Wholesale movement of Bhutanese refugees to US to end (so they say!)

11/19/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

But, the UN still has 8,500 more to go to completely clean out their camps in Nepal.

The other day I mentioned that the US under Obama committed to helping the UN clean out some of its African camps of the people from the DR Congo and I predicted the resettlement would go way beyond the 50,000 (over 5 years).

After all, the US State Department has a track record….

Sauerbrey with UN ceil — Bush Asst. Sec. of State for PRM, stunned the UN in the fall of 2006 with news that the US would lead in cleaning out the camps.

New readers may not know that in 2006, the Bush Administration said, oh sure, we will take 60,000 over 5 years of the displaced ‘Bhutanese’ (really people of Nepali origin) living in UN camps in Nepal.

Never mind that we had no strategic interest and no responsibility for the Bhutan/Nepal quarrel.

The mostly Hindu ‘Bhutanese’ ended up in camps in Nepal when the country of Bhutan said they wanted only their people in their country (formerly known as Shangri-La). Nepal refused to take in its people flooding out of Bhutan causing the UN to build camps.

So, I presume looking for more docile third world workers, George W. Bush said sure!

We were only supposed to take 60,000 over five years. But guess what?

We are now up to 94,473 (2,000 more are being processed) in nearly ten years!

I’m telling you, once the spigot opens, closing it becomes almost impossible! Just look at the Somalis who we have been admitting for 30 years!

From Kathmandu Post:

Nov 19, 2017-As the decade-long third country resettlement programme of the Bhutanese refugees living in eastern Nepal draws to a close, the fate of the those still in the camps hangs in the balance.

The Ministry of Home Affairs (MoHA) and the UN refugee agency in Kathmandu confirmed that the third country resettlement scheme is closing down after the last batch of refugees leaves by the end of December.

Currently there are around 8,500 refugees in the camps in Jhapa district but both sides—Nepal government and the UNHCR—have yet to find alternatives for them.

There was pressure on Nepal government to locally assimilate the refugees in Nepal, but Kathmandu has been constantly saying that these refugees should be repatriated to Bhutan.

[….]

Screenshot (1103)_LI — LOL! So much for sharing in the responsibility with 7 other countries! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhutanese_refugees

Nearly nine out of 10 Bhutanese refugees (90 percent) have been resettled since the launch of the third country resettlement programme in 2007, with nearly 111,000 refugees resettled in eight different countries. “Globally, far less than 1 percent of refugees are resettled. Thus, the resettlement programme for Bhutanese refugees in Nepal is truly exceptional,” the office said. The UNHCR, together with the international community, is working closely with the government of Nepal to find solutions for the remaining refugees, the UNHCR added. According to the UN office, with nearly 111,000 refugees resettled in third countries and only 8,500 of them remaining in Nepal, the opportunities to achieve durable solutions at this juncture are great.

[In 2006 we were told there were 100,000 that needed to be spread around the world, but see now they are up to nearly 120,000. Where did the extra 20,000 come from? Wandering in from the neighborhood?—ed]

[….]

Quick facts

Approximately 120,000 Bhutanese fled from their country and arrived in Nepal to become refugees from Bhutan in the early 1990s

They were lodged in several camps in Jhapa in eastern Nepal

The third country resettlement programme was launched in 2007

In the last one decade, nearly 111,000 refugees from Bhutan have been settled in various western countries, with the US alone receiving more than 90,000 of them

Nearly 2,000 refugees are currently undergoing screening process under the third country resettlement programme

The UN refugee agency says it is set to close down the third-country resettlement programme by early next

The last batch is likely to leave in December after which an estimated 8,500 Bhutanese refugees will remain in Nepal

More here.

For my extensive file on the Bhutanese resettlement to America, click here. You will see in early posts how hard the people fought to NOT be distributed around the world.

And, if you want to know how many your state ‘welcomed’ here is a map today at Wrapsnet.

Screenshot (1100)

Screenshot (1101)_LI — Top ‘welcoming’ states are Pennsylvania, Ohio and Texas (making sure those states turn reliably blue, so dark blue you can’t read the numbers on the map!)

45,732 refugees admitted this fiscal year so far, 45% are Muslim

05/29/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been asked frequently what the numbers look like for which religions are practiced by refugees entering the US right now.
Unless Donald Trump tells us that the New York Times story was fake news last week, see here, and that we are not shooting for 70,000 refugees this year, we will assume it is true (and report the numbers as they come in). Just a reminder that any number in excess of 70,000 will put Trump ahead of most Bush years and ahead of several of Obama’s years.

It doesn’t matter what religion the alleged Burmese biter practices, the questions you should ask are, how did he get through “extreme vetting” and can we afford ‘refugees’ with this degree of apparent mental illness? https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2017/05/28/burmese-biter-was-headed-for-new-bern-nc-are-we-importing-mentally-ill-in-refugee-program/

Before I give you the list, I want to emphasize that religion should not be the main criteria for your assessment of whether the refugee is good or bad for America.
First, these people are all supposed to have been PERSECUTED? Do we take some who are really simply economic migrants, those who need work? If so, that is not the purpose of the Refugee Act of 1980.
Can we afford large numbers with mental illness, or illnesses such as TB?
Can we afford those who have no hope of getting off welfare for a generation?
Can we afford those who might already have criminal tendencies that do not become evident in those personal interviews (when no data is available from failed nation states)?
Are we to take into consideration the need by big companies and the Chamber of Commerce for a steady supply of cheap immigrant labor (supported by your tax dollars)?
Are we taking some supposed ‘refugees’ for other purposes of the US State Department, to ‘help-out’ some country that is having a security or economic problem? Or, as we have done in some cases (Uzbeks? Meskhetians?), where we want something from that country?
Again, religion should not be the primary reason we admit or deny anyone, unless they can prove they are being persecuted for it!
Here is a list of some of the religions recorded at Wrapsnet and the refugees who practice those religions (data for this fiscal year from October 1, 2016 to today). Note: This program operates on a fiscal year basis!
Again, I do not include below all of the religions listed. These are the larger (or more interesting to me) numbers and these are not my categories, they are how they are categorized at Wrapsnet. 45% of those entering the US in this fiscal year practice some form of Islam. Since Trump was inaugurated on January 20th, the percentage of Muslims entering the US has dropped to 39%.
Numbers for the fiscal year 2017 (so far):

Baptists (1,591)

Buddhists (1,380)

Catholics (2,713)

Christians (6,890)

Evangelical Christians (364)

Hindu (979)

Jehovah Witness (388)

Jewish (149)

Moslem Suni (9,663)

Moslem Shiite (2,509)

Moslem (8,180) These must not have designated a sect

No religion (369)

Orthodox (983)

Pentecostalist (3,901)

Protestant (1,918)

Yezidi (416)

Total refugees this fiscal year: 45,732
Like it or not, these will be Trump’s refugees because years from now (especially if we reach the 70,000 mark by September 30th), no one will remember that Obama presided over 3 1/2 months of the fiscal year.
Again, the data base goes on for 22 pages and I’ve picked those with the largest numbers, or in a few cases ones that interested me like the small number of Jews entering as refugees. If HIAS (formerly Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) still focused on Jewish refugees they would be out of business by now!
One last thing!
We have been admitting mostly Burmese Christians for probably a decade, but the number of Burmese Muslims (Rohingya) are on the rise and I note that, for this fiscal year, 1,108 of the ‘Moslems’ are from Burma. I was also surprised to see how large a number of ‘Moslems’ there were from the DR Congo (325) when that whole flow was supposed to have been, we were led to believe, Christians.

Mr. Cool goes to Milan, is paid millions to announce that "climate refugees" will flood the first world

05/11/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Changing the subject?
Just in case Islam-generated conflicts run out of steam in the Middle East and Africa, Barack Obama crossed the Atlantic to collect a speaking fee reportedly in the $3 million range to pronounce that, as a result of global warming there would be a refugee crisis “unprecedented in human history.”

Unbuttoned to mid-chest: We are told that Mr. Cool forgot his tie. If you are a former President of the US staying in what must be the most expensive hotel in the city, isn’t it possible to send out for a wonderful selection of beautiful ties? http://www.nationalreview.com/article/447465/obama-climate-speech-milan-offered-nothing-new

He wants to make sure that world Open Borders activists (and global corporations looking for cheap labor) wouldn’t run out of reasons to tear down borders to the first world (if Islamic conflicts fail to do a good enough job).
Obama talked extensively in the speech about the impact of warming, while several reports lately say the earth is entering a cooling period. So which is it?
Below is some of what Obama said in what some, here are calling a “contradictory speech.”
From the UK Independent:

Climate change could produce a refugee crisis that is “unprecedented in human history”, Barack Obama has warned as he stressed global warming was the most pressing issue of the age.

Speaking at an international food conference in Milan, the former US President said rising temperatures were already making it more difficult to grow crops and rising food prices were “leading to political instability”.

“Floods on sunny days”—bad, very bad….

He said the United States was currently experiencing “floods on sunny days”, increased wildfires and, in Alaska, increased coastal erosion as the ice melts and no country was “immune” to the problem.

If world leaders put aside “parochial interests” and took action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by enough to restrict the rise to one or two degrees Celsius, then humanity would probably be able to cope. [So, might we shut up about this issue if sunspot activity and natural cycles restrict the rise to one or two degrees?—ed]

Failing to do this, Mr Obama warned, increased the risk of “catastrophic” effects in the future, “not only real threats to food security, but also increases in conflict as a consequence of scarcity and greater refugee and migration patterns”.

“If those rain patterns change, then you could see hundreds of millions of people who suddenly find themselves unable to feed themselves, because they’re already at subsistence levels.

“And the amount of migration, the number of refugees that could be resulting from something like that, would be unprecedented in human history.”

Dare I mention the scientific notion of carrying capacity and that a population die-off might be mother earth’s way of staying in balance (okay stone me!).
Continue reading here.
I have a ‘Climate Refugees’ category with 49 previous posts on the topic, here. I don’t know if they have settled their differences, but early-on the climate refugee agitators were at odds with the ‘humanitarian’ refugee agitators over the use of the word “refugee.” ‘Humanitarians’ were angered by environmentalists stealing the word that they had over decades built up as one that invokes warm and fuzzy feelings among people who know nothing.

Nearly 100,000 Bhutanese refugees later we help UN clean out camps in Nepal

12/28/2016 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Lesson! When the Department of State welcomes an ethnic group to America expect the resettlement to be larger and longer than they initially said it would be.

We have followed the process of cleaning out UNHCR camps in Nepal of Bhutanese refugees ever since the Bush Administration said: ‘come on in’ we well take 60,000. This resettlement was planned to last for five years (as we now approach ten!). I suspect it was UNHCR Antonio Guterres (now Secretary General of the UN) who talked the Bush State Department in to this!
***Update*** More news here: UN says the movement of over 100,000 third worlders to first world countries was a great success.
The so-called “Bhutanese” are people of Nepali ethnicity that were pushed out of Bhutan when the Bhutanese government basically said, we want Bhutan for Bhutanese and you Nepali people who have moved in here for decades need to leave. To learn more about what happened, check out wikipedia, here.
bhutan-map
When we began posting on this group of mostly Hindu people back in 2007, most did not want to be resettled anywhere but back in Bhutan. And, obviously Nepal wasn’t welcoming their kinsmen home.

So, how did this become our problem?

Why did the US decide to resettle tens of thousands and scatter them around America? Frankly, with our economic muscle certainly we could have prevailed on either Bhutan or Nepal to work this out! Or, did we simply acquiesce to pressure from the United Nations? And, was the refugee industry looking for more paying clients and big business looking for cheap labor?
So here we are almost ten years in. We said we would resettle 60,000 and so I checked Wrapsnet.org (2007 to December 15, 2016) to see exactly how many we have taken since 2007. The answer is 91,713! But according to this article in the Katmandu Post we will be closing the program in 2017 (I guess to make more room for the Muslim Syrians, Iraqis and Somalis).
For ambitious readers, visit our archive on the Bhutanese by clicking here. Some have done well in America, but for years they had an extremely high suicide rate that worried the resettlement industry. One of many morals to this story is that when the US State Department gives you a number that will be resettled, expect the resettlement to be much larger and much longer than they said it would be!

Many forced to choose resettlement against their will!

Here is the story from before Christmas from the Katmandu Post (notice that many are still holding out hope that they will go home to Bhutan):

Dec 15, 2016- More than 100,000 Bhutanese refugees have been resettled in various countries under the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugee (UNHCR) third country resettlement programme. But some the remaining refugees in eastern Tarai are still putting their feet down for repatriation.

Around 2,000 of the remaining 11,000 refugees, put up at various camps in Jhapa and Morang, are refusing the third country resettlement and willing to return their own homeland in Bhutan, according to a source at the UNHCR. The repatriation campaign has come closer to end after the UN body’s resettlement programme. The repatriation campaign has been weakened as the leaders spearheading repatriation themselves opted for third country resettlement. And the majority of the remaining refugees are also in resettlement process, giving up hope of repatriation.

Bhampa Rai, Balaram Poudel, among other refugee leaders, are still campaigning for repatriation, though. They blamed the government of Nepal for its failure to take any initiatives for their cause. “Nepal could neither convince Bhutan to take back refugees nor pressure the international community over the issue,” said Rai, claiming that hundreds of refugees had been forced to choose third country resettlement against their will.

[….]

According to the UNHCR, 107,000 refugees are already resettled in various host countries, including the US, Australia and Canada. Another batch of around 9,000 refugees are in the process of resettlement, officials at the UNHCR said.

The UNHCR’s third country resettlement programme will come to an end in 2017.

So where are they in America? (Or, at least where were they originally resettled). Map is from Wrapsnet.org.

screenshot-104 — States cut off in my screenshot are Hawaii (0), Alaska (148) and Florida (671)

Here are the top ten states where the Bhutanese were resettled:

screenshot-103 — Inds stands for Individuals.

One of the things I’ve always wondered about is this: The UN was so anxious to close these camps (to deny these people a ‘right of return’) while they never had any interest in resettling the Palestinians around the Arab world, but has kept the Palestinian camps (really cities) open for over 60 years. I’m actually not wondering. I really do know the answer! It was (and is) to keep a thorn in Israel’s side.

Concord, NH: Bhutanese refugees' religious ceremony draws neighbors' ire

10/17/2015 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I’m running out of time this morning after writing so much about Allentown, PA, but want to get a few more things posted before I have to move on to other of life’s duties.

Over a week ago a large gathering of Bhutanese refugees disturbed a quiet Concord neighborhood with chanting, large numbers of people and traffic. The original story is here at the Concord Monitor. One resident put a “GO HOME” sign in a window.

That story was followed by an apology of sorts from one of the Bhutanese refugees involved. But interestingly he blamed the federal refugee contractor for not giving the former UN camp residents, the Hindu Bhutanese, a sufficient cultural orientation.
For new readers, we have now resettled over 80,000 Bhutanese refugees from camps in Nepal (they are really Nepali people that Nepal didn’t want back once they were expelled from Bhutan). The UN wanted to clean out the camps (the plan was very controversial because many did not want to be “scattered to the four winds” as they said at the time).

bhutansa — People ask me all the time—who are these Bhutanese? Here is a map of Bhutan and Nepal. The so-called Bhutanese refugees were living for 20 years or so in UN camps in Nepal. The UN wanted to clean out the camps so we said o.k. and now more than 80,000 are scattered throughout America. They are not Muslims. http://www.oocities.org/bhutaneserefugees/refugeecampmap.html

The Bush Administration decision to resettle 60,000 in the US was made by former Maryland candidate for Governor Ellen Sauerbrey who was the Bush Asst. Sec. of State for PRM. As I said, we are now up to 80,000 and they are still coming.
Don’t forget readers that the Refugee Admissions Program is 35 years old and Republicans like George W. Bush enthusiastically helped this migration of third worlders to America.
We have a very lengthy archive on the Bhutanese resettlement going back to 2007, learn more by clicking here. Pay attention to stories about the high suicide rate of the Bhutanese people in America.
So back to the Concord news. This is PRAJA SHAPKOTA writing a sort-of apology for the disruption in the neighborhood, here (see photo!).

I feel concerned with the discontentment generated due to the religious ceremony in the Heights neighborhood of Concord (Monitor front page, Oct. 7).

As a member of the community in Upstate New York, I wish to express my personal viewpoints with some background information.

We the Bhutanese people of Nepali ethnicity have come to the United States after persecution and eviction by the absolute monarchy of Bhutan from 1985 to 1995. We have spent more than 18 years in crowded refugee camps of Nepal in uncertainty when Nepal was undergoing political metamorphism.

The refugee camps strengthened family and neighborly bonds with higher interpersonal interactions, which has become a community culture. What we see and do shapes our ways of life – our very culture.

We primarily follow the Hindu traditions, and for a family a lengthy religious function is once or twice in a generation. In case of Rudra Timsina, the function was a way of sharing joy with the community after buying a house – the achievement of a dream. Most invitees attend the discourses and cultural activities at least once in seven days as this is also a method to socialize among people with cultural and language barriers.

Such people constitute more than 50 percent in our community – illiterate in English and unaware of the American culture and traditions. We have never lived with people of totally different culture. Hence, this is a case of “conflict of culture and outlook” and not a conflict of community.

[….]

….in my opinion, the resettlement agencies with local community organizations should initiate at least a month of group orientation on the various aspects of American culture, such that a “conflict of culture” can be lessened.

I’ve had complaints from some of our readers about the large number of Bhutanese refugees in their communities. At least this writer is sensitive to the disruption created in this Concord situation.

Who is bringing the Bhutanese to Concord?

Go here to the handy list, and see that three federal refugee contractors are dividing up the pie in the same office in Concord (Church World Service, Episcopal Migration Ministries and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service). Manchester, NH has been overloaded so now it looks like they are busy little beavers colonizing Concord.