I haven’t written about Bhutanese refugees in awhile. To date, we moved over 96,000 of the Nepali people (mostly Hindu, some Buddhists) who had been expelled from Bhutan to American towns and cities.
Go here for a post which gives a little of the background about the George W. Bush era plan to help the UN clean out its camps on the border of Nepal. It was supposed to be a joint effort with many other countries, but of course we took the vast majority of them.
We said we would take 60,000 beginning in 2007, but as is always the case, we go way beyond what we told the public we would do.
Here is where they were distributed in the US (from Wrapsnet):
We have also reported on many previous occasions about the exceedingly high suicide rate in the US Bhutanese ‘community.’
It is interesting to me that many do-gooders who push refugee resettlement to America never grasp that some people cannot make the cultural shift and that pushing resettlement can actually have deadly consequences, as it did for this man.
If you go back to my early posts (see archive) on the Bhutanese resettlement, you will see that the camp dwellers initially fought like hell to not be “scattered to the four winds.”
Note that he worked in a meat processing plant! Even in Vermont, refugees work in slaughterhouses! Why didn’t that make him happy?
….and was wearing a hijab, thus making her an even greater target for trigger happy police.
Here we go again! As Leo Hohmannsays, here comes the Council on American Islamic Relations and the mental illness excuse! What I want to know is, if so many of these violent Muslim refugees have mental problem, why weren’t they screened out in the super-duper screening process that Obama’s State Department/DHS claimed we had? Hohmann’s post opens with this:
Police face backlash after officers shoot, kill knife-wielding Somali refugee near Atlanta
CAIR Georgia Executive Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell: The hijab could have caused police to react with less restraint! Photo and bio: http://www.cairgeorgia.com/about-us/394-executive-director-edward-ahmed-mitchell.html
How many times has a Muslim migrant attacked innocent Americans and the Council on American-Islamic Relations or some other advocacy group swoops in to suggest that the attack was a result of mental illness?
~It happened in the mall stabbings in St. Cloud, Minnesota, carried out by Somali refugee Dahir Adan in 2016 [when CAIR suggested Adan’s insomnia may have caused him to snap]
~It happened last summer when another Somali refugee threatened the townspeople of Faribault, Minnesota, with a knife.
~It happened after the Ohio State University car and knife attack in 2016 by Somali refugee Abdul Razak Ali Artan.
~It happened in the attack that killed 14 Americans in San Bernardino in December 2015 by Syed Farooq and his migrant fiancée.
~It happened in Chattanooga in July 2015 when five U.S. servicemen were shot and killed by Kuwaiti-American Mohammad Abdulaziz.
~And when Amina Ali Ahra, aka Iesha Ibrahim, a female refugee from Somalia, attacked and beat a Lawrenceville, Georgia, woman and her daughter with their own flagpole in 2016 the FBI refused to charge Ibrahim with a hate crime because it said she was mentally impaired.
Well, it happened again on Saturday, April 28, in Johns Creek, a suburb of Atlanta, where Somali refugee Shukri Ali Said, 36, was threatening her family members with a knife.
Read all of the details (with links) of what happened by clicking here.
…..and you, the US taxpayer, will be paying for it! (or else!) An estimated 1000-2000 of the coming 10,000 Syrians could need (costly!) mental health treatment!
Here is the AP story at ABC News(emphasis is mine):
For the thousands of Syrian refugees expected to arrive in the U.S. in coming months, the first order of business will be securing the basics — health care, jobs, education and a safe home.
But what organizations helping resettle them might not be prepared for, and what refugees themselves might be in denial about, is the need to treat the mental scars of war, experts said.
[….]
Organizations that work with refugees said it’s too early to assess the full scope of arrivals’ mental health needs. But experts say it’s important to keep tabs on the emotional state of new arrivals, since symptoms may not appear until months or years later — well after most resettlement support services have ended. [It is all on the community then which must come up with the $$$ for all of this care!—ed]
The U.S. has taken about 2,500 Syrian refugees since the conflict there began in 2011, including about 100 in Massachusetts. The Obama administration expects to take in at least 10,000 in the federal fiscal year that began in October. Experts estimate 10 to 20 percent of incoming Syrians will have war-related psychological problems warranting treatment.
At about two years after arrival reality hits and mental health problems appear according to Dr. Richard Mollica at Harvard. Photo and bio: http://www.williamjames.edu/about/profiles/faculty/richard-mollica.cfm
“They’re in the honeymoon phase,” said Richard Mollica, a psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School who has spent decades working with torture and genocide victims. “In the first year, they’re so happy to be out of that situation. They feel something wonderful is going to happen in America.
And “wonderful” doesn’t come and that is where I believe the mental health crisis begins!
The streets are not paved with gold, they have to work (find work!) and the mythical city of El Doradois just that, a myth. Many will want to go home.
“It’s only about two years later or so when there’s a mental health crisis,” he said. “It’s at that point that reality hits and they really need a lot of mental health care.”
And get this! If you don’t take care of their mental health they could turn into Islamic terrorists!
Failure to address them could lead some refugees to withdraw from society, increasing the chances they’ll be drawn to extremist groups, Arnetz [Michigan professor] warned.
Some good news! Syrians are only trickling into the US and at the present rate, Obama won’t get to that magic 10,000 by September 30th (the end of the 2016 fiscal year). See numbers (so far) here. I’m guessing the securityscreening is going very slowly.
For ambitious readers we have 289 previous posts in our ‘health issues’ category (refugees have a lot of health issues!).
Since we are on the subject of the costly health needs of Syrian refugees (Netherlands in previous post), here is some news about how Canadian mental health providers are getting ready for the huge influx of mostly Syrian Muslims expected to be settled from coast to coast in the coming year.
From michaelcolborne.com:
Doctors in a handful of clinics across Canada are preparing for the arrival of many thousands of refugees fleeing the war in Syria. So far only a few have arrived, but more are expected as part of the new government’s commitment to settle 25,000 Syrian refugees through 2016.
Dr. Meb Rashid co-founded Canadian Doctors for Refugee Care. Photo from twitter: https://twitter.com/mebrashid
“The most significant part of our practice is dealing with mental health issues,” says Dr. Meb Rashid, who works at the Crossroads Clinic, a refugee clinic in Toronto, and is currently working with Lifeline Syria to establish clinics for the expected influx of Syrian refugees in Toronto.
[….]
Meeting the health needs of thousands of Syrian refugees will not be easy, Rashid admits. “It’s really the scope of this. If we’re looking at tens of thousands of people, we haven’t seen those types of numbers before.” As well, he and other doctors are concerned that the current lack of full health coverage for privately sponsored refugees under the Interim Federal Health Program will make it difficult to meet Syrian refugees’ health needs.
Despite this, Rashid and his colleagues across the country, from Toronto to Vancouver to Halifax — where a new clinic for refugees has just opened — say they are ready for the challenge. “We’re starting to ramp things up,” says Rashid.
Continue readinghere.
New readers might be interested to know that we have an entire category entitled ‘health issues’ where we have 284 previous posts about refugee and immigrant health archived.
All of our posts on Canada are archived here (159 previous posts!).
German people welcome refugees (health problems and all!). For how long?
This is a long article, carefully written to avoid scaring the heck out of readers, but you can imagine the challenge of dealing with hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers flooding the German health care system. Screening for communicable diseases is at the top of the list for new arrivals, but many don’t get screening for weeks or even longer.
I’ll let you read it yourself. However, here is one particularly concerning subject, and one we have here in the US as well—-refugees have mental health problems. And, these are the people Germany is counting on to be the worker-bees of the future who will take care of the aging German population?
From Health Affairs Blog:
In the immediate future, efforts to reduce bureaucratic hurdles need to continue; however, it is just as important is to address the linguistic, cultural, and societal barriers to access. This is a particular concern for ensuring proper mental health care. Studies show that more than half of the asylum-seekers and refugees arriving in Germany have mental health problems, especially minors. And institutional accommodation and restricted economic opportunities have been associated with worse mental health of refugees. While mental health services are available, and there are specialised services for traumatised refugees, uptake is low due to low awareness and cultural barriers. Other issues that need urgent attention are providing adequate shelter to avoid crowding and ensuring good hygienic condition.
About the photo: It is here at Snopes where the Leftwing site tries to dispel a story making the rounds about a woman doctor working in Germany. Read it and decide for yourself if it rings true, or not.
More ‘Invasion of Europe’ news is here. Click herefor our complete archive on Germany. And, if you’ve never seen it, we have an entire category on ‘health issues’ (282 previous posts).
