Category: Who is going where

Troubled Catholic resettlement office to restart Virginia program

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Back in March and early April Fredericksburg, VA area churches had said ‘no more!’—no more refugees should be resettled until the hundreds recently brought to the Fredericksburg area were properly resettled and their needs met.  Now comes news that the troubled Catholic Diocese of Arlington refugee office has reformed itself somehow and more refugees will be coming to this region of Virginia.

From Fredericksburg.com:

As many as 100 refugees could come to the Fredericksburg area in the next year.

Officials with the Catholic Diocese of Arlington’s Office of Migration and Refugee Services announced the expected arrivals seven months after area church leaders asked the federal government to stop the flow of refugees here.

But refugee services officials also announced different leadership and more staff in the local resettlement office.

And area volunteers hope that this time around, refugees will be resettled successfully, thanks to the shakeup in the refugee services office.

“I believe we can do this in a much better way than we experienced last March,” said the Rev. Ted Snow, pastor of Regester United Methodist Church in Stafford County. Snow said he is “a staunch supporter” of resettlement, but in March he joined area local leaders criticizing the local process.

Over the past five years, more than 500 refugees have resettled in the Fredericksburg area.

Federal government drops off refugees and promptly forgets them!

I’ve heard that many times before, as well as the complaint that there is little communication with the federal contractors, like the Catholic one here in Fredericksburg. 

In the past three years, local officials have criticized the resettlement process, saying it seemed that the federal government invited the refugees in, dropped them into the area and promptly forgot about them.

They also complained that the local resettlement office was understaffed and failed to communicate with groups offering to help refugees get on their feet here.

Tensions rose as church leaders, social workers, educators and volunteers struggled to meet the demands of an often needy population. They provided transportation, English classes, summer camps, jobs and financial help.

In March, about 20 volunteers, clergy, social workers and educators met with resettlement leaders and state and federal government officials.

That meeting did little to smooth tensions, but the refugees services officials promised to communicate more with the community.

One local church leader says ‘no thanks,’ we will take care of the still struggling refugees previously brought to the area.

Other church leaders said they are going to give the new leadership a chance, but they aren’t sure things will improve.

Some who have helped with resettlement efforts in the past have said they won’t attend the meeting. They plan to concentrate on helping the refugees who are already here.

The Rev. Larry Haun, one of the most vocal leaders calling for a halt in local resettlements, will not attend. His congregation, Fredericksburg Baptist Church, still helps dozens of newcomer families with transportation, money, tutoring, school supplies, clothes and more.

“I wish them well. I hope it goes well, but we’ve got more than we can do with what we have now,” Haun said.

New York Times says Arizona is a haven for refugees

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The article could be called “When victim groups clash, the New York Times has a tough choice.” It begins:

PHOENIX — Here in Arizona, illegal immigrants get the boot. But refugees get the welcome mat.

Even as officials rage at what they have called the “invasion” of illegal immigrants, mostly Mexicans, Arizona has welcomed thousands of legal immigrants from such grief-torn lands as Somalia, Myanmar and Iraq, and is known for treating them unusually well.

Indeed, the scorched expanse of the Phoenix valley can seem like a giant resettlement lab. Bosnians trim the watered lawns of the Arizona Biltmore, and Karenni speakers have their own prenatal class at St. Joseph’s hospital. A Sudanese goat farmer is thriving in a desert slaughterhouse built with a micro-enterprise loan. (He is glad to demonstrate his skill in turning goats to goat meat.)

Oh. So Arizona doesn’t really hate immigrants. An amazing admission from the New York Times. It goes on:

Only three states accepted more refugees on a per capita basis over the past six years. Arizona took nearly twice as many refugees per capita as its liberal neighbor, California, and more than twice as many per capita as New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

“In the degree of welcome and receptivity we see, I would certainly put Arizona at the top,” said Robert Carey, a vice president at the International Rescue Committee, which resettles refugees in a dozen states.

The work contrasts with the state’s renown as the scourge of illegal immigrants, whom critics blame for driving up crime, stealing jobs and burdening hospitals and schools.

“We’re not anti-immigrant — never have been,” said State Senator Russell Pearce, a Republican who is a leading critic of illegal immigration. “But we expect people to follow the law.”

Of course the story has a little section bashing Sheriff Arpaio, who

conducts frequent raids on immigrant neighborhoods, stopping people for minor infractions and reviewing their immigration status. He says these raids have netted hundreds of illegal immigrants. Critics say they spread fear and harass legal residents.

But in the end, amazingly, the refugees trump the illegal aliens.

Refugees seem slow to sympathize. The two groups often compete for jobs or housing, and some refugees say Latino gangs have preyed on them.

The United States “stands for law and order,” said Wissam Salman, 35, a hotel housekeeper from Iraq. “If they don’t look for these people it will be a disaster.”

Ibrahim Swara-Dahab, the Sudanese goat farmer, agrees.

“I have some problems with the Mexican people; they stole my goats,” he said. “If they don’t have documents, they should go back to their country.”

Hat tip: Gateway Pundit

Is Islam a threat to America?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

That is the title of a very long article at the Tennessean yesterday.  Regular readers of RRW know that Nashville, TN is one of the most, let’s just say active cities in the US where citizens are addressing and educating the public on the issue of radical Islamic activity.  High levels of Muslim immigration to Tennessee only make the issue hotter there.

As is usual for the Tennessean, the slant of the story denigrates those who are doing the educating.  It is my view that good fortune has brought together some well-educated and brave people willing to speak up, one such group is ACT for America.  Here, one of its leaders suggests banning Muslim immigration.

Act! For America, a national group whose mission is to educate people about the “multiple threats of Islamofascism,” has 328 local chapters across the country. One of its largest chapters, with about 400 members, is in Davidson County. Act West Nashville has 400 to 600 people on its mailing list but local leaders will not say how many of those are considered active.

The group has shown films like Homegrown Jihad, which alleges there are 35 terrorist training camps in the United States, and First Comes Saturday, Then Comes Sunday, which claims Muslims will first destroy Jews and then Christians. It also runs a blog at actwestnashville.com, with links to Web sites like Jihadwatch.com.

Act West Nashville spokesman Vijay Kumar, who was born in India but is now an American citizen, thinks the United States should ban immigration from Islamic countries. The group has met to share its concerns with 40 churches and community groups, Kumar said…..

Read the whole article.

Interestingly, the Tennessean left out of the discussion how they were caught flat-footed (scooped by Ken Timmerman at Newsmax) last May when a group of citizens from across the US and Europe (including me) went to Nashville for a long-planned educational conference on Islam and were booted from the hotel (Loews Vanderbilt!) days before the conference began.  The charge by the manager, Tom Negri, was that we threatened the safety of their guests and employees by having an educational discussion about Islam.  Of course, what does that say about free speech and local Muslims???  Ultimately,we had police protection in our new location!  If there was no radicalization going on in Nashville, as this article attempts to show, then why would Negri have fear for his guests’ and employees’ safety?

In my view, this was left out of the story because it would shed a negative light on the part of the Muslim community of Nashville and demonstrate paranoia on the part of the Open Borders “community organizers,” like Negri and his pal from Chicago, Avi Poster.

And, by the way, hotels such as Loews Vanderbilt depend on cheap immigrant labor, here, so they have a financial interest in more immigrants in Nashville.

See other stories on that Nashville experience here, here and here.

Endnote:  Did you notice in my post yesterday on immigration statistics from the Migration Information Source that Tennessee is in the top 5 states in the US for the percentage of growth in the immigrant population.

However, between 2000 and 2008, the five states with the largest percent growth of the immigrant population were South Carolina (68.2 percent), Georgia (57.7 percent), Tennessee (56.3 percent), Nevada (55.0 percent), and Mississippi (51.7 percent).

Catholic Charities of Tennessee helps boost those numbers as the major refugee resettlement agency there.

UN and its leftwing media friends continue to badger Japan to diversify

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We have written previously about the pressure Japan is under to take more refugees and asylees.  So far, apparently wanting to preserve its unique culture, Japan has resisted.  But, last year under stepped up pressure from the UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees) and its leftwing media lobbyists, Japan did begin a pilot program of refugee resettlement.   I feel sorry for Japan which apperently hasn’t completely bought into the diversity-is-strength-multiculturalism-uber-alles-no-borders-goal of the Left.

So far, it looks like Japan is only taking Asians. 

However, we had a good laugh back in September 2008 about a Japanese blogger hankering to bring Somalis to Japan, here.

This is the article that prompted me to post again on Japan.  From Japan Today:

It’s easy not to notice them: they blend in anonymously with the rest of the foreign faces here. You could be forgiven for not even realizing they exist at all. But refugees and asylum seekers are very much a reality in Japan — and as their numbers increase, the government is coming under fire for its handling of the issue.

Despite being the third largest donor in the world to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Japan admits only a tiny number of asylum seekers compared to other industrialized nations, and often appears reluctant to grant refugee status to those who do come. Damning statistics are bandied about, such as the fact that the country has accepted just 508 refugees from the 7,297 applications made since 1982.

The media doesn’t paint a very flattering picture, either. Many will remember the Dogan and Kazankiran families, Kurdish Turks whose unsuccessful battle to be recognized as refugees in Japan was reported extensively in local English-language press and overseas. When two members of the Kazankiran family were summarily deported in January 2005, the UNHCR denounced the move as “against international law,” and the Japanese government received widespread condemnation.

Both families have since been resettled in other countries, but the memory of their struggle has lingered on. So too have criticisms from organizations such as Amnesty International, which reported in May that Japan “continued to deport failed asylum applicants to countries where they faced a risk of torture or other ill-treatment.” Not exactly the most glowing of report cards. But is the reality as bad as the detractors would have us believe?

Japan has only recently begun to feel the impact of the refugee crisis. It didn’t ratify the 1951 U.N. Convention relating to the Status of Refugees until 1981, bowing to international pressure in the wake of the Vietnam War and the flow of refugees — the so-called “boat people” — that resulted from it. It took three years after the fall of Saigon for Japan to accept just 500 people, and ten years before the quota was raised to 11,500.

Although these were significant numbers for a country that had never previously taken in refugees, the government wasn’t ready to open the floodgates yet. Instead of granting individual refugee status to those it accepted, Japan admitted the refugees as a group based on humanitarian grounds. The number of refugees accepted thereafter slowed to a trickle — during the whole of the 1990s, fewer than 50 asylum seekers were granted refugee status.

Read on.

Alaska gets refugees too

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is the first time I’ve seen anything about refugees being resettled in Alaska.  It appears that there is a stepped up effort going on to be sure Alaska gets to share in the joys of diversity too!   From Catholic News Agency:

Anchorage, Alaska, Jul 18, 2009 / 02:21 pm (CNA).- In Anchorage, Catholic Social Services is committed to living out the Gospel mandate, in which Jesus called his followers to welcome the stranger. This is a blessing for people like the Kafley family, who fled the terrors of ethnic cleansing in their homeland of Bhutan in the Eastern Himalayas.

“The government of Bhutan was trying to rid Bhutan of people of Nepalese origin,” explained Patrick Pillai, who mentors the Kafleys through a CSS program. “People were fleeing the country, but Nepal did not want to accept them all because it would sanction the persecution.”

As the official refugee resettlement agency for Alaska, CSS is commissioned to receive people who can no longer live in their own country due to political or religious persecution, war, famine, ethnic cleansing and a host of other woes. If Alaska has been chosen as their destination from among those sent by the United Nations to the U.S., CSS does the work of acclimating them to their new homeland.

And, check this out Alaskans, you are getting Somalis as well.

Last year, CSS welcomed 85 refugees directly from their countries of origin. They came from the Congo, Somalia, Sudan, Togo, Iraq, Georgia, Ukraine and Russia. This year refugees have included those from Bhutan and Cuba.

Statistics for Alaska and your state too can be found here, just follow the links to the ORR databases.   I just looked up the previous few years for Alaska and in 2006 Alaska resettled 4 Cubans, 16 from the former Soviet Union, and 4 Vietnamese, for a total of 24 refugees.   In 2007, 30 former Soviet Union (they don’t break it down, maybe Uzbeks) refugees were resettled in Alaska.   So, the numbers are increasing.

To new readers:  I haven’t kept up the “your state” page at the top of our home page, but you can use our search function for your state to see what we have written previously and then use the link to the databases and you can go all the way back to the early 1980’s to see who has come to your state.