Category: Who is going where

Nashville may get new wave of refugees

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

 Update 2/18/08:  See the letter here from Chris Coen of Friends of Refugees adding more to this story.

That’s the title anyway of another refugee puff piece story in the Tennessean today.    I’ve seen so many of these articles I know just what they will say before I even read them.    The reporter, Janell Ross, has bought the template story hook, line and sinker.    It starts out all kind of warm and glowing with a refugee success story (they all do!)   In reference to Nashville’s multiculturalism, one refugee gushes:

“When people come out here from California, they can’t believe it.”

(Translation)  Oh, we in Nashville are so cosmopolitan, so California.

Then she gives us the usual statistics.

The State Department says it plans to admit up to 70,000 refugees this year. And refugee resettlement agencies working in Nashville have been asked to prepare to resettle a small number [wait, what happened the “wave” in the headline to this article].

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Nashville already is home to an estimated 3,000 Somalis, 4,000 Sudanese and 5,000 to 7,000 Kurds.

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A trip along some of south Nashville’s major streets reveals stores that sell African garments, and Southeast Asian beauty products, as well as grocery stores where indoor and outdoor signs are written in Arabic. Nashville is also home to four mosques.

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In the area of southeast Nashville some call “Little Kurdistan,” it’s not uncommon for people to speak Kurdish, for women to wear traditional Kurdish garments and for 3,000 people to attend a single Kurd’s funeral.

She does throw in a little of the dark side, but it’s all about the bad things those white racist rednecks are doing.  Or, how the refugees just aren’t getting all the taxpayer benefits they deserve.

But, one wonders if these lazy reporters know how to google anything.  Did she not know about the Kurdish gangs in Nashville or the Somali Center director being arrested, or all that controversy in nearby Shelbyville?

Lookout Nashville, TN,  Muslim mayor by 2015 in the heart of the Bible belt?

Why do we keep reading stories about volags not doing their jobs?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

 Update 2/17/08:  See my post that follows up on this one here.

 Update 2/20/08:  New information on this story here.

Just this morning I posted on a ho-hum article about Burmese refugees arriving in Connecticut and now, thanks to a reader, I’m posting on another article from the same paper about a volag not taking care of refugees.

This happened in Hagerstown, MD near where we live and it’s what Chris Coen of Friends of Refugees described to us too—non-profit groups funded by the federal government leaving refugees in a lurch.  Luckily in Waterbury, CT the refugees have some church people looking out for them.   This time the culprit appears to be the International Institute of CT which must be a subcontractor of the US Committee for Refugees and Immigration.

Confusion about late fees for missed rent payments, missed doctor’s appointments and letters from the Department of Social Services have left many refugees frustrated and angry. Some no longer trust the institute to handle their concerns, said Diana Monti of the Living Faith Christian Church. But Oliver denies that. “That’s not what we’re hearing from them,” she said. “They’re going to have to have confidence in us. They’re going to have to trust us and we are going to respond to their concerns.”

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Additionally, a nurse at a local middle school says she has called the institute four to six times over the last two months to facilitate immunization requests for six refugee students. Brenda Gugliotti, of West Side Middle School, says the institute has not returned her phone calls and if the students do not receive immunizations by mid-March, they will be excluded from school. “I try to be fair,” said Gugliotti. “But this is my last warning… It’s very frustrating and it’s very, very time consuming… I have a few children in the building who are medically fragile. It’s not fair. The International Institute does not answer. These are not the only six children in the building.”

This article raises a couple of issues.   I really don’t get it, why aren’t these NGO’s who are contracted to take care of the refugees taking care of them?  Read the whole article and you’ll see that the volag people are throwing blame to the refugees.   Can you imagine being in a very foreign country and within a few months being expected to fend for yourself with government bureaucracy?  

And, then the second issue it raises is the one about health.  Ft. Wayne, IN has had a very challenging time dealing with health issues with its Burmese population and Waterbury, CT really must get on top of any problems right away.   In Ft. Wayne the big concern has been the cost of immunization and the high number of refugees with TB.  For readers interested in health issues see our whole category on the subject here.

Refugees in Connecticut

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Nothing much new here but we don’t often see information about refugees going to Connecticut, so if you live in CT then check out this article from the Republican-American about Burmese refugees to your state.  Burma is much in the news because the leader of the Karen was assasinated this past week.  

We mostly resettle the Burmese Christian Karen refugees from camps in Thailand, but there are rumblings that the Muslim Rohingya from Burma (now in Bangladesh) are being considered for resettlement in the US. 

More on Burmese refugees here from Reuters today.

Connecticut received over 20,000 refugees between 1983 and 2005.  The largest numbers are from the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia.

New English Review: Interview with Shelbyville, TN reporter Mosely

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

 Update:  See Judy’s excellent points about this interview here.

Stop whatever you are doing, and read this great interview on Somalis in Shelbyville by Jerry Gordon of New English Review and reporter Brian Mosely!    Here is a part of the introduction.

We have written extensively about the problems of assimilation of émigré Somalis in cities like Nashville, Minneapolis, Lewiston, Maine and another Tyson Foods locale, Emporia, Kansas with a Somali meatpacker work force. The problems in those communities have included issues such as TB, public health, drug dealing, petty crime, in some cases massive unemployment, federal Medicare and Medicaid fraud and separation of Church and State provisions.

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One of the few members of the Fourth Estate, who has covered the problem of assimilation of legal Somali humanitarian émigrés in the US, is Brian Mosely of the Shelbyville Times Gazette.

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In a series of hard hitting articles in the Shelbyville Times Gazette, Mosely has vividly portrayed the problems of what happens when hundreds of Somalis with a strong tribal culture and Muslim faith come to a small community in America’s heartland. What threads through Mosley’s series is the Somalis demonstrable lack of discernable public health standards and minimal education, plus their rejection of US cultural standards of tolerance and offers from community outreach groups.

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In this interview with Mosely, we discuss the background that led to the Times Gazette Somali series, the reaction of the community to his reports and opinion pieces, comments by readers, and the attempt to muzzle his free speech rights under our Constitution.

Read it all here.  It is fascinating.

Note:   We have a very good search function at RRW and have covered the Shelbyville issue extensively, just search for the word “Shelbyville.” 

Bosnians busted in Driver License scam

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

In the aftermath of Bill Clinton’s war in Bosnia, the United States admitted over 100,000 Bosnian Muslims as refugees.  They got taxpayer funded airfare, a rent subsidy, food stamps, health care, and a caseworker to find them a job.    Here’s how they repay the charity.    (Hat tip:  Janet Levy)

The FBI has cracked a Spokane-based ring that it says paid bribes to a state contractor and used foreign-language interpreters to help Bosnian immigrants cheat on tests to obtain commercial driver licenses fraudulently from the state of Washington.

Read the whole story at the SpokesmanReview.com. 

Washington State has received 89,000 refugees through 2005 and nearly 5000 of those are from the former Yugoslavia.