“I haven’t felt the commitment and the attention I was expecting.” [From the Biden Administration]
Angie Plummer, Ohio resettlement contractor
Hope all of you had a good Thanksgiving with your friends and family. No promises, but I will try to post from time to time so I won’t have too big a gap in my now nearly 15 year running catalog of ills surrounding the US Refugee Admissions Program.
Reminder: there are over 9,000 posts archived here at RRW and the search function works pretty well. Choose a few key words and see what is here.
You surely know by now that the tens of thousands of Afghan evacuees are being treated like legitimate refugees and have swamped the refugee program causing complaints to surface from other ethnic groups and from contractors*** who do not want the Afghans to completely wipe out the chances of others, like the Somali starring in thisColumbus Dispatchreport, getting their extended family members into the US.
Biden’s pause on refugee resettlement worries agencies, advocates in Greater Columbus
Aden Hassan wants his mother here. He blamed Trump for not moving faster and now he blames Biden.
Biden has paused the regular resettlement program in order to accommodate the Afghans, many of whom have not been vetted and likely will never be legal refugees.
Columbus is a top Somali resettlement target city
Angie Plummer, executive director of local refugee resettlement agency Community Refugee and Immigration Services (CRIS) [CRIS is a subcontractor of Church World Service—ed], which resettled Hassan, said there’s no reason why Afghans and refugees from other countries can’t be helped simultaneously.
“When we were asked do we want to pause (refugee) arrivals, I said no because it’s apples and oranges,” Plummer said. “We don’t think that it’s necessary. It’s not a competition for resources to have these folks come.”
[….]
“I fear there’s only so much bandwidth and that it’s shifted to focusing on Afghans, and we can’t take our eyes off these other crises that are happening,” Plummer said. “We want to serve the Afghans well, but we also feel committed to serving those people whose cases we started and who got the shaft under Trump.”
In light of the pause, refugee resettlement advocates are lamenting the fact that Biden did not prioritize rebuilding the refugee resettlement program as soon as he was inaugurated in January.
Plummer said she is concerned because the program’s capacity is still being rebuilt after Trump’s administration decimated its infrastructure.
“Any stopping and starting creates pains,” Plummer said. “I worry about that. Even if their intentions are to try to exempt out certain groups, we should be trying to ramp it back up and help this machinery work again.”
[….]
“I haven’t felt the commitment and the attention I was expecting,” Plummer said. “I really thought some wrongs would be righted and they haven’t been, and it feels like they’ve been shuffled down the road.”
Meredith Owen, Church World Service
The fact that the administration hasn’t prioritized restoring resettlement capacity sooner makes Meredith Owen, director of policy and advocacy at the national refugee resettlement agency Church World Service (CWS), furious.
“The problem is you never want to undermine or harm one refugee population in the name of another,” Owen said.
But, that is exactly what is happening. Muslim Afghans are apparently Biden’s priority. There is much more, visit theColumbus Dispatch for additional details.
*** For new readers, these are the nine major federal resettlement agencies which have contracts with the US State Department and the Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Refugee Resettlement to place refugees (find housing!) and get them signed up for their welfare benefits, their medical care and get the refugee kids in school.
If you have an agency working near you and it doesn’t have the same name as one of the nine below, check its website carefully and you will most likely find it is a subcontractor of one of the nine (like CRIS is a CWS subcontractor).
Poor mouthing….
Know that when they “got the shaft” under the Trump Administration they were fundraising on their plight something they can’t do now that their guy is in charge of the taxpayer portion of their money stream.
Governor Paul LePage once quipped: “I was Donald Trump before Donald Trump became popular!”
The Republican Governor who attempted to stem the flow of Maine taxpayer- funded welfare to literally the world says he will run again in 2022. If he wins it would end 4 years of Democrat control of a state trending blue in recent years.
‘Working People Vote Republican’: Former Gov. Paul LePage Launches Comeback Bid in Maine
Former Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) announced Monday that he would run once again in 2022 as he seeks to serve as the state’s governor, a role he previously held for two terms.
LePage said in a campaign announcement:
Today I am officially starting my campaign for Governor of Maine. Maine faces several challenges and we must work toward building a better future based on individual liberty, fiscal responsibility, and an economy which empowers everyone including our rural communities.
“We simply cannot continue to look to Washington, DC for bailouts, subsidies, or leadership,” he added. “We must ensure Maine is a great place to raise a family for generations to come, for all Mainers regardless of background.”
Nevermind that it is the United Nations that halted refugee travel due to the Chinese virus crisis.
Refugee contractors are trying to “chart a path forward” as refugee admissions this year are set to be the lowest they have ever been since Senators Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden and the peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter, created the US Refugee Admissions Program that became law in 1980.
But, oh how they love their sob stories featuring poor suffering families seeking to be reunited.
Sob story design and promotion is one of the Leftwing media’s greatest skills!
Sorry, no sympathy from me for a mother who leaves her INFANT daughter in a hellhole refugee camp to come to America with a supposedly sick husband expecting then to have the US government fly her daughter to her at a later date.
A family was set to be reunited after nearly four years apart. Then coronavirus struck.
(CNN) More than three years ago, Deman Aman Abshir, a Somali national, faced an impossible choice: leave behind her newborn daughter to come to the United States or watch as her husband’s health worsened.
She left behind an infant daughter, now three years old, to hop on that plane with a supposedly sick hubby. She had another choice!
Abshir and her husband, fleeing deteriorating conditions in Somalia, worried that any delay in leaving could hinder their chances to resettle in the US and get medical treatment, she said. So they left.
[….]
In 2011, amid an ongoing civil war in the country, Abshir decided to leave Somalia and fled to a refugee camp in Ethiopia.
“Life was hard and there was a lot of struggle,” she said.
Over the years, the health of Abshir’s husband, Mohamed Hussen Ibrahim, who was being treated for a neurologic condition that prevented him from walking and doing other daily activities, started to worsen.
His “neurologic condition” apparently didn’t prevent some daily activities!
And, he sure must have gotten some magical medical treatment in the US (on your dime!) because he got a job, but there is not one word in this story about his diagnosis, treatment or recovery.
In late 2016, more than a year after their case had been approved, the couple was ready to depart to the United States.
“Three different situations happened at the same time: my husband’s situation got worse; we had our newborn; we had the process approved,” Abshir recalled. “It was 2016 so Trump was getting elected, so we knew if we had to delay, the opportunity would never come so we had to choose sacrifice to be with our child or leave for the US with my husband to get better treatment.”
She had another choice: Let her husband go on to America (so you could pay for his medical care) and she could stay in Africa with her INFANT daughter!
Now we are expected to believe she is so emotional over the separation that she can’t work!
Abshir’s four-month-old daughter had not been part of the original case, therefore adding her would delay their departure and postpone obtaining medical treatment for her husband. Abshir called the decision to leave Nimco behind “painful,” recounting the difficulty she had in keeping jobs in the US because she was overwhelmed with emotions.
Plummer is described as the family’s lawyer, but she also happens to be the Executive Director of CRIS a Columbus, Ohio based subcontractor of Church World Service, facts not reported by CNN. https://www.crisohio.org/about-us/
Since then, Plummer has tried to get Nimco’s case approved to reunite with the family. The nearly four-year uphill battle appeared to be reaching a conclusion when the coronavirus pandemic shut down arrivals.
[….]
Abshir, whose husband also lost his job because of the pandemic [“also”? weren’t we just old she couldn’t hold a job due to being emotionally distraught?—ed] has remained hopeful, but extended separations often weigh on families.
[He had a job, wow! He must have recovered from his serious health issue and inability to walk.—ed]
CNN continues….
“I see these cases and it’s joyful when a child reunites with a parent and it’s all wonderful superficially but you can’t get that time back. The child doesn’t know their parents … just the psychological impact to the family for as long as the delay continues,” Plummer said. [Taxpayer-funded counseling ahead?—ed]
All of that is to set the tone for the rest of the article that goes on to bash the Trump Administration.
We do learn that no date has been set to resume refugee resettlement.
Refugee arrivals to the US were suspended as of March 19, with the exception of certain emergency cases, a State Department spokesperson told CNN.
No date has been provided on when admissions will resume.The spokesperson said State “will seek to resume refugee arrivals when it is safe and logistically feasible to do so, subject to any travel restrictions in place at that time.”
I had been wondering if Minneapolis’s large population of African refugees had joined the throngs of rioters and looters. It seems they have.
It is more proof that the citizens of Minnesota’s St. Louis Countywho just last week protested against refugees for their towns and cities are right—diversity destroys the social fabric of communities.
Feel the rage! From the refugees? Or, from American taxpayers who for decades have been paying billions of their hard-earned dollars to bring, dare I say it, a bunch of ingrates who now say we are racists and they fear for their sons?
I suspect you have one answer for them!
From Channel News Asia (yes, an international news site painting white America as the root of all evil):
In Minneapolis, African refugees see American dream in tatters
(Their dream in tatters? What about our dreams for the country we love?)
MINNEAPOLIS: African refugees living in Minneapolis were already struggling with their “American dream” when George Floyd died in police custody.
Now their dream is in tatters and they have joined their African American “brothers” in the streets to protest racism in their adopted homeland. [Cut the B.S. with the mushy “adopted homeland” lingo. They didn’t come here because they love America!—ed]
[….]
The state of Minnesota, where Minneapolis is located, has the highest percentage of refugees per inhabitant in the whole country, with two percent of the US population but 13 per cent of its refugees, according to the most recent census.
Among them are a large number of people from the Horn of Africa – Ethiopians and Somalis – whose presence in the marches was noticeable because of the colourful robes worn by the women.
[….]
Deka Jama, a 24-year-old woman who came to the United States from Somalia in 2007, showed up with friends, all of them veiled, to protest the discrimination that met them in their new homeland.
“We thought that everyone would be equal, that we would not be judged by religion, by colour, by our dresses. That’s not how we were welcomed,” she told AFP.
She feels a close affinity to African Americans, many of them descended from slaves and who have been Americans for generations.
There is “something connects us,” she said. “We are all dehumanised, regardless of our cultural differences. We have to be here for them.”
Minnesota’s Somali community has a source of pride, though, in Ilhan Omar, a 37-year-old born in Mogadishu who was elected to Congress in 2018.
[….]
“So many people know a social and economic neglect,” Omar said on Sunday.
According to Minnesota Compass, a website that tracks the state’s demographics, families from Africa are particularly hard hit.
In 2016, Obama was President, he sure didn’t do much for African poverty in America (or was that part of the plan?)!
In 2016, 12 per cent of the population of Minnesota was living under the poverty line, but that number rose to 31 per cent among the Ethiopian community and 55 per cent among Somalis.
Immigrant-owned businesses destroyed too! And, yet, it is all about racist white America. Have they no eyes to see or brains to think?
That has meant that for many refugees, an important facet of the American dream — social mobility – has broken down over time.
And the riots that have followed some protests have not helped their plight, since some of the looted businesses were immigrant-owned.
Here is an idea! If so many live in poverty, then we need to stop importing them. Clearly there isn’t enough work! Clearly they are ungrateful.
Frankly more angry demanding refugees, like these Minnesota Africans, will be the death knell of America.
By the way…..
Where were all these angry Somalis (and their African-American “brothers”) marching in the streets demanding justice forJustine Damondwhen one of their people, a Somali police officer, killed an unarmed white woman in ‘Little Mogadishu’ in the summer of 2017?
That police killing didn’t send white mobs into the streets to demand justice by committing violence, and to rob and steal. Civilized people respect our legal system—the legal system that is the bulwark of a successful and prosperous country.
Somali refugees have been in Arizona for more than 5 years, but their English language skills are lacking it seems according to data collected on the distribution of Coronavirus informational videos.
Videos in Somali are the most watched of ten videos produced by refugee advocates to teach them how to avoid spreading the virus.
Produced In 10 Languages For Arizona Refugees, COVID-19 Safety Videos Reach 70,000
The official language of the African nation Burundi is named Kirundi. Julie Ngiriye speaks it and other languages, which is why the social worker and care coordinator helped make an informational video about the coronavirus for Burundian refugees living in Arizona and beyond.
“I know the struggles they go through for having going through the same struggles myself,” she said.
In the video, Ngiriye explained how to wash your hands. She also talked about social distancing, not sharing plates or food utensils, and sneezing into your elbow. The goal, she said, is to inform.
“How it is really pandemic, not a simple disease,” she said.
The video is one of 10 produced in different languages. They feature Ngiriye, staff called cultural health navigators, and a doctor at Valleywise Health’s Pediatric Refugee Clinic.
“It is actually the best medium to be able to reach the majority of them in the community,” Ngiriye said, and noted that many refugees don’t read or write.
The doctor said shared apartments, jobs with no sick leave, and limited child care options make refugees especially vulnerable to COVID-19. As the coronavirus started to sweep through Arizona, state officials and Valleywise Health joined forces to make safety videos in languages like Swahili, Karen and Arabic.
In less than a month, the 10 videos have been watched on YouTube about 70,000 times. The video done in Somali has the most views. A local leader said it’s because most of the Somali community has been here for years. Making sure newer arrivals also get the message is the hard part.
Refugee contractors are trying to “chart a path forward” as refugee admissions this year are set to be the lowest they have ever been since Senators Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden and the peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter, created the US Refugee Admissions Program that became law in 1980.
