Category: Who is going where

U. of Vermont psychologists helping Bhutanese refugees with mental problems; send more refugees to Vermont!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

There really isn’t much new and exciting in this story, but I’m posting it because I was interested in the small number of refugees going to Vermont, after all, Vermont’s senior Senator Patrick Leahy has, over the years, been a big pusher for more refugees and more stuff for them.

UVM psychology professor Karen Fondacaro will be busy with her Bhutanese torture victims. Here with co-founder of NESTT (New England Survivors of Torture and Trauma). http://www.uvm.edu/~psych/?Page=news/NESTT_walk_2010.html

We have had many many reports of Bhutanese (really Nepali people) who were living in UN camps on the edge of Nepal until we took 80,000 of them to America in the last 6 years or so and who are now in the US in need of mental health programs.  See our Bhutanese archive with many posts on the high suicide rate among this group of refugees, some want to go home. (BTW, Reader CW recently suggested a the creation of a ‘Repatriation Fund’ for any refugee, unhappy with America, to be allowed to go home.)

From Kentucky.com (I wondered if a Kentucky publication reported this story as a hint to start mental health counseling in KY for its burgeoning refugee population):

BURLINGTON, Vt. — The scars Ajuda Thapa carries today are emotional — the product of years living in fear, being forced from her home in Bhutan and enduring the murder of her husband during 19 stateless years before she arrived in Vermont as a refugee.

Like many others like her here, she’s helping ease the emotional trauma she suffered through a special program at the University of Vermont for the region’s refugees.

[….]

But the safety she has now didn’t do anything for the anxiety, depression and lingering emotional scars that threatened to turn her into a recluse hiding in her home. So her doctor referred her to Connecting Cultures, a program at the University of Vermont that has helped ease the emotional trauma of hundreds of others like her.

Thapa regularly attends meetings where she talks about what she experienced.

“It helps a lot to get relief from that kind of mental pain,” said Thapa, an ethnic Nepali who became stateless after leaving Bhutan in 1992.

Here are some numbers for Vermont:

Connecting Cultures organizers have found that about 65 percent of the estimated 7,000 refugees living in greater Burlington from more than two dozen countries had suffered some form of torture. [Dr. Fondacaro will be very busy!]

[….]

Thapa has struggled to deal with the emotional trauma that comes with the nearly two decades of fear and loss she experienced after being forced from her home. She is one of an estimated 1,300 Bhutanese refugees who have been resettled in Vermont, the largest single refugee nationality in the state.

Those are paltry numbers compared to many other states…

There surely needs to be a national campaign to persuade Vermonters to be more “welcoming” and to accept more refugees there, after all that would only be fair!

See our Vermont archive by clicking here.

Liberal Bill Maher takes on Muslim assimilation problem: sometimes people don’t melt!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

From Breitbart News:

“You don’t have to be a right-wing nut to worry!”

On Friday’s broadcast of his HBO political talk show, comedian Bill Maher channeled Breitbart News on the threat that radical Islam poses to European countries, along with the dangers sharia law represents to Western freedoms.

What follows is a discussion, including about the recent controversy surrounding terror expert Steve Emerson’s exaggeration on Fox News about the Muslim population level in Birmingham, England.

Maher cited these facts, then said, “Sometimes in a melting pot, people don’t melt.”

Maher went on to say, “I don’t want to live in a world where we can’t wear a mini skirt walking down the street… You don’t have to be a right-wing nut to worry” about radical Muslim threats.

“We know that there are some Muslims who want to take over” and eliminate our culture and laws, Maher concluded.

Muslim population levels

On that Birmingham Muslim population question (Maher says Birmingham is 25% Muslim, I’ve seen 20%)….  Last month I wrote an extensive paper (yet to be published) on the refugee program and Muslim immigration and during my research I concluded that the Muslim population of a city or a country only needed to get to about 3% before the Islamic supremacists became emboldened and  began to push their sharia compliance agenda.

If you are wondering, the only really thorough study I could find on Muslim demographic levels was this one from 2010 at Pew Research.

What I realized also is that we really do not have a good handle on how many Muslims are permanent residents of the United States.  Someone must do a very serious and thorough analysis soon!

We are probably around 1% as a country with pockets higher than 3%.  Pew (in 2010) said France was at 7.5%, but all of the recent estimates I’ve seen put their Muslim population at 10%.

Writer: Tennessee governor’s plan to expand Medicaid will surely bring more refugees to Tennessee

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

On Friday, The Tennessean published a letter from Don Barnett a Nashville resident and expert observer of the Federal Refugee Resettlement Program critical of Republican Governor Haslam’s plan to expand Medicaid in Tennessee.

Did you know that Obama got his idea to give away “free” junior college tuition from Tennessee’s Republican Governor? I sure hope Obama isn’t bringing Haslam to Washington on Tuesday for the State of the Union as an example of his willingness to work with Republicans! Photo: http://www.courierpress.com/news/obama-to-propose-national-program-similar-to-tennessee-promise

New readers of RRW might not know that your state will be “welcoming” more refugees if you are expanding Medicaid.

Last March we reported on an Office of Refugee Resettlement report (Key Indicators for Refugee Placement FY2014) that seeks to identify the best places to resettle refugees.  Medicaid expansion is a key indicator that yours is a welfare-rich territory.

There is a second, more recent, Key Indicators report here (a very useful map on page 19 of the newest Key Indicators shows which states have expanded Medicaid and which haven’t as of April 2014).

Here is The Tennessean on the Haslam call for a special session of the legislature.  Barnett’s response follows (emphasis is mine):

It is downright strange that a Republican governor would propose expanding Medicaid under a plan worked out with the feds on the basis of a “verbal agreement” while withholding specifics of the plan from legislators expected to decide on its merits.

The last time Tennessee took part in an experiment with Medicaid, the rolls swelled to the point where nearly 1 in 4 Tennesseans were in the program. It took a Democratic governor, Phil Bredesen (2003-11), to put the brakes on the program by reducing benefits and removing more than 170,000 from the rolls.

One sure effect of Medicaid expansion will be to increase the number of refugees that come to Tennessee, a state that already takes more than its fair share of refugees on a per-state basis. The refugee resettlement contractors have publicly stated they will expand resettlement in those states that expand Medicaid coverage.

Tennessee’s main refugee contractor, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and its local affiliate Catholic Charities, was instrumental in stopping a Tennessee bill that would have required resettlement contractors to merely inform the state of the numbers of refugees they place in Medicaid/TennCare.

The last time they released this data — in 2011 — 59 percent of refugees had gone into the program upon arrival for the year. An additional 36 percent of refugees went into a separate taxpayer-funded health program for refugees. When the refugee program started in 1980 the feds promised to cover state Medicaid costs for refugees for three years, but soon withdrew all support — and that promise was in writing.

Why would the General Assembly approve any program before considering all the costs?

Sheesh, and what is going on with these Republican governors?  What good is it for Republicans to brag about their larger number of governors when they act like Democrats!

By the way, refugees have huge medical and mental health problems, see our Health Issues category to see what I mean.

See also our extensive archive on Nashville—a preferred resettlement site.

UK luxury hotels house African ‘asylum seekers’

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment
Daresbury Park Hotel in Cheshire is owned by Alex Langsam. Asylum seekers are intimidating to female guests, according to reports at the Daily Mail.

 

What is the matter with these European leaders (and Obama too) that they are so tone-deaf when it comes to dealing with Islam and the huge numbers of Muslim ‘asylum seekers’ and ‘refugees’ flooding Europe and the US.

Have they all taken a symposium on how to really really bring out the anger in their citizens?

Maybe it is some sort of psychological experiment to see how far they can push us!

It wasn’t too long ago that we heard of a German local government purchasing a luxury hotel in Cologne for asylum seekers, and now we learn that the UK government is funding housing in four-star hotels in Britain for what really amounts to illegal aliens who have been crashing almost every European border!

No wonder they are piled up in Calais, France wanting in to the UK (be sure to open this link!)!

From the UK Daily Mail (hat tip:  ‘Cool Tolerance’).

Emphasis is mine:

Guests at a luxury spa hotel have complained after discovering they were sharing their break with asylum seekers.

Around 35 migrants were checked into the four star Daresbury Park Hotel in Warrington, Cheshire, at an estimated cost to the taxpayer of £2,000 a night for the group.

One disgruntled guest wrote on review site Trip Advisor: ‘I cannot believe that we had to queue up with asylum seekers for our meals! If you want a soup kitchen atmosphere, with a little bit of intimidation thrown in, then this is the place to stay.

‘As long as these poor refugees are getting full bed and board at this hotel at our expense, I think we will find somewhere else to spend our hard earned money.’

Hotel magnate Alex Langsam has a sweetheart deal with the British government to house ‘refugees’ in his 47 hotels! Photo: http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/business/business-news/britannia-buys-carrington-house-hotel-5715743

From human traffickers to hotel owners, to landlords, to “religious charities” the world over, it is all about the money—government money to special people in the lucrative refugee industry.

(And, heck, they get to wear the white hat of humanitarianism while they are at it!)

The Daily Mail continued:

The Daresbury is part of the Britannia hotel chain, owned by Alex Langsam.

In October MailOnline reported that in a deal costing the taxpayer tens of thousands of pounds a week Mr Langsam is putting up hundreds of migrants in his chain of 47 hotels.

Another guest, part of a group of four women who stayed at the hotel, wrote: ‘What we hadn’t known about were the number of African male asylum seekers who were residing there.

Read it all.

‘Pungentpeppers’ spotted a couple more stories about similar problem in other hotels, here and here.  Both Britannia hotels I see.

Alas, the ‘Invasion of Europe’ continues, see our complete archive here.

Turkish border is a two-way street: easy for French Islamic terror suspect to leave and others to come in

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

There is a very informative article today about what is happening in Turkey where it is believed that the Paris ‘wife’ (Hayat Boumeddiene) of one of the recent Muslim killers easily slipped into Turkey and then equally easily crossed into the IS stronghold in Syria.

We previously heard that Obama’s only real pal in the world was Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. I wonder if they are still best buds? Here with their wives in 2009. Photo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Recep_Tayyip_Erdogan_with_Obamas.jpg

Compounding the terrorist detection problem is the deteriorating relationship of other European countries with Turkey.

The story is from an Australian paper called the Bega District News and written by Middle East Correspondent Ruth Pollard.

Here are some snips relating to the very real problem that the refugee population there surely harbors Islamic State infiltrators.

Setting the stage:

It is a conduit for money, weapons, oil and fighters – and it rarely discriminates.

Whether you’re a moderate rebel or an Islamic State jihadist, Turkey’s 900-kilometre border with Syria has long been a vital supply route for those fighting on the front lines of Syria’s brutal civil war. More than 1.5 million refugees have also fled across this border.

But Turkey’s hope that any fighter – no matter how extreme – would help opposition rebels bring down the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has proven unfounded.

Instead, Assad remains in power, while extremist groups such as the Islamic State and al-Qaeda backed Jabhat al-Nusra have gained significant ground at the expense of what’s left of the Free Syrian Army and the other groups fighting to overthrow the regime.

And all the while, the terror these extremist groups practise is creeping ever closer towards Turkey.

Then near the end:

It is naive to believe that all the refugees who cross from Syria into Turkey are genuinely fleeing the regime, Sadik (Assistant Professor Giray Sadik from the Yildirim Beyazit University) says.

“It is almost inevitable that there will be some fighters in the almost 2 million refugees we have hosted since the eruption of the Syrian crisis. There is a need for enhanced security cooperation and also emergency humanitarian cooperation with the EU – on both sides it is far from being satisfactory.”

One thing is certain, he says. Turkey, like Europe, is vulnerable to attack because of its borders and the presence of foreign fighters on its soil.

Read it all.

US taking refugees from Turkey

Back in September 2014 we reported that the US State Department sent Simon Henshaw to discuss taking Syrian refugees from Turkey, here.  We haven’t resettled too many Syrians yet, only a few hundred, but I see in State Department statistics that we have processed 1,340 refugees through Turkey in only the first three months of this fiscal year (Oct-Dec 2014).  I wonder who they are.

In those three months of FY2015 only three other processing countries supplied larger numbers of refugees to America than did Turkey:  Iraq (2,881), Malaysia (2,130) and Thailand (1,390).