Category: Where to find information

Comment worth noting: answering Liam

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Comments worth noting is our category for readers comments that are posted now, but on an older post, so it would be unlikely for readers to see them.   I am assuming from past comments that Liam is an Iraqi, but I can’t say for sure.  Liam’s comment to this older post is worth noting because it’s an opportunity to give you additional information.

Liam says:

yes I am asking question

what is the recent arrival of Iraqi families in the USA and which states and which country in the Middle East are they coming from and the dates please

Liam, we are not an agency of the government and so therefore we have no access to the information you are requesting.  We do know that we have brought 9,581 Iraqis to the US this fiscal year that began Oct. 1, 2008.  Where they went in the US, we don’t know.  Where they came from in the Middle East, we don’t know.   The reason we don’t know is that the government and the refugee agencies keep all that secret from the public.

We know all that information is recorded at this office of the US State Department (here), but the average citizen has no access to the data.

Liam said:

all other Iraqi arrival in other countries are getting published

you mention that the USA has resettled 200000 refugees from a different nationalities since 1980
compared to the UK this is very small number

the UK has taken at least four million Iraqis most of them are Kurdish and plenty more from other nationalities

I guess all those other countries publishing data are better than the US, what can I say. We all know the US is the worst country in the world, right Liam?   By the way, there is no way on earth that the UK has taken 4 million Iraqis, but if that  figure is anywhere near being correct, I guess that explains why the UK is having such a horrific experience with immigrants and maybe it’s time they cut back on Middle Easterners in the UK.

Liam said:

every body in the world pay tax not only in the USA
and there is no full employment in any country
and as you know there are plenty of forginers are working in Iraq and getting paid a high salary but Iraqis do not mind

And your point is?

Hurry, get your free government money before it runs out

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Your tax dollars:

The State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration announced today the availability of additional tax payer funding for refugees who need help paying rent.   Five million dollars of Federal Emergency Housing Assistance can be applied for between today and May 21st, but hurry, the taxpayer funding will be going fast.

See today’s announcement here.

Oh, and you have to be an approved federal contractor—-one of the top ten or presumably one of hundreds of their subcontractors.

Chicago: Overloaded, exhausted, drained and out of stuff for refugees

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The Daily Northwestern tells us about the plight of Sudanese refugees and laments the fact that we aren’t bringing so many these days from Africa, but then goes on to report that volag, World Relief, can’t handle the refugees that are coming.    Nevertheless, the US State Department is still sending refugees to Chicago.

“Chicago as a city is really overloaded,” says Christine Deyerler, a Communication senior who interns at World Relief-Chicago, an immigration and refugee aid association that helped Liduba. “Right now they’re taking a lot of Burmese and Iraqi refugees, but not a lot of African ones.”

For those who reach the United States, the first person a new arrival might see is someone such as Deyerler, who often meets refugees up at the airport by prearrangement. The U.S. State Department disseminates highly specific set of services refugees must receive within their first 90 days in the United States, down to the smallest details, such as the number of dishes and mattresses per occupant. The case worker will ferry them to their apartment, the Social Security card office and the grocery store. Within the first week, their children are administered vaccines so they can enroll in school. However, these ready-made accommodations cannot negate the emotional shock of the move.

Chicago is running out of jobs, donations, and furniture even.

“Your status has been ripped,” says Keri Lucas, director of educational services at World Relief. “You are nothing. What’s valuable is handed to you, and you have no concept of the future.”

However, the State Department does not mandate any additional assistance after the first 90 days. More personalized services such as job training, English classes and psychological counseling are often “referred out” to community-based organizations, Lucas said.  [Like the American Civic Association in Binghamton]

“The first thing my boss said to me was that Chicago is really exhausted,” Deyerler says. “(World Relief) is running out of donations and jobs slowly. Right now they have no furniture and are trying really hard to get more donations. A lot (of refugees) have to keep going off and on public aid to get by.”

It’s the same old story everywhere these days—-refugees piling into American cities and the agencies contracted to care for them are not fulfilling their contracts with the government.  And, it’s not just the economy, these stories could be found all over the US before our economic downturn began, it’s just they weren’t being reported!  

I wonder how the State Department is getting around this—their requirement that their contractors supply refugees with the bare minimum to survive and that, in some cases,  isn’t being done.

Here for your review is the US State Department’s Operational Guidance for Resettlement Agencies.   If you should see this is not being followed by a resettlement agency in your community, please contact the US State Department, Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration to report neglect of basic requirements for refugees.

You will note at the contact page there is no place for anyone to complain.  We have advocated for a Complaint Hotline for the refugee program so citizens and refugees could have one place to lodge complaints.   I see that hasn’t happened.   In the meantime, contact Barbara Day (  daybj@state.gov )    who heads up the portion of the program that manages the resettlement.

UN Report: Asylum seekers increase, but overall number still only half of what it was in 2001

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This news account in the International Herald Tribune of a report by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reminded me that we don’t write often enough about asylum.   Asylees are people who claim persecution of some sort (political, religious, etc) but have usually already arrived on a country’s doorstep.  Simply being an economic migrant doesn’t count.

Once granted asylum, at least in the US, the person is given the same perks that a refugee receives—a caseworker, food stamps, cash help, job counseling and so forth.

The UNHCR says the number of asylum seekers worldwide has risen in the last year, but is still only half of what it was in 2001.

PARIS: Turmoil in Afghanistan and Somalia swelled the ranks of asylum-seekers last year, driving refugee numbers higher for a second consecutive year after they dropped to a two-decade low in 2006, the United Nations refugee agency said Tuesday.

Iraqis remained the single largest population of people seeking protection in industrialized countries, but their numbers fell 10 percent in 2008 from the previous year, the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said.

Overall, the United States remained the chief destination for refugees from all countries, receiving 13 percent of total applications.

In all, about 383,000 people made new asylum requests in 51 countries in 2008, according to the U.N. agency. That was 12 percent more than the 341,000 who sought protection the previous year, and more than the 307,000 who sought assistance in 2006, when numbers fell to a 20-year low.

Still, the 2008 figures were well below level of 2001, when 623,000 people lodged new asylum claims, the U.N. agency said in a report on asylum trends in industrialized countries in 2008.

You can get the full report here.  See also the 2007 Yearbook of Immigrant Statistics for more fun with numbers, here.     We actually have more asylees entering the US than refugees and those asylees had the where-with-all to get here and are not screened in advance by Homeland Security as are refugees.

And for those who think Sweden is so kind, so diverse, so humane, so much better than the US, take note.  Looks like they may be full-up.

Sweden tightened its rules last year, resulting in a drop of two-thirds in the number of Iraqis who requested protection there.

See “Muslim immigration killing Sweden” here.

The New York Times is of some use after all: great tools to see immigration and diversity trends

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The New York Times web site has some fascinating interactive graphics about diversity and immigration. On this one, you can see how the ethnic/racial composition of schools has changed from 1987 to 2006. You can look up figures by state county and school district, and these are compared with national trends. The site says:

Immigration’s impact is often first seen in the classroom. The increasing diversity of the nation’s education system is the most detailed measure of where immigrants have settled in recent years. View demographic changes in more than 17,000 school districts across the nation — including your own.

The general trend is this:

Fueled by the latest wave of immigration, enrollment of Hispanic and Asian students in American schools has increased by more than 5 million since the 1990s. The increases are occurring not just in long-time immigration hotbeds, but in places as far flung as Sevier County, Arkansas to Colfax County, Nebraska, to Marion County, Oregon.

Asians increased from 5 to 6 percent; Hispanics from 13 to 21 percent over the period. Blacks and Native Americans remained the same, at 17 percent and 1 percent respectively, and whites dropped from 66 to 56 percent. This represents students, remember, so the minority figures are larger than in the general population.

On that page there is a link to this amazing map of immigration trends by nationality.  You  can run your cursor over any county and see the total population and the number of foreign-born. The counties are coded by color to show where most of the foreign-born are from.

Even better, there’s a timeline that runs from 1880 to 2000. You can select a nationality and move the pointer along the timeline to see what each census showed of that nationality’s settlement. Even this is at the county level, so you can learn, for instance, that in 1890 in Douglas County, Nebraska, there were 260 French-born people out of a total population of 158,008.