Bowling Green, KY a growing Muslim community, the result of refugee resettlement

Someone needs to tell Senator Rand Paul what is happening in his home town.

A mosque in Bowling Green. Saudi money?

Here is a gushy, politically correct, story (entitled: Growing Diversity) on the huge Muslim population in Bowling Green, but not one word about those Iraqi refugee terrorists convicted there last year.

From the Bowling Green Daily News (hat tip: Robin).    By the way, the Bosnian migration was a Bill Clinton project.  He wanted to help his meatpacking friends get some cheap refugee laborers.  I’m guessing he sold out America in exchange for some campaign cash from meatpacking giants.

But, you can bet that Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was perfectly fine with it, or Kentucky wouldn’t be as high as it is on the list of states “welcoming” refugees.  The Bush State Department contributed also to the demographic change we see today.

Daily News:

When Sulejman Hasanovic moved to Bowling Green 15 years ago from Bosnia, he recalls the few Muslims who lived in the community at the time meeting in homes to worship.

Now, Bowling Green has two mosques and an estimated 7,000 Muslims, who make up about 10 percent of the city’s population. They have emigrated from as many as 23 countries, including Burma, Iraq and Russia.

Even with such a presence, Hasanovic still meets people who aren’t aware of Bowling Green’s Muslim population.

“It’s a big shock for them. They’re like, ‘Oh, you’re here,’ ” he said. “But after 15 years, I think people are getting used to us here.”

Thank USCRI!  That is the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants one of the primary resettlement contractors working in Bowling Green.  And, coincidentally that contractor is run by the woman, Lavinia Limon, who was Bill Clinton’s director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement during the initial Bosnian importation.  Back to the story:

A growing Muslim population

As they have in Bowling Green, Muslims have become part of the national fabric, with about 2.5 million living in the U.S., said Lawrence Snyder, associate religious studies professor at WKU. Bowling Green has one of the highest percentages of Muslims in the state, and it’s rare for a city of its size to have two mosques.

“For the most part, they have been welcomed without much backlash,” Snyder said. “I think that says a lot about the nature of our community.”

The large growth of Bowling Green’s Muslim community occurred in a relatively short amount of time because the city is seen as a good place for refugees to resettle and a lot of those refugees happen to be Muslim, Snyder said.

“In some ways it’s just kind of a quirk of history,” he said.

What the heck—a quirk of history! 

Snyder wants you to believe these Muslim refugees “found their way” to Bowling Green ’cause from a continent away they heard Bowling Green was lovely.  Bowling Green was targeted by the US State Department and its resettlement contractors.  The US State Department planned this demographic change! Maybe someday we will know why!

The rise of Muslim immigrants is not limited to Bowling Green, but is a trend across the nation as well.

Compared to 20 years ago, a smaller percentage of new U.S. green card recipients are coming from Europe and the Americas and a growing number are coming from Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, according to a report from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

In 2012, Muslims made up about 10 percent of new legal immigrants to the U.S., compared to 5 percent in 1992, according to the report.    [This is the study we told you about here.—ed]

To learn more about what “diversity” has brought to Bowling Green, we have an entire lengthy archive on this Kentucky city.  I think we first became aware of problems in Bowling Green in April 2008 when a Bosnian teen would-be robber was shot and killed by a homeowner.  The homeowner was exonerated.

The photo is from this blog which has photos from other mosques in Kentucky as well.

I’m AnnC@refugeewatcher on twitter. Please tweet this and also follow me!