I will be talking about all the goings-on in the West and Midwest with the Somali/Swift controversy and any other refugee-related issues listeners ask about. For more information, check out Always on Watch here.
Category: Where to find information
Asylees: having trouble in the UK? Canada will take you!
We’ve been hearing lots of stories out of Great Britain and the rest of Europe too about immigration rules tightening. Not to fear, here is a website called “Asylum Destitution Support Network” that instructs, among other things, on how to get into Canada.
If you are in the process of seeking asylum or been refused asylum in the UK, you will not be able to apply for asylum in another member country of the European Union.
However, if your asylum claim has been refused and the Home Office do not intend to remove you by force or cannot obtain travel documents to facilitate your removal, continuing to live in the UK with out the right to work or access to the normal benefits UK citizens are entitled to, life for you in the UK will be very harsh.
Likewise you may have made a claim years ago but Home Office has failed to make a final decision.
You may wish to find another country that will accept you as an economic migrant or refugee.
Economic migrants, by the way, are people literally flowing by the millions out of their home countries trying to find work (or a welfare security net). This website instructs readers on all the programs available to them in Canada.
Refugee/Economic Admission Programmes
Many countries have ‘Refugee’ or ‘Economic’ programmes, which allow refugees or people seeking work to apply for entry into their country from another country, which is not the country of residence of the applicant.
Notably Canada, who have various schemes to facilitate entry for refugees and economic migrants.
For all the details, read on.
How did we get so many Somali refugees—the numbers are telling
Update October 23, 2016: 9,020 were admitted according to the Refugee Processing Center.
Update October 21, 2015: 8,858 were admitted in FY2015, here.
Update October 26, 2014: The final tally for FY2014 is 9,000!
Update September 7, 2014: Found it! FY2013 Somali admissions to the US–7,600!
Update August 29th, 2014: Finally got around to updating the stats at least for FY 2011 and 2012 (see below). Couldn’t find 2013 but will keep looking. We are nearly doubling the numbers of Somalis admitted this fiscal year (2014). As of July 31, we have admitted 7,326 Somalis to your towns and cities.
Update August 28th, 2014: I need to update the recent years. The numbers stayed low for a number of years because family reunification had been closed to Somalis for years due to the huge fraud uncovered by the State Department in 2008, but Somali resettlement to America is on the rise again.
Update November 13th, 2010: This post continues to be one of the most visited posts at RRW. I have just now updated the numbers for FY 2010 below which ended on September 30th.
I finally got around to something I’ve been promising to do for weeks (months!) and that is go over all the records of Somali resettlement numbers.
I do want to remind readers that these numbers are only for the Refugee Resettlement Program of the US State Department. We just had a commenter to another post suggesting that the numbers are much larger then the government statistics indicate for immigration to the US. I don’t doubt that. But, again, these are the numbers that the Office of Refugee Resettlement must present to Congress each year for that special category “refugees.”
Much to my surprise, the numbers (and patterns) for Somali refugees admitted to the US are even more shocking then I had originally guessed.
Also, in my last post, I quoted the reporter as saying that the Somalis began arriving in Minneapolis in the late 70’s. Well, maybe there were a handful, but the largest numbers have arrived here AFTER 9/11!
The Refugee Act of 1980 presumably required the Office of Refugee Resettlement to begin reporting to Congress annually. The first table I looked at lumped all numbers from 1983-1993. In those 10 years, 4413 Somalis were admitted as refugees.
Then here we go:
1983-93: 4,413
1994: 3,508
1995: 2,524
1996: 6,440
1997: 4,948
1998: 2,952
1999: 4,321
2000: 6,002
2001: 4,940
2002: 242 (Guesses why this is so low? 9/11 freaked everyone out!)
2003: 1,708
O.K. so in 2003 we had admitted a total of 42,017 Somalis to the US. In those 20 years each Somali family was having on average 6 children.
Continuing (are you sitting down?):
2004: 12,814
2005: 10,101
2006: 10,330
2007: 6,958
2008: 2,523
2009: 4,189 (on the rise again even though family reunification is suspended still!)
2010: 4,884
2011: 3,161
2012: 4,921
2013: 7,600
2014: 9,000
2015: 8,858
We have reported to you before that the number is so low (relatively low!) for 2008 because DNA testing in Africa showed that the refugee program was corrupt through and through and those thousands coming in as “family” were lying.
We have admitted 83,991 Somali Shariah-supporting immigrants to the US in 25 years [as of when I first wrote this post—ed] More then half, 43,682, came since September 11th!
Who was responsible and why? I don’t know. I do know that African resettlement was not a priority until, according to a report by Heidi Boas which I mentioned here last year, the Congressional Black Caucus got involved:
Anyway, I am getting away from my story. According to Heidi Boas* in her lengthy 2007 paper entitled, “The New Face of America’s Refugees: African Refugee Resettlement to the United States:”
….several of the individuals interviewed for this paper identified the Congressional Black Caucus as one of the most influential groups advocating over the past decade for increased African refugee resettlement to the United States.
I also think that in addition to political reasons that the Black Caucus had for boosting minority voter numbers, that big businesses, like these meatpackers we have been talking about, have been working with friends in the State Department and the Department of Health and Human Services as if those agencies were their employment services.
Do you ever wonder if the Congressional Black Caucus members know what they did to our own American blacks because these immigrants are pushing them out of jobs now?
I know who could answer all of our questions about how and why we took militant Muslims in such great numbers into the US: Terry Rusch, Director of the Office of Admissions, US State Department could tell us, if she was willing. [Editors note, Rusch has since retired.]
If you would like to check numbers yourself, the best thing I can do is send you to this post as a starting place. I got these numbers at so many different Office of Refugee Resettlement Annual reports to Congress that it is too cumbersome to put all those links in here. However, you should be able to use the links I just mentioned and sort it out—you will also find it interesting to see from what countries we are admitting refugees and to what states they are going.
Alaska not a big refugee resettlement state
In light of Senator John McCain’s choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as a running mate, and out of curiosity, I just checked to see how many refugees have gone to Alaska since 1983 and the number is relatively small—just under a thousand. Go here to check the numbers in your state. The refugees who went to Alaska came from Iran, Afghanistan, and the former Soviet Union among a smattering of other countries.
Compared to states like California, New York and Florida all of which have resettled hundreds of thousands, Alaska’s numbers are tiny.
But, of course, smaller still are Deleware’s! Just a reminder that Senator Biden, Obama’s VP, is one of the primary Senators who for 28 years has pushed for more refugees to come to the US, yet his state has taken only 771 of the millions who have come (on the taxpayers’ dime) here.
Bush calls for financial assistance for displaced Georgians
Your tax dollars:
In a memorandum to the Secretary of State, President Bush yesterday asked that internally displaced Georgians receive American aid:
I hereby determine, pursuant to section 2(c)(1) of the Act [Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1962], that it is important to the national interest to furnish assistance under the Act, in an amount not to exceed $5.75 million from the United States Emergency Refugee and Migration Assistance [ERMA] Fund, for the purpose of meeting unexpected and urgent refugee and migration needs, including by contributions to international, governmental, and nongovernmental organizations and payment of administrative expenses of the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration of the Department of State, related to the humanitarian needs of conflict victims and those displaced by recent violence in Georgia.
For you numbers folks, here is the FY2007 ERMA fund (couldn’t find 2008 in my few minutes of research), but here is a report from our friends at Refugees International (RI) about how happy they are that the FY2008 monies in this category bring the fund to its chock-full level of $100 million. RI must be busy lobbying on the FY2009 fund about now.