They must be spreading the refugees and ‘Unaccompanied alien children’ out from Harrisburg and are getting a little blow-back or they wouldn’t have needed a get-their-minds-right luncheon for the community in Mechanicsburg (8 miles west of Harrisburg, PA an overloaded resettlement city).

By the way, this is standard operating procedure.  Just like Minneapolis and the bedroom community of Eden Prairie we wrote about yesterday.  The US State Department and its refugee contractors overload a city, tensions build and then have to spread new refugees out to the surrounding towns and cities because they want to keep families and ethnic groups linked up in a 100 mile radius of the original “seed community.”  Mechanicsburg!  See your future in Eden Prairie!

Luncheon to make sure a ‘pocket of resistance’ isn’t growing in PA?

From The Sentinel:

The word refugee became a hot potato topic in recent months as the United Nations and other organizations called on the United States to grant the refugee status to thousands of unaccompanied immigrant children who have crossed the southern border while fleeing violence and crime in Central America. The United Methodist Home for Children in Lower Allen Township announced in July it was planning to provide shelter for some of these children.

Given the flurry of discussion, Catholic Charities and Mechanicsburg-based Mission Central provided a community educational luncheon Thursday to discuss the similarities and differences between the unaccompanied children and other refugees, clear up misconceptions about immigrants, and give suggestions for how the public can help care for refugees in the area.

Catholic Charities again stretching that definition of the word “refugee.”  In my view that is what this whole UAC push is about.  They want the “children” to seek asylum and be recognized as full-blown asylees (which means refugee) so they can be hooked up with their social services (normal legal immigrants have to wait five years for welfare) and be on the fast track to US citizenship.

Catholic Charities does not currently provide shelter for unaccompanied Central American children — although they have requested grant funds to do so in the future — but the organization currently helps immigrants from countries like Bhutan, Nepal, Somalia and Burma, said Sara Beck, ESL services manager.

To be a refugee, a person has to be fleeing from a well-founded fear of persecution or violence in their home countries — and the situation many of the Central American children are facing “sounds a lot like a refugee,” Beck said.  [Beck is quoted as an authority, but if its the same Sara Beck I found, she is a recent college student, probably on loan from AmeriCorps—ed]

Beck and Visscher said fears of immigrants bringing disease or security concerns to the United States should be relieved by a proper understanding of the screening process both the unaccompanied children and refugees undergo.

“These people aren’t just plopped here randomly — there’s a whole process to this,” Visscher said.

We have dozens of cases where in fact they were just “plopped” down and were later found to have some serious crime, terrorism, or health issues and they were “plopped” down without the community having been fully informed of what was being done to their community in the name of Christian (government-funded) “charity.”

All of our posts on the ‘Unaccompanied minors’ can be found by clicking here.

And remember, Pennsylvania is in the top ten resettlement states in the US, here.  Click here for our Pennsylvania archive.

Update:  Reader Joanne just sent this detailed report from the Pennsylvania Health Department about refugees and their medical issues in PA.  You can even see how many positive TB cases went to your counties.