Those two countries are Syria and Somalia*** as the Obama Administration works overtime to pour as many refugees in to the US as they can before Donald Trump takes office on January 20th.
The numbers we have been reporting in recent weeks go way beyond anything we have seen in the last nearly ten years of writing this blog.
Questions are also beginning to arise about whether the refugee agencies (the non-profit resettlement contractors) can properly care for them due to those high numbers of arrivals. We have reports of refugees placed in hotels, delays in medical screening, and refugees without winter clothing, all are violations of US State Department regulations for contractors.
I promised some maps for someone, which sent me to Wrapsnet.org this morning.
These are maps (screenshots) for the placement and numbers of Syrians and Somalis for the last 15 months. That would include all of FY2016 and the first three months of FY2017 which ended on December 31, 2016. (The fiscal year for the placement of refugees runs from Oct. 1 of one year to Sept. 30th of the next year.)
Obama said at the beginning of FY16 that his State Department would admit 10,000 Syrians (98% Muslim) to the US that year. We are now (in the last 15 months) up to 16,153!
Virtually all Somali refugees are Muslims. You should know we pick them up all over the world and place them in your towns and cities. So Donald Trump’s administration needs to be careful and not say we will halt refugees coming from Somalia (for example), because few if any come from Somalia directly. (We do expect Trump to halt them!)
And, if you missed it yesterday, many questions remain about one Somali admitted to the US in 2016 who was free to wander the streets of Aberdeen, SD and attempt to sexually assault a special-needs woman there. See our post yesterday, here.
***Thousands more Iraqi, Afghan, and Burmese Muslims have entered as well during these same 15 months, but we chose to focus only on Syria and Somalia for this report.
Category: Where to find information
Nearly 100,000 Bhutanese refugees later we help UN clean out camps in Nepal
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.
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.
Here are the top ten states where the Bhutanese were resettled:
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.
Somalis pouring in to US in first 10 weeks of the fiscal year, could be biggest year ever for Somalis
Update: 23 years after Black Hawk Down, why are Somalis our problem? here.
I told you about the astronomically high numbers of Somalis being admitted to the US here recently, but since I was working on data for the first ten weeks (here for overall numbers and here for Syrians), I figured I would put the Somali numbers in the same format.
So according to data at Wrapsnet.org we have admitted 2,959 Somalis to the US in the first ten weeks of FY2017, that is highest rate in the over 30 years we have been admitting them, see here. This also would result in a higher resettlement rate than the one for Syrians right now.
Bush’s 2004 number of 12,814 will be dwarfed if Donald Trump doesn’t follow through on his campaign promise to halt the flow of refugees from terror-producing parts of the world.
Virtually all Somalis are Muslims and very few come in to US outside of the Refugee Admissions Program. Although some do come illegally across our borders and then apply for asylum.
Here is the map of where they went (again these are the numbers for October 1, 2016 to December 10, 2016). This is the number for resettled refugees only:
Here are the top ten states in which they were placed. Large numbers will move on to Minnesota or Ohio after initial resettlement.
If as time goes on and you know I wrote about refugee numbers, but can’t find the post, you can always go to the category here at RRW called ‘refugee statistics’ or the one called ‘where to find information.‘
At present rate, almost 14,000 Syrians would enter US this fiscal year, 98% Muslim
Two days ago, I reported on the total number of refugees being rushed in to the US right now presumably to beat an expected cut-off of resettlement from at least some countries (terror-producing) of the world after Donald Trump becomes President on January 20th.
And, although we reported new proposed sites have been placed on hold (see Bloomington, IN), there are still plenty of existing sites where refugees are being placed at the highest rate in recent memory.
Here is a map from Wrapsnet.org showing the numbers and placement of Syrians admitted to the US in the first ten weeks of this fiscal year (Oct. 1, 2016 to Dec. 10, 2016).
2,671 have been placed, and at this rate we would expect 13,889 by September 30th, 2017, if Donald Trump doesn’t do what he promised.
Here are the top ten states so far in FY2017 receiving Syrians.
Data from Wrapsnet puts the percentage of Muslims at 98% and the vast majority of those are Sunnis (remember it is the UN choosing our refugees!).
Just a reminder, this is only data for resettled refugees and does not take in to account Syrians getting in to the US through other means.
More on those refugee "processing countries" (who is coming in from where? why?)
….For those of you who are hardcore refugee research geeks!
![rpcLogoSmall [Converted]](https://refugeeresettlementwatch.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/rpclogosmaller1.jpg)
I’ve mentioned ‘processing countries’ from time to time over the years with a special animus for the program (initiated during the Bush Admin) to bring ‘refugees’ in to the US from Malta.
These ‘refugees’ are primarily economic migrants (but what else?) who crossed the Mediterranean from North Africa in hopes of getting farther north in Europe. For some never-explained reason we take hundreds to America every year.
So this morning when I wrote about how NGOs are being accused of aiding and abetting the human traffickers to Europe, I mentioned processing countries again.
I thought it would be a good idea now to bring this to the attention of the Trump transition team and Members of Congress who care about our security. How can we possibly know who these wandering (mostly Muslim) ‘refugees’ are? And, since most are being processed first by the United Nations, can we trust the UN?
We are entitled to know which ethnic groups come through these processing countries!
We know from news reports that Syrians are coming in from Turkey and Jordan. We are still bringing thousands from Iraq. We know that a large number of the Somalis come to the US from Kenya, but we know from news reports that Somalis make their way all over the world and get to such odd places as Pakistan, Malaysia, South Africa (the rainbow nation!) and Malta and then we pick them up as refugees (if they are legit refugees why didn’t they just go to the UN camps in Kenya?).
Hint to Trump team: Note that we take zero Somalis directly from Somalia so you won’t be able to say we are pausing immigration from Somalia, you must refer to the ethnic group no matter where in the world we get them!
I want you to have a look at the numbers (screenshot below) of those who have come in the US in just the first two months of the fiscal year (October 1, 2016 to November 30, 2016), many from countries where they would have been perfectly safe. (Having fun with geography!)
BTW, it is important to capture this information now because by the end of the next month, these maps disappear down some black hole at Wrapsnet.org (or at least I can’t find them!).
