One more refugee crime case where in addition to the pain and suffering he caused, not only did we pay for his resettlement, but taxpayers will pay for his trial and incarceration for life. I think the cost of criminal trials of refugees and the cost of their time in prison should come out of the US State Department’s budget and out of the contractors’ hides. Of course it is still all your tax money, but at least it might cause the resettlement industry to be more careful about who they bring to your towns and cities.
By the way, we have 1,556 posts in our ‘crimes’ category, here. Happy reading!
News of the surge of illegal aliens swamping Texas and being driven and flown to other states, has pushed most of our other “refugee” news to the side, but here is one bit of news from a week ago that must be mentioned.
This is a problem we have written about off and on for seven years—by federal executive order (Clinton) local governments/courts are required to have interpreters available for the myriad languages being spoken by immigrants in their communities, but most can’t afford it.
Cough? (Got TB?) COURTNEY COLLINS / Courier Staff Photographer
From WCF Courier (hat tip: ‘pungentpeppers’). By the way, note that here we go again with Catholic Charities and meatpackers needing cheap labor!
WATERLOO | Emergency dispatchers and response teams are struggling with a widening language divide as they attempt to service Waterloo’s growing population of non-English speakers.
The communication barrier creates problems for all parties involved, from the dispatcher deciphering a 911 call to the officer trying to put together an accurate police report to the concerned resident trying to communicate a problem with little to no knowledge of the English language.
Over recent years, Waterloo Police have dealt with a slew of languages including Bosnian, Spanish, Serbian, Croatian, Burmese, French and Vietnamese.
In 2006, Burmese refugees began settling in Waterloo for the employment opportunities at Tyson’s meat plant, and the community has been growing ever since.
Dispatchers at the Black Hawk Consolidated Communications Center receive about a half-dozen calls a day in foreign languages.
But resources for interpretation are slim, a Courier investigation shows.
And as refugees from Burma continue to move to the area at a steady pace, bringing with them five vastly different languages, it has quickly become a complex problem to solve.
Nearly 1,500 Burmese refugees have planted roots in the Waterloo area, according to local estimates. That population is expected to reach 2,000 in the next year. In summer months, about two to four households migrate to the area each week.
Stephen Schmitz, who resettles new refugees through Catholic Charities in Cedar Rapids, estimates that more than half of these incoming refugees are illiterate.
There is more, read it all. Be sure to check out the comments!
I don’t have time to do all the linking but know that BIG MEAT (and its head hunters at the State Department and contractors like Catholic Charities) is responsible for changing the demographics of many small cities in the Mid West and South. It is a win-win for them—cheap captive “illiterate” labor (refugees cannot go home) that you subsidize them (housing, food stamps, education). They get to wear the do-gooder white hat and you pay the price!
How about if the meatpackers, like Tysons, pay for the extra costs to the community—like interpreters!
About the photo: We are not suggesting that the woman in the photo was asking refugees if they have TB, but readers should know that Burmese especially have higher rates of TB than some other refugee groups. See our health issues category for more on TB in the refugee population, but here is one postgenerally making the point.
The thing that amazes me most about articles like this one, about how there aren’t enough ‘resources’ for the large numbers of refugees arriving in ‘welcoming’ cities and states, is that NO ONE ever says, maybe we should slow the flow into the US until such time that we can afford them!
Paw Moo Htoo (Mom in the photo) has been in America seven months….Htoo says her case worker only showed her how to turn on the lights and oven, but said nothing about enrolling her kids in school. So at first, they didn’t go.
There is so much in this reportfrom the Des Moines Register by Rehka Basu (Hat tip: ‘pungentpeppers’) that I didn’t know where to begin snipping it. So please be sure to read the whole article! Emphasis below is mine:
On the Monday after standard time went into effect, Lee Mo’s children missed school. The Burmese refugee family knew the American ritual of moving clocks forward and back, but they didn’t know on which dates that happened, so the school bus left without them.
Even if she had known the date, Mo couldn’t read a calendar. For much of her five years here, she has had to estimate time based on the position of the sun. She doesn’t know her age. She can’t make a phone call. Like about half of the people in Iowa who speak her native Karenni, she can’t read in any language. Neither she nor her husband went to school. [We have admitted tens of thousands of Burmese like this family!—ed]
An estimated 6,000 Burmese are in Iowa and some say life was easier in the camp!
Since 2006, refugees from Burma have been turning up in Iowa, becoming its largest incoming refugee group.
There are an estimated 6,000 refugees from Burma who are here, divided about evenly between three main language groups (though there are dozens of less-spoken languages), according to Henny Ohr, executive director of EMBARC, a new Des Moines nonprofit to help them. The Iowa Bureau of Refugee Services counts 1,667 refugees from Burma in Iowa, but that doesn’t include secondary migration from other cities. Yet Ohr says no Karenni speaker in Iowa is fluent in English.
For all of the deprivations in the refugee camps — houses of bamboo and leaves, lit only by candlelight; dug pits for toilets; no electricity or running water; no health care or police to fight crime — Mo says that life was easier.At least she knew how to navigate it.
In the “old days” resettlement contractors used private money and volunteer help to go beyond what their government dole paid for, today they don’t!
Refugee resettlement core services from the U.S. State Department were always limited to 90 days, and there is a one-time per capita grant of $1,800, of which $700 can go to agency staff for management, says John Wilken, chief of the Bureau of Refugee Services in the Iowa Department of Human Services. But in the past, income-eligible single people or couples without young children could also get cash assistance and medical care for five years. That was cut back to eight months.
“In the old days, agencies doing resettlement often went beyond 90 days, I presume because they had private dollars or volunteers,” said Wilken. “As the landscape has changed and resettlement has become more costly, resettlement agencies have had to limit their services to exactly what they’re getting paid for.”
Take note Wyoming, state taxpayers help foot the bill.
Low-income refugees with children get welfare benefits under Iowa’s Family Investment Program, with a lifetime cap of five years.The Bureau of Refugee Services uses federal funds for refugees here less than two years to pay for employment-related services primarily. The bulk of that $550,000 last year paid for bureau staff, job transportation and telephone interpretation services. Language instruction was limited to “self-learning” on computers using Rosetta Stone programs. The bureau has no Karenni-speaking employees.
There are other federal grants, including some to prepare elderly refugees for citizenship, or targeted to Des Moines Public School children, and partnerships with Lutheran Services of Iowa, Catholic Charities and the Des Moines chapter of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. But as Wilken says, “All of us would say there’s a pretty substantial gap in comprehensive case management.”
Secondary migrants arriving for meatpacking jobs! (Immigrant cheap labor!) Meatpackers make money, while taxpayers subsidize the lives of these legal laborers.
And when families are resettled in Iowa from other states — for meatpacking jobs or because relatives are here — the 90 days of assistance won’t follow them, and the Bureau of Refugee Services won’t help. Wilken said it didn’t compete for such funds; the Committee for Refugees and Immigrants administers them. Yet secondary migrants are the biggest group of refugees from Burma.
Just a reminder, Bill Clinton began the flow of refugees to Iowa for his meatpacking buddies, here.
Ohr calls it a crisis.
It is a crisis alright, but one not to be solved by throwing more taxpayer dollars to contractors! Let’s bring fewer refugees!
IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — The war is long behind them, as are their days living in forests and refugee campus, but life for Abdineko Mausa and Andjela Uredi’s family of 12 remains a difficult one.
For nearly two years, the Congolese family — with 10 children ranging between 2 months to 21 — have lived elbow-to-elbow in a tiny Johnson County apartment.
[….]
The Iowa City Press-Citizen reports (http://icp-c.com/1nWNHCV ) that will change this fall, however, when the family moves into a newly built six-bedroom, two-bathroom home — the largest ever constructed by Iowa Valley Habitat for Humanity. The Iowa City-based organization has put nearly 100 families in homes over the past two decades — including many refugees — but likely none as large as Mausa and Uredi’s family.
The article then gives readers some facts on the Iowa refugee program. Not mentioned here, however, was the big flood of Bosnians Bill Clinton sent to Iowa for his meatpacking buddies.
Through the United Nations Refugee Agency, the family came to Fort Worth, Texas, in 2010. They eventually relocated to eastern Iowa, where they’ve lived since 2012. Mausa has a job on a factory line through a local staffing service, and they rely on government help, as well as local charities, to get by. The family’s three youngest children were born in the U.S., where Mausa and Uredi are currently working toward citizenship.
John Wilken, bureau chief for Iowa’s Bureau of Refugee Services, estimates that more than 50,000 refugees have settled in Iowa since the state’s program began in 1975. That number, however, doesn’t include refugees who have since left the state, or who — like Mausa’s family — are considered secondary migrants because they previously lived in another state.
Over the past five fiscal years ending in 2013, 2,580 refugees settled in Iowa, though just 31 were from the Congo. In recent years, the Burmese have been the top refugee group arriving in Iowa, followed by the Bhutanese and Iraqis.
Wilken said for refugee families, finding housing during the recession and the years after has been doubly difficult.
Yup, but they keep bringing them in anyway!
I wonder do Gillette and Casper, Wyoming have big inexpensive apartments and houses for rent?
A Polk County District Court judge halted questioning over a sex abuse accuser’s mental health Wednesday during a Des Moines Islamic leader’s trial.
Two women, a mother and her 18-year-old daughter, who allege they were touched inappropriately by imam Nermin Spahic, 41, during a healing ritual testified in court on Wednesday.
[….]
The two women who have accused Spahic were among a string of witnesses who testified on the third day of the trial, including Spahic’s wife. Throughout testimony, Spahic sat with his attorneys and an interpreter, taking notes on a notepad.
During her testimony, the 18-year-old woman’s mother told jurors she was “in shock” after her encounter with Spahic.
More refugee mental health problems?
The woman, who came to the United States from Bosnia with her husband and daughter in 1997, said she took her daughter to see Spahic at the Islamic and Cultural Center Bosniak in Des Moines. The woman wanted the imam to pray over her daughter to help relieve her of severe mood swings and problems with cutting herself. However, she and her daughter were not regular members of the mosque and had never met Spahic.
So instead of praying at the mosque, the Imam was invited home where the women learned it was necessary to get naked in order to find those pesky spirits.
In a 9 p.m. ritual at the apartment the woman and her daughter shared in Johnston, Spahic allegedly had the 18-year-old woman lie nude on her bed while he rubbed cumin oil onto her skin. Spahic’s defense attorney has said the ceremony in Bosnian Islamic tradition is designed to locate “evil spirits” in a person’s body.
Spahic touched the 18-year-old woman’s genital area, breasts and buttocks during the ritual, she said in court Wednesday. Spahic asked her if she was “calm” during the ritual and she lied to the imam in hopes of ending the ritual, she told jurors.
“I only lied and said that so he would get out of my room,” she said.
The mother testified through an interpreter that once Spahic finished the ritual with her daughter, he asked her to participate as well.
And, since her daughter was so traumatized the Mom said, sure let me try it!Read on!
A police officer who grew up in Bosnia testified that he had never heard of such a ritual. There is something very fishy about this whole thing. Or, am I mistaken and this is one of those beautiful things ethnic diversity brought to “welcoming” Polk County, Iowa.
It has entertainment value, I suppose, if it weren’t for the cost this trial dumps on the local taxpayers!
* Question for Wyoming? Do you need cheap labor this badly?
Readers, this must mean good news for Iowa—-the state has no more American citizens in poverty! 