In 2007, then Asst. Secretary of State for Population Refugees and Migration, Ellen Saurbrey, said the US had agreed to take 60,000 of the 100,000 Bhutanese (really Nepali) refugees living in camps in Nepal over a five year period. Here we are, going on 7 years, and we have now taken in 75,000 with more on the way!
Sauerbrey: 60,000 over five years.
You can read all about why we decided it was our duty (here) to do this when we had no national interest in it—other than that the UN told us to do it! And, surely US companies, looking for cheap legal labor, were egging the Bush administration on, while the human rights industrial complex agitators cheered. In fairness, we can’t blame Sauerbrey for what the subsequent Obama State Department is doing.
But, pay attention because they will do this (lie) about the Syrians as well.
Once the US State Department begins the process with its resettlement contractors, the numbers will balloon way beyond what they promised in the first place. Remember the contractors are paid by the head to resettle refugees in your cities and town. They are always out scouting for a fresh supply!
Other countries were supposed to help, but as is the usual case, the lion’s share falls on the US.
Nepal – The United States this week resettled its 75,000th Bhutanese refugee from eastern Nepal. Tilak Chand Ghimire, 44, his wife, 12-year-old daughter and 75-year-old parents, will start new lives in Akron, Ohio, where his brother resettled in 2010.
The move brings the total number of Bhutanese refugees resettled from Nepal since 2007 by IOM, in close cooperation with the Nepali government, the embassies of resettlement countries and UNHCR, to 88,770.
Get it! We took 75,000 of the 88,770 resettled so far!
All subsequent negotiations to allow them to return to Bhutan failed and almost the whole 107,000 caseload are expected to eventually be resettled in third countries, notably the US.
We have an extensive archive on Bhutanese refugees going back to our first year writing RRW, click here to learn more. You will see in the early posts that a large number of the Bhutanese/Nepalese camp dwellers DID NOT want to be resettled in third countries.
The thing that amazes me most about articles like this one, about how there aren’t enough ‘resources’ for the large numbers of refugees arriving in ‘welcoming’ cities and states, is that NO ONE ever says, maybe we should slow the flow into the US until such time that we can afford them!
Paw Moo Htoo (Mom in the photo) has been in America seven months….Htoo says her case worker only showed her how to turn on the lights and oven, but said nothing about enrolling her kids in school. So at first, they didn’t go.
There is so much in this reportfrom the Des Moines Register by Rehka Basu (Hat tip: ‘pungentpeppers’) that I didn’t know where to begin snipping it. So please be sure to read the whole article! Emphasis below is mine:
On the Monday after standard time went into effect, Lee Mo’s children missed school. The Burmese refugee family knew the American ritual of moving clocks forward and back, but they didn’t know on which dates that happened, so the school bus left without them.
Even if she had known the date, Mo couldn’t read a calendar. For much of her five years here, she has had to estimate time based on the position of the sun. She doesn’t know her age. She can’t make a phone call. Like about half of the people in Iowa who speak her native Karenni, she can’t read in any language. Neither she nor her husband went to school. [We have admitted tens of thousands of Burmese like this family!—ed]
An estimated 6,000 Burmese are in Iowa and some say life was easier in the camp!
Since 2006, refugees from Burma have been turning up in Iowa, becoming its largest incoming refugee group.
There are an estimated 6,000 refugees from Burma who are here, divided about evenly between three main language groups (though there are dozens of less-spoken languages), according to Henny Ohr, executive director of EMBARC, a new Des Moines nonprofit to help them. The Iowa Bureau of Refugee Services counts 1,667 refugees from Burma in Iowa, but that doesn’t include secondary migration from other cities. Yet Ohr says no Karenni speaker in Iowa is fluent in English.
For all of the deprivations in the refugee camps — houses of bamboo and leaves, lit only by candlelight; dug pits for toilets; no electricity or running water; no health care or police to fight crime — Mo says that life was easier.At least she knew how to navigate it.
In the “old days” resettlement contractors used private money and volunteer help to go beyond what their government dole paid for, today they don’t!
Refugee resettlement core services from the U.S. State Department were always limited to 90 days, and there is a one-time per capita grant of $1,800, of which $700 can go to agency staff for management, says John Wilken, chief of the Bureau of Refugee Services in the Iowa Department of Human Services. But in the past, income-eligible single people or couples without young children could also get cash assistance and medical care for five years. That was cut back to eight months.
“In the old days, agencies doing resettlement often went beyond 90 days, I presume because they had private dollars or volunteers,” said Wilken. “As the landscape has changed and resettlement has become more costly, resettlement agencies have had to limit their services to exactly what they’re getting paid for.”
Take note Wyoming, state taxpayers help foot the bill.
Low-income refugees with children get welfare benefits under Iowa’s Family Investment Program, with a lifetime cap of five years.The Bureau of Refugee Services uses federal funds for refugees here less than two years to pay for employment-related services primarily. The bulk of that $550,000 last year paid for bureau staff, job transportation and telephone interpretation services. Language instruction was limited to “self-learning” on computers using Rosetta Stone programs. The bureau has no Karenni-speaking employees.
There are other federal grants, including some to prepare elderly refugees for citizenship, or targeted to Des Moines Public School children, and partnerships with Lutheran Services of Iowa, Catholic Charities and the Des Moines chapter of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. But as Wilken says, “All of us would say there’s a pretty substantial gap in comprehensive case management.”
Secondary migrants arriving for meatpacking jobs! (Immigrant cheap labor!) Meatpackers make money, while taxpayers subsidize the lives of these legal laborers.
And when families are resettled in Iowa from other states — for meatpacking jobs or because relatives are here — the 90 days of assistance won’t follow them, and the Bureau of Refugee Services won’t help. Wilken said it didn’t compete for such funds; the Committee for Refugees and Immigrants administers them. Yet secondary migrants are the biggest group of refugees from Burma.
Just a reminder, Bill Clinton began the flow of refugees to Iowa for his meatpacking buddies, here.
Ohr calls it a crisis.
It is a crisis alright, but one not to be solved by throwing more taxpayer dollars to contractors! Let’s bring fewer refugees!
Uwe and Hannelore Romeike and their children left their native Germany in 2008, fleeing persecution by the government because they wanted to homeschool their children. Lynda Altman reports in the Examiner
The family applied for asylum based on religious persecution. Asylum was granted. However, the Obama administration overturned that decision and the Romeike family faced deportation.
HSLDA stepped in and fought the deportation. They lost the battle at every turn. Even when Glenn Beck stepped in with a sizable donation, the family still could not catch a break in court. Then, a petition was filed with thousands of signatures requesting that the U.S. Government answer a final request. On that, the family won.
The Romeike family. Six and counting.
The U.S. Supreme Court was supposed to hear the case on Monday, March 3, 2014. Instead of hearing the case, the court decided against it. That left the Romeike family with no more options. They were out of time and legal recourse. It looked like deportation was inevitable.
After public outcry, the Department of Homeland Security gave the Romeike family permission to remain in the United States. This happened on Tuesday, March 4, 2014.
Blogger Ben Swann has these further details (as well as some details about what happened to them in Germany):
The Romeike’s received help from the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA). The HSLDA requested a rehearing with the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. The request was denied. The case caught the attention of the homeschooling community, as well as a number of Christian groups. An online petition asking President Obama to grant the family asylum was signed by more than 127,000 people. Eventually the Romeike’s and the HSLDA decided to request a hearing with the Supreme Court.
Michael Farris, founder of the HSLDA, commented, “The Attorney General and Sixth Circuit are ignoring critical evidence and are trying to send back this family who is trying to stay in our country legally. We are hopeful that the Supreme Court will go the other way and see what the original immigration judge saw: that this family and other religious homeschoolers in Germany are being persecuted for what they believe is the right way to raise their children.”
Both writers give the petition and public outcry credit for the outcome. I wonder; I’ve never heard of a petition to the federal government having any effect. It’s great if that’s true. I do remember that more than 20 years ago Rep. George Miller of California introduced a bill in Congress that homeschoolers interpreted as threatening to their right to educate their children. (I should say “we homeschoolers” as I was one at the time.) They jammed the Capitol switchboard — it was reported to be the most calls ever — and the bill was withdrawn. Today there are many more homeschoolers.
I posted on the case here in 2010 and Ann posted here in 2013 when the Romeikes were denied asylum. Note that they were initially granted asylum and then that was overturned at the federal level. We can imagine how much the Obama administration would love a Christian family educating its children outside the state’s control. (Not!) I’d love to know the inside story of the judicial and government actions in this case.
As Ann commented in her post when the Romeikes lost their asylum case: We will take Chechens, Somalis and Rohingya Muslims, but not persecuted Christians from Germany who pose no threat to America. Go figure!
Addendum: Here a great piece by Michael Farris, Dangerous Policy Lurks behind Romeike Triumph. I don’t have time to write about it, but if you are interested in homeschooling, parental rights, religious freedom, or oppressive government, there’s a lot here for you.
Russian news outlets have been reporting that there are hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who have sought asylum in Russia over the last two months.
They say 140,000 have crossed the border into mother Russia for protection in the last two weeks.
Russian President Putin sure does know how “refugees” on the move can ring the medias’ bells. He knows the drill! Just follow the news on Syrian refugees to know what I mean!
News stories emanating from Russian state media this past week raise a serious question. Is Russia creating a fake refugee crisis in the Ukraine to justify its military intervention in the region?
No one has actually seen the refugees. Read it all. I have no time for more this morning.
Next time you hear the Palestinians and their supporters whining, remember hundreds of thousands of Jews lost their ancestral homes when forced to leave Arab countries and they aren’t demanding any ‘right of return!’
Yemenite Jews en route from Aden to Israel, during the Magic Carpet operation (1949–1950). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_Arab_and_Muslim_countries
By the way, has the US (the Obama Administration) officially recognized this report? From the Jerusalem Post(hat tip: Jeff):
Canada, early on Tuesday, accepted the recommendation of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development that “Canada officially recognizes the experience of Jewish refugees who were displaced from states in the Middle East and North Africa after 1948.”
The recognition came following the committee’s November 2013 report on Recognizing Jewish Refugees from the Middle East and North Africa.
The committee “learned of the discrimination and hardship faced by Jewish people living in the Middle East and North Africa in the 20th century,” according to the report.
Further, said the report, “almost all of the Jews in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen eventually left their homes and communities, which had existed in the Middle East and North Africa for centuries.”
[….]
Next, the report said that the countries in question had 856,000 Jews before 1948, 76,000 in 1968 and only 4,315 in 2012.
[….]
CIJA chairman David Koschitzky responded to the news, saying, “Today’s decision brings Canada one step closer to recognizing the otherwise forgotten persecution of Jewish minorities across the Middle East.”
He continued, “This is not only a matter of ensuring historical accuracy. Once implemented, it will correct a fundamental imbalance in a Canadian policy that acknowledges Arab refugees, but makes no mention of Jewish refugees resulting from the Arab- Israeli conflict.”
