Tag: Minneapolis

Minnesota study: autism hits Somali kids harder, IQs lower

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Heretofore it was assumed that Somali kids in the Minneapolis area had a higher rate of autism then white kids, but this new study says the difference is slight.   Our earlier postings all focused on Somali community activists blaming America for autism that they claim they never had in Africa—like the whole vaccination controversy that has been pretty much debunked in scientific circles. Some families reportedly went back to Africa in disgust.

Minnesota Somali woman with autistic son

My unscientific earlier guess centered on the lack of Vitamin D Somali mothers (covered from head to toe in a northern climate) likely received during pregnancy, but these statistics don’t fit that theory well as American blacks do not have the same levels of autism as the Somalis or the white people in the study.

My other theory, also just a guess! is based on the possible genetic affects of in-breeding in polygamous families.  Here are all of our previous posts on Somalis and autism.

So why, according to the new study, is it hitting Somali kids harder (not that there are significantly more cases!)—-the Somali kids’ IQs are lower and so the condition manifests itself more starkly than those with higher IQs.   This of course raises the question, not answered here: what is the average IQ of the Somali population as a whole compared to the white population?   Uh oh!

From the Star Tribune (emphasis mine):

Autism might not be any more prevalent among Somali-heritage children in Minneapolis than it is among white children in the city, but the severity of the developmental disorder appears harsher in this minority group.

In a much-anticipated report released Monday, University of Minnesota researchers found statistically similar rates of autism symptoms among 7- to 9-year-olds in Minneapolis, regardless of whether they were Somali or white. But all of the Somali-heritage children with autism also had related intellectual disorders — defined as scoring 70 or less on IQ tests — compared with a third of autistic children in the study overall.

“Somali children are much more likely to also have an intellectual disability, which means their symptoms, their characteristics, the ways in which autism presents itself in these children are very different,” said Amy Hewitt, the lead author of the study and a senior research associate in the university’s Institute on Community Integration.

Concerns about the prevalence of autism among Somali children surfaced among parents in 2008, and were validated in 2009 when a report from the Minnesota Department of Health found that Somali preschoolers were two to seven times more likely to receive autism services from the Minneapolis public school system.

The U study, released Monday, was an outgrowth of that Health Department report, and is the largest examination ever in the United States of autism prevalence among Somali immigrants’ children.

Rather than counting the number of children signed up for autism services, or even who have received a diagnosis of the developmental disorder, the researchers examined medical records from thousands of participating families and evaluated whether children met the medical criteria for autism — regardless of whether it had been diagnosed.

The net result was that one in 32 Somali children in the study met the diagnostic criteria for autism, compared with one in 36 white children. The rates were notably lower at one in 62 for non-Somali black children in Minneapolis, and one in 80 for Hispanic children. The rates for the Somali and white children were higher than national averages as well.

There is much more, read it all.

It is a good thing we have Obamacare now to pay for all this on-going medical treatment for refugees!

Photo is from this story, one of many, where Somalis were demanding answers about why their kids were afflicted with autism at a higher rate (or so they thought) than white American kids.

Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton: Somalis time will come

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

And, so it has with the election of Abdi Warsame to the Minneapolis City Council.

Dayton to Warsame: Your time has come

The Star Tribune has another glowing profile of the first Somali-American (Englishman?) elected to such an important post in a major America city.

After Somali immigrants failed to elect one of their own to the Minnesota Senate two years ago, a small group of them joined supporters of the victor, Kari Dziedzic, for a campaign event in her father’s home in northeast Minneapolis.

Gov. Mark Dayton, who was there, urged the East African attendees not to give up, saying their time would come.

One of the Somali-Americans in the crowd that day was Abdi Warsame, who became the first member of his community to win election to the Minneapolis City Council this month, two decades after Somali refugees began arriving in the state.

“I felt like he was speaking to me that day,” Warsame said.

His landslide victory in the Sixth Ward race signals the rising political influence of Somali-Americans in Minneapolis and offers a window into the changing demographics that also swept into office the council’s first members of Hmong and Mexican descent.

But Warsame’s win was different from that of the other immigrant candidates, Blong Yang and Alondra Cano, in that he relied more heavily on bringing members of his cultural community out to the polls — some for the first time.

“He couldn’t have done it without other communities in the Sixth Ward, but everyone recognizes the Somali vote was important for him. It was really impressive,” said Ryan Allen, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota who is studying Somali-Americans’ experience in the Twin Cities.

Somali immigrants have created mosques and nonprofits and gotten involved with civic life in ways that outsiders have not immediately seen, he said, and “all of that activity built a base that Warsame was able to take advantage of.”

Warsame joins Ahmed Hassan, elected the same night as he was to the City Council in Clarkston, Ga., as the highest elected Somali-Americans in the United States.

There is more, read it all. I’m still wondering how Warsame came to be an American citizen after being resettled and raised in England.  You can’t just pop on over from England and become an American citizen.  There is mention in the story that he has a 7-year-old daughter in Texas who he doesn’t want to talk about (he came to the US in 2006).  Maybe he married his way in?

Photo is from the Puntland Post.

Mainstream media: Somalis just “found their way” to America

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

In the wake of the brutal slaughter in Kenya (don’t open this link if you have a weak stomach) by Somali Jihadists a little over a week ago, I’m struck by the fact  that the mainstream media is running one story after another about America’s growing Somali population, but the word “refugee” never makes it into the telling.   I can’t say never, but I just reviewed a bunch of recent stories in The New York Times, The Washington Post and Time magazine and searched for the “R” word. It was not there!

A seriously wounded girl is carried away from the Westgate mall in Nairobi as Al-Shabaab’s terror reign unfolded.

And, by the way, I still haven’t seen any further report on whether Americans have been officially identified among the killers.  Have you?

Do you think the average reader, someone not following immigration issues daily, wonders how a particular group of immigrants ‘found their way’ to America?  I think they do, so why does the media rarely mention the legal programs through which the US government is changing America’s demographic make-up?

Below is an example from a New York Times story entitled, ‘Somali Community in U.S. Fears New Wave of Stigma After Kenya Attack.’

Would this help you know anything about how the Somalis got here, how they in fact became a “community” (through the US State Department’s Refugee Resettlement Program going back three decades)?   The “R” word does not appear in the story:

More than 32,000 people of Somali ancestry live in Minnesota, census figures show, and local leaders say the true number is far higher. Some came in the 1990s after fleeing civil war, and others are their children, many of them born in this country.    [By the way, the number is way higher than 32,000 in Minnesota, in addition to the tens of thousands in other preferred resettlement states—ed]

They “came….after fleeing civil war.”   What!  they just got on a plane and said “here we are America,” “let us in,” and then picked Minnesota on a map?

Regular readers of RRW know how it happened (here and here), but do the reporters not know or do they deliberately cover-up the truth about LEGAL immigration programs gone wrong?

By the way, there is a good article (at Powerline, hat tip: Judy) about the problems the media is glossing-over with the Somali “community” in Minnesota, but it too doesn’t use the word refugee.  Why is that?

US stepping up deportations of Somali refugees with criminal backgrounds

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Were some of Rep. Keith Ellison’s constituents doing the killing in Kenya on Saturday?

Rep. Keith Ellison swearing in on the Koran as the first Muslim Member of the House of Representatives in 2007. Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images

 

This article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune went unnoticed over the weekend (at least by me!)  when the issue of Somalis and Minnesota took center stage in faraway Kenya as Somali terrorists slaughtered dozens of innocent shoppers (see our report here).

We’ve written about Somali deportations previously and noted that the US Supreme Court has already ruled that it is legal to send immigrants back to countries in chaos if they break American laws.  But, the ‘human rights gang’ is always agitating against the idea as is the case now in this report.

From the Star Tribune (Minnesota Somalis make up most of the list of those to be sent back):

The federal government is engaging in an aggressive effort to deport Somali immigrants who run afoul of U.S. law, after refraining for years from shipping people back to a country wracked by civil war and lacking a functioning government.

The policy change affects more than 3,100 Somali nationals who have received final orders for removal from the United States since 2001, either because of violations of immigration law or criminal convictions. That includes 435 people who were ordered removed from the immigration court in Bloomington, representing 13 percent of all such Somali cases in the country’s 52 immigration courts.

Until recently, they had been allowed to remain in this country despite the removal orders, living in a legal limbo, wearing ankle bracelets or under requirements to check in periodically with authorities.

Now that’s changed.

Since 2012, 33 Somalis across the United States have been deported to Somalia, including 22 so far this year. Most have come from Minnesota, home to the nation’s largest Somali refugee community. Thirty Somalis remain in custody this month from the St. Paul region of the immigration service, faced with a pending or final deportation order.

Next the Tribune gives us a sob story about how these kids grew up here and don’t know Somalia, some don’t know the language.   How about a sob story for the US and Minnesota taxpayers who raised these “kids”—housed, fed and educated them!

This is so backwards!  The poor Somali “kids” could become “victims” in Somalia.  What about their victims here?

The increased deportations have raised the thorny issue of whether it is proper to send offenders, many with admittedly lengthy criminal rap sheets, to an unstable country they don’t know and where many believe their presence will be tantamount to a death sentence.

What do you do with people who have no legal right to stay here, but nowhere safe to go?

“We still consider Somalia to be extremely unsafe,” said Deepinder Mayell, director of the Refugee and Immigrant Program for the Minneapolis-based Advocates for Human Rights. “Even affiliation with western countries could be a threat. It makes them stick out. …. They could become subject to increased scrutiny or targeted as a victim.”

Rep. Keith Ellison is worried that al-Shabaab will get these poor kids. 

I think this morning Ellison has to be sweating until we find out if some of his constituents are actually among the al-Shabaab Islamic terrorists who did the slaughtering in the Kenya mall!

The Tribune story continues:

U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, whose district includes a large segment of Minnesota’s Somali community, said he will be requesting a detailed briefing from the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice on their guidelines for deportations to areas with potential safety concerns. Despite some gains in Somalia, he said he remains concerned about things such as recent asymmetrical attacks by the terrorist organization Al-Shabab.

“Asymmetrical attacks by the terrorist organization Al-Shabab!”  Is that what happened in Kenya?

There is a lot in this article but I don’t have the time this morning, so please read the whole thing here.  Lawyers are wondering why the feds have renewed their interest in deporting the Somali criminals.  I would like to know that too!

Readers:  I’m away from the computer this morning, so if anything interesting happens send me a note at our new address:

AnnRRW@yahoo.com

The world’s most dangerous place is Somalia

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

That is the conclusion of author James Fergusson in a new book aptly titled ‘The World’s most dangerous place.’

Interesting to us is this review by Steve Weinberg at The Star Tribune in which Weinberg draws attention to Fergusson’s research in the United States, in Little Mogadishu/Minneapolis.    Emphasis below is mine.

Weinberg:

When James Fergusson, a journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland, decided to write a book about a chaotic African nation, he initially had no clue that his research would require a visit to Minneapolis.

It turns out that one of the largest populations of Somalis outside their national borders is in the Twin Cities. Some of those residents are almost surely linked to violent organizations overseas and thus might constitute a terrorist threat, according to Fergusson. He was drawn to Minneapolis in large part by the presence of Omer Abdi Mohamed, a resident who had pleaded guilty to a U.S. government charge of conspiring to recruit warriors for possible illegal activities within and outside North America.

Beyond Omer’s case, Fergusson wondered why the Twin Cities had become the destination of between 75,000 to 100,000 Somalis, especially given the frigid weather — frigid, at least, compared with the parched heat in the Horn of Africa.

Enter those Lutherans again!  Weinberg continues:

Here is part of the answer, in a fascinating paragraph written by Fergusson: Lutherans whose ancestors arrived from Scandinavia to settle Minnesota run social service agencies efficiently and generously. [With taxpayer money!—ed] “A number of voluntary Somali migrants, mostly professionals with ambitions to study or to set up businesses, had been drawn to the Twin Cities even before the [Somali] civil war by the abundance of jobs and social housing on offer, at a time when the local economy was conspicuously booming. Word soon spread of the good life in Minnesota, making the state the destination of choice when the main refugee exodus began in the early 1990s.” When Fergusson visited Minneapolis, he identified “the de facto parliament of the Somali community” as a Starbucks coffee shop just off Riverside Avenue.

While in the Twin Cities, Fergusson concluded that the large refugee population consists mostly of hardworking Somalis. But he demonstrates that the recruitment of suicide bombers has occurred in the Twin Cities, and that various gangs of Somali refugees have shattered the peace of the Twin Cities from time to time.

I do hope Fergusson went beyond the notion that Somalis ‘found their way to Minneapolis.’  We have extensively chronicled how Minneapolis and increasingly elsewhere in Minnesota has been targeted for refugee resettlement by the US State Department and resettlement contractors like the US Conference of Catholic Bishops/Catholic Charities and the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services/Lutheran Social Services which are PAID to resettle them in “welcoming” cities (not so welcoming cities too!).

Here is a 2011 post we wrote explaining in some detail how the contractors brought the Somalis to Minneapolis, most didn’t find their way there!  Perhaps now they do, but when there is no serious and sustained squawking by the community as it reaches overload, the contractors just keep pouring in the refugees.  This 2011 post is daily one of our most-read posts here at RRW.