Category: Who is going where

Ohio: Active TB in refugees there too!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Michael Patrick Leahy’s latest expose’ on where ACTIVE Tuberculosis is found in America reveals that the Akron, Ohio area has it too.

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As Executive Director of the International Institute of Akron, Elaine Woloshyn is in charge of the refugees arriving in the city. The IIA is a subcontractor of USCRI the same federal contractor working to expand to Rutland VT and Reno NV. It is also the major federal contractor in Twin Falls, Idaho. http://iiakron.org/our-team/

We have a few posts on Akron here at RRW.  I’d like to direct you to one in particular because it is an example of what I am learning on my road trip through the heartland.  There is money involved in refugee resettlement and local elected officials and their cronies are figuring out how to tap it!  It is your money as developers look to the taxpayer-funded gravy train coming from Washington! (In addition to the foreign money that is buying up real estate!)
I digress.  Along with the money (for special people) comes other problems, including frightening health risks for all of us.
Leahy at Breitbart:

CLEVELAND, Ohio–Eleven refugees have been diagnosed with active tuberculosis in Summit County, Ohio, over the past six years, Dr. Margo Erme, medical director of the Summit County Public Health Department tells Breitbart News.

The case of active and communicable tuberculosis were in the county that holds Akron, with a population of 199,000. It is the largest city in Summit County, population 541,000.

The county lies immediately to the south of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County. Many of the delegates and members of the media attending the Republican National Convention held in Cleveland this week are staying at hotels in Summit County and are shuttled on buses thirty plus miles each way.

“From 1/1/2010 through 12/31/2015, 37 cases of tuberculosis (both pulmonary and extrapulmonary) were reported in Summit County,” Dr. Margo Erme, medical director of Summit County Public Health, tells Breitbart News in an email.

Of those, “16 were US-born” and “21 were foreign-born.” Of the 21 foreign-born, “10 did not come into the US on refugee status, 11 came into the US on refugee status,” Erme says.

Of the “US-born” I would like to know how many live in households with the “foreign-born?”
No time to write more, but check out this fluffy puffy piece on the growing Arab population of Toledo—a city I just visited!  A “model city” for Syrian refugees they say!  Ahhhh!  More when I have time.

Syrians arriving in Nebraska, governor notified

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I’m dashing off this post as I run out the door to make it to the next city this morning on my RRW road trip…

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Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts is being notified about refugees arriving in the state. This is new news….

This is your usual fluffy puffy piece about happy, grateful refugees.
However there is a little nugget in here that I didn’t know.  Apparently governors are being notified by the feds about who is coming and how many. It is not clear if they are being notified where they will be placed.
If they are being notified, this is new news and a demonstration that our complaints about the secrecy of this program are changing how the US State Department and its contractors have operated for decades.
From the Omaha World-Herald:

During June alone, 2,406 Syrian refugees arrived — more than the previous six months combined. Such numbers appear to have the Obama administration on track to meet its stated budget year goal of resettling 10,000 refugees in the United States by the end of September.

Nebraska’s Syrian refugees arrived without fanfare, which was by design.

Local agencies settling the families on behalf of the U.S. government said they didn’t treat these arrivals any differently from the hundreds of other refugees they help relocate each year.

[….]

The Ricketts administration — which despite its protestations last November has acknowledged being powerless to stop the federal government’s resettlements — was aware that Nebraska had received its first Syrians. The governor receives a monthly report from the federal government with general information on refugees settled in the state, including nationality, gender and age.

In a statement to The World-Herald last week, Ricketts called on President Barack Obama to answer his and other governors’ calls to tighten security checks on new refugees.

More here.
Gotta run.  We have lots of previous posts on Nebraska especially interesting is one where a town rejected a meat packing plant because they didn’t want the disruption of immigrant/refugee labor.  Type the word Nebraska in our search window to learn more.

New Hampshire: Are they priming Laconia for a new resettlement site?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I could be wrong, but the fact that a refugee is going to tell you his success “story” at a roundtable discussion tomorrow night sure looks suspicious to me. Why bother with a propaganda event if they aren’t getting Laconia primed for a new resettlement site?

Laconia map
Manchester has been overloaded with refugees and so are they out scouting more sites in the state?

Here is the news at the Laconia Daily Sun:

LACONIA — As present global conflicts are forcing millions of individuals to flee their home countries, nations around the world are opening their borders to refugees in need of a place to resettle. Recognizing that Laconia has been one of the cities in New Hampshire welcoming refugees for the past 20 years, the Laconia Human Relations Committee is hosting an educational refugee resettlement roundtable forum in Laconia which will allow community members to better understand the process of resettlement in the region.

The forum will be held on Monday, July 18, at 6:30 p.m., at the Woodside Building at the Taylor Community. The forum aims to educate citizens on why refugee resettlement occurs and the process individuals must go through to get refuge in the United States. Carol Pierce, director of the Laconia Human Relations Committee, will facilitate a conversation with local refugees who have first hand accounts of how the process works in our region.

[….]

Stories like Ragassa’s will be shared at the roundtable forum, specifically discussing what challenges refugees had when they came to the United States and how they overcame them, as well as an informational presentation explaining the difference between immigrants and refugees. The forum is free and open to the public, but reservations are requested by calling 524-5600.

What the heck? Laconia has been welcoming refugees for 20 years we are told.  Well, I’ve been following the refugee program and Laconia has not been a resettlement site.  I didn’t go back 20 years, but I did go back into the data for the last nearly 8 years and other than 35 Bhutanese resettled there in 2009 and 2010, Laconia has not been a target site.
This ‘forum’ sounds to me like Laconia is in their crosshairs next!
For an extensive archive on New Hampshire (and especially Manchester) click here.

Which resettlement contractors are screwing up in Michigan?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Have a look at this article from Arab American News from last week.

Welcome_To_Dearborn
Not enough housing in Dearborn where all the refugees want to live to be with their own kind of people reports the Arab American News.

It starts out with the usual heartwarming stories about refugees finding new lives in Michigan (the state getting the most Syrian Muslims) but then read down 11 paragraphs where we hear about the trouble the new arrivals are having after basically being left in the lurch by resettlement contractors and in one case NO agency is helping them.
Readers this is very common, we’ve heard it repeatedly over the years and instead of taking fewer refugees that could be taken care of properly, the federal contractors are overloaded (there are never enough volunteers backing up the paid staff!) and the refugees complain.  And, you can’t blame them, they have been sold a bill of goods about life in America and their expectations are very high.
Get this….how is it that a whole family is basically wandering around loose in Michigan with no one responsible for them but another refugee.

The Kabati family now enjoys a new, seemingly peaceful life, but anticipated the challenges that lay ahead as soon as they arrived at the airport.

Kabati said while other refugees were greeted at the airport by representatives of refugee aid groups and taken to their homes, they were greeted by a friend, who offered to provide any further assistance the family needed. Kabati added because they had no family in Michigan, the IOM inadvertently held his friend, also a recent Syrian immigrant, fully responsible for their aid.

The family friend gave them shelter for two days, until he secured them an apartment.

As of Saturday, Kabati and his family have not received paperwork and needed assistance to initiate their resettlement, like Social Security numbers, insurance and food stamps.

Kabati said he and his family are eager to start learning English, so they are able to get around and communicate with others. A tough language barrier prevents them from integrating into American society.

So far, no aid group has offered to place them in ESL courses, unlike the cases with other refugees.

Yikes! How many other Syrians have simply been flown in to a city and dropped?  You might not have a lot of sympathy for them, but you should. The refugees are just pawns. Again, we see evidence that this program is being run with incompetent leadership and is not about caring for the the world’s downtrodden as its first priority.
This is an example of gross incompetence on the part of the US State Department and some contractor which dropped the ball in Michigan!
Why? Because instead of slowing the flow to a level that could be accommodated and assimilated, the UN and the US State Department are sending them into communities at unsustainable levels hurting both the refugees and the citizens of the town or city unlucky enough to be a target site.
Continue reading the story for the litany of other complaints the new Michigan Americans have.
The primary contractors operating in the state are the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LSS Michigan), the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and get this, in Dearborn, it is USCRI—the same agency that isn’t doing a very good job in Lowell, Mass.

Massachusetts: Alleged assault by Syrian refugee exposes secretive nature of refugee program

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The lack of transparency that surrounds the resettlement of third world refugees through the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program is likely the single-most important factor in why I have been writing about it for nine years.  Almost nothing makes me so angry as the arrogant treatment of citizens in towns across the country as refugees are placed in communities with no advance warning in most cases and certainly no thoughtful discussion and planning.

Lavinia Limon smirking
Lavinia Limon is the woman making the decisions about which refugees go to Lowell. USCRI is also in charge of Twin Falls, Idaho and is opening new offices in Rutland, VT and Reno, NV. Go to our extensive archive on Limon (formerly Bill Clinton’s director of the ORR) to learn more: https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/?s=Lavinia+Limon

For decades the only way citizens learned of the program was when it was already up and running and problems had occurred and here we learn from the Lowell, Massachusetts city manager that they have had the same experience.
BTW, controversies like the one on-going in Rutland, VT actually started the same way—a mayor secretively worked with the federal government to ‘welcome’ Syrians to town, and when the residents found out all hell broke loose directed mostly at the mayor for acting secretively.
Here is the latest news from Leo Hohmann at World Net Daily who tells us about some excellent reporting from the Lowell Sun on that case from last week where a Syrian man was arrested for allegedly making advances at a 13-year-old at a public swimming pool.

The secrecy of the federal refugee-resettlement program has once again been highlighted by a local official who has seen the dark side of the program play out in living color.

In Lowell, Massachusetts, a 13-year-old girl was twice groped at a public pool last week by a 22-year-old man freshly imported into the community from Syria as a “refugee.”

The city manager of Lowell told his local newspaper Tuesday that he was not even notified by the U.S. State Department or its resettlement contractor that Syrians were being delivered to his community.

Emad Hasso, 22, of Syria pleaded not guilty Friday to inappropriately touching the girl at the state-run Raymond Lord Memorial Pool in Lowell, according to the Lowell Sun.

This marks the second high-profile sexual assault on an American girl in the past month by a refugee. On June 2, a 5-year-old girl in Twin Falls, Idaho, was reportedly raped by an Iraqi refugee boy while an older refugee from Sudan filmed and coached him during the assault.

Hasso is one of 18 Syrians, all of them most likely Sunni Muslims, who have been secretly planted in the Lowell community since May, according to the State Department’s Refugee Processing Center online database.

City Manager Kevin Murphy said he’d like to receive regular numbers from the federal contractor that resettles refugees in the city. The International Institute subcontracts with the main federal contractor, U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, or USCRI, to deliver refugees to Lowell.

The city does not know when or from where refugees come to Lowell, Murphy said, and is only made aware of them in instances like this one where a refugee gets arrested or otherwise singled out for bad behavior.

“I think we’ll reach out to the International Institute to see if they could cooperate with us in the future by letting us know when they relocate individuals to Lowell,” Murphy said.

Good luck with that!
There is much more here, including a list of the cities where large numbers of Syrian Muslims (yes, they are 99% Muslim and mostly Sunnis) have been placed this year, continue here.
By the way USCRI is the primary federal contractor and the International Institute is a sub-contractor.  Be sure to see this older post when USCRI’s office was ultimately closed in Waterbury, CT (they weren’t caring properly for the refugees they had placed).  See why I referred to Limon for years as ‘whoop-de-do.’
One more thing that will interest you folks in Idaho.  Click here to view a copyrighted photo of Lavinia Limon with the CEO of Chobani Yogurt at the Clinton Global Initiative last September.  They are all in this together—MONEY!