst. Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration telling us so again in what I guess is his swan song report to the “stakeholders” who depend on refugee funding for their livelihoods.  He says the flow of refugees into the US  is slow due to enhanced security screening especially for Iraqis.

You can bet your booties that they have more security problems than the two Iraqis arrested in Kentucky last month on terrorism charges that they aren’t letting the public know about.

Schwartz (a protegee of George Soros) is leaving his job as head of the refugee program to go to a university job in Minnesota.  My first thought is that he might be one of the first rats to leave the sinking Obama Presidency ship.  Or, the program is unraveling and Schwartz is getting out while the getting is good!

Read Schwartz’s report for an overview of where the program is as he heads for the exit (LOL! try really hard to leave out all the schmaltzy humanitarian mumbo jumbo as you read).

A couple of things I want to highlight:

Schwartz says that Congress and the contractors want more Africans and so they are going to try to bring more from the Horn of Africa (aka Somalia):

Members of Congress and the NGO community have long expressed concerns about our limited capacity to process refugees from Africa, where refugee processing is extremely labor-intensive and time-consuming. Though we made considerable progress between fiscal years 2009 and 2010, with resettlement from Africa increasing from 9,670 in 2009 to 13,305 in 2010, arrivals have dropped in 2011 and significant challenges remain. Thus, we plan to augment our refugee coordination offices in the Horn of Africa and in Central Africa, which will further improve our capacity to resettle vulnerable refugees.

The African fraud in the family reunification program (P-3) has still not been solved.  The program was closed in 2008 and still isn’t open!  They must be having some huge mess behind the scenes on this.

The P-3 component of our refugee admissions program provides for refugee adjudications and resettlement of family members of previously admitted refugees. This P-3 component is important, as it provides protection to vulnerable people while also promoting the principle of family unification. It was suspended in 2008 due to concerns about fraud, and resuming the program has been a priority for me and for the PRM Bureau. We have sought to establish procedures that will permit resumption while ensuring the integrity of the program, and have consulted closely with the NGO community and others. While we believe that establishment of DNA testing will be necessary to permit resumption of the program, we have been seeking to implement such a program in a way that would not create financial burdens for genuine refugees – as testing can be expensive.

Readers, don’t you think DNA testing is a whole heck of a lot cheaper then admitting someone fraudulently and giving them welfare into the foreseeable future (not to mention the possible security risk someone who is lying poses for us)?   Just imagine how much it is costing the US taxpayer at this moment for legal and investigative work with all the Somali refugees running off to Africa for terror training (surely some of those came in fraudulently in the P-3 program).

With much fanfare, in 2009 the Obama Administration launched a reform initiative in the White House on the refugee program.   There is some verbiage here about the great strides they have made, but citizens out in the resettlement towns and cities aren’t seeing it.

Since July 2009, the White House has led a multiagency effort designed to identify ways to enhance the effectiveness of the Refugee Admissions Program.

We are told they discussed the “capacity of agencies and communities to receive refugees.”   But, did anything change?  We note that Manchester, NH has asked for a moratorium on refugee resettlement and is experiencing resistance!  And, then the feds and the whole national resettlement network is having fits and conference calls about what to do with the Tennessee “Refugee Absorptive Capacity Act” where the state took the initiative on the issue of CAPACITY since the federal government wasn’t doing anything to curb the numbers.

Here it is—the announcement near the end that the number of refugees resettled this year will be much smaller than Obama wishes.

We’re proud of all these efforts, as they reflect a commitment to sustain and strengthen the U.S. Refugee Admissions program. But we are also well aware of deep concern about a significant reduction in the number of refugees that will be resettled in the United States in 2011. While we do not yet know just how many new arrivals we will have, the number will be well below last year’s figure of 73,311 – and well below the 2011 ceiling of 80,000 established by the President.

This reduction reflects processing challenges that have resulted from additional, multi-agency security screening measures that have recently been established, and which augment long-standing multi-agency clearance procedures that have long been in effect. The enhanced procedures are the product of an evolving understanding of security threats.

The refugee lobby and the now deceased Senator Ted Kennedy had pushed very hard for “in-country” processing of Iraqis.  You see normally a refugee must have left the country where he believes he is persecuted before claiming refugee status, but the NGOs and Kennedy pushed for a person in Iraq (still living in the country) to claim he is a refugee and be processed into the US.   This must be one of the places where they are finding the “security threats.”

Last year, we resettled 3,762 from the in-country program in Iraq, and this year, the number is likely to be much lower.