I find it interesting to examine Wrapsnet’s ‘Processing Country’ maps when they are updated at the end of each month. We don’t know exactly who is being processed through each country (these are not necessarily the countries of origin of the refugees being placed in your towns), however we can make educated guesses. Kenya for example….
UNHCR camp (Dadaab) in Kenya where Somalis wait for a ticket to your town. This is why Kenya is the #2 processing country for refugees arriving in the US.
Since Kenya, considered a safe country that has hosted huge United Nations camps primarily for Somalis, is the second largest processing country, we can assume that we are working hard to help the UN clean out camps like Dadaab and that large numbers of Somalis are arriving from the camps Kenya would like to close! The Kenyan government believes Islamic terrorists are harbored in the UN camps. In the first three months of the present fiscal year (Oct. 1, 2016-December 31, 2016) we admitted 25,671 refugees, a much higher number than I have seen for the last 10 years and in keeping withreports like this onefrom Rochester, NY where the resettlement contractor says they can’t manage the huge flow coming in.
Of the 25,671, Iraqis account for 3,624, Syrians 3,566 and Somalis 3,488 (all terror producing countries).
If Donald Trump doesn’t pause the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program when he takes office, and this rate of entry continues, we will have the highest years for Syrians and Somalis (in 30 years for Somalis!) entering the US.
So here (below) is the latest ‘Processing country’ map (I did not reproduce the South American portion, but know that we are processing small numbers in from there).
Not obvious on this map, and not in the top ten, but noteworthy are the island nation of Malta (in the EU) that sent us 170 illegal alien boat people (calling them refugees) who landed on Malta in just those three months. They are the European Union’s problem, not ours! I have written dozens of posts on this practice that began in the Bush Administration! See here.
Also maddening is the fact that we are doing the same thing in South Africa where we are taking that country’s illegal aliens (such as the unwanted Somalis) to the US as refugees. In the first three months we took in 338 from S. Africa. These are not persecuted whites we are admitting! South Africa is supposed to be the welcoming RAINBOW NATION, so why must we take their rejected asylum seekers? Why are their immigration problems ours?
There are so many reforms Congress could be making even if they don’t have the stomach for a complete rewrite of this program, including disallowing such practices as we see going on with S. Africa and Malta!
Here is the ‘Processing Country’ map and note that in many cases these are Muslim countries we are processing from.
Here are the Top Ten Processing countries (remember we don’t know which nationalities are being processed in these locations):
http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/protection/resettlement/575836267/unhcr-projected-global-resettlement-needs-2017.html
Nayla Rush at the Center for Immigration Studies has done the work for us and analyzed a new UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) report which makes suggestions for reform that basically increases the number of migrants (aka refugees) that would move from the third world to the first.
Watch for it! They will be pushing for “alternative pathways” because they know that the refugee system they have been relying on is crumbling. Of course, one option in that reform (in my opinion) should be to sever our connection with the UNHCR altogether and choose our own refugees (and how many!) and thus leave the UN out of our immigration business!
Wouldn’t it be great if Trump UN Ambassador Nikki Haley could preside over the process of severing our ties to the UNHCR! (I can dream!)
Here is Rush’s opening paragraph:
The latest United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) resettlement assessment report summarizes its 2015 activities and introduces its 2017 strategic direction and needs.1 At a time when refugee protection is addressed on a global scale, the report, “UNHCR Projected Global Resettlement Needs 2017”, provides us with insightful information about submission categories and acceptance rates, top resettlement countries of origin and destination, and more. It also suggests how badly in need of reform the entire refugee system is. [Of course the UN’s idea of reform and ours is very different!—ed]
Lesson! When the Department of State welcomes an ethnic group to America expect the resettlement to be larger and longer than they initially said it would be.
We have followed the process of cleaning out UNHCR camps in Nepal of Bhutanese refugees ever since the Bush Administration said: ‘come on in’ we well take 60,000. This resettlement was planned to last for five years (as we now approach ten!). I suspect it was UNHCR Antonio Guterres (now Secretary General of the UN) who talked the Bush State Department in to this!
***Update*** More news here: UN says the movement of over 100,000 third worlders to first world countries was a great success.
The so-called “Bhutanese” are people of Nepali ethnicity that were pushed out of Bhutan when the Bhutanese government basically said, we want Bhutan for Bhutanese and you Nepali people who have moved in here for decades need to leave. To learn more about what happened, check out wikipedia, here.
When we began posting on this group of mostly Hindu people back in 2007, most did not want to be resettled anywhere but back in Bhutan. And, obviously Nepal wasn’t welcoming their kinsmen home.
So, how did this become our problem?
Why did the US decide to resettle tens of thousands and scatter them around America? Frankly, with our economic muscle certainly we could have prevailed on either Bhutan or Nepal to work this out! Or, did we simply acquiesce to pressure from the United Nations? And, was the refugee industry looking for more paying clients and big business looking for cheap labor?
So here we are almost ten years in. We said we would resettle 60,000 and so I checked Wrapsnet.org (2007 to December 15, 2016) to see exactly how many we have taken since 2007. The answer is 91,713! But according to this article in the Katmandu Post we will be closing the program in 2017 (I guess to make more room for the Muslim Syrians, Iraqis and Somalis).
For ambitious readers, visit our archive on the Bhutanese by clicking here. Some have done well in America, but for years they had an extremely high suicide rate that worried the resettlement industry. One of many morals to this story is that when the US State Department gives you a number that will be resettled, expect the resettlement to be much larger and much longer than they said it would be!
Many forced to choose resettlement against their will!
Here is the story from before Christmas from theKatmandu Post(notice that many are still holding out hope that they will go home to Bhutan):
Dec 15, 2016- More than 100,000 Bhutanese refugees have been resettled in various countries under the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugee (UNHCR) third country resettlement programme. But some the remaining refugees in eastern Tarai are still putting their feet down for repatriation.
Around 2,000 of the remaining 11,000 refugees, put up at various camps in Jhapa and Morang, are refusing the third country resettlement and willing to return their own homeland in Bhutan, according to a source at the UNHCR. The repatriation campaign has come closer to end after the UN body’s resettlement programme. The repatriation campaign has been weakened as the leaders spearheading repatriation themselves opted for third country resettlement. And the majority of the remaining refugees are also in resettlement process, giving up hope of repatriation.
Bhampa Rai, Balaram Poudel, among other refugee leaders, are still campaigning for repatriation, though. They blamed the government of Nepal for its failure to take any initiatives for their cause. “Nepal could neither convince Bhutan to take back refugees nor pressure the international community over the issue,” said Rai, claiming that hundreds of refugees had been forced to choose third country resettlement against their will.
[….]
According to the UNHCR, 107,000 refugees are already resettled in various host countries, including the US, Australia and Canada. Another batch of around 9,000 refugees are in the process of resettlement, officials at the UNHCR said.
The UNHCR’s third country resettlement programme will come to an end in 2017.
So where are they in America? (Or, at least where were they originally resettled). Map is from Wrapsnet.org. States cut off in my screenshot are Hawaii (0), Alaska (148) and Florida (671)
Here are the top ten states where the Bhutanese were resettled: Inds stands for Individuals. One of the things I’ve always wondered about is this: The UN was so anxious to close these camps (to deny these people a ‘right of return’) while they never had any interest in resettling the Palestinians around the Arab world, but has kept the Palestinian camps (really cities) open for over 60 years. I’m actually not wondering. I really do know the answer! It was (and is) to keep a thorn in Israel’s side.
Of course Obama would love him, they are both socialists who believe in distributing the world’s refugees throughout wealthy western countries. (And redistributing your wealth to the third world!)
U.S. President Barack Obama (R) delivers remarks to reporters as he welcomes U.N. Secretary General-designate Antonio Guterres (C), of Portugal, in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, U.S. December 2, 2016. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst http://mobile.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSKBN13R23Z
Yesterday Obama welcomed Antonio Guterres to the White House, here at Reuters:
U.S. President Barack Obama on Friday said he was confident that United Nations secretary general-elect Antonio Guterres would be an effective leader of the international organization.
“He has an extraordinary reputation,” Obama told reporters ahead of his meeting at the White House with Guterres, a former prime minister of Portugal.
[….]
Obama and Guterres were expected to discuss cooperation between the United States and the United Nations.
Guterres said he was ready to forge a relationship with U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s administration.
He said he was totally committed “to work closely with the United States in the present administration” and “also with the next administration.”
Trump, who takes office Jan. 20, has named South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who has relatively little foreign policy experience, as the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Continue reading here.
We will try to stay on top of this, becauseas I said here, Nikki Haley has demonstrated weakness when it comes to refugees being admitted to the US. Will she succumb to the arguments Guterres will surely make: Gov. Haley your family benefited from immigration to America, are you going to deny that same privilege to _____ (pick an ethnic group!). And, I have a suspicion that Senator Lindsey (Open Borders) Graham will be hovering behind the curtain.
As UN High Commissioner for Refugees for the past ten years, we naturally followed Guterres’ career, go here for more.
Heard him speak in Washington, here, in 2015.
All over the country, as we have been reporting, refugee advocates are having pow-wows and crying sessions about what Donald Trump might do about refugees on January 21st.
Many of those advocates have gotten comfortable, and felt safe in their jobs, through several Presidents including Bush, Clinton, Bush and Obama, but all that is expected to change.
This is a story fromNew Hampshire Public Radio (Clinton country) where experts try to predict what is coming.
The first quotes are from Chris George from the New Haven, CT resettlement agency. We told you about him here last week. He is hoping we still take in Obama’s last wish—110,000 this fiscal year. Asst. Professor Ruxandra Paul (Amherst): Trump on solid ground to cut flow of refugees, but she worries that other countries will follow suit. However, one thing never mentioned is that we are far and away the world leader in PERMANENTLY resettling refugees, most countries, including most European countries, do not admit permanent refugees.
Then we hear from a law professor who argues that we have given Presidents too much power. As far as the Refugee Act of 1980goes, the crafters of the law (all Dems) gave the President power. Congress was expected to “consult” and weigh in, but that body has until very recently ignored its role.
(Only Senator Sessions held a required hearing on Obama’s plan, the House has been silent under Rep. Trey Gowdy’s chairmanship of the immigration subcommittee.) New Hampshire Public Radio:
“A president can exercise the highest level of authority, when it comes to border control or foreign policy,” says Sudha Setty from Western New England University Law. “So in terms of setting that refugee ceiling for future fiscal years, future President Trump does have the authority to set that ceiling very low.”
Setty said Trump’s freedom to exercise sweeping decisions, like banning Muslims from entering the U.S. continues a disturbing trend of the last two administrations.
“The lesson of the last 15 years has been that we have given the president a tremendous amount of power. And we have not put into place a lot of accountability measures when it comes to anything that is deemed to be national security or terrorism or national security related, and that’s not changing any time soon.”
Next up is another assistant professorwith a little nugget that is useful. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees gets $1.5 BILLION a year from us (and not mentioned here is the fact that the UN is choosing most of our refugees).
Amherst College Political Scientist Ruxandra Paul is watching both sides of the Atlantic right now. She says if U.S. leadership changes direction on its decades long commitment to refugee resettlement, more global uncertainty is sure to come.
“Donald Trump has been suggesting that the US has contributed too much and that allies from western Europe are not covering their share of the burden.”
Last year the U.S. gave the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) more than $1.5 billion. The European Union next in line, followed by several European countries, gave in the hundreds of millions. [We gave a half a billion here just in July—ed]
From a legal perspective President Donald Trump will be on solid ground if he chooses to lower the refugee ceiling. If he does, Paul says, it’s possible other countries will do likewise.
Nikki Haley?
In light of that bit of information, that the UNHCR gets $1.5 billion a year from us, is Nikki Haley going to be tough enough and would she be able to deal with the refugee issuewhich The News & Observer, a North Carolina paper, says is one of four major UN issues she will have to confront?
Will Senator Lindsey (Open Borders!) Graham be coaching from behind the curtain?
Ambassador to the UN is not a little out-of-the-way job and will depend greatly on who Trump picks for the Secretary of State which she will be reporting to! Placing Haley there is not putting her in a place to simply keep enemies close. A deputy assistant job in the Labor Department would have been a better fit. If Trump does go hardline on refugees and wants the UN funding cut would Haley resign and cause him a PR embarrassment down the road? I think she would (and the likes of Senator Lindsey Graham will be cheering her on from the sidelines as they prepare for 2020)!
Trump wants to end Muslim migration to the U.S. until terrorist threats are addressed, banning refugees fleeing violence in countries like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. This policy directly violates international law, which stipulates that other countries have an obligation to take in people seeking refuge from persecution in their home country and cannot bar refugees based on origin. [Trump (we hope) will follow US law which gives him the power to limit refugee flow, not international law!—ed]
Although Haley opposes Trump’s outright Muslim ban, she was among 30 governors who demanded Syrian refugees not be resettled in their states, citing security concerns. A spokeswoman for the governor said last year that until refugees can be properly vetted “it’s not appropriate for them to be sent to South Carolina or any other state.” [Just words and they all knew it!—ed]
New UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, is, from our point of view, the worst possible UN leader they could have chosen.
Refugees are not allowed into the country until they pass a series of background and health checks, a process that can take up to two years. Governors can’t legally stop refugees from being resettled in their states. [For the umpteenth time, the Syrian screening has been reduced to 3 months and we do admit refugees with TB and other diseases.—ed]
Incoming U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres is likely to resist any American efforts to dismantle refugee programs. He formerly served as the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and is a strong advocate for wealthy countries doing their fair share to help the most vulnerable. He will take office Jan. 1.
This last makes me wonder (again) whether the Trump transition team has any idea of what they are up against at the UN and how those of us who voted for Trump feel about the ‘world body.’ Endnote: If you were digesting your Thanksgiving meal and didn’t read my post last night, here it is. Islamists say their long game is to take America down through immigration and out-breeding us!
