Pew: Christians still make up most of US immigrant population, but Muslim share is growing

No worries!  Only a quarter of a million US Muslims say violence against civilians in the name of Islam may sometimes be justified!

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life came out with a new study just yesterday about the religious make-up and size of the mostly legal immigrant population in the US.

As you read through this ponder these facts (I’ve rounded the numbers):

~ The US population is around 315 million.

~Pew says the US Muslim population as of 2011 was 2.75 million.

~We are adding roughly 1 million immigrants a year (for the past 20 years) and 100,000 of them are Muslim.

~Christians make up the largest share, but the share of Muslims and Hindus is growing.

Here are some interesting segments of Pew’s conclusions (I’ve highlighted the parts that interest me):

Over the past 20 years, the United States has granted permanent residency status to an average of about 1 million immigrants each year. These new “green card” recipients qualify for residency in a wide variety of ways – as family members of current U.S. residents, recipients of employment visas, refugees and asylum seekers, or winners of a visa lottery – and they include people from nearly every country in the world. But their geographic origins gradually have been shifting. U.S. government statistics show that a smaller percentage come from Europe and the Americas than did so 20 years ago, and a growing share now come from Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East-North Africa region.

With this geographic shift, it is likely that the religious makeup of legal immigrants also has been changing. The U.S. government, however, does not keep track of the religion of new permanent residents. As a result, the figures on religious affiliation in this report are estimates produced by combining government statistics on the birthplaces of new green card recipients over the period between 1992 and 2012 with the best available U.S. survey data on the religious self-identification of new immigrants from each major country of origin.  [US refugee program does track religious affiliation, they just don't make the information public.---ed]

While Christians continue to make up a majority of legal immigrants to the U.S., the estimated share of new legal permanent residents who are Christian declined from 68% in 1992 to 61% in 2012. Over the same period, the estimated share of green card recipients who belong to religious minorities rose from approximately one-in-five (19%) to one-in-four (25%). This includes growing shares of Muslims (5% in 1992, 10% in 2012) and Hindus (3% in 1992, 7% in 2012).

More coming from Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

The geographic origins of new permanent residents have shifted markedly during the past two decades, according to U.S. government data. In 1992, a total of 41% of new permanent residents came from the Asia-Pacific region, the Middle East-North Africa region or sub-Saharan Africa. By 2012, more than half (53%) of new green card holders were from those regions.

No surprise!  Most Muslim population growth in US is coming from immigration.

The estimated number of new Muslim immigrants varies from year to year but generally has been on the rise, going from roughly 50,000 in 1992 to 100,000 in 2012. Since 2008, the estimated number of Muslims becoming U.S. permanent residents has remained at or above the 100,000 level each year. [Readers, that means that probably the biggest chunk of legal Muslim immigration is coming through our refugee and asylum programs---ed]

Between 1992 and 2012, a total of about 1.7 million Muslims entered the U.S. as legal permanent residents. That constitutes a large portion of the overall U.S. Muslim population (estimated at 2.75 million as of 2011).

Most Muslim immigrants coming from Pakistan, Iran, Bangladesh, Iraq, Somalia and Ethiopia.

The most common countries of origin among Muslim immigrants in 1992 included Pakistan, Iran and Bangladesh. Those countries, as well as Iraq, also were among the most likely birthplaces of Muslim immigrants to the U.S. in 2012.

In recent years, a higher percentage of Muslim immigrants have been coming from sub-Saharan Africa. An estimated 16% of Muslim immigrants to the U.S. in 2012 were born in countries such as Somalia and Ethiopia. In 1992, only about 5% of new Muslim immigrants came from sub-Saharan Africa.  [Whew! That means about 16,000 Somalis and Ethiopians came last year!  Higher than I thought!---ed]

Now just for fun, go to Pew’s worldwide Muslim survey last month, here.

Don’t you just love it how Pew spins this with the word ‘few’!

Few U.S. Muslims voice support for suicide bombing or other forms of violence against civilians in the name of Islam; 81% say such acts are never justified, while fewer than one-in-ten say violence against civilians either is often justified (1%) or is sometimes justified (7%) to defend Islam. Around the world, most Muslims also reject suicide bombing and other attacks against civilians. However, substantial minorities in several countries say such acts of violence are at least sometimes justified, including 26% of Muslims in Bangladesh, 29% in Egypt, 39% in Afghanistan and 40% in the Palestinian territories.

So, if we have roughly 2.75 million Muslims in the US and 8% say it’s often or sometimes justified to use suicide bombings and violence against civilians in the name of Islam, that means that 220,000 American Muslims think violence against civilians is justified (someone check my math, maybe I have too many zeros!).  Ahhhhh!

I’m confident (aren’t you?) that when we take immigrants from Egypt, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories that we are only getting those from the percentage who do not approve of violence against civilians in the name of Islam—right!

I bet there is a lot of juicy stuff in here for anyone with the patience to dissect it!

Bhutanese resettlement in America surpasses 60,000 headed to 70,000

In 2006, then Bush Assistant Secretary of State for Population Refugees and Migration, Ellen Sauerbrey, announced that the United States would begin to “clean out the [refugee] camps” in Nepal where people of Napali origin had been living since being expelled from Bhutan.  She said we would take 60,000 of the 100,000 refugees.

We have resettled over 66,000 and there is no end in sight.  In fact, one has to laugh because the camp population appears to be growing.

Some of the Bhutanese are doing well in America, others are not.  Type ‘Bhutanese’ into our search function for many reports on how they are faring around the country.  One problem that has become apparent is that the Bhutanese have a very high suicide rate.

From UNHCR:

KATHMANDU, Nepal, April 26 (UNHCR) – The resettlement of refugees from Bhutan reached a major milestone this week, with 100,000 people having been referred for resettlement from Nepal to third countries since the programme began in 2007. Nearly 80,000 of them have started their new lives in eight different countries – an important step towards resolving one of the most protracted refugee situations in Asia.

[.....]

The acceptance rate of UNHCR’s referrals in Nepal by resettlement countries is the highest in the world – at 99.4 per cent of total submissions. The United States has accepted the largest number of refugees (66,134), followed by Canada (5,376), Australia (4,190), New Zealand (747), Denmark (746), Norway (546), the Netherlands (326) and the United Kingdom (317).

The math is a little fuzzy here, or is it me?  There were 108,000 in the camps originally, 100,000 have been dispersed to the “four winds,” yet 38,100 remain to be resettled?

Of the original population of 108,000 refugees originating from Bhutan and living in Nepal, some 38,100 remain in the Sanischare and Beldangi camps in eastern Nepal. Most of them have expressed an interest in the resettlement programme.

Ellen Sauerbrey, Bush Asst. Secretary for PRM. We have to resettle them to keep them from becoming terrorists.

Controversial decision!

Sauerbrey’s original decision in 2006 was highly controversial, not so much controversial to Americans (most had no clue this was happening) who might question the wisdom of cleaning out refugee camps in the third world (especially where the refugees were in no danger) and adding to our unemployment and welfare rolls, but from a segment of the Bhutanese camp dwellers themselves.

We wrote about the camp conflicts in many posts in the first years of RRW’s existence, but here is a story from 2010 I hadn’t seen in which former GOP candidate for Governor of Maryland explains what happened.

From Inside the Bay Area:

“We all expected repatriation but it did not happen,” said Amalraj, a Jesuit priest from India. “Fifteen rounds of talks. Nothing happened. All the countries pressurized. Nothing happened.”

Then came Ellen Sauerbrey. With a few choice words delivered at a United Nations meeting four years ago, the Bush administration official triggered an end to repatriation talks and put the American dream on the minds of thousands of refugee children and their parents.

The United States would take them — up to 60,000 of the more than 100,000 Bhutanese refugees stranded in Nepal — and find homes for them in American cities and suburbs. That was the surprise message Sauerbrey brought to a meeting of diplomats in Geneva in fall 2006.

Some in the audience were stunned. Sauerbrey knew her words would put immediate pressure on other wealthy countries to act, but she did not tell many of them in advance.

Like most Americans, the former Republican state legislator from Maryland spent most of her life knowing little about the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, home to fewer than 700,000 people. That changed when President George W. Bush nominated her director of the State Department’s refugee division in 2005, brushing aside Democrats — including then-Sen. Barack Obama — who argued at hearings that Sauerbrey lacked experience for the job. She was appointed in early 2006. Bhutan quickly became a priority.

“I remember saying to some of my heads, some of my offices, we’re going to settle this,” Sauerbrey said in an interview this year. “Next year is going to be the year of Bhutan. We’re going to settle this problem.”

Sauerbrey said getting the refugees to “third countries” — someplace other than Bhutan and Nepal — was the best and only remaining solution to an intractable humanitarian crisis in the Himalayas. Bhutan refused to recognize as citizens those who fled in the early 1990s, arguing their departure was voluntary and permanent. Nepal, one of the world’s poorest countries, did not have the economic capacity to integrate them. The United Nations could not run the camps forever.

Really!  The UN could not run camps forever?  Isn’t that exactly what the UN is doing with the Palestinians.  Why isn’t the UN, after 50-60 years! not dispersing the Palestinians to the four winds?  We know why—they must remain right there as a constant thorn in the side of Israel!

Sauerbrey said in 2007, apparently about Muslim refugees, that we had to take them so they wouldn’t become terrorists, here.  Below she suggests the largely Hindu and Buddhist Bhutanese/Nepalese might turn to radicalism if we didn’t take them to your cities.

Why are these UN camps our problem?  And, with the US’s mighty economic influence, couldn’t we put some pressure on these tiny poor nations to repatriate their people?  By the way, Bhutan considered the Nepali people as illegal aliens who were diluting their ethnic population.

Observers also worried the situation in the region might grow dangerous as refugees, frustrated by years living in limbo, looked to radicalism or political violence, Sauerbrey said.

“My perspective became, we could be arguing about who’s to blame for 100 years,” Sauerbrey said. “The U.S., we’re not here trying to make political statements about who’s right or wrong. There’s a big problem, a humanitarian problem, when children are born and raised and have never seen anything but a refugee camp.”

State Department officials predict the U.S., by 2014, will be home to at least 60,000 Bhutanese refugees, more than half the total. Seven other countries, led by Canada and Australia, have accepted the rest.  [The US surpassed 60,000 by late 2012.---ed]

“When I made the statement that the U.S. was willing to take 60,000,” Sauerbrey said, “it was with the knowledge that between Canada and Australia and to a small degree, European countries, we could almost clean out the camps.”

“There were a lot of refugees who say for the first time there was a solution,” said Sauerbrey, who resigned at the end of 2007, just as the resettlement began. “There were other refugees who wanted only one solution, which was to return to Bhutan. It started a real debate.”

Violence erupted in camps largely instigated by those who objected to their people being dispersed to the four winds to live “like beggars.”

A contracting agency, the International Organization for Migration, or IOM, was met with resistance when it arrived to the town of Damak to organize the resettlement in 2007. Some refugees enthusiastically took buses into Damak to sign up for resettlement and be interviewed. Other refugees pelted those buses with stones. Families known to harbor thoughts of leaving the camps faced death threats. In one nighttime attack, assailants lobbed small explosives over the gates of the IOM office, injuring no one.

The most influential protests came from refugee political leaders and their allies in Nepal who wanted to keep the pressure on Bhutan to take the refugees back.

“Instead of pressurizing Bhutan, which violated our human rights, America initiated the resettlement process,” said Tek Nath Rizal, an exiled Bhutanese politician who now lives in Katmandu and opposes the mass resettlement to the West. “We have to go there like beggars. We cannot live in dignity.”

So when do we start cleaning out the Palestinian camps so as to stop the radicalization?

So, how many refugees did each of the contractors resettle in 2009?

As we reported here, the Office of Refugee Resettlement recently released its Annual Report to Congress for 2009 (four years late!).  To save you from going through its nearly 200 pages, I’m from time to time going to bring you some nuggets.  Already I’ve told you two place we could start cutting the bloated federal budget by cutting grants for “healthy marriages” and for “ethnic community based organizations” which are essentially little ‘Acorns’—community organizing outfits funded by you.

Wait till I tell you about those special savings accounts for refugees.  Did you know that you are putting your money into their private savings accounts laundered through non-profits?

I hope to have a couple of things for you today, including the savings accounts, here is the first.  If you go to Appendix C of the report, you can learn all about the Big Nine federal contractors who monopolize the program.  There were ten in 2009 as the State of Iowa was being phased out.

Here is the contractor and the number of refugees it brought to your towns and cities in 2009 (remember they are being paid by the head!):

Numero uno!

Church World Service:   6,602 (plus helped 10,806 Cubans and Haitians)

Episcopal Migration Ministries:  4,792

Ethiopian Community Development Council:  3,874

Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society:  2,306

International Rescue Committee:  11,547

Iowa Dept. of Human Services:  426

Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service:  10,129

US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants:  7,166

US Conference of Catholic Bishops:  22,417  (11,064 Cubans and Haitians)***

World Relief (National Association of Evangelicals):  7,264

For more on these mostly “religious” non-profits read a report at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) which I missed in March of last year, here.   Looks like in my survey of 2009, the Catholics are number 1 followed by the secular IRC, and with the Lutherans coming in at number 3.    (Although that depends on whether you count Church World Service’s Cubans and Haitians).

Says the always diplomatic CIS:

It is to the United States’ credit that our nation has, from her founding, provided a safe haven for the unjustly persecuted. However, even well-meaning efforts require accountability and should be balanced against other important, competing priorities. Without appropriate balance and oversight, helping refugees shifts from being a worthy humanitarian gesture in truly exceptional cases to an avenue for government largesse, enriching private bureaucracies while feeding public cynicism.

Readers, there is no oversight of the refugee resettlement program.

***Endnote:  The US Conference of Catholic Bishops is pouring $millions into their political immigration platform, as we learned a few days ago at the Washington Post. Are they using taxpayer money?  Remember they are paid by the head for all those refugees they are resettling.

Unemployment rate for legal refugees through the roof; contractors should oppose amnesty for illegals

But, they won’t of course.  Most of the federal refugee contractors are out stumping for so-called “comprehensive immigration reform”* which will only mean more destitute immigrants competing with refugees and Americans for jobs.

A NumbersUSA ad circulating this morning (watch it!) in opposition to Lindsey Graham and the ‘gang of eight amnesty plan’ prompted me to look at the shocking unemployment rates for LEGAL immigrant labor—refugees—in the newest stats we have from the FY 2009 Annual Report to Congress on Refugees which I mentioned here and here (food stamp use skyrocketing) yesterday.

The unemployment rate for all refugees (who wish to work and are able to work, some are too old or too sick) for FY 2009 was 50% for those arriving that year!  If you argue that things have improved since 2009, then where are the statistics?   By not producing the legally required reports for 2010, 2011, and 2012, the ORR forces us to rely on the latest statistics available.  By the way, our total number of ‘refugees’ (of all sorts) admitted in FY 2009 was 89,500.  And, we are now proposing to legalize 11 million competitors for jobs?

Shocking graphs

Look at the graph on page 95 for example.  In 2004, 60% of refugees worked an average of 44 weeks.  By 2009, only 32% of refugees were working for (get this!) an average of 14 weeks.    What this says to me is that the resettlement contractors were finding refugees any work they could get, even if it lasted only 14 weeks or less, in order to get their employment stats up.

So, tell me why do we need more immigrant labor when these poor LEGAL immigrants aren’t working?

Next time you see your Catholic priest ask him why the Catholic Church is pushing legalization of illegal immigrants while getting paid to resettle tens of thousands of refugees who will find no work and go on welfare.

* Not “comprehensive” reform anyway because it doesn’t consider the Refugee Resettlement Program.

UNHCR opens refugee pow-wow in Geneva tomorrow, plans for America’s refugees

And, they are going to be planning for America to get more Muslims.  Well, they don’t say it exactly that way, but that is the gist of it.

Here is the press briefing from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (on the “consultation”).  I wonder how many American bureaucrats and NGOs on the taxpayer’s dime have headed off on a sweet summer junket to Switzerland today?

UNHCR and its partners are meeting between Monday and Wednesday of next week in Geneva to look at ways to better help the 859,300 refugees globally for whom resettlement is the only possible solution to their plight.

The 18th Annual Tripartite Consultations on Resettlement, chaired by Australia, and bringing together representatives of resettlement countries, Non-Governmental Organizations, service providers, and UNHCR staff, has three main objectives: it will look at enhancing resettlement as a solution for refugees and as mechanism for burden sharing between countries; improving the ways in which resettlement works with a view to reducing the time taken for considering cases for resettlement; and improving reception and integration of resettled refugees.

Globally, there are just 81,000 resettlement places each year offered among some 26 States, meaning that in any year only one-in-10 persons needing resettlement will have an opportunity to be resettled.

You know what is so funny?  The Obama Administration has set its ceiling for the 2012 fiscal year at 76,000 (costing the US taxpayer $1 billion per year!), so that means the other 25 states get to resettle 5,000 among the 25 Nations (wow! 200 refugees each).

It gets even more hilarious!

Over the past five years UNHCR working with resettlement States, NGOs, and other partners has been able to use resettlement to help 330,000 refugees resume their lives. In 2011 UNHCR submitted 92,000 refugees to countries for resettlement, and 61,649 refugees departed with UNHCR’s help to 22 countries.

In 2011, the US resettled 56,424 of the 61,649 that went to 22 countries!  So, therefore, about 92% of the UNHCR’s refugees came to the United States in 2011!

And, using various sources* (not including the 20,000 or so Cuban refugees that are never included in the stats), here are the numbers we (US) have resettled in the last 5 years:

2007:  48,281

2008:  60,192

2009:  74,654

2010:  73,311

2011:  56,424

Total for the last five years:  312,862   (330,ooo resettled worldwide)

Looks like the US resettled 95% of those refugees resettled by the over two dozen countries taking credit for resettling refugees.

Now here are the ethnic groups this gang in Geneva will be talking about sending our way this next year!

Based on current trends, by country of origin, Somalis, Iraqis, Afghans, and Congolese are expected to be the major refugee populations over the coming years with higher resettlement needs.

Looks like we will be getting mostly Muslims (or the refugee victims of Muslims)!

Addendum:  See Geert Wilders speech in Colorado last weekend, here.   While Wilders warns,  No more mosque building and no more Muslim immigration!, the beat goes on in Geneva.

* One good source for numbers for recent years is the Cultural Orientation Resource Center, here.  You can also visit the Office or Refugee Resettlement Annual Reports, here.  But, that reminds me, ORR is still breaking the law and thumbing its nose at Congress as it is 3 years behind in sending reports to Congress either because of bureaucratic ineptitude or they are hiding something—-perhaps statistics on how bad the economy is and how refugees are not working and are thus living on welfare.

You can also use WRAPS to see who (which nationalities) has been resettled in your town.

Refugee camps are never emptied

This article from AlertNet (the world’s humanitarian news site) about a refugee camp in Thailand gives readers some idea of how the spigot will never turn off.  People are cared for in camps and become reliant on aid.  With the hope of resettlement in the West, they just keep coming.

From AlertNet:

MAE SOT, Thailand (AlertNet) – The smell of deep fried snacks mingling with sweet tea, the ladies with shopping baskets laden with fresh greens, the men puffing on cigars in teashops with blaring TVs, teenagers milling about stalls with the latest mobile phones and gadgets – it’s a typical market scene in any small town in Southeast Asia.

But this is no town. This is Mae La, a sprawling refugee camp an hour’s drive from the border town of Mae Sot in northwest Thailand.

It is home to over 45,000 people from Myanmar who fled their homeland as a result of the world’s longest running civil war between the national army and indigenous ethnic groups.

The official Thai term for these places – there are nine along the border housing some 142,000 people – is ‘transitional camp’. But Mae La was set up 27 years ago.

Children who were born and grew up here know little beyond the thatch-roofed, wire-fenced existence.

They just keep coming:

With a host of support programmes, food aid and the prospect of possible resettlement, these camps offer a life far better than what most people have in Myanmar, attracting more people to cross the border, observers say.

The market at Mae La may be in full swing three days a week and motorbike taxis are readily available for residents who want to go out, but officially residents are not allowed to leave the camps so employment and livelihood opportunities are limited.

The Thailand Burma Border Consortium (TBBC), an NGO which has been working with refugees from Myanmar for 25 years, says people were initially self-reliant, but have become totally aid-dependent over the years because of the restrictions on their movement.

And we just keep taking them. Burmese refugees consistently top the list of refugees admitted to the US each year.

Here is what I wrote in January in a post about the US Census not accurately counting the Burmese in the US:

According to the most recent annual Report to Congress from the Office of Refugee Resettlement we resettled 16,074 Burmese from 1983-2007 (just the refugee program).  And, let me say AGAIN, the ORR is now nearly 3 years behind in releasing these LEGALLY REQUIRED documents to Congress.  However, we have another source of numbers here.*

1983-2007:      16,074  Burmese arrived in US as refugees

2008:                   18,139

2009:                   18,202

2010:         +        16,693

____________________

69,108

* Readers, in previous years this site kept up with the numbers monthly and yet has failed to post any new numbers since last September.  I can only assume someone doesn’t want the public to see the number of refugees we are admitting this year.

American Community Survey gets numbers wrong on US Somali population

This is a story from the Mail (UK) last week about how segregation is declining between blacks and whites in America (true).  But, the article is written like this one about Rednecks the Mail published a few days ago that clearly ‘looks down its nose’ at Americans.

It begins:

Racial integration between black and white people in the U.S. is at its highest level for a century, new figures reveal.

Segregation among blacks and whites fell in roughly three-quarters of the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas as the two racial groups spread more evenly between inner cities and suburbs.

Still, ethnic segregation in many parts of the U.S. persisted, particularly for Hispanics.

The research found that a new generation of upwardly mobile black families is moving to America’s fastest-growing cities, with a decline over the past decade in black-white segregation.

[....]

The data is among the Census Bureau’s most detailed yet for neighbourhoods and comes ahead of results from the official 2010 census which is released next spring.

The American Community Survey is sent to about one in 10 households each year. It includes questions on ancestry, national origin and many other traits that are no longer asked about in the census done every 10 years.

Only 85,700 Somalis in America is completely wrong

The Mail has published a sidebar about Somalis in America which demonstrates how profoundly wrong the methodology of the American Community Survey is.  Either they are deliberately not releasing the true numbers, they didn’t get their surveys distributed in Somali communities or people lied on the surveys.  Here is a portion of the sidebar:

Nearly one in three people with Somali ancestry in the U.S. now live in Minnesota, which has the largest concentration in the country, the study revealed.

[....]

The data released this week found about 25,000 of the 85,700 Somalis in the U.S. live in Minnesota. Ohio, Washington and California also had large populations of Somalis, but the survey data found no more than 10,500 of them in any state except Minnesota where the Somali population is growing.

[....]

In many communities the population has grown and prospered, with Somali-owned shops and mosques proliferating. Somali translators work in the schools, the children of refugees go on to college and community leaders become public figures.

But there have been worrying signs about the second generation, with reports out of Minnesota of Somali gangs running interstate prostitution rings and investigations of young men going to fight with al-Shabab, which seeks to establish an Islamic state in Somalia.

Ahmed Sahid, president of Somali Family Services of San Diego, said the local population there was swelling with a ‘second migration’ driven by Somalis leaving cold parts of the U.S.

The government estimates there are 5,000 Somalis in the San Diego area, but Sahid said estimates are often wrong, and he thought there were 15,000 to 20,000.

Sahid is correct and the American Community Survey is wrong.

In 2008, I laboriously poured over records at the Office of Refugee Resettlement and recorded these numbers of Somalis admitted to the US since 1983 (I subsequently updated this post for 2009 and 2010).  We admitted, through the refugee program alone, 93,687 in those 27 years—that is only through the refugee program not other legal immigration programs such as the diversity visa lottery, or non-refugee family reunification.  It doesn’t include those who got here illegally and are seeking asylum and it doesn’t include those coming across both our southern and northern borders and disappearing into Somali communities which, by the way, are seeking to segregate themselves.

Does the American Community Survey expect us to believe that since over 93,000 Somalis were admitted in nearly three decades that many left and that none had families, leaving us with 85,700 today?

Tens of thousands of Bhutanese transition to the US

This is an informative report at the Contra Costa Times on how refugees—they are called Bhutanese, but are really of Nepali origin—are arriving by the tens of thousands in the US and how they are being prepared for life in America in camps in Nepal.

I had a laugh over this paragraph:

In the past two years, more than 30,000 Bhutanese refugees have migrated to the United States, Canada, Australia and five other countries. The refugees, members of a Nepali-speaking ethnic minority, left Bhutan 18 years ago under pressure from the government.  [The Bhutan government wanted Bhutan for Bhutanese not for Nepali people.]

I laughed because although they say 30,000 have gone to the US, Canada and Australia, we have officially taken 29,371 of those according to statistics available at the Cultural Resources Orientation Center here.    The numbers breakdown as follows: FY 2008—5,320, FY 2009 —13,452, and FY 2010 as of July 31st (the fiscal year ends Sept. 3oth)—10,599. 

This exodus to the US was launched in 2007 by former (Bush Administration) Asst. Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration Ellen Sauerbrey’s promise that the US would take 60,000 Bhutanese over 5 years.  So they have about 30,000 to go over the next two years to reach her promised goal.

The article goes on to discuss how the elderly (who will btw be eligible for SSI in the US)  have a more challenging time with the training to enter the US.  And, there is a very interesting discussion about how the refugee camps are experiencing a decline in the educational system as teachers are being resettled.

The elderly need to learn some English and how to flush a toilet!

Refugees say better preparation for life abroad is more important now than ever. Elder refugees, most of them former farmers in Bhutan, are enrolling in English classes for the first time, hoping it will ease their transition, and the migration agency is teaching life skills to adults on topics ranging from child-rearing to the workings of American-style flush toilets.

However, it appears their biggest worry is about crime and the poor economy.

The teachers have also been tasked to talk a lot more about the refugees’ big concerns: the tough economy and crime.

Two Bhutanese refugees who had recently arrived in America were killed after robbery attempts in Florida and Texas. Many more have been mugged, including several young Bhutanese men in Oakland. The refugees are placed in cities where they can find affordable apartments and easy access to public transit. Many of these places also suffer from poverty and crime.

Mugging stories spread like wildfire back in the camps, where they are often tinged with racial stereotypes, fears and jokes.

Agency workers said they have tried to tailor their cultural orientation sessions to respond to fears and misconceptions about life in the United States.

We have written many many posts on the Bhutanese resettlement to the US, including reports of those murders mentioned in this article.  I encourage readers wishing to learn more to please use our search function and search for ‘Bhutanese.’

Where do I find refugee statistics?

It occurred to me just now, as I helped a reader find some numbers, that it might be a good idea to repeat where you can get statistics on what refugees came to the US and to what states they were first resettled.  We have written 2,311 posts since we began RRW in July of 2007 and have a category entitled ‘where to find information’ here.   However, it would take some research on your part to find some important data bases.

Here are the statistics on refugees arriving in the US from 1983-2005.

Here are the statistics on individual years from 2000-2008.

This site has the numbers and country of origin (but not destination) for this fiscal year to August 31st.

For those of you looking to find out what religion refugees are, this site, Worldwide Refugee Admissions Processing System (WRAPS), does keep those statistics but you can’t access the site or get the numbers unless perhaps you know some Member of Congress who will get the information for you.  They may initially tell your Congressman that they don’t keep such numbers, but they do.

Here is a report from Homeland Security about refugees and asylees admitted in 2008.

This is a post I wrote on just Somali refugee numbers.  This post is one of the most active we have with many visitors arriving daily even though it is a year old.

For information on all legal immigrants go to this post and follow the links back to the 2007 Yearbook of Immigrant Statistics (it takes a few minutes to load).

If you enjoy numbers these links should give you hours and hours of fun!

A more balanced report on world refugee numbers

The Washington Post’s article on the UNHCR’s report on refugees is more balanced than the one in the International Herald Tribune that Ann posted on earlier. It reports on repatriations as well as new refugees. It says there is a record number of refugees — 11.4 million.

The number had risen last year too, after ten years of decline.  The reason for the decline was “the success of massive voluntary operations in Afghanistan, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Angola,” the High Commissioner for Refugees said. Once these were over, the numbers stopped declining.

On the Iraqis it says:

Syria, Jordan and Lebanon reported an influx of more than 885,000 Iraqi refugees in 2007, according to UNHCR spokesman Peter Kessler. In contrast, only 110,000 Iraqis returned to their home country last year.

That’s interesting. I haven’t seen that large a number for returnees anywhere else. The International Herald Tribune reported 78,180 had returned by March 31. But the Post article doesn’t make clear when the UN’s year begins and ends, so perhaps the rest have returned since then. 

African refugees are doing better:

The latest U.N. figures show that the number of refugees from Africa continued a decade-long decline, dropping 6 percent last year, as more than 1.5 million returned to their homes in Congo, southern Sudan, Liberia and Burundi.

There were 3.1 million new people displaced in their own countries, and 2.1 million returned to their homes.

Now, here’s some information that makes all these numbers not quite what they seem:

Part of the change in the number of refugees and displaced people last year was driven by a new definition of the two groups. It now includes individuals who had never registered with the United Nations. The new formula boosts the number of Afghan refugees by about 1 million, to 3.1 million. At the same time, the U.N. refugee agency also stopped counting about 820,000 people as refugees — including 560,000 in the United States — who have been resettled outside their homeland.

I have no idea what that last sentence means. We have 560,000 refugees here? They didn’t all come last year, so where did the number come from? Is it all the refugees we’ve taken over the years? If so, why were they still being counted as refugees?

Despite some faults, this article paints what seems like a realistic picture of refugees in flux — some leaving their homes, some returning as conditions change. This is quite different from the usual picture, which leaves the impression that refugees are pouring out all over and everything is hopeless. The Washington Post can be quite good on occasion.