Colorado Gov. Jared Polis has a message for the Trump administration: Refugees are welcome in Colorado.
Colorado Governor Jared Polis, send us more refugees! He may get his wish if the refugee flow destined for Texas is diverted elsewhere.
[….]
Polis said at the governor’s mansion Tuesday that refugees add to Colorado diversity and economy.
“They’re entrepreneurs and they’re filling jobs in important parts of our community,” he said, citing economic impact statistics that suggest that for each refugee who joins the economy, helps create four jobs.
“We’re proud to continue to make sure Colorado is open to the oppressed from across the world and we hope the loss to any other states that don’t want to accept refugees will be Colorado’s gain, as we seek to continue to grow a Colorado for all,” Polis said.
Now see this!
I’ve heard horror stories like this coming out of struggling cities for years, but nothing like this one since Trump was elected President.
The media is usually all too willing to hide any bad news about refugees, like these in the Denver area and they surely don’t want to provide ammunition for Trump and company.
If this is how refugees are living in ‘welcoming’ Colorado, the President is right that the flow must be curtailed.
At least four members of a refugee self-help group called Street Fraternity died from car wrecks and guns in 2019. The Street Frat soccer team got booted from an indoor league. Rising rents and urban renewal — the City Council recently designated an east Denver area where refugees are resettled as “blighted” to hasten a high-density overhaul — raised economic pressure on refugee families.
And, Governor Polis wants more!
Denver and other American cities historically have offered immigrants an upward path. Federal census data shows 15% of Denver residents and 19% in adjacent Aurora are foreign-born — higher than the 13.6% nationwide. But the relatively small subset of immigrants who are refugees — people who fled persecution in Africa, Asia and Central America and were legally admitted into the United States — face an increasingly difficult environment.
[….]
In economically booming Denver, the rising rents and gentrification already have driven some refugee families away, according to directors of the Street Frat, which is run from a Disabled American Veterans basement between Xenia and Xanthia streets off East Colfax Avenue.
Send us more poor people says Governor Polis!
Yet the Street Frat endures as a hub that helps 40 or so young men and their families get by in one of metro Denver’s toughest areas. City data shows that 48% of children in the East Colfax neighborhood live in poverty, and 80% of third-graders aren’t up to par in their reading.
[….]
“I just want to get a job,” said Amisi Mbuyi, 27, whose mother and four siblings moved with him in 2017 to escape tensions in the Republic of Congo, where he graduated from high school.
A construction site accident left his right forefinger scarred and ended that job. Living at home with his mother became difficult due to her discomfort with his U.S.-born girlfriend, and living mostly on the streets with the girlfriend has exposed them to taunts. Mbuyi said he’s been sleeping in a dilapidated laundromat lately, bundling up as much as possible to endure the cold.
But, wait, didn’t the governor say that refugees not only have jobs, but are helping to create jobs? So he wants more!
Street Frat directors have scrambled to meet needs. They began a fresh food giveaway on Thursdays, working with food rescue groups that collect fruits and vegetables. The idea is to help young men, who agree to a code of hard work, respect and obeying the law, by also helping their cash-strapped mothers.
At a recent giveaway, Muslim women who fled rural Myanmar, formerly Burma, to a UN refugee camp in Thailand — and who now in Denver lack transport to supermarkets — flocked to the cardboard boxes of potatoes and greens set out in a parking lot. [She is part of the controversial resettlement of the Rohingya people to your towns and cities.—ed]
Resettled refugees don’t have enough to eat, but Polis says send us more diversity—what more poor people for the poor vs. rich diversity balance sheet in Denver?
Street Frat volunteers are setting up a recording studio where members rap, dance and produce poetry. A recent talent show featured rap performers and included families. The directors also are looking for a therapist to help refugees who survived horrors abroad that left psychological scars.
[….]
On a recent night, Bility and program coordinator Levon Lyles were doing all they could in a stairwell to stabilize a refugee from eastern Congo who lives on the streets and, not taking prescribed medications from a clinic in Aurora, has struggled mentally.
Yes, the good governor must be saying Colorado needs more mental health diversity too!
Last spring, conflict between student groups at the New America School, a charter school for immigrants in Aurora, led to allegations someone had a gun. A student from Street Frat faced discipline. Street Frat director Yoal Ghebremeskel intervened at the school, trying to clear up misunderstandings, and ended up mediating the conflict between student factions.
Diversity in the schools is so beautiful right Mr. Humanitarian Governor!
In neighboring Aurora (19% immigrant population), Mayor Mike Coffman says its an emotional issue for him and says that tonight the mayor and council will likely virtue-signal by voting to approve the resettlement of even more struggling refugees. However, it is county governments that must opt-in or opt-out according to federal guidelines.
But, never mind, they will soon be pushed out of this neighborhood and into someone else’s neighborhood as the rich move in.
We keep hearing from our young men that they’re trying to find jobs so they’ll be able to afford rent,”he said. “We’re seeing some folks move out.”
[….]
“This area’s going to gentrify, like all of the city. Nobody’s going to stand in the way of gentrification. Hope and vision? We’ve tried to offer some,” he said. “Yes, the streets will be safer. But they will be so boring. So white. So gentrified.I mean, how many more brewpubs, chain coffee shops and cheap workout places do we need?”
“Where do people who are just barely making it go? How about these people who we promised a chance at the American dream? They’re raising families, with cultures and languages that are so rich. What is going to replace them?”
This is what the do-gooder Leftists like this governor (and the federal resettlement contractors!) do—promise the American dream (to feel good about themselves) then shove the problems off on others (you! taxpaying citizens!) to clean up.
Mainer Cynthia Anderson recently published a book about how 6,000 plus Somali refugees are busy resuscitating a supposedly dying Maine city.
No surprise that the Star Tribune, in the heart of Little Mogadishu, MN, reviewed Anderson’s book. One quote in the review stands out and it makes my blood boil!
“I also think journalists, including me, sometimes don’t push for answers lest they appear insensitive or out of fear they’ll provide ammunition to haters.”
Just think about that, she is admitting she might have pulled some punches so as not to give us (haters! and Islamophobes!), critics of the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program, any ammunition. WHAT THE H***!
If so-called journalists were HONEST, for one thing there would be no need for me to write this blog and secondly if they were HONEST then maybe government programs like this one might be reevaluated, reformed or trashed.
Review: ‘Home Now: How 6,000 Refugees Transformed an American Town,’ by Cynthia Anderson
“Home Now” by Cynthia Anderson; Public Affairs (318 pages, $28)
“A moving chronicle of who belongs in America.” Guess you can see the bias right there at Amazon.
At a campaign rally in Portland, Maine, President Donald Trump linked worsening crime in Maine to the influx of Somali refugees there. He blamed their large community in Minnesota for straining the state’s social safety net and bringing potential recruits for Islamic terrorist groups.
“You see it happening,” Trump said. “You read about it.”
The above is a reminder to all those wimpy Republican governorswho are ‘welcoming’ more Somalis, Iraqis, and Syrians to your states that the President wants to rein-in the program. Duh!
Long before Trump turned refugee resettlement into a national flash point, Cynthia Anderson was immersing herself in Lewiston, Maine, a small white town that came to host one of the largest populations of Somali-Americans in the country, for her timely, richly detailed book “Home Now.”
Anderson grew up in a village 45 miles away and recalled the area’s gradual decline leading up to 2001, when the first Somali refugees arrived in nearby Portland.
She reported on Lewiston’s transformation for more than a decade, moving from seeing Somali newcomers as passive victims traumatized by war to people with complex, resilient trajectories.
Anderson also writes about Fatuma Hussein, a community leader and advocate for Somali women who admires Maine’s civility and is optimistic about relations between natives and newcomers. She speaks out in opposition to Trump’s election, yet she is also forthright about the challenges of merging different cultures in Lewiston.
The town is not prepared to absorb the arrivals so quickly; the mayor draws headlines for saying Lewiston is “maxed out.”
Anderson deftly sums up the tension by noting that the new refugees were not ungrateful but nor were they just grateful.
[….]
Though the book paints a mostly rosy picture of how refugees can revitalize a community, Anderson is honest [?—how honest?—ed] about her qualms.
During debates over a state bill aimed at the Somali-American community to ban female genital mutilation (FGM), she admits to being conflicted. Anderson is initially opposed, and doesn’t want to see the Somali community hurt, but nor does she want harm to come to any Somali girls.
[What woman could possibly be conflicted about the brutal practice of slicing off a portion of a girl’s genitals?—ed]
Anderson also acknowledges that the refugee vetting process warrants examination, noting that records can be inadequate in war-torn countries.
She considers it fair to question how long refugees take to become self-sufficient, finding answers inconsistent and hard to find. [No kidding—this program is run in secrecy! The refugee contractors and the government don’t want anyone to find out how poorly the refugees are doing!—ed]
“I also think journalists, including me, sometimes don’t push for answers lest they appear insensitive or out of fear they’ll provide ammunition to haters,” she admits. “But not asking and not knowing provides fertile ground for rumors to flourish. It’s also patronizing; Lewiston’s newcomers can withstand the scrutiny.” [Note that she deftly suggests that those of us with concerns are trafficking in rumors!—ed]
Anderson raises these questions through her portrait of Jared Bristol, driven after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to become an activist against Islamic extremism. Bristol advocates for the FGM bill during a hearing that’s one of the only times Anderson sees Muslims and anti-Islamists in the same place.
Such activists, Anderson writes, “are wrong if they believe I absorbed nothing they and other anti-Islamists said or that my thinking didn’t shift, however incrementally.” [So what good is absorbing if she then pulls punches?—ed]
Scrutiny comes anew when a man dies of a fatal head injury after being attacked by several teens of African descent.
Nevertheless, and moving right along, the expert concludes:
….that Mainers feel that integrating refugees is worth the effort, even as it has taken time and money.
That is not what I’m hearing!!!
See my extensive, and I mean extensive archive on Lewiston here at RRW (there is more at ‘Frauds and Crooks.’)!
Gee, I wonder if Ms. Anderson used any of the material I’ve compiled over the years? Did she get the story about the Somali teen who burned down four apartment buildings in 2013 for example? Or the one about the ISIS fighter whose wife lived in Lewiston? Or the Somali health care scammers? And, as far back as 2009 Somali ‘youths’ were roaming the streets and attacking people.
I meant to post on the numbers and geographic distribution of refugees in 2019 yesterday, but got sidetracked by the feckless GOP governors again.
So here is what I learned about calendar year 2019.
(We normally talk about refugee data on a fiscal year basis but because this is the time of year for look-backs on the previous year, I thought I would look back at 2019.)
We admitted a total of 27,513 refugees as your new neighbors during the course of 2019. 13% of those were Muslims from a variety of countries. The others represented many many religions, or none at all.
And, in light of the newest Middle East flare-up you should know that we admitted almost equal numbers of Shiites and Sunnis and so we have invited both of the warring factions to come live among us!
I’ll give you some more interesting data below, but first I want you to see where the federal refugee contractors*** placed the refugees.
Always humorous is the fact that Delaware hardly ever gets refugees, although it was then Senator Joe Biden who joined Ted Kennedy’s team to create the dysfunctional program back in 1979 (Jimmy Carter signed it into law in 1980).
(I love this pic of Joe and Ted! Do you think this pair had our best interests at heart when they figured out how to fund Leftwing ‘non-profit’ groups with taxpayer dollars to distribute refugees around America?But, of course we can’t expect Republican governors to know anything about the history of the program or how it works! That would be expecting way too much!).
I know it is hard to read the numbers, but the top five ‘welcoming’ states in calendar year 2019 were Texas, Washington, California, New York and Kentucky (slaughterhouse workers?).
The bottom five were Washington DC with 3, and big fat zeros for Delaware, Hawaii, West Virginia and Wyoming.
The top sending country was the DR Congo by far with 11,152 impoverished, poorly educated and low-skilled Africans delivered to many states(I need to do another post just on the DR Congo). Obama told the UN we would take 50,000 over five years and we are way beyond that number now.
Burma (4,681) and Ukraine (4,013) were the next two big senders. I need to look into this Ukraine conveyor belt because now that we have confirmed that refugees are used as pawns/bargaining chips for other purposes of the State Department, I’m wondering if that is driving that resettlement.
Of the 4,681 Burmese, 689 are the Muslim Rohingya which gets me to the point I made recently.
If you think that we are saving Middle Eastern Christians and other minorities from the three largest distribution centers in the Middle East—Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria—we are not.
During 2019 we admitted 1,364 Afghans and 1,290 of those were Muslims.
In addition to the 27,513 regular refugees we admitted in 2019, another 9,561 Special Immigrant Visa holders from Afghanistan and Iraq arrived. You can bet they are all Muslims and are treated just like regular refugees in that they can access social services and bring their families!
So we can safely say that in calendar year 2019 we admitted 37,000 refugees/SIVs and that approximately 38% of the total are Muslims.
And, get this! According to the Funding Guidance I’ve been yakking about for days, we will be taking another 10,000 SIVs from Iraq and Afghanistan (maybe Syria!) in the 2020 fiscal year. That is over and above the 18,000 ceiling that the President determined for the year.
The FY 2020 ceiling for refugee admissions established by the President, after consultation with Congress, is 18,000. In addition, applicants should include 10,000 Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) recipients in their planning. Applicants should assume similar admissions and recipient numbers for performance periods beyond FY 2020.
***For new readers these (below) are the nine federally-funded refugee contractors that operate as a huge conveyor belt monopolizing all refugee placement in America.
Church World Service poster girl!
For decades they have decidedin secrecy where to place refugees and they don’t want to lose that power because even as they pontificate about their religious convictions and humanitarian zeal, they are Leftwing political activist groups working to change America by changing the people and using your money to do it!
And, they do not limit their advocacy toward only legal immigration programs, but are heavily involved in supporting the lawlessness at our borders.
The question isn’t as much about refugees per se, but about who is running federal immigration policy now and into the future?
(I plan to say this once a day from now on!)
I continue to argue that these nine contractors are the heart of America’s Open Borders movement and thus there can never be long-lasting reform of US immigration policy when these nine un-elected phony non-profits are paid by the taxpayers to work as community organizers pushing an open borders agenda.
(If you are new and are confused because your local resettlement agency doesn’t have one of these names, just know that they are a subcontractor of one of the nine and you can usually find out which one by going to their website.)
(Zainab Chaudry, director of CAIR Maryland outreach)
Of course they are, they have apparently been lobbying him heavily. Just as you can be sure they were busy in most states making sure that governors, especially Republican governors, toed the line.
I told you about Hogan’s consent yesterday, here. I guess it shouldn’t have been a surprise because he has always been a ‘never Trumper’ so supporting the President on reform of the UN-driven Refugee Admissions Program wasn’t at the top of his priority list.
So far I am not seeing any Maryland county governments begging for refugees (although I can think of several ready to invite more ‘diversity’ and more poverty to their counties).
Hogan letter: Maryland will keep door open to refugees
BALTIMORE — The Council on American-Islamic Relations is praising Gov. Larry Hogan’s decision to agree to receive refugees this year while criticizing President Donald Trump’s policies.
CAIR power! Big smooch for Hogan!
Hogan made his decision well before a Jan. 21 deadline set by the Trump administration.
In a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Hogan wrote, “We are willing to accept refugees who the federal government has determined are properly and legally seeking refugee status and have been adequately vetted.”***
“They are a great asset to Baltimore and to Maryland,” said Ibrahim Abusway, community development of Islamic Circle of North America Relief USA.
“We are thrilled with this decision,” said Zainab Chaudry, director of CAIR Maryland outreach.
The president imposed the requirement for cities and states to make a decision as to whether or not they would accept refugees after he cut the total number of refugees the United States will accept to a historic low of 18,000.
“This is just another step that is indicative of the Trump administration’s anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-refugee agenda,” Chaudry said.
While Maryland has accepted nearly 10,000 refugees under the Hogan Administration since 2016, Hogan was among 31 governors who wanted to refuse Syrian refugees in 2015.
“In 2018, CAIR had the opportunity to actually introduce Gov. Hogan to a couple Syrian refugee families that were settled in the Baltimore area, and not only was he able to hear more about their personal story, the circumstances that led them to flee their country and civil war and strife and to settle here in the United States, but he also learned about how they were launching a small business,” Chaudry said.
Just so you know, by very large margins (even under Trump), the vast majority of Syrians entering the US are Muslims.
*** This vetting issue is a red herring! Hogan surely knows that you can’t robustly vet anyone when they come from failed states. The vetting in many cases involves nothing more than asking the refugee if he/she has associated with any terrorist groups. What do you think they will say! Lying to infidels is permitted in the Islamic ‘faith.’
And, besides, the State Department’s Funding Guidance expressly says a governor can’t put any conditions on his/her letter. However, Hogan did place a condition—he said they must be “legally vetted refugees” (whatever that means!). See his letter here.
Was that so he could throw a little bone to all of you who might be concerned about who he is welcoming to Maryland?
The letter may consent to initial resettlement for refugees only in certain localities within the state, but otherwise must convey the state government’s unambiguous and unconditional consent to accept the initial resettlement of any refugee in that state in FY 2020. The consent may not be conditioned on acceptance of certain refugees or on any other factor, such as refugees’ race, ethnicity, religion, or national origin.
For the umpteenth time—why are the squabbling factions in the Middle East our problem? They have been fighting among themselves for centuries and we are then expected to take them in—why?
That is one of the latest Leftwing media attacks on the President, but when I saw this headline (below) my reaction was WOW! that would be great!
Trump praised Orban in the White House in May—for saving Christians from migrants (sniffed) EuroNews. https://www.euronews.com/2019/05/13/watch-live-viktor-orban-holds-talks-with-donald-trump-at-white-house
Trump’s Dream Is to Become America’s Viktor Orbán
But, before I get to the news (a change of pace from the daily dribble of reports about weak-kneed Republican governors who have no hope of ever being brave leaders like Viktor Orban, or Donald Trump)—-Happy New Year!
And, thanks to all of you who have come back to the newly reconstructed Refugee Resettlement Watchafter efforts by the Leftists to delete my work from the internet failed earlier this year. Also, I very much appreciate letters and e-mails expressing support even if I don’t always have time to answer, and many thanks for donations that have come my way.
This morning I wanted to chuckle a little and so had saved for today thisNew York Mag story from the day after Christmas by political commentator Jonathan Chait famous for having gotten it hilariously wrong about a possible Trump presidency in 2016.
Chait said smugly in February of 2016 that liberals should welcome Trump’s candidacy, a story that was smacked down hereas one of the ten stories of the 2010s that should never have been published:
Chait’s immensely confident take on why the Democrats should support a Trump nomination is a humiliating crystallization of the wrongheaded thinking that propelled him to the White House: he asserts that Trump would easily lose (wrong), that he might force the Republicans to rebuild their party (wrong), that his presidency would do less harm than a conventional Republican (wrong) and might even do some good (WRONG!!!), that Trump’s presidency might end up like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s California governorship (wrong, and based on nothing besides “they were both celebrities”).
In addition to wanting a break from dreary domestic refugee policy, I wanted to get back to a bit of news on one of my favorite topics—the Invasion of Europe.
Here is the ever astute Jonathan Chait (pretending to get inside Trump’s head) opining on how Trump wants to be an AUTHORITARIAN like Hungary’s Orban, or so Chait says of Orban.
AUTHORITARIAN must be a word selected as a Progressive talking point for 2020!
And, in case you don’t get it after the first or second time the word AUTHORITARIAN is offered, Chait uses the word ten times in its various forms to make his point.
For several years, Hungary has been the name American liberal intellectuals have given to their worst domestic nightmares.Hungary’s president, Viktor Orbán, has fashioned an apparently permanent majority for his conservative Fidesz Party by wielding the levers of the state to marginalize the social, political, and legal power of his opposition. American conservatives are now becoming fascinated in equal measure with Orbán’s Hungary. The liberal nightmare of an authoritarian America is becoming the conservative dream.
Orban has been working to keep Soros hard Left political agitators out of Hungary. BTW, have you noticed that the Left is now suggesting that attacks on Soros’ globalist political machinations are somehow displays of antisemitism.
Orbán’s attacks on liberal democracy long predate Donald Trump’s candidacy. Five years ago, Orbán delivered a famous speech denouncing liberal democracy (“liberal values today incorporate corruption, sex, and violence”) and promising an alternative. To the extent American conservatives paid Orbán any attention then, it was to denounce him, perhaps while throwing in a swipe at the Obama administration for failing to confront him forcefully enough. The Republican Party’s growing defense of Orbán is a window through which we can glimpse its slow descent into authoritarianism. [Ha! I doubt the Republican Party is defending Orban!—ed]
Orbán’s political style, combining hyperbolic denunciations of Muslim immigrants with anti-Semitic tropes targeting George Soros as puppeteer, anticipated Trump’s by several years. He has won a place in the president’s circle of trust. Orbán, along with Vladimir Putin, reportedly helped persuade Trump to distrust Ukraine’s reformist president. Connie Mack IV, a former Republican member of Congress and a paid lobbyist for Orbán, participated in a whisper campaign undermining hawkish Russia adviser Fiona Hill as a tool of Soros.
You get the drift of where this is going, read it yourself.
He wraps with this paragraph suggesting that any of us who are concerned about immigration and its impact on western civilization are really just hankering for AUTHORITARIAN control.
Even so, the appearance of Orbánism on the American right is yet another sign that the most dangerous undercurrents of the Trump era are not particular to one buffoonish septuagenarian reality television star. Trump has brought out a strain of authoritarianism on the right that will survive his presidency. Whether or not Trump succeeds in his transparent goal of becoming America’s Orbán, he will not be the last to try. [There is no one on the horizon who will come close to trying, sadly—ed]
If you are as much an Orban fan as I am, read it all (for a laugh!).
Now, here is the primary reason for Orban’s popularity, something that Chait barely mentions (from Politico in 2015):
Orbán says migrants threaten ‘Christian’ Europe
….and Western Civilization!
Interesting that in Chait’s polemic there is only a tiny mention of why Orban is so popular at home and admired by many here, and that is his dogged defense of his borders, his people, and his fight for western civilization and a Christian Europe.
So if indeed President Trump wants to be more like Orban, he needs to work a little bit harder in 2020.
See my complete file on the Invasion of Europe by clicking here. And, go here, for my previous posts on my hero—Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
Of course they are, they have apparently been lobbying him heavily. Just as you can be sure they were busy in most states making sure that governors, especially Republican governors, toed the line.
Here is the ever astute Jonathan Chait (pretending to get inside Trump’s head) opining on how Trump wants to be an AUTHORITARIAN like Hungary’s Orban, or so Chait says of Orban.