Maine: Gee, no jobs for educated refugees, what a surprise!

01/31/2014 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Nor are there jobs for your college graduate kids!

Just now as I turned off the TV, President Obama was being interviewed about how to create more jobs and yesterday the Republicans were announcing their plan to flood the job market with both uneducated and educated immigrants for their big business donor friends, yet here is a story from Maine boo-hooing about no jobs for educated refugees!

University of Southern Maine audience listens to plight of refugees who can’t find work!

From Maine Public Broadcasting Network. (Hat tip: ‘pungentpeppers’) An Iraqi with a college degree from Iraq took part in panel discussion on jobs hosted by Catholic Charities of Maine among others. I guess there are no more struggling job-seekers among the Americans in Maine!

Portland resident Sarah Mahdi came to the U.S. with a college degree, but, like many immigrants, has had trouble getting it recognized in the U.S. It’s not an unusual problem. Maine educators and other service providers are now looking for ways to make it easier for educated immigrants to find suitable jobs or further their educational opportunities.

[…..]

“When I first came to the States I just wanted to study,” said Mahdi, who was among a handful of immigrant students sharing their experiences Wednesday night at a panel discussion in Portland. The panel was organized by the University of Southern Maine’s Office of Multicultural Student Affairs, and Catholic Charities Maine.

New Mainers Resource Center uses tax dollars to help immigrants prove they actually have a legitimate college degree.

One place immigrants can turn to is the newly-established New Mainers Resource Center, one of the several service providers on hand at Wednesday night’s event to offer advice. The center’s program co-ordinator, Sally Sutton, is talking to George Dakonsa, who arrived here from the Democratic Republic of Congo seeking asylum four months ago.

“I have a bachelor’s degree in economics and finance,” he says. “I’d like it if they can help me to evaluate.”

The center was recently opened by Portland Adult Education with the aim of specifically helping college-educated immigrants in their search for suitable employment or further education. Co-ordinator Sutton says with immigrants like Dakonsa come an opportunity to breathe new economic life into the state. [Would someone please explain exactly how they are breathing new economic life into the state!—ed]

That bad ‘ol Maine governor is at it again—-how dare he try to balance the state budget!

The New Mainers Resource Center, however, may end up being a short-lived venture. It’s meant to be a two-year pilot project funded at $75,000 a year.

But the program could be eliminated after its first year – just one small part of the nearly $34 million in spending cuts being recommended in a report commissioned by the LePage administration, looking for ways to balance the two-year budget.

Governor LePage needs to continue working on something else! Maine has become a go-to state for asylum seekers.

Check out this article from The Free Press from earlier this month:

Maine has become known to many central African asylum seekers as a place where they can find community support as well as temporary financial assistance while they have their visas and work permits approved. Often they arrive on tourist or business visas, sometimes with forged documents. While many asylum seekers are well educated and come from financial means, the money doesn’t last long and many end up in homeless shelters while their applications are being processed.

Maine happens to be one of a handful of states that does not require proof of citizenship. All asylum seekers must show is that they are applying for asylum. Unlike official refugees, such as many in the Somali and Sudanese populations who are resettled in Maine by the U.S. State Department [and Catholic Charities—ed], asylum seekers do not qualify for any other state or federal benefits while they are applying for asylum. The whole asylum approval process can take from one to two years and it typically takes at least 150 days for asylum seekers to be eligible to legally work once approved for asylum.

See also, Maine the welfare magnet one of our top posts of all time.

One more thing….so much for the importance of educated refugees!

Reader ‘tomasrose’ sent us this comment to our earlier post about Bhutanese low-skilled laborers and the US State Department (as headhunters) bringing them in for businesses:

I spoke with a refugee from the middle east just last week and he confirmed, of course, refugees are coached in what to say to improve their chances at coming to the U.S.. One of the things he said is they hide any education they might have. If the U.S. thinks you are educated your chances of moving to the U.S. are lower. He cited an M.D. from Baghdad who told refugee officials he was a menial laborer and, presumably, would be happy to work the same jobs in the U.S.. Had he advertised his credentials as a doctor, he would have a better chance at going to one of the Scandinavian countries, but to get the U.S. he had to really dumb his resume down.

First Congolese settle in Lancaster Co. PA

10/17/2013 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

On-going conflicts in DR Congo is the US’s problem now—excuse for tens of thousands of “refugees” to be resettled in America.

This is your typical ‘formulaic’ story about a new refugee arriving in small town America. I’m posting it here just to remind you that we are expected to take 50,000 refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo over the next few years.

Why? I don’t know, some fuzzy notion that Belgium and the West messed up West/Central Africa and now we are obligated to take in their people displaced by warring factions.

From Lancaster Online (emphasis is mine):

Terry K. Mulumba decided to leave behind his haunting past.

“Thinking about it would be wrong and would take me down,” he said.

Mulumba, a 22-year-old studying for the math and science portions of the GED test, is one of the first refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to have been resettled in Lancaster County.

Lutheran Refugee Services and Church World Service each expect to resettle 50 more Congolese here in the coming year. To put that into perspective, Lutheran Refugee Services settles an average of 200 refugees of varying nationalities in Lancaster County each year.

Like Mulumba, who came here in 2012, many Congolese are escaping the eastern and southeastern regions of the country because of political and ethnic tensions that were fostered through years of Belgian colonial rule and a Western-backed dictatorship.

Just for your information, Lancaster (the city) at the heart of Amish country, has had refugee overload for some time and so the resettlement agencies are now spreading refugees to surrounding small towns in the county, like this one (Akron, PA) in this story.

For new readers, Lutheran Refugee Services (subcontractor of LIRS) and Church World Service are two of nine US State Department contractors resettling refugees with your tax dollars in the US. Also, for new readers one of our top (most-clicked on) items here at RRW is our fact sheet, here.

Click here for previous posts on Lancaster.

Congolese refugee numbers grow by the day

07/20/2013 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

And, as we reported earlier, the US will be taking 50,000 (actually the resettlement is already underway).

1,811 (from DR Congo) have arrived so far this fiscal year. Check out the numbers here for all nationalities arriving in 2013. Somalis are approaching the 5,000 mark as of June 30th.

New Congolese refugees waiting for space at new UN transit center. UNHCR photo

I’m reminded that we were only going to take 60,000 Bhutanese refugees but are already up to nearly 70,000 with no end in sight.

Here is the latest story from the UN:

BUNDIBUGYO, Uganda, July 18 (UNHCR) – More than 14,000 Congolese refugees have moved voluntarily to a transit centre in western Uganda’s Bundibugyo district but tension is rising between locals and thousands of people still camped in a school closer to the border with Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

The transit centre was opened last Sunday by the government and its partners, including UNHCR, to help cope with an influx last week of almost 70,000 Congolese refugees fleeing fighting across the border in North Kivu province between the Allied Democratic Forces, a Ugandan rebel group, and the DRC armed forces. The centre is 30 kms from the border.

UNHCR staff in Bundibugyo said that 14,372 people had registered at the centre by early Thursday afternoon. They included at least 60 unaccompanied minors, mostly male…

Tensions building in the local community.

A bigger group of 20,000 to 30,000 people remain camped in and around Butogo Primary School located near the border. Many of these people wish to remain close to the border so that it will be easy to check on their homes and crops during daylight hours, but their presence has started causing tensions with the local community.

So, the “rebel” group—Allied Democratic Forces (“puritanical” Muslims, but the UN can’t say the word)—are on the move, and we will get the refugees to add to our unemployed and needy people in your city. I’ll bet you this project ends up involving a lot more than the proposed 50,000.

Shall we call Lexington, KY “Little Congo?”

03/02/2013 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Sure sounds like it. Don’t tell Professor Kotkin that these new immigrants didn’t ‘find their way’ to Lexington, Kentucky as the result of all the buzz back in Kinshasa about the great economy for ‘new Americans’ in “the horse capital of the world”.

Red states are being turned blue through refugee resettlement.

Once a seed community has been established and no one complains, more will arrive.

From WEKU-FM (hat tip: Robin)

They aren’t coming from Syria yet!

As refugees flee the civil war in Syria, few will probably settle in the Commonwealth. Barbara Kleine with Kentucky Refugee Ministries [subcontractor of one of the top nine federal contractors Church World Service—ed] says many displaced Syrians still remain within that nation’s borders. “There are just multiple layers of security checks before people are admitted to the U.S. and that can takes months up to years really. So right now, there is no process in place that is processing Syrian refugees who are outside the country,” said Kleine.

But, they are going to “welcoming” Lexington from the Congo:

Congolese on the march! ‘Finding their way’ to Lexington, KY with the help of Church World Service!

Meanwhile, the number of immigrants from the African nation of Congo who settle in central Kentucky is expected to grow significantly. Kleine says about 800 Congolese ex-patriots now live in Lexington. She predicts they’ll attract even more refugees from that war-torn nation.

“When there is a community of say Congolese or Bhutanese in your community and you can prove to the State Department that you have the language capacity and the community support to welcome those refugee, then you are able to continue to resettle that population,” added Kleine.

Kleine says the new immigrants could arrive in the Lexington-area this coming fall. Over the last five years, she says Lexington has become one of the nation’s most popular destinations for refugees from Congo.