Category: Iraqi refugees

Harrisonburg, VA welcoming Iraqi refugees

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Of course we have already heard that Iraqis, unhappy in Virginia, have recently returned to the Middle East.   Undaunted by the facts, however, puff pieces continue to be written in what I can only conclude is a continued campaign to tell the public that everything is peachy with refugee resettlement in this miserable economy.

A couple of things in this ho-hum news story prompted me to write about it, especially this first line .

The U.S. State Department decides where to place refugees.

I don’t believe the State Department is putting push-pins in a map and deciding that your city is the next “welcoming” city.   The volags, the non-profit federal contractors seem to be the driving force.  It is they, unelected and unaccountable to the taxpayer, deciding where refugees will go, or at least that is how it has been in our experience.  Once a community is targeted by a volag (see Top Ten here), the only way any community can say “no” is if citizens make a lot of noise (elected officials will run and hide).   Or, if the resettlement agency (one of the hundreds of subcontractors to the Top Ten) screws up in some way, and THEN the State Department steps in (see Waterbury, CT agency closed here).

“They’re looking for existing resources in [the] community. They’re looking for the ethnic community in place, also affordability of housing, and availability of employment,” says Sokolyuk [Director of a refugee agency that is unnamed in this article].

All those factors have come together to make Harrisonburg an appealing places to send Iraqi refugees in particular.

In the last three months of 2008, 32 Iraqi refugees came to Harrisonburg. Already this year, that number has nearly doubled.

What makes Harrisonburg a good place to relocate Iraqi refugees when Fredericksburg (maybe 70 miles away) was not?

Then this:

The resettlement office has to offer assistance to refugees for about a month. Funds are limited.

“I mean, how much can you do within 30 days? That’s all they require from us,” says Sokolyuk.

He says it used to be easier for refugees to get a job in that time frame. Now, it’s closer to three to four months.

Assistance for only one month???    That is absolutely not true.  Yes, they get a stipend toward their first month’s rent from the State Department, but the resettlement agency is responsible for them for 6-8 months depending on what programs that agency has signed up for with the Office of Refugee Resettlement in the Dept. of Health and Human Services.*  The variety in the programs remains a mystery to me.  Even after the agency is no longer responsible, refugees are eligible for many government welfare programs including food stamps.

* By the way, there is little continuity from program to program, so one family of refugees in a community, resettled by one agency, can be getting a whole lot more or less than another family resettled by another agency which causes much confusion, anger and resentment within refugee communities.

Comment worth noting: Iraqi refugee speaks out in Utah

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Our ‘comments worth noting’ posts are to bring to your attention comments we receive to mostly older posts that readers would be unlikely to see.   This comment came to us yesterday from Vav who identifies himself/herself as an Iraqi refugee resettled in Utah.  We have written many posts on Utah’s struggling Iraqi population most recently reporting that some Iraqis are packing up to return to the Middle East.   Here is what Vav had to say at this post.  He/she is blaming the volags (see top ten contractors here) hired by the State Department to resettle them for their difficult situation.

I am an Iraqi refugee here in Utah. Many of the problems we face are because of the incompetency of the Catholic Community Services (CCS), International Rescue Committee (IRC) and Asian Association. These three NGOs are consuming funds provided by tax payers and deliver very poor services in return to their Iraqi refugee clients in the aspects of integration and employment. Actually, I am shocked how did they hired this unqualified staff here in Utah, the case workers are almost with zero experience and so unmotivated to assist and help. Iraq is not safe for us to go back to, and most of us have been through too much to come here, we really like to become good citizens of USA/Utah. We do not ask for special treatment, and we do not want to add more burdens on the tax payer’s shoulders. We only ask the community, to assist us on putting more pressure on NGOs funded by the federal government to resettle us here.

State Department, what is going on?   Our poor economy can’t be entirely to blame for the continuous stream of unhappy and angry Iraqis we are hearing from, or hearing about.

Coincidentally, just this a.m. I came across this article from a Vermont publication about a very happy Iraqi Christian couple.  He was an interpreter for American forces and the couple hopes one day to take all of their American education back to Iraq to help their country.  One thing noticibly missing from this article is any mention of help from a volag, a government contractor.   They seem to have been completely taken under the wings of Americans—at a University and at a church and in a small town—and express their deep gratitude for all the help they received.

I don’t know what the answer is to these widely divergent stories from Iraqi refugees.  I do think Americans are generally privately charitable, but when charity becomes a government program and funded by the federal (and state) government, with little oversight to boot, it becomes not much better that the Motor Vehicle Administration at providing services.  And, frankly any incentive for private charity is removed—afterall, the government is taking care of it, right?

End note:  Lest you think that maybe it has to do with the state—that Vermont is more ‘welcoming’ than say Utah—it doesn’t.  Just last month we told you about the angry Iraqis in Burlington, VT, let down by their resettlement agencies.

Refugees International Report from Iraq: no mention of Christians

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

To further make the point I made yesterday in my post about Refugees International’s pro-Muslim (really if you read it carefully, it is pro-Sunni Muslim) bias, here is a recent RI report from Iraq that discusses “vulnerable” groups, but never uses the “C” word.

The last segment entitled “Focus on the Most Vulnerable” gobbles up nearly an entire paragraph on the much smaller number of Iraqi Palestinians that have been displaced then the Christians who are running for their lives from Muslim persecution.  Here is the whole section, if you didn’t know the circumstances you would never know who the other “vulnerable” might be.

As efforts continue to stabilize and rebuild Iraq, special attention needs to be given to the most vulnerable, and durable solutions need to be found. The stateless Palestinians of Iraq remain one of the most vulnerable groups, and are the subjects of discrimination and attacks by many factions. The hundreds who sought shelter in the camps of Al-Tanf and Al-Waleed at the Syrian border with Iraq must be resettled immediately and the criteria applied should be the same as for Iraqis. According to the UN, there are 10,000 to 12,000 left in Iraq. For this population, resettlement to a third country is likely to be the only durable solution.

The U.S. and the international community must also turn their attention to Iraqis who will not be able to return home, whether they are refugees or internally displaced. They may be too vulnerable to return, or have reasons to fear for their safety. Either way, there are currently no plans to address their needs and plan for their future. The U.S. must engage Syria, Jordan and other host countries on finding durable solutions for these particularly vulnerable groups. As for the 39% of internally displaced Iraqis who don’t plan to return home, they will need assistance to either integrate in their new communities or resettle elsewhere. The political implications for the future of Iraq must be carefully considered, while respecting the will of the displaced.

As for resettling the Palestinians, these Iraqi Palestinians have blasted Arab governments for not helping, here, where they called their co-religionists hypocrites.   I have never seen RI or any other NGO put pressure on Arab governments to take in their Muslim kin and I believe it is either their pro-Muslim/anti-West (US is always bad) bias or that RI is flat-out chicken to take on a Muslim government.    The pressure is always on the West to take-in this group of Palestinians who are persecuted by other Muslims because they were friends of Saddam.

Meanwhile in the US, a Chaldean (Christian) group is helping resettled Christian Iraqis weather the economic down-turn by establishing an ‘Adopt-a-Family’ (note how nice it is to see Iraqi women not covered from head to toe) program where private citizens help Iraqi Christians pay their bills thus placing less demand on the American taxpayer to do so.  I wonder if the Chaldean group can apply for the Emergency Housing money from the State Department.  I’m betting they can’t.

Kentucky becomes state number 18 where Iraqis are unemployed

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We’ve been keeping a running tally of states* where we see news accounts of unhappy Iraqi refugees unable to find employment in the US.  Some are well-educated professionals who can’t even find a low-level full time job.   But, perhaps more troubling is that someone abroad is telling them that life here will be a cake walk.

This article from the Lexington Herald-Leader reports on several Iraqis and what their experience has been in the US, some are happy to be safe, but all are worried about finding work.  This is Raghad Abdul Majeed’s story.

Months later, when it became clear she would move to the United States, Majeed attended an orientation meeting for refugees in Syria. It will be easy to find jobs in America, she was told.

Since her arrival last May, however, that has not been the case. Her professional training as an Arabic teacher didn’t count for much here because she could not speak English. In the dreadful economy, she applied for jobs that didn’t require language skills, but she encountered Americans with college degrees applying for the same work.

She landed a couple of odd jobs.

After a week as a hotel maid, she was fired for not working fast enough. Then, her temporary job at the Amazon.com shipping center stopped soon after the holidays were over.

“We had imagined America to be the safest place for our children and that it would be the best place to find a job. (But) the lack of a job is a kind of threat. It’s not a safe situation if you don’t have a job here,” Majeed said.

Luckily a church is picking up some of the slack since her resettlement agency obviously has too many refugees to care for.

When the initial money from Kentucky Refugee Ministries ran out, food stamps paid for meager groceries. Walnut Hill Church paid her phone bill and utilities. Still, it didn’t alleviate her frustration.

If only I had known….

“It’s not just my problem. It’s the problem of all the Iraqi families here,” she said. “If someone told me these are the obstacles I would find in America, I wouldn’t have come … I would return to Iraq.”

*The 17 other states where Iraqis have few job prospects and are unhappy include: Arizona, Maryland, New Hampshire,Virginia, New York, Michigan, Ohio, Georgia, Idaho, Connecticut, New Mexico, California, Utah, North Carolina, Texas, Vermont and Washington. See our Iraqi refugee category for all these stories and more.

Iraq’s VP wants Christians to stay

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Iraqi Christians apparently are still being threatened and killed by Muslim extremists in Iraq causing them to continue to seek refuge in surrounding countries according to this article in The Christian Post.

The vice president of Iraq, Adel Abdul Mahdi, urged the country’s Christian population to resist fleeing Iraq and called on the international community to help protect the dwindling minority group from extremists.

Since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, some 250,000 to 500,000 Christians have left the country. Christians, although making up only three percent of Iraq’s population, account for nearly half of the refugees leaving Iraq, according to the U.N. High Commission for Refugees.

“The position of Iraqi Christians is vulnerable and Iraq must not be left alone to face this. It’s a collective task,” said Abdul Mahdi, a Shiite Muslim, at a conference hosted by the French Institute of International Relations in Paris on Wednesday, according to Agence France-Presse.

“Christians are an integral part of Iraq,” he said. “We need to help Iraq and help Christians remain in Iraq.”

Iraq’s Christian population has mostly fled to neighboring countries such as Syria and Jordan, but has also been granted refuge in Western countries including France, Germany, and the United States.

Members of the tiny Christian population are forced to leave their homeland because of daily physical threats to their life. More than 200 Christians [Edit: as Judy pointed out here the numbers seem to be unreliable]  have been killed, dozens of churches bombed, and countless believers have been kidnapped for ransom money since 2003.

And, a reminder, the Christians were living in what is now Iraq long before the Muslim’s arrived.

Iraq is home to one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. Many religious freedom groups have warned that if nothing is done soon the Christian population in Iraq will likely disappear.