The FY 2013 refugee spigot is open and we are beginning to see reports about how many refugees might be coming your way this year. Obama is aiming for 70,000 new Democrat voters in need of social services for FY 2013. Yesterday I told you that Erie was a “preferred community” for refugee resettlement and has been for over ten years.
Back in 2008 there was some ‘funny money business’ going on with the International Institute in Erie (an USCRI subcontractor) but they must have gotten their problems solved when they canned the director. And, they must be over the squabbles there between the resettlement contractors.
Below is the short news story that gives us two bits of information in addition to the notice about the large number of refugees the city is expected to absorb. First, most are Bhutanese which definitely means we have decided to go beyond the original 60,000 Bush-approved Bhutanese/Nepalis we were taking from camps in Nepal.
And, the second thing you should know is that this demonstrates exactly how your city gets overloaded. The resettlement contractors, here the International Institute of Erie and Catholic Charities, are paid to process-in the family members of the original seed population they initially resettled. They are paid by the head so there is an incentive to find more family members to import.
More than 600 refugees will start calling Erie home in 2013.
Erie’s two refugee resettlement agencies, the International Institute of Erie and the local branch of Catholic Charities, expect to serve a total of 650 refugees in the 2013 fiscal year, officials with those agencies said.
The vast majority of the new arrivals will be Bhutanese, coming to Erie by way of refugee camps in Nepal, said Nandu Subedi, resettlement program leader for Catholic Charities in Erie.
The U.S. government approved the entry of Bhutanese refugees in 2007, and they started arriving in Erie in mid-2008, Subedi said. They’ve been arriving steadily every year since, about 600 to 800 annually, he said.
Since the start of the 2013 fiscal year in October, Catholic Charities has settled 49 refugees, all but six of them from Bhutan.
“A lot of their relatives are already settled here and the others like to move to where their friends and family are,” Subedi said. [And the US taxpayer pays us to accommodate the refugees’ desires and bring in the families, including the old grandmas in need of social security—ed]