Category: Nashville

Bhutanese add to the ethnic hodge-podge that is Nashville

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We’ve written so much about refugees in Nashville, TN that we have a whole category on the city, here.

Now we see the Bhutanese are arriving to seek  food and hotel industry jobs in the home of country music.  I wonder if they are replacing the Somalis in that work in Tennessee?

The Tennessean (a paper that advocates for Open Borders):

Tek Nepal was among the first 15,000 Bhutanese resettled across the United States after years of living in refugee camps.

Nepal arrived in California in 2008. It was expensive. It was hard to adapt without friends and relatives.
Then, family in Nashville sold him on this city, and he moved here in 2010.

“We were looking for job opportunities,” Nepal said. “In a lot of ways, Nashville was like our climate and it fit our culture. We like it here.”

Nashville’s Bhutanese community, which has grown to about 1,000 people, celebrated its first cultural festival on Sunday.

I suspect the Somalis weren’t working out too well for places like the Loews Vanderbilt Hotel (we were there), and we reported recently that meatpackers seemed to be going for more docile refugees like the Burmese (and now Bhutanese).

Historically, Middle Tennessee has been a resettlement destination for many refugees, including Cubans, Kurds, Sudanese, Somalis and Ethiopians.

The Bhutanese are the latest wave of resettled refugees in Middle Tennessee. The group has found jobs in the food and hotel industries.

Several readers at the Tennessean article wanted to know about this assertion that “historically” Nashville has been a resettlement destination.  They don’t understand that an aggressive government contractor (Catholic Charities and Holly Johnson in this case) working closely with the US State Department can quickly turn a city into an ethnic hodge-podge.   Maybe they don’t know how Nashville became the Kurdish gang capital of the US!

I love it how news stories about refugees always make it sound like the refugees just magically appeared (started to arrive) in a given city.  Rarely do they report that (blank) federal refugee contractor was paid to bring the refugees to their city without much if any consultation with local governments.

The Bhutanese started arriving here in 2008 after the U.S. State Department announced that 60,000* people would be resettled over several years.

Atlanta has the largest Bhutanese community, estimated at 10,000.

Thanks to some serious activists and a leading Tennessee Senator, a new bill was signed into law in Tennessee just this month that will begin to address the problems of lack of notification and consultation with local governments when Catholic Charities and the feds bring future refugees to Tennessee.

* The number is expected to go over 60,000.  The ‘Bhutanese’ are really from Nepal originally and were expelled from Bhutan as that country was experiencing a surge in ethnic nationalism and wanted to keep Bhutan for the ethnic Bhutanese people.  The refugees we are resettling are ethnic Nepali people which the country of Nepal refused to repatriate.  So, we are helping them with their little problem of clearing out refugee camps in Nepal.  Bush Asst. Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration Ellen Sauerbrey is credited with this plan, here, in 2007.

Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies writing at National Review Online (citing RRW) on the Bhutanese “refugee” issue had this to say in 2009:

The State Department is using resettlement to serve a transnational human-rights agenda that has nothing to do with promoting our vital national interests. In effect, our foreign-policy elite views the actual United States as a sort of hinterland where they can dump their overseas problems.

[…..]

Refugee resettlement should be reserved only for the most desperate persecuted people in the world, who face imminent death if they stay where they are and will never have anywhere else to go. If they think about it at all, this is what ordinary Americans think the refugee program is doing already, but it isn’t.

Tennessee takes major first step to regain some local control of refugee resettlement process

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We have been writing about this problem for years and questioning why the US State Department and its contractors are not required to take the wishes of local communities into consideration when distributing refugees throughout the country.

Fed up the lack of any state or local control over the refugee resettlement process in Tennessee, two women have led the initiative, now signed into law by the governor of Tennessee, that would begin to give some power to decide how many refugees may be resettled to local communities back to local governments.  We told you about this bill introduced by State Senator Jim Tracy, whose district includes Shelbyville, here, in February.   (For new readers, Shelbyville archive is here.)

The first law of its kind in the US

The Tennessee Eagle Forum led the legislative push with help from members of ACT for America.

Here is a summary (written by one of the activists involved in its passage) of the Tennessee Refugee Absorptive Capacity Act:

The “Refugee Absorptive Capacity Act” passed overwhelmingly in both the House and the Senate with bi-partisan support and is the first of its kind to be passed in any state. [The governor has signed the bill into law—ed]

The federal refugee resettlement program is not particularly well understood nor is its impact on local “host” communities either well documented or even publicized. However, as state and local budgets become more challenging to constrain, combined with local economies and unemployment statistics, the issue of whether a particular community can absorb and provide for new refugees, is a very timely issue. The objectives of the Tennessee RACA bill are especially relevant for states like Tennessee, which in 2007 withdrew from administering the federal program, and opted to allow Catholic Charities as the fiduciary agency, administrate the state’s refugee program.

The change-over in 2007 inadvertently created a communication gap at both the state and local level which has been addressed by the RACA with a requirement for quarterly reporting to the relevant legislative committees and to the local city council budget chairman.

Within 30 days of arriving in the U.S., local resettlement agencies assist new refugees in applying for all public entitlement and benefit programs. The resettlement agencies also assist with such necessities as housing, securing employment and medical care. While the initial 4 months of resettlement are funded with federal dollars, subsequent sources of support may need to come from state and local resources.

The RACA, consistent with federal regulations, articulates the factors that are supposed to be assessed to determine local “absorptive capacity” and goes on to require that the “absorptive capacity” is evaluated at regular intervals in consultation between local governments and local resettlement agencies before commitments are made for refugee resettlement in any particular community.

It has been unclear in the past whether the local authorities responsible for addressing local budgetary allocation and needs, have been included in the consultative process. Assuring their active participation in this process helps to ensure that commitments made on behalf of a host community by the agency contracting with the federal government who in turn contracts with the local affiliate resettlement agencies, are commitments that the host community can fulfill.

The RACA also incorporates in a slightly modified model, a recommendation that has been made repeatedly by the National Governor’s Association and more recently in a hearing by the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the refugee resettlement program. The RACA provides that a local city council or other local governing body, may pass a resolution establishing that based on the “absorptive capacity” factors in the bill the community cannot absorb new refugees and may thereby request a one year moratorium on new refugee resettlement in that community.

Also, please see this one  page fact sheet at the Tennessee Eagle Forum website.

Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana (a state suffering under refugee overload especially in Ft. Wayne) authored a major report on this same issue—absorptive capacity—here last summer.

Geert Wilders speaks the truth in Tennessee

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders spoke in Nashville last night—fitting that it was Nashville as we have written often about the growing Muslim (mostly Somali) population in that city.  Note we have a whole category on Nashville, here, and two years ago I attended a meeting there and the conference hotel which originally booked our meeting threw us out—free speech indeed!

From American Thinker (Hat tip: Scott):

Dear friends from Tennessee. I am very happy to be in your midst today. I am happy and proud to be in this impressive church.

My friends, I am here to speak words of truth and freedom.

Do you know why America is in a better state than Europe? Because you enjoy more freedom than Europeans.
And do you know why Americans enjoy more freedom than Europeans? Because you are still allowed to tell the truth.

In Europe and Canada people are dragged to court for telling the truth about islam.

I, too, have been dragged to court. I am an elected member of the house of representatives in the Netherlands. I am currently standing in court like a common criminal for saying that islam is a dangerous totalitarian ideology rather than a religion.

The court case is still pending, but I risk a jail sentence of 16 months.

Last week, my friend Lars Hedegaard, a journalist from Denmark, was fined because in a private conservation, which was recorded without his knowing, he had criticised the way women are treated in islamic societies.

Recently, another friend, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, a human rights activist from Austria, was fined because she had criticised islam’s founder Muhammad. She had said that Muhammad was a pedophile because he had married a 6-year old girl and raped her when she was 9.

Read it all.  Use our search function for “Geert Wilders” for more posts on this brave man!

Geert Wilders will be in Tennessee

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Geert Wilders, the outspoken defender of free speech in Europe as he calls for a halt to Muslim immigration to his homeland, the Netherlands, will be in Nashville next week.  This according to the excellent website Gates of Vienna, here.

The Canadian chapter of the International Free Press Society is bringing Geert Wilders to North America next week. After visiting three Canadian cities (Toronto, London, and Ottawa), on May 12 Mr. Wilders, along with Sam Solomon and Bill Warner, will appear at the Cornerstone Church in Madison, a suburb of Nashville. This event is being held under the auspices of the Tennessee Freedom Coalition.

Mr. Wilders, who initiated his discussion of “The Failure of Multiculturalism” in Rome on March 25, will continue his battle against cultural relativism and Islamization, beginning in Canada on May 8 and ending in Nashville on May 12. Canada is famous for having invented Multiculturalism under Pierre Trudeau in the late 1970s, so it will be ironic for Canadians to be lectured by Geert Wilders on this modern disease, and to receive a warning from the rising political star in the Netherlands.

Mr. Wilders will continue his lectures in Nashville, where the current legislature is contemplating “anti-sharia” legislation. Nashville’s neighboring city of Murfreesboro is famous for its battle over a planned mega-mosque. The Cornerstone Church is a large church in the Nashville area, where several thousand Christians are expected to listen to Wilders’ “Warning to America.”

Judy and I had the pleasure of hearing Mr. Wilders speak in Washington, DC in February of 2009 here.  Type ‘Geert Wilders’ into our search function for our many reports on his warning to the West.

Tennessee is at the epicenter right now of the push-back against Islamic supremacism in the US, here.

Soros building a more “welcoming” America and Tennessee is a target

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday, George Soros’ Open Society website ran a feature story on “Welcome to Shelbyville.”  That’s a propaganda film I’ve told you about too many times to count. (See most recently here).  “Open Society” wants you all to know that Tennessee is the model for future “welcoming” initiatives blah, blah, blah.

It all sounds so lovely—reaching out to the world’s downtrodden and “welcoming” them to your town.  What Soros is really welcoming is classic Marxism as the imported “have-nots” will go to war with the “haves.”   And, as this American Thinker article this week tells us, the third worlders will become the voters who assure America’s and Western Civilization’s demise.

From “Importing Disaster…”:

As long as we continue our suicidal immigration policies — where 85 percent of newcomers hail from the Third World and Asia (thanks, Ted Kennedy) — the only thing that will be in question about our descent into socialism, and perhaps beyond, is the rate.

Despite this…. all most conservatives talk about is 2012 this and 2012 that. Yet, what good is fighting for momentary political success if you don’t secure the cultural foundation of which it’s born? And how can you enjoy the latter when the rate of cultural invasion greatly exceeds the rate of assimilation?

Remember that people create the government; government doesn’t create the people. If you replace Westerners with Muslims, you no longer have Christendom (or even the shell of it we now inhabit) but Iran West. And if you replace apple-pie Americans with I-want-your-piece-of-the-pie socialists, you no longer have the US but the USSR redux. Oh, of course, our immigration scheme isn’t replacing us in one fell swoop; instead, it’s happening incrementally, which all the frogs in the frying pan of water don’t really seem to notice much. But as the aforementioned census data demonstrates, those increments are becoming bigger — and more rapid. And a death by a thousand cuts is still a death.

You might want to visit my post of two days ago about Tennessee as those Muslims we “welcomed” to Tennessee rallied at the Capitol over two bills—one to head off any terrorist attack and the other that seeks to re-gain some control by the State of Tennessee for refugee resettlement there.   Thankfully there are some political leaders in that state who aren’t going down without a fight.

Be sure to check out this map and see if you are a target for the “welcoming” socialists.