Category: Your State

More refugees to Wisconsin….

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

…..and more federal dollars to fund them (well, to fund the contractors).

There is nothing unusual about Wisconsin.  Everyone is going to get more refugees and Washington will surely have the funds flowing to the contractors* now that the Obama Administration is free to go full steam ahead.

If you live in Appleton, Barron, Green Bay, Madison, Milwaukee and Oshkosh, here they come.

From AP at Fox 11:

MADISON (AP) – Agencies in six Wisconsin communities will receive a total of $1.5 million to help resettle new refugees.

The state Department of Children and Families says the latest refugees arriving in Wisconsin are mainly from Burma, East Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Nepal. To receive refugee status, a person must have a well-founded fear of persecution and not be able to safely return to their home country.   [LOL! Now they are saying East Africa so as not to say Somalis.—ed]

That definition of a refugee is important.  It used to mean that the individual refugee had a fear of persecution, now one only needs to be from a certain region of the world and one is assumed to be persecuted.  The refugee industry has long wanted that expanded definition and now they have just made it so.  And, hey, didn’t Obama tell us that Iraq and Afghanistan are safe—after all, he says we don’t need our military there!   Somalia has a new government and is encouraging its people to come home.   And, who is persecuting in Nepal?

AP continues:

The state has funded refugee programs using federal money, beginning with the Hmong resettlement in Wisconsin. Local agencies provide a host of services to the refugees, including language and literacy classes, school enrollment, job information and mental health services.  [You pay for all of this!—ed]

The funding has been targeted for agencies in Appleton, Barron, Green Bay, Madison, Milwaukee and Oshkosh. About 1,000 new refugees are expected to settle in Wisconsin this year.

For Wisconsin readers, you can learn more about refugees in Wisconsin here at your state agency website.  Five of nine federal contractors appear to have divvied up Wisconsin.

An afterthought:  Just as I hit publish I remembered that I wanted to mention that one of the bits of information for you to note at the Wisconsin website might answer an oft-asked question, namely, do refugees who come as senior citizens get social security?  The answer is yes—for up to nine years.   SSI will continue past that time if they become US citizens:

A refugee senior must naturalize within nine years of arrival or lose eligibility for SSI.

* The ORR website is down, but for new readers the big nine contractors who hold a monopoly on federal contracts are:

The so-called “religious ” contractors receiving tax dollars:

US Conference of Catholic Bishops  (we just mentioned them yesterday, here)

Church World Service

Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services

World Relief

Episcopal Migration Ministries

Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society

The secular contractors:

US Committee on Refugees and Immigrants

International Rescue Committee

Ethiopian Community Development Council

Fun with numbers: find out how many refugees came to your town in last 5 years

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Just this morning as I wrote the previous post on an Iraqi woman who beat her daughter, I had a close look at some databases at the US State Department’s Refugee Processing Center.

They have a database where you can see how many refugees and from what countries were resettled in your town.  And, I mean town!  Apparently the cities are overflowing with immigrants and the State Department is busy spreading new refugees out to even small towns.   They want to make sure you too experience the joys of multiculturalism.

Keep in mind, a refugee might be resettled in a particular town, but they are free to move after in some cases 3 months (it’s called secondary migration).   No one tracks where they go (this is America you will be reminded by open borders activists), but the problem is that, assume they are receiving treatment for TB where originally resettled, there is no way of knowing if they continue the meds after moving.

So those resettled in your town may no longer be there, or conversely they have attracted secondary migrants to come to your town and the numbers of a particular nationality are now larger.

Go here and scroll down to “Arrivals by destination city by nationality” open link to a ‘fun’ database.

This post will be archived in our ‘where to find information’ category.

The New York Times is of some use after all: great tools to see immigration and diversity trends

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The New York Times web site has some fascinating interactive graphics about diversity and immigration. On this one, you can see how the ethnic/racial composition of schools has changed from 1987 to 2006. You can look up figures by state county and school district, and these are compared with national trends. The site says:

Immigration’s impact is often first seen in the classroom. The increasing diversity of the nation’s education system is the most detailed measure of where immigrants have settled in recent years. View demographic changes in more than 17,000 school districts across the nation — including your own.

The general trend is this:

Fueled by the latest wave of immigration, enrollment of Hispanic and Asian students in American schools has increased by more than 5 million since the 1990s. The increases are occurring not just in long-time immigration hotbeds, but in places as far flung as Sevier County, Arkansas to Colfax County, Nebraska, to Marion County, Oregon.

Asians increased from 5 to 6 percent; Hispanics from 13 to 21 percent over the period. Blacks and Native Americans remained the same, at 17 percent and 1 percent respectively, and whites dropped from 66 to 56 percent. This represents students, remember, so the minority figures are larger than in the general population.

On that page there is a link to this amazing map of immigration trends by nationality.  You  can run your cursor over any county and see the total population and the number of foreign-born. The counties are coded by color to show where most of the foreign-born are from.

Even better, there’s a timeline that runs from 1880 to 2000. You can select a nationality and move the pointer along the timeline to see what each census showed of that nationality’s settlement. Even this is at the county level, so you can learn, for instance, that in 1890 in Douglas County, Nebraska, there were 260 French-born people out of a total population of 158,008.

A state is permitted to withdraw from the Refugee Resettlement Program

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

For as long as we have been writing RRW, a year and a half now, I’ve wondered how it is that no refugees are resettled in Wyoming.   I had heard the state had “opted out” of the program but I could never figure out how this was done.

Today a kind reader sent me this section from the Code of Federal Regulations that answers my guestion!   A state is permitted to withdraw from the Refugee Resettlement Program.

The following is from Section 400.301, Withdrawal from the Refugee Program from 45 CFR.   The “Director” is the Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) in the Department of Health and Human Services.

(a) In the event that a State decides to cease participation in the refugee program, the State must provide 120 days advance notice to the Director before withdrawing from the program.

(b) To participate in the refugee program, a State is expected to operate all components of the refugee program, including refugee cash and medical assistance, social services, preventive health, and an unaccompanied minors program if appropriate. A State is also expected to play a coordinating role in the provision of assistance and services in accordance with §400.5(b). In the event that a State wishes to retain responsibility for only part of the refugee program, it must obtain prior approval from the Director of ORR. Such approval will be granted if it is in the best interest of the Government.

(c) When a State withdraws from all or part of the refugee program, the Director may authorize a replacement designee or designees to administer the provision of assistance and services, as appropriate, to refugees in that State. A replacement designee must adhere to the same regulations under this part that apply to a State-administered program, with the exception of the following provisions: 45 CFR 400.5(d), 400.7, 400.51(b)(2)(i), 400.58(c), 400.94(a), 400.94(b), 400.94(c), and subpart L. Replacement designees must also adhere to the Subpart L regulations regarding formula allocation grants for targeted assistance, if the State authorized the replacement designee appointed by the Director to act as its agent in applying for and receiving targeted assistance funds. Certain provisions are excepted because they apply only to States and become moot when a State withdraws from participation in the refugee program and is replaced by another entity. States would continue to be responsible for administering the other excepted provisions because these provisions refer to the administration of other State-run public assistance programs.

[60 FR 33604, June 28, 1995, as amended at 65 FR 15450, Mar. 22, 2000]

Based on that Section c, it looks like they aren’t going to let any state out easily.

For the entire Code of Federal Regulations for Refugee Resettlement, go here.  It is a treasure trove of information.

An afterthought:  I don’t know how many times over the last year and a half we have heard officials at state or local level say there is nothing they can do about refugees coming to a particular community—it’s all the federal governments doing they say.   Well this puts a lie to that notion, a state can say NO and it looks like a state can say, slow down the numbers!