If Trump doesn’t turn off the spigot, both of refugees and funding/regulations for low income housing (Obama’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing!), then expect refugee contractors to find your town!
Changing the heartland one town at a time!
Tyson Foods is the top employer in Garden City, Kansas and the primary reason Somalis and other refugees move there. If you have a Tyson Foods plant (or any BIG MEAT plant near where you live, you will have refugees too. Here we have news from Kansas where a federal refugee contractor crows about all the new housing that could be available for refugees in Liberal, Dodge and Garden City, Kansas. Governor Brownback recently withdrew the state from the Refugee Admissions Program, but that means nothing unless he is willing to sue the federal government on states’ rights grounds.
His withdrawal means that contractors, like the International Rescue Committee,will move in to run the program with Washington. As we said here, Brownback cannot be trusted on this issue!
From KSN.com(Refugees may double for southwest Kansas in 2017):
GARDEN CITY, Kan. (KSNW) — Southwest Kansas welcomed 67 new refugees to the area in 2016, just shy of the 80 the International Rescue Commission [Committee—ed] was authorized to re-settle, but that number could soar this year.
Any Longa, director of the International Rescue Committee office in Garden City, says she is working to expand housing opportunities for refugees. http://www.gctelegram.com/news/local/ugandan-natives-share-sorrows-humor-of-moving-to-america/article_0639af00-30b8-55c9-9028-5c39ede42b6b.html
“We do have the capacity to settle 140,” said Amy Longa, who manages the southwest Kansas site of the Commission. “I do not know how many we’ll end up settling by the end of the fiscal year.”
It depends on many factors at play in the international resettlement efforts, but the number of new refugees settling in Dodge, Liberal, and Garden could potentially double this year over last year.
[….]
The housing shortage in the region is an obstacle, but it is being addressed.
“We’re now seeing a little more opportunity with the recent building,” said Carol Davidson with Garden City Community Development, “and we also have plans in the future, this next year 2017, we do have a development that’s going in.”
“19 duplexes, 12 fourplexes, and five 36-unit apartment complexes,” said Cory Hodapp, who owns the company building a new housing complex in Garden City. “We’ll have half of the duplexes and half of the fourplexes complete this year.”
Good news for the IRC and Tyson Foods!
It’s good news for the IRC, which competes with the market to help find homes for refugees.
“What we have been working on the past two years is reaching out to landlords and creating partnerships with landlords to create housing,” said Longa. “Not only in Garden City, but in Dodge and Liberal as well.”
As we have reported on many previous occasions, the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program works closely with large companies like Tyson Foods and others to supply them with cheap immigrant labor. Those laborers are further subsidized by your tax dollars including those used to expand low-income housing.
So, don’t fall for the humanitarian mumbo-jumbo! Refugee resettlement is an industry! Chambers of Commerce want it, housing developers want it, big industries want it for cheap labor, local mosque leaders want it, politicians want it (money!), and the resettlement contractors get jobs and nice salaries all while pretending to wear a white hat of humanitarianism!
We have many previous posts going back several years on Garden City,click here. And, see Garden City’s wikipedia pagewhere someone had to be sure that the recent arrest of three Kansans who allegedly planned to blow up one of the Somali apartment complexes has been added to the page.
There is another article about Kansas and refugees, here, in recent days. You might want to have a look at.
WTH! Too many people in US STILL have TB! Well, gee, that might be because we keep bringing in new cases!
Michael Patrick Leahy at Breitbart continued his excellent series of investigative reports on the incidence of active TB in the US refugee population with this report from Virginia. Yesterday we told you about two other Leahy articles on TB in refugees earlier this week, see here. Leahyon this Virginia revelation:
The state of Virginia refuses to track the number of refugees it resettles who are diagnosed with active tuberculosis (TB).
[….]
… the Virginia Department of Health (VDH) does not think it should be a priority to track foreign-born TB cases by category, as do 44 states who have provided the CDC with that data since 2012 (Tennessee became the 45th state to do so in 2014) in its annual Report on Tuberculosis in the United States.
“The Virginia Department of Health does not collect the data you have requested,” a spokesperson for VDH responded when Breitbart asked to know the immigration status upon first entry of the 168 foreign-born residents of Virginia diagnosed with active TB in 2015.
More here.
For more on refugee health see our ‘Health issues’ category by clicking here. And, remember readers, your tax dollars pay for expensive TB medication (if the case is discovered!).
BTW, still have had no one tell me if volunteers, working with resettlement agencies, are trained to spot symptoms or are educated on how to protect themselves and their families from becoming infected with TB when they work with newly arrived refugees.
You probably got this news the other day at Drudge, but I am posting this and another article about Tuberculosis by Michael Patrick Leahy at Breitbartto keep our ‘Health Issues’ category up to date. If you’ve never scrolled through it, we have cataloged 321 posts in the last 9 years on the topic of refugee/immigrant health problems. Some of our very first posts in the category were about costly Tuberculosis treatment for refugees in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. TB Symptoms don’t usually show up in the first year of infection. https://www.physio-pedia.com/File:Symptoms_of_TB.png Hereis Leahy three days ago. BTW the refugee industry is quick to tell you that immigrants with latent TB are permitted entry to the US, but pay attention because these are refugees with activeTB.
Between 2012 and 2015, 1,565 refugees were diagnosed with active tuberculosis (TB) in the United States, according to annual reports published by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
The CDC data, which has been public but obscure until now, shows that the number of refugees diagnosed with active TB in recent years is more than three times greater than previously reported by any media outlet.
The number of refugees diagnosed with TB in the United States has increased every year since 2012, the first year the CDC began publishing data on foreign-born cases of the disease by category, when 358 were diagnosed. In 2013, 396 refugees were diagnosed with TB. The following year, 2014, 402 refugees were diagnosed with TB, and in 2015, the number of refugees diagnosed with TB rose again to 409. Data for 2016 has not yet been reported.
Continue reading here.
And, then yesterday, Leahy, who has become an expert on the Tuberculosis problem growing in America, reported that a middle school student in South Carolina has been diagnosed with active TB. School officials are working hard to keep the story tamped down. I wondered, when I read this, if parents at the school were told to keep their mouths shut about the status of the student—is he/she foreign born? Is he or she a refugee? Breitbart:
A student at Castle Heights Middle School in Rock Hill, South Carolina was diagnosed with active tuberculosis (TB) in December.
Officials with the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC) and Rock Hill Schools, part of the York County Public School System, are not disclosing the patient’s country of origin.
“We can’t provide any more information about the individual that was confirmed with the case of tuberculosis,” a spokesperson for the South Carolina DHEC tells Breitbart News.
“We are in the middle of our contact investigations,” the spokesperson adds.
LOL! Leahy’s reputation must be spreading!
“Your reporting on Breitbart.com implies that you will attempt to use this data to indicate the confirmed case of TB is from a foreign-born student connected in some way to the influx of refugees into the United States over the past few years,” Rock Hills Schools spokesperson Frost adds.
“The identity of the student is and will remain private as we are bound by federal law (FERPA) to not release medical or educational information about students. As such, we cannot confirm or provide the birth location of the student involved in this case,” he notes.
Continue reading here. Leahy has much more including many links to related information.
I’ve said it more than once, and will keep saying it: If Islamic terrorism doesn’t frighten you, this (sending your kids to school were Tuberculosis could be found) should! And, would someone who works for a refugee agency tell us if volunteers are trained to spot symptoms in the refugees they are helping and are given any instructions on how to keep themselves safe?
Update January 5th: Be sure to see my next installment of this story, here.
A newly arrived Somali refugee*** who court records show had arrived in Aberdeen, SD to work for the controversial meat packing plant there was found guilty by a jury on December 20th of attempting to sexually assault a special-needs woman.
Read the story! And, ask yourselves, why didn’t the local media report on the case?
Did it have something to do with the controversy roiling there among citizens who were vigorously opposing a plan to make Aberdeen a new resettlement site (only Sioux Falls and Huron were getting direct resettlements), a plan supported by the mayor, as we reported last April. Aberdeen Mayor Mike Levsen: ““We need workers, and we certainly would be glad to have more friends and neighbors and more children in our schools and more cultures that we can learn from.” [And you get to pay for it all while big business gets cheap labor!] https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2016/04/16/heads-up-aberdeen-south-dakota-new-resettlement-site-being-proposed/BTW, for new readers, my title refers to the sexual assault case that the media and elected officials downplayed in Twin Falls, Idaho earlier in 2016. Hereis what Leo Hohmann (WND) learned yesterday. After you read the whole incredible story, see what I have to say below about the timeline.
A refugee newly arrived from Somalia has been tried and convicted for attempting to sexually assault a special-needs woman while she was sitting outside of a home for the disabled in Aberdeen, South Dakota.
Liban Mohamed, 39, was in the United States for only about a week when he tried to force himself on a 31-year-old woman with severe disabilities.He is not a U.S. citizen, but whether he will be deported in the wake of his conviction remains unclear.
The trial for Mohamed was held just a few days before Christmas and not a word of the conviction has made it into the local media, residents of Aberdeen told WND on Tuesday.
Mohamed speaks no English and required two interpreters at trial, according to the state’s attorney who prosecuted the case.
“I do know he lived in Aberdeen,” prosecutor Christopher White told WND. “The day that it happened, he was staying at the White House Inn hotel in Aberdeen. What came out at trial, in his defense attorney’s opening statement, was that he arrived in Aberdeen that day and had only been in the United States for approximately a week, and he had come to work at the beef plant in Aberdeen.But I don’t know if he had already started working or was about to start work there.”
Mohamed mentioned to law enforcement that he had been hired on at the Demkota Ranch beef plant, White said. [Someone needs to do some research on DemKota Ranch Beef and figure out how closely they are working with Lutheran Social Services of SD and the US State Dept.—ed]
Read the whole thing! Click here. Don’t miss the line where Mohamed told the arresting officers that what he did was o.k. in his country!
Hohmann wraps up with this:
According to court records obtained by WND, Mohamed was arrested July 30 and indicted by a grand jury on Aug. 15. The jury was seated on Monday, Dec. 19, and the trial was held Tuesday, Dec. 20.
What a coincidence!
I was in Aberdeen meeting with residents on July 25, just five days before the arrest. Citizens there were becoming troubled by the changes they were seeing in their community and expressed fear about just such a thing happening. They told me that the meat plant was luring labor like these newly arrived Somalis and they had already noticed an increase in crime. They said that they did not want a resettlement office in town.
As we reported in April, there was a big push going on to open a direct resettlement site in Aberdeen which would presumably supply labor for DemKota directly from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. A small refugee office existed in Huron, but most refugees placed in South Dakota still go to Sioux Falls which is 200 miles away from Aberdeen. Tim Jurgens, State Refugee Coordinator. SD is a Wilson-Fish state which means that state elected officials have virtually no say about the program that is run by Lutheran Social Services and the US Dept. of State in Washington, DC.
Because of the public outcry in late summer and early fall, Lutheran Social Services appeared to back off a plan to open a direct resettlement site in Aberdeen after some of the citizens I met on July 25 organized a resistance. (I’ll give you some numbers below for SD).
The first public meeting organized by residents occurred a little over two weeks later and the Aberdeen News didn’t miss that event reporting on it on August 12th. Go hereto see what happened at the heated meeting and read about the paper’s biased news coverage.
Look at the timeline. Mohamed was arrested on July 30th (no local media coverage). A grand jury indicted him three days after (on August 15th) the paper wrote in negative (biased!) tones about the citizens who dared question what was happening in their quiet town. Did the paper cover up the sexual assault story on purpose because it confirmed the things citizens said they were worried about (or was it just incompetence)?
Look at what was happening in Twin Falls, Idaho in the first week of August! Click here. All hell had broken loose about a sexual assault there!
And, then of course it is quite stunning that no court reporter was present at the trial on December 20th. But, also not present was the family of the victim, and there still remains a question about how the guardians of the mentally-impaired woman were not told to be in court.
Many more questions remain!
Have the wheels come off the US Refugee Admissions Program? Are they trying to shoe-horn so many refugees in to the country that there is flagrant violation of contracts going on?
Refugees are to be placed by the contractor (LSS SD) directly in to apartments or rental houses and their initial resettlement period is about 3 months during which the contractor introduces the new refugee to American culture, signs them up for their welfare services, gets kids in school, tries to find them jobs, and arranges their medical screening (for things like TB!).
I am simply blown away by the information given by the state’s attorney that Mohamed had only been in the US a week and was walking the streets of Aberdeen unsupervised.
What! Did LSS simply bring him in to Sioux Falls and put him on a bus to Aberdeen to work at the meat plant? And, then put him up in a hotel? (I’m getting more and more reports of refugees being housed in hotels when State Department policy has always been that the refugee is to be picked up at the airport and escorted to their furnished apartment with ‘culturally appropriate’ food in the refrig!). What is going on? Too many refugees for them to handle?
I know it is pretty easy to unload on Mohamed, but why was he literally walking the streets in Aberdeen? He didn’t even speak English. Was no one supervising him? Was no one giving him any instructions about American culture and laws especially as it relates to the treatment of women?
Does this guy have a family? Or are we admitting single men to work in meatpacking now? Didn’t Homeland Security find out during his vetting process that he might have a problem?
What did Aberdeen’s mayor Mike Levsen know (about the sexual assault case) and when did he know it?
What role did Aberdeen’s mayor play in bringing DemKota to Aberdeen, and did he encourage LSS to open a refugee office to supply the company with cheap labor? Is it even a US-owned company?
I think folks in Aberdeen need to start having a serious look at the man they elected mayor in 2004! What! 12 years! Isn’t it time for a new mayor? See one of many stories about him here.
South Dakota numbers
This is getting too long, so here (below) are some numbers from South Dakota (via Wrapsnet.org). I’m sure this story isn’t going away any time soon especially since sentencing is scheduled for January 30th! (After expensive-to-taxpayers incarceration, will he be sentenced to be deported?)
In the 8 fiscal years since Obama has been in office, South Dakota received a total of 4,319 refugees. The largest groups were Bhutanese and Burmese, but Somalis came in at #3 with 577 placed in the state. Almost all of them were resettled in Sioux Falls. 64 Somalis came in FY 2016 (Mohamed would have been one of them, but does he have a family that we are now completely supporting somewhere else in SD?).
***Almost all Somalis who get in to the US come as resettled refugees, however, if we learn that he came in with a work visa that is going to open up a whole new controversy for the incoming Trump administration. OMG! Work visas from terror-producing countries of the world! Jeff Sessions, as newly appointed Attorney General must look into this case.
https://www.aclupa.org/
In myprevious post I noted that the media (the New York Times) is working overtime to sell the public on the notion that everything is just peachy in Lancaster with the decades-old refugee program there. Then we see stories like this one that indicate at least some segments of the community are not thrilled at all—namely the school system.
BTW, see my Ten Things your town needs to know when ‘welcoming’ refugees and see that the first great impact on your community will most likely be in the school system.
Look how much this lawsuit filed by the ACLU is costing Lancaster taxpayers! If your town becomes a new ‘welcoming’ site, be prepared for unanticipated costs like these!
From Keystone Crossroads (hat tip: Joanne):
About 17,000 of the refugees arriving each year in the U.S. are children, yet their education — in particular, how public schools might accommodate them — plays a surprisingly minor role in placing families.
Federal law says public schools have to adjust to meet any number of students’ varying needs, including overcoming language barriers.
But that doesn’t always happen.
A few lawsuits have been filed in recent years on behalf of student refugees suffering the consequences of systematic shortcomings.
Schools have settled out of court in most cases.
Not Lancaster.
[….]
Lawyers for the Pennsylvania ACLU and Philadelphia-based Education Law Center sued the School District of Lancaster last summer.
The lawsuit claims that, despite the city’s robust tradition of resettlement, several teenage refugees waited months to enroll in public school. Ultimately, they were denied outright or diverted to magnet school Phoenix Academy, which has less support for nonnative English speakers than mainstream McCaskey High School.
[….]
In the meantime, a judicial panel in Philadelphia is considering Lancaster’s appeal. (See that story here)
[….]
Whether the district’s on the hook for any expenses depends on how the case turns out.
Defense attorneys’ bills are at about $150,000 so far, according to the district’s business administrator Matthew Przywara. The ACLU’s costs are approaching $2 million.
But Lancaster’s insurer has indicated it won’t pay out more than $100,000 for this lawsuit, district officials say.
There is more, continue reading here.
If the ACLU prevails be forewarned for refugee resettlement to your town to become even more expensive! Click here for more on Lancaster, PA. Someone should do a study of the negative impact on this longtime resettlement site.
