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.

World Refugee numbers rising, sort of

June 20th is World Refugee Day, so you are probably seeing an up tick in the number of news articles about refugees this week.  Here is one from the International Herald Tribune that says numbers of refugees are rising.

Oh, but you could look at it this way, the numbers are down since a high of almost 18 million during Bill Clinton’s Bosnian war.      Holy cow!   I suppose you could then say that the Clinton era Balkan war produced more refugees than the Iraq War—how can that be?

The number of refugees fleeing to other countries to escape conflict and persecution rose in 2007 for the second year as factors from climate change to overly scarce resources threatened to increase the flow, the United Nations refugee agency warned Tuesday.

A total of 11.4 million refugees were under the care of the agency, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, in 2007, including about 400,000 experiencing conflict in their home countries, the agency said. The total for 2006 was 9.9 million.

The total was modest compared with the 17.8 million refugees in 1992 at the time of the Balkan wars, but after a steady drop from 2001 to 2005 it represents a worrying trend, the relief agency said.

“We are now faced with a complex mix of global challenges that could threaten even more forced displacement in the future,” António Guterres, the high commissioner, said in a statement. “They range from multiple new conflict-related emergencies in world hot spots to bad governance, climate-induced environmental degradation that increases competition for scarce resources and extreme price hikes that have hit the poor the hardest and are generating instability in many places.”

The number of people displaced by conflict but remaining in their countries also rose in 2007, to 26 million, the agency said, citing statistics provided by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, a private organization based in Geneva.

Lest you start feeling good about the refugees coming to the West, the UN wants to dispel any notion you have about doing good.     We western countries are bad, bad, bad because we don’t allow the millions in (to deplete our resources), and now the developing nations are getting stingy too.

The latest statistics contradicted a number of misconceptions about the impact and distribution of refugee patterns, officials said, starting with the notion that Western countries admit most fugitives from conflict.

Instead, 80 percent of refugees remain in developing countries in the immediate vicinity of their own country, the UN agency said.

Pakistan accepted more than 2 million refugees and Syria 1.5 million in 2007. The United States sheltered 281,000, the statistics showed. Only a tiny proportion find resettlement in third countries: about 49,900 people in 2007 and 821,000 in the decade ending in 2007.

Developing countries are increasingly unwilling to shoulder the refugee burden and are imposing stricter criteria for acceptance.

“It’s becoming a more and more inhospitable world for refugees,” said William Spindler, an agency spokesman.

 Someone asked me recently why I thought things were changing and increasingly we see stories other than “puff pieces” about refugees and as I said previously, I think part of the reason is that the guilt trip works less and less frequently these days! 

Canada’s refugee problems and programs

A report from London, Ontario, bemoans the lack of services for refugees.  The woman the reporter chooses to highlight their plight has to have the worst refugee story I’ve ever read. The woman was kidnapped as a 17-year-old nursing student in Congo, and watched while the men killed her friend and ate her flesh. They cut a piece out of this woman’s leg; her life was saved only because they didn’t like the taste of her flesh.

Naturally, she suffers from severe psychiatric problems. So do many, perhaps most, refugees. Canada’s famed national medical system cannot cope. (On the other hand, could any system cope with such deep trauma?)

The article includes a helpful summary of Canada’s refugee program:

WHAT CANADA DOES

- Through Citizenship and Immigration Canada, the federal government spends $44.5 million a year on its Resettlement Assistance Program, it’s humanitarian response to the world’s refugee crises.

- Each year, Canada accepts between 7,300 and 7,500 government-assisted refugees, who receive settlement services and monthly financial support for one year after they arrive.

- Before 2002, those with serious medical conditions were not eligible, but a change of legislation that year opened the program to the world’s most vulnerable refugees. Those with high medical needs are often accepted through Ottawa’s Joint Assistance Program, and generally receive two years of financial assistance while a private organization such as a church assists.

- Canada also accepts about 4,500 privately sponsored refugees each year.

- London’s Cross Cultural Learner Centre accepts and helps settle about 400 refugees a year. About 275 of them come through as government-assisted refugees.

Here is a nice little point: Canada has a population of about 33 million. The United States has about 300 million people, about ten times as many.

Canada’s government accepts and funds about 7,300 refugees each year. The U.S. figure is 70,000, about ten times as many.

Same per capita number. Yet:

Through its Resettlement Assistance Program, Canada accepts more than 7,000 refugees in dire need of resettlement each year — a $44.5-million humanitarian response to suffering refugees.

Because of this program, Canada is regarded internationally as being one of the more compassionate countries, says Susan McGrath, head of York University’s Centre for Refugee Studies.

Hmm, are we regarded as compassionate, internationally?

I’d like to know more about those additional 4,500 privately sponsored refugees. Apparently they come in without government assistance. It would be interesting to know how that works, and how those refugees fare compared with the government ones. 

Finally, these numbers are definitive evidence that the report we concluded was false last month, Canada planning to take 85,000 refugees from Kenya, was truly the product of someone’s fevered brain.

Brookings: Refugees are spreading out from traditional “gateway cities”

At the September forum in Hagerstown, MD someone asked representatives of the US State Dept. about an apparent policy to spread refugees out to small and middle-sized American cities and away from the traditional “gateway cities.”  We have heard, but cannot confirm, that this was a directive of the Clinton Administration.  Early in the meeting the question was brushed aside, but later the State Dept. spokeswoman admitted that the social services in traditional immigrant receiving cities had become over-taxed.

Thanks to the Jacksonville article yesterday, we now know that The Brookings Institution actually reported on this trend back in April.  Check out their report by going to this page at Brookings and then download the document entitled, “Refugee Resettlement in Metropolitan America.” 

Some interesting findings come as no surprise:

*  Little is known about refugee resettlement at the metropolitan level. 

*  Unlike other immigrants refugees have access to considerable federal, state and local support.

*  Sometimes the placement of too many refugees in one area has overwhelmed local communities and stirred tension.  (Ed: No, really!)

On this last point, the government officials and volag employees made the people in Hagerstown (see the website VDARE yesterday for more on our city) feel that they were residents in the only city in the country that had concerns.  That is the part that makes me want to scream.  Why can’t these officials just admit it and say, yes, there are problems but we try our best to resolve them.  Instead they acted shocked, like this had never happened before and therefore there was something terribly wrong with us!

Now, back to Brookings.  You gotta have a look at this report.  As expected, the top three original “gateway cities” were New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.    But, I was interested in the eleven top cities that had the largest refugee populations as a percentage of the foreign born in the city calculated from figures up to the year 2000.   They are:

Utica-Rome, NY   (See our earlier post on Utica here.)

Fargo-Moorhead, ND-MN

Erie, PA

Binghamton, NY

Spokane, WA

Portland, ME

Lincoln, NE

Waterloo-Cedar Falls, IA

Burlington, VT

Manchester, NH

Des Moines, IA

I’ll bet that none of these cities had any advance warning or opportunity to plan ahead for the rapid expansion of social services for the needy required of refugee resettlement sites.  

Note on November 23rd:  Here is a better report on the Brooking Report at the Migration Information Source.

46,000 Iraqis returned in October

An Iraqi government spokesman, Brig. Gen. Qassim Al-Moussawi, said that 46,000 Iraqi refugees came home last month, the AP reported yesterday.

He attributed the large number to the “improving security situation.”

———————————-

“The level of terrorist operations has dropped in most of the capital’s neighborhoods, due to the good performance of the armed forces,” al-Moussawi told reporters in the heavily-guarded Green Zone. Al-Moussawi did not give numbers of Iraqis returning home before October.

What follows is even more interesting. The Red Crescent (the Muslim version of the Red Cross) has reported an increasing number of internally displaced people in Iraq — nearly 2.3 million all told, mostly women and children.

Al-Moussawi questioned those figures in a news conference on Wednesday, publicly asking the Red Crescent to “give reasons behind this high number.”

————————————

“The increase announced by the Red Crescent is not logical, because now we are living a stable security situation and many families have returned to their original places,” al-Moussawi said.

————————————–

He suggested some families had registered for Red Crescent aid because they were in financial straits, but that they had not been displaced.

I’m sure these war-battered people need aid, and you can’t blame them for figuring out how to get it. But it means we can’t trust the numbers given for internal refugees. And the external refugees are starting to come home. It will be interesting to see if more refugees return to Iraq in November.

Good overall look at immigration and its impact on America

 Your tax dollars:

Someone just brought to my attention an excellent report by Steven Camarata at the Center for Immigration Studies entitled “Immigrants at Mid-Decade.”  It includes some useful statistics on refugees too.   But, if you had been wondering why in recent years it seems that immigrant numbers have increased dramatically, well its because they have.   Here is just a part of Camarata’s conclusion:

The latest data collected by the Census Bureau show that the years 2000 to 2005 are almost certainly the highest five years of immigration in American history. Immigration continues to be the subject of intense national debate. The 1.5 million immigrants arriving each year have a very significant effect on many areas of American life. Immigrants and their young children (under 18) now account for one-fifth of school age population, one-fourth of those in poverty, and nearly one-third of those without health insurance, creating enormous challenges for the nation’s schools, health care system, and physical infrastructure. The low educational attainment of many immigrants, 31 percent of whom have not completed high school, is the primary reason so many live in poverty, use welfare programs, or lack health insurance, not their legal status or an unwillingness to work.