Another story about Iraqis trying to adjust to America

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update 1/31/08:   A refugee advocate from Arizona wrote a critical letter to the editor at Time.  See her letter here.

Time magazine this week has a story about Iraqi refugees trying to adjust to America — the country where they thought every car was new and everyone was rich.   Instead they find roach infested apartments and menial work.   We reported on a similar article in the Washington Post a couple of months ago.  Here is how the Time article begins:

There are moments when Faeza Jaber wants to pick up Khattab, her 7-year-old son, and flee back to Baghdad. Life in Phoenix is proving harder than she had expected. She needs a job that will pay her rent–not easy for a 48 year-old single mother with basic English and little local experience. Then there are a number of smaller challenges that, taken together, can seem insurmountable for a woman who has never previously lived away from her homeland–where to find day care for Khattab, how to decipher utility bills, what to do about her car that’s been towed away. Just the thought of more logistics is daunting. “My head is tired,” she says, her voice shaking. “All these papers. In America, a woman must be a man.” So sometimes she dreams of going back to Baghdad, where she knows the language and the streets and has friends and family–and where the men do the paperwork.

Read it, its just another in a long line of stories about refugees whose expectations of America have not been realized.   Makes you wonder who is preparing them for the culture shock.

My dream to be a meat packer

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Just happened to come across this website called “Colorado Confidential” with an article about African refugees who dream of jobs in meat packing.   And, for those who want to get a broader view of what goes on behind the scenes in refugee resettlement its a good overall article.   But, in light of what happened yesterday at Tyson’s Food in Emporia, KS, I wonder if there needs to be a reassessment of the job prospects in that industry.

Omar, 23, also from Somalia, spent nearly five years as a refugee in Nepal* before finally being resettled in Colorado. He arrived in mid-December. Once he gets a Social Security number, Omar plans to move to Greeley for a job at the Swift meat-processing plant, where wages start at about $10 an hour.

* A side issue:   What was Omar doing in Nepal?  It’s not exactly next door to Somalia and in fact it’s on another continent!

This was interesting in the article too.

Krassin Gueorguiev is program coordinator and lead teacher at the Spring Institute for Intercultural Learning, which has offered WorkStyles, an intensive course on American employment culture for refugees and asylees, for 25 years. Gueorguiev says many refugees arrive with a utopian image of life in the United States, and the reality – that most of them barely scrape by – is a hard slap.

The Spring Institute is the same outfit that was involved in settling the Somalis in Emporia, KS, so will they go back there now and help them find new employment?    On the Spring Institute’s Form 990 it states that “Grants are received from the federal as well as local governments to assist foreign students to work with US companies.”     At least $900,000 was received as a government contract in FY 2006.  You are paying for this.

As for the last line in the quote above:  “utopian image of life in the United States.”   I discussed that increasing problem in yesterday’s post on Bhutan.  Guess they got a hard slap in Emporia yesterday.

Here’s a shocker for you: Tyson’s meat packing plant in Emporia to close

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

 Update 1/28/08:  To get a feel for what is happening in Emporia, where the shock is barely settling in with residents, read these four articles and the comments from the Emporia Gazette (here, here, here and here).

Update 1/29/08:    American Congress for Truth blog has a post on the Emporia situation today here. Post says Somalis plan to leave Emporia.

We have been writing for several months about the fact that the Tyson’s meat packing plant in Emporia, KS had been bringing hundreds of Somali workers (400 by one count) and their families to this Kansas city causing a culture clash of some magnitude.   As a matter of fact, we have a whole category (over 20 posts) here at RRW addressing that controversy.

Now comes the news, out of the blue and late on a Friday, that Tyson’s will lay off 1500 workers at that plant.

Beef slaughter operations will cease within the next few weeks. However, the facility will still be used as a cold storage and distribution warehouse and will process ground beef.

_________

The discontinuation of slaughter operations will result in the elimination of approximately 1,500 of the 2,400 jobs currently provided at the Emporia plant.

I’ve wondered on previous occasions what happens to refugees and towns flooded with immigrants if the economy starts to tank.  It is already difficult enough I’m told to find work for unskilled laborers such as the Somalis, where will they go now?    Will they stay in Emporia on welfare?  Or, move with Tyson’s to another unsuspecting city?  Time will tell.

Affected workers will continue to be paid and receive benefits for 60 days. Tyson Human Resources representatives will begin meeting with them next week to discuss other employment opportunities within the company. The workers will be encouraged to consider transferring to other Tyson locations, such as company beef facilities at Finney County, Kansas; Dakota City and Lexington, Nebraska; and Joslin, Illinois.

Come to think of it, didn’t Tyson’s representatives only about two months ago lecture the people of Emporia to welcome these newcomers to their city, that the Somalis were now part of the community? 

Start your own blog! After all it is “Common Sense”

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I know I am harping on this, but a few weeks ago, writing in our new category called ‘creating a movement’, I suggested that a key element to advancing our concerns was to study the issues, gather some facts and start a blog of your own.    All over the world free speech is being limited— sadly even in countries like England and Canada.  So to make it harder for us to eventually have our free speech rights taken, we need to create more free speech and that is where blogs come in.

If you are thinking, “Forget it, I could never produce a blog that would attract thousands of daily readers,” no you won’t (at first anyway), but don’t place that high expectation upon yourself.   

Here is a blog called “Common Sense” that was started a few months ago by my friend The Patriot Sharpshooter.  Mostly he covers local and state issues disgesting such exciting fare as the County Board of Education budget, and writes at the rate of about a post a day.  Today he has a post on immigration that relates to what we cover here at RRW and posts along with it an e-mail from a friend in Israel who describes his personal experience with terrorism there. 

In conclusion, here is an analogy that I am sure will appeal to the Sharpshooter:  You know they say they won’t be able to come for our guns if everyone has one, well the same idea applies to free speech.   Get a blog and join the fight for America’s continued strength through freedom of speech. 

Bhutanese refugees worried that they will be slaves in America

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We have written on several previous occasions * at RRW about the Bhutanese refugees in United Nations camps in Nepal , some have been there for as long as 17 years.   The United States has agreed to take 60,000 of these displaced people.  The problem in a nutshell right now is that many camp leaders do not want their people scattered across the face of the globe because they think that if they stay together they will continue to be a political force and then might have some hope of returning to Bhutan. 

The BBC reported this week (again) that violence and intimidation are being used against those who do wish to leave for America and points west.   This has been going on for months now.  What interested me most was this line:

……. a number of rumours are spread – that the flights out are to various extents a trick, with some people believing they will be used as slave labour on arrival in the US.

Of course ‘slavery’ in its most commonly understood ugly form is illegal in the United States.   We do occasionally hear reports that refugees are used by local volags (voluntary agencies) to do jobs for the volag without pay.  Although we suspect that is rare.

More commonly however we hear and read reports of refugees who are shocked at the menial work for long hours that they must do, preferably as soon as 30 days after arrival.   Some of you reading this are probably saying, so what, that is what we desire and admire in America—good old fashioned hard work, pulling yourself up by the bootstraps and all of that.    I agree.

However, I think the problem comes when displaced people spend a generation in a camp being taken care of by the United Nations  and they haven’t a clue what it’s like in America.  Like our fellow in Hagerstown from the Congo who just couldn’t grasp that he had to work to keep from being evicted, somehow a number of refugees are arriving here, expecting Shangri-La, without proper preparation overseas for what to expect in the hardworking West.

 Reform needed

We need some reform.  We need to take less refugees and make sure those we bring are better prepared for life in America before they even get on the plane.  They must be thoroughly briefed on our culture.   And, then we need for the volags to set aside some of their government funding to pay for refugees airfare back to their home countries and, yes, maybe even  back to camps for those unhappy souls who decide they preferred their country or continent to American culture afterall.

* We have a very good search function, so check out our previous posts on this issue by typing in Bhutanese refugees into the search box.  

 I also previously suggested that refugee resettlement is being used by big companies to find cheap labor.  Here is one of the posts I did on that.   We’ve heard the same information from Emporia, KS, Shelbyville, TN and now Muscatine, Iowa (see comments).