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 1 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.

Somali refugee numbers

I should have reminded readers of the number of Somali refugees that have been brought into the US in the Refugee Resettlement program when I wrote the two previous posts about the Somali rape case and the brutal Somali wife beating case.  

The Refugee Resettlement program of the Federal government and the non-profit groups (volags) contracted to resettle refugees have brought 64,942 Somalis to the US from 1983-2005 according to the 2005 ORR Report  to Congress (See Appendix A).   Each of those Somalis can apply through the volags to bring others of their family to America.    This is never-ending.

Macon’s Muslim Mayor

It looks like Imam Yahya Hendi has his first(?) Muslim Mayor.   If you recall last week we wrote that Hendi, speaking to an audience in Saudi Arabia, predicted that the US would have 30 Muslim Mayors by the year 2015.   Yesterday I received this news from Always on Watch who directed me to the Neocon Command Center for this story.

MACON, Ga. — Some Macon residents have called for demonstrations and boycotts after the mayor of the central Georgia city formally reached out to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez with a declaration of solidarity.

______

He (the mayor) announced in February that he had converted to Islam and was working to legally change his name to Hakim Mansour Ellis. Ellis, who was raised Christian, said he became a Sunni Muslim during a December ceremony in the west African nation of Senegal.

I went back and checked my stats on how many refugees have been resettled in Georgia since 1983.    Georgia has a substantial refugee population.  Now, I’m not saying this got Mayor Ellis elected but it’s something to think about.    From 1983 to 2004,  48,817  refugees have been resettled there,  9,365 of those are from 5 primarily Muslim countries of Africa.    Also, it came to our attention in Hagerstown that at least  one of our Somali refugees moved to Georgia to be with her kind of folks.   Others of our Somalis moved to the Pacific Northwest where other Somalis are congregating.

You know this brings me to something I’ve been pondering.   Why is it that no one would ever call the Somalis racist for moving to where lots of other Somalis are (and away from us folks who are a differant color and religion)?  However, if we said we wanted to live with people who have our American culture, we would be racist, xenophobic, bigoted and unenlightened hate mongers.

Anyway, I  am getting away from my story.    According to Heidi Boas* in her lengthy 2007 paper entitled, “The New Face of America’s Refugees:  African Refugee Resettlement to the United States:” 

….several of the individuals interviewed for this paper identified the Congressional Black Caucus as one of the most influential groups advocating over the past decade for increased African refugee resettlement to the United States.

I guess what I’m getting around to is that refugee resettlement is more than giving some downtrodden folks a better life, it’s about politics and getting the votes and changing our communities.   It’s about changing America.

*I don’t have this paper on-line but if you are interested, please e-mail us at refugeeresettlementwatch@vigilantfreedom.com 

Can any of you direct me to another city with a Muslim Mayor?   We could keep a running tally and see how well Hendi does with his predictions!

Muslim Refugees to Maryland

     According to numbers we just recieved from the US State Department, Maryland beats the national average in the resettlement of Muslim refugees.     From 2002 through 2007 (to date) Maryland has been the resettlement destination of 1,556 Muslim refugees out of a total refugee pool of 3,979.   Muslims thus represented 39% of the refugee population for those years.    The national average from 1990 to 2003 was 15%, with  peak year 1999 (44%).   (We have not obtained national averages for more recent years.)

      The statistics received from WRAPS (Worldwide Refugee Application Processing System)*, indicated that of the remaining 2,423 refugees in that time period 22 other religions were represented.     This group of refugees hailed from 42 differant countries.   

      My home county (Washington Co.) received 125 Muslim refugees out of 168 total refugees since 2004 when resettlement began in earnest.    That puts us at 74% Muslim refugees resettled.

      *  What is WRAPS?  Here is what they say at their website  http://www.wrapsnet.org/

The Refugee Processing Center (RPC) is operated by the U.S Department of State (DOS) Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) in the Rosslyn section of Arlington, Virginia USA. 

. . . . .

At the RPC and at Overseas Processing Entities (OPEs), an interactive computer system called the Worldwide Refugee Admissions Processing System (WRAPS) is used to process and track the movement of refugees from various countries around the world to the U.S. for resettlement under the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP).

Try contacting WRAPS and find out what is happening in your state or city.  E-mail help@wrapsnet.org  and see what response you get.  Then let us know!

More stats: How many refugees have come to your city?

     Although lengthy and slanted (all is just peachy), the Brookings Institution published last fall a 31-page report about the Refugee Resettlement program, how it works, who pays for what, and how much.  Most interesting though is that it is chock full of tables with cities and how many refugees settled in each and from where they came since 1983.

The report is entitled:    From ‘There’ to ‘Here’: Refugee Resettlement in Metropolitan America

http://www.brookings.edu/metro/pubs/20060925_singer.htm

by Audrey Singer and Jill H. Wilson
September 2006