This isn’t the first time we have seen ‘hints’ that some Bhutanese refugees weren’t happy about the fact that 80,000 plus of them were sent to the US over the last seven years or so.
Map is a little out of date, but still gives you an idea of where they were all distributed.
I guess “hints” isn’t the right word. Here in October of last year we reportedon the updated news about the high suicide rate among Bhutanese resettled across America and that some are sorry they came here (probably not thrilled about the meat packing work!).
You can learn all about the Bhutanese migration to America that started under George W. Bush by clicking here for our complete archive.
Now, here is just a little news item that I found interesting at the Nepalese Voice:
Jhapa: The Bhutanese refugees residing in Nepal have demanded not to close their repatriation mission on Saturday.
Expressing their will to return their homeland, some 10,000 refugees have demanded to keep their repatriation mission open.
A 21-member delegation of the Elderly Citizen Repatriation Committee has submitted a memorandum to the government officials urging them to support their repatriation mission.
They also blamed some donor agencies for forcing the Bhutanese refugees for third country resettlement.
In 2007, just as RRW was getting off the ground, the Bush Administration said that the US would “welcome” 60,000 Bhutanese (mostly Hindu) here over 5 years (read one of many accounts, here).
Congressional briefing for Hindu American Foundation. http://www.bhutannewsservice.com/main-news/haf-supports-first-congressional-briefing-in-capitol-hill/
We are now up to 80,000 of the Bhutanese (really Nepali people) who were booted out of Bhutan after living there for a generation or two. Nepal didn’t want its ethnic people back, so they lived in UN-run camps on the edge of Nepal before Bush said, let them come (The contractors need ‘clients’ and we need more docile laborers anyway! Bush didn’t exactly say that, but that is the reality).
Their arrival here was traumatic for many and news is plentiful about their hardships in the land whose streets are (NOT!) paved with gold. Their high rate of suicide in the US has not gone unnoticed by health officials (here is one recent story on that subject).
Refugees as pawns!
When I saw this news, my first reaction was ho-hum now they want some special favors for their people, so I was surprised to see that they want the US to pressure Bhutan to let some of them return to Bhutan from the camps and to let some of those resettled here to return as well!
This is not the first time we have seen “refugees” beg to go home after they learned the harsh reality of life in America. (See a post from 2010 here about how we brought thousands of Kosovars here in 1999, paid resettlement contractors to get them ‘settled,’ and then airlifted them ‘home’ within a year).
There is no incentive to slow the flow!
In 1999, the contractors were in need of warm bodies (they are paid by the head to resettle refugees and it is the need for the continuous cash flow that keeps this whole scheme afloat) and so they pressured the Clinton Administration to bring them some paying customers. Frankly, I think this is the same thing that happened with the Bhutanese and I always wondered why the mighty US (and the bullies at the UN) couldn’t financially pressure Bhutan and Nepal to repatriate their people instead of undertaking a hugely expensive resettlement of an entire population and then scattering them across the US and destroying their culture.
For the first time in the US Congress, the Bhutanese American Advocacy Day has been celebrated.
There are around 80,000 Bhutanese refugees in the US.
Organised by the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) early this week on November 17, the first-of-its-kind event featured a congressional briefing along with meetings with the State Department and several House and Senate offices, the foundation said in a statement.
Life isn’t so good in America, we want to go home!
The Bhutanese delegation also asked the State Department and members of Congress to assist in applying multilateral diplomatic pressure on Bhutan to repatriate refugees remaining in the camps of Nepal as well as those resettled in other countries who long to return to their ancestral homeland.
Panelists sought to educate policy makers on the challenges endured by Bhutanese Hindus resettling here in the US, as well as the ongoing human rights concerns in Bhutan.
Bhutanese Hindu refugees living in major cities throughout the US are facing a number of challenges, including a high incidence of mental illness and suicide, trouble obtaining employment and difficulty in retaining their cultural and religious traditions.
Thanks to Obama, their difficulty in finding employment will only get harder as they compete with 5 million newly legalized aliens.
See our extensive archive on the Bhutanese, here. The resettlement is now winding down just as the Syrians will become the next favored group. At least the Bhutanese are not Muslims!
The Centers for Disease Control has some reports you might like to see if Bhutanese and/or Congolese refugees are being resettled in your towns. This could be important information needed by your local health department.
Below is where you can find more information at the CDC website.
The CDC has some great stats, and not just on health issues. http://www.cdc.gov/immigrantrefugeehealth/profiles/congolese/population-movements/index.html
For the Congolese (we have begun the movement of50,000 to the US) the big concerns are parasites, Malaria, and mental health problems relating to sexual and gender-based violence.
Gee, I guess Obamacare’s money tree will be taking care of all these problems! (This post is archived in our ‘health issues’category).
The refugee health profiles found on this page provide key health and cultural information for specific refugee groups resettling to the United States. Information gathered from the World Health Organization (WHO), International Organization for Migration (IOM), the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), US Department of State, and other sources is provided to help resettlement agencies, clinicians, and public health providers facilitate medical screening and interventions appropriate for each refugee group.
For new readers, please visit our Bhutanese archive for background because I would have to write a book to bring you up to speed. We have been taking thousands of Bhutanese (Nepalese) refugees ever since the Bush Administration began admitting them in 2007 (or was it 2008), it doesn’t matter, the bottom line is now we are headed toward 80,000 admitted so far and many are struggling.
According to this article as many as 55 have hanged themselves when they learned the “American dream” was a nightmare for them.
Som Subedi (left) on suicide watch for Lutheran Community Services (salary paid by the US taxpayer).
Som Subedi is stuck in traffic. He’s running late to check on one of his flock: a 37-year-old woman who’s among scores of newly arrived Bhutanese immigrants he watches over like a worried parent.
Ran Gurung is on Subedi’s watch list. A refugee advocate, he fears Gurung is not adjusting well since arriving in June from a camp in Nepal, where her husband mysteriously vanished. She came to the U.S. alone, with only a few relatives already here for support.
Feds didn’t want to listen at first. Why? I suspect they didn’t want anything to interfere with the warm and fuzzy feeling they get from their do-gooder work.
That’s how Subedi discovered a disturbing trend: Bhutanese immigrants in the U.S. are killing themselves at an alarming rate. Many deaths take place during the 15-day Dashain holiday that starts in late September. The festival celebrates family and community.
He calls it the Suicide Season.
In six years, up to 55 Bhutanese immigrants have hanged themselves, using ropes or traditional scarves, and Subedi suspects the rate might be even higher. He has hounded federal agencies such as the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement to investigate the trend. He sent emails, made telephone calls, even traveled to Washington to address officials.
“I was bothering them,” he said. “I was a pest. It was what I had to do.”
The American dream is dangerous!
Why were people killing themselves when they were finally free of the hopelessness of the camps, able to start a new life?
Then it struck Subedi: For many Bhutanese, the American experience was just plain lonely.
He wrote a column for the Oregonian newspaper, questioning the American dream. “I am a refugee from Bhutan,” he began, describing how he once encouraged friends in the camps in Nepal to hurry to the U.S., a place he called “close to heaven.”
He wrote: “Now I see those newly arrived struggling; they question me about my ‘heaven.’ Some say they would return, if possible, to their dark refugee camps rather than face their desperate situations in Oregon. I have come to feel that ‘the American dream’ is dangerous, because people come here with great expectations. I have stopped calling the camps in Nepal.”
I hope all of this gives pause to the social engineers at the UN (which promoted this resettlement because they wanted to close the camps in Nepal, while never of course wanting to close the camps housing the Palestinians!), the State Department and their paid lackeys (the church contractors). The arrogance of Americans! It never seems to occur to any of them that people are better off in their own cultures with their own kind of people.
We did learn just recently that the Bhutanese program is to be closedand the spaces made available to Syrians (who will be another unhappy bunch arriving in your cities soon). Come to think of it maybe the Syrians won’t be so unhappy because the mostly Muslims mission here will be to be part of Al-Hijra thus giving more meaning and purpose to their lives in America. The Bhutanese are mostly Hindus.
The US State Department, the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) and whichever resettlement contractor they used in Rochester, NY to resettle these Bhutanese (Nepalese) are a bunch of nincompoops!
They must think that if they plunk down some new minority into an African American neighborhood that all of those people of different colors will somehow sympathize with each other and magically melt into a sort of blissful multicultural co-existence.
Locked inside their house in northwest Rochester, the Nepalese family felt under siege.
Outside, a crowd of young men — 20 to 25 in number — broke windows to the home and threatened to storm inside, according to members of the family. Moments before, several young men had followed and jumped a Nepalese teen. That scuffle then escalated into the menacing gang.
It wasn’t until the police came that the crowd scattered. This incident, in daylight hours Thursday, is another in a growing list of attacks against South Asian refugee families who have been settled in areas of northwest Rochester near Jones Square.
[….]
As law enforcement officials decide how to curb the intimidation and violence, the refugees themselves say they feel ignored and left to fend for themselves.
[….]
Many of the refugees are hesitant to talk to police, and, when they do, they have not been able to provide much information about their attackers. Typically, the offenders have been young African-American men, creating a volatile situation in which the refugees feel at risk in the very neighborhoods where they have been resettled.
Think that’s bad, just wait until potentially thousands of Central American teenage “refugee” boys arrive in upstate New York (resettled there by some of the same nincompoops!).
They couldn’t create more chaos and strife if they tried (or, scary thought, maybe they are trying?).
For new readers(and we have many lately), here is just one postwith a little history (Bush legacy also) about how we have resettled 75,000 Bhutanese/Nepalese in the last 6 years or so.
