Category: Other refugees

Suicide rate high in US Bhutanese refugee communities

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I told you about Director Eskinder Negash’s year-end review for the Office of Refugee Resettlement here and here recently.  There was one paragraph in his report that I noted to follow up on.  It was this:

ORR has been working with CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) to try to understand what is triggering suicides in Bhutanese refugee communities, undertaking an Epi-Aid study focusing on eleven communities in four states: (1) Arizona (Phoenix and Tucson), (2) Georgia (Atlanta Metropolitan Area, including Atlanta, Clarkston, Decatur, and Stone Mountain), (3) New York (Buffalo, and Syracuse) and (4) Texas (Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston). Results of the study were shared with ORR in October, and ORR is following up on CDC recommendations and next steps.

Here is the report from the CDC dated October 2012.  Sixteen newly resettled Bhutanese/Nepali refugees killed themselves in a three year period alarming the social engineers at the ORR in Washington DC, and within a year of getting to the US.   Researchers had data on 14 of those and interviewed family members to try to ascertain why they killed themselves (13 by hanging).  The reasons were in order of importance:  language barriers, worry about family back home, separation from family, and difficulty in maintaining cultural and religious traditions.

You will have to go to the report for the CDC’s recommendations which include more mental health screening for refugees, building support in communities among families etc, and expanding mental health facilities for refugees.

Just a reminder to readers that there was much angst and consternation in the refugee camps in Nepal where these refugees had lived for going on two decades about coming to the US in the first place.  We wrote about it on several occasions as the great emptying of camps began in 2007.  We reported last month that in the ensuing years we have resettled over 60,000 Bhutanese/Nepali people, so that meatpackers would have some more good docile workers, the contractors could get your taxpayer dollars, the Dems could get more voters and Americans could feel all warm and fuzzy about giving them this opportunity (I just threw that last part in there because I’m so cynical now!).

And, just so you know, some Bhutanese are doing well. Here is one glowing report from Pittsburgh, PA.   But, oops! it is the location of one of the suicides as we reported here in 2010 (Sheesh, I googled Pittsburgh Bhutanese and my own post came up!).

Japanese refugee resettlement program falling apart already

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

A few years ago, and after much pressure from the United Nations and the international humanitarian cabal, Japan reluctantly agreed to take some refugees.  Seems things aren’t working out so well as the 16 they planned to take this year backed out (Did they hear that the work was hard in Japan?).

As the program collapses and with a straight face, supporters of bringing the joys of diversity to Japan say ‘Japan will be left behind the international society!’

First consider visiting some of our older posts about Japan being dragged kicking and screaming into diluting its unique culture by typing ‘Japan’ into our search function.  Here is one story you might start with.  One of my favorite stories about Japan was this one where a blogger says he thinks Somalis would get along very well in Japan, and I don’t think he is kidding!

Now here is the latest news from Mainichi:

This year, the third since Japan launched a refugee resettlement system for refugees forced out of their homelands, it appears that the number of refugees applying to come and settle in Japan will sink to zero.

Supporters of these refugees warn that if nothing is done to improve the situation, Japan will be left behind by international society. This prodded me into thinking about what stance the nation should take on the refugees who fill the world.

Since 2010, 45 Myanmar refugees who had resided in refugee camps in Thailand have come to Japan to live under the nation’s refugee resettlement system. In September this year, Japan was due to accept 16 refugees from three families in its third round of the resettlement program. But before they left Thailand, relatives of one of the three families pleaded with them not to go, and that family subsequently made a turnabout and remained in Thailand. Another related family joined them in staying behind, and the remaining family felt uneasy about moving to Japan alone, so gave up on the idea. In the end, the number of applicants is said to have fallen to zero.

No applicants want to come this year!

In 2010, the United States accepted 54,077 refugees for resettlement. The corresponding figures for Canada and Australia were 6,706, and 5,636, respectively. Japan, on the other hand, accepted a mere 27 in its resettlement system. International society, which realized that Japan is not a country built on immigration, hoped that Japan could give birth to a small system that would grow into a large one. In March this year, Japan decided to extend the system for another two years, but the shock of having no applicants is rocking the system’s foundations.

Yikes!  Hard work!  And, this after they have had a “mere” six months of language and cultural orientation training (Imagine that, in the US the volags give refugees the ol’ heave-ho at well under six months and then we are giving publically-funded language and cultural training to Somalis on their culture and language!).

Improvements in the way refugees are accepted once they arrive in Japan are also vital. Two families from the first round of Myanmar refugees that arrived in Japan the year before last underwent workplace adaption training at an agricultural corporation in Chiba Prefecture, but claimed they were forced to work for long hours, contrary to what they had been told, and so they refused to work for the corporation and moved to Tokyo instead. The possibility cannot be ruled out that news of the commotion surrounding these two families eventually made its way to the refugee camp in Thailand, prompting other families to refrain from applying for the refugee resettlement program.

Read it all.  Will the UN pounce on Japan?  Watch for it!

The Cubans are coming, but how many?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

A reminder as you read this story:  “Economic migrants” are not refugees or asylees.  Refugees must prove that they are being persecuted, not simply that they want a better life economically and a job (or social services!).

Breitbart posted this UPI story over the weekend, and just now I wanted to check my usual places where I find statistics (and where I’ve told you to find stats) on arrivals, but all I get now is some DOTNETNUKE server telling me I have to download something else to get to the WRAPS website. See what you get when you go to www.wrapsnet.org.    Of course it could be me, but I am assuming the State Department is now making it harder for us to see the numbers.

So, that’s  one more reason why it’s important for the Office of Refugee Resettlement to do its job—required by law!—to send an annual report to Congress, as I mentioned here yesterday so that the Congress and you—the taxpayer—know how many you are paying for.  They have not followed the law for all of Obama’s years in office! and the squishes in Congress don’t demand it!

Here is the Breitbart post on Cuba:

The number of Cubans arriving in the United States without visas has risen sharply in the past year, U.S. officials say.

There has been a surge in Cubans traveling to the United States from other countries — including Spain, Ecuador, Mexico and Canada — the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported. Greater numbers are also traveling by boat to Florida.

[….]

About 20,000 Cubans arrive every year on scheduled flights from Havana with visas. No one keeps an exact count of the others, but refugee groups estimate it is about 10,000 a year.

The Coast Guard detained 1,275 Cubans on boats intercepted before they reached Florida in the 12-month period ending Sept. 30. That was the highest number since 2008.

“The influx of Cubans into the U.S. is increasing,” said Ernesto Cuesta, who runs programs for Haitian and Cuban refugees for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Miami. The young people we are seeing are desperate. There is no hope in Cuba.”  [The Bishops should know since they are a federal contractor paid to take care of them—ed]

The hundreds of comments to the article are more interesting then this confusing story.

One commenter says that contrary to popular wisdom that Cuban-Americans vote  largely Republican, not so this time (Romney won Cuban Americans in Florida by a tiny margin, here).  Another says that non-citizen Cubans (refugees are not automatically citizens!) are voting in Florida and another, ‘Rushbabe’, (on why they are here and coming in larger numbers) says:  Freebies, from our newly re-elected Santa Claus.

To get an idea of how many Cubans are entering the US through the refugee program, you will have to visit the most recent annual report to Congress, here, for 2008 because I can’t get to that WRAPS website I mentioned above.  (The Obama Administration owes Congress for 2009, 2010, 2011 and soon 2012).   There are only two possibilities for why these have not been completed—incompetence or they are hiding something. 

Oh, and by the way, we have a refugee office in Cuba processing “refugees” into the US.

Go to the Appendix Tables, here (scroll down to near the end of the report).  On page A-1 (Table I) you can see that we brought over 345,000 Cubans through the refugee program into the US from 1983-2008.   That’s about 13,000 on average per year.  However, note that in 2008, the number has risen to 23,000 plus (and for the previous five years the numbers were over 20,000 each year).

Again, these are just the “refugee” numbers for Cubans, not numbers for all those who came into the US illegally.  As refugees they are eligible for most of the welfare goodies we offer—food stamps, Section 8 housing, medical care, SSI, education and the list goes on!

Now check out Table II and you can see that most went to Florida.   But, you should really enjoy checking out who all went to your state!

60,000th Bhutanese refugee arrives in the US

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Under a resettlement plan initiated by then Bush Asst. Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration, Ellen Sauerbrey, the US agreed to take 60,000 so-called Bhutanese that the government of Bhutan claimed were really Nepalese who had settled in Bhutan illegally.  Nepal refused to take its ethnic people back and so they had lived for years in camps run by the UN.  In 2007, the UN persuaded third countries to take them, and the US agreed to 60,000 over 5 years.

The 60,000th Bhutanese refugee arrived in the US a few days ago, but it looks like we aren’t going to stop there.

From South Asia Revealed:

As many as 60,000 Bhutanese refugees have been resettled in the US from Nepal where they had taken refuge in the 1990s after being forced out of their country.

On September 4, the 60,000th Bhutanese refugee, departed from Nepal to USA. The 28-year-old woman will start a new life in Columbus, Ohia, with her husband and young daughter, said a statement from the US Embassy here.

The US, in close coordination with the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), began resettling Bhutanese refugees residing in eastern Nepal in 2007.

Besides the US, which has accepted 60,000 refugees, some 11,000 have already settled in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, New Zealand, and the UK, as part of the third country resettlement programme initiated in 2007 in association with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Our doors are open for more people in need of jobs and social services:

“The US is committed to considering for resettlement as many Bhutanese refugees as express interest,” said the US Embassy.

Initially, the US government had expressed interest to accept a maximum of 60,000 Bhutanese refugees.

I wrote a lot about the Bhutanese in the early years, most “refugees” did not want to come to the US.  They wanted help from us and others in persuading Bhutan to let them go back there.  I’ve always wondered why such a powerful country as ours couldn’t have made it attractive (lucrative!) for Bhutan and Nepal to welcome back their own ethnic people.  Some of the displaced felt after several generations in Bhutan that they were more Bhutanese than Nepalese.  Frankly, it would have been more culturally sensitive and cheaper for us to send some gifts to the two countries and for them to find room for the displaced people.

Type ‘Bhutanese’ into our search function and note that while some have made it in America, others are having a very hard time especially as victims of crimes in rotten neighborhoods where the volags (federal ‘church’ contractors) have placed them.

The African aid racket revisited

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Editors note:  I’ve got a whole bunch of stuff to post that I’ve missed lately due to internet problems that have been plaguing me ever since that big Eastern storm a couple of weeks ago, so, sorry, if you have sent me story ideas and you haven’t seen them posted.   Please know that I love to get tips from readers who always find such interesting topics and make my work easier.   Here is one:

American Renaissance has a good book review  by Jon Harrison Sims (Shaking hands with the devil) of a book published in 2010 by Linda Polman, a Dutch journalist, about the humanitarian aid racket in mostly Africa and Asia. (Hat tip: Tom)  There is suffering and poverty, but are the NGO’s and government agencies padding their own pockets while fostering corruption worldwide?   Does that sound familiar?

Before I give you a bit of Sims’ review, I was reminded of the novel I read early this summer thanks also to a tip from a reader.  I read Paul Theroux’s “The Lower River,” truly one of the darkest novels I’ve ever read.   In it the main character returns to Africa late in life with a hankering to return to the village where he had, as a young man, been a happy Peace Corps volunteer.  What he finds is a nightmare after decades of corruption mostly by, you guessed it, NGOs.

Then just a reminder, that in 2009 we reported on the racket, here, in “Aid to Africa an unmitigated disaster.”

And, who can forget the wrath brought down on the head of Irish journalist Kevin Myers who said this in July 2008:

The wide-eyed boy-child we saved, 20 years or so ago, is now a priapic, Kalashnikov-bearing hearty, siring children whenever the whim takes him.

Back to the Linda Polman book review, here is Sims (emphasis mine):

What’s wrong with humanitarian aid? The short answer to the question posed by Dutch reporter Linda Polman in the subtitle of her book is “everything.”

[….]

Miss Polman knows what she is talking about when she says foreign aid is a racket. She has tramped through countless refugee camps in Africa, interviewing aid workers, refugees, African government officials, and rebel leaders. What she found is one of the biggest con-games of our time.

That there is genuinely terrible suffering, disease, poverty, and violence across much of Africa and Asia she does not question. That western humanitarian and development aid is the answer, or even part of the answer, she does question. She thinks all it does is perpetuate poverty, fund corruption, and foster dependence. To the question “So we should do nothing then?” she answers that that would be better than what we are doing now.

Miss Polman is not the first reporter or chastened aid worker who has come to that conclusion, yet every year the money spent on humanitarian and development aid increases—she says the idea of donor fatigue is a myth—and what she calls “the crisis caravan” rolls on. Why? The short answer is money.

The biggest players in the aid game are the international non-governmental organizations, or NGOs, which get money from governments and private donors.*** There are tens of thousands of them; no one knows how many. On average, 1,000 of them descend on a humanitarian crisis zone, along with 10 United Nation agencies, and at least twice as many government aid organizations. With their flags and tents, and white Land Cruisers, relief camps are like a traveling circus.

Phantom aid!

Each year governments spend $120 billion on humanitarian and development aid, but an average of 60 percent never leaves the donor countries. It’s called “phantom aid,” and is spent on salaries, conferences, publicity, transportation, and contracts for Western businesses that make or deliver aid supplies. Miss Polman says the Americans are the worst offenders; an estimated 70 to 80 percent is phantom aid.

Read it all, here.

*** Like Church World Service perhaps?  CWS is one of the top nine federal refugee contractors and you may recognize them as the “crop walk” organizers.   I haven’t looked at a Form 990 for CWS in awhile.  Here is 2011.   Some interesting numbers:

Income $78,732,897

Government grants $39,190,629 (almost exactly 50% of their funding comes from you!)

Total salaries $15.2 million  (with pensions and benefits another $5 million)

Top two highest salaried employees with benefits:  $268,000 and $296,000

$1.3 million went to pay rent

$1.7 million went to travel (yippee!)

$2.2 million went to professional fees (whatever that is)