Up to 10,000 Syrian refugees, most of them Muslims, will be
resettled in cities throughout the U.S. in 2015, with that figure expected to
surge to near 75,000 over the next five years.
While some of the planned destinations for these refugees
are starting to leak out, the big question is: where will they be going?
The U.S. State Department does not announce where it plans
to send foreign refugees for resettlement within the United States, although
the locations do eventually show up in a government database some weeks after
they arrive in their host cities. Word of their anticipated arrivals will
sometimes surface earlier in local media reports.
And that’s already happening in North Dakota, Kentucky,
North Carolina, Ohio and Washington.
North Dakota
The Jamestown
Sun of Jamestown, North Dakota, reported
recently that the Midwestern state is expecting about 400 new refugees to
arrive from the Middle East this year.
Lutheran Social Services of North Dakota and its “community
partners,” which include schools, medical facilities, law enforcement, county
and volunteer agencies and churches, are anticipating a shift in the ongoing
resettling of refugees there.
The state is expecting a slowing of
the influx of Hindus from Bhutan and an increase in the number of Muslims
coming from the Middle East, reported
Ann Corcoran in her Refugee Resettlement Watch blog.
The Lutheran agency has recently resettled a number of
people from Afghanistan, and is planning for refugees in the coming months from
Syria and Iraq, who are escaping the brutality of the Islamic State, also
called ISIS, and civil war in Syria, the Sun reported.
Laetitia Mizero, program director and state refugee
coordinator at Lutheran Social Services, said 260 refugees will settle in the
Fargo area, about 95 in Grand Forks and 45 in Bismarck.
Once a city gets a refugee “seed community” started, it
tends to grow, Corcoran said. That’s because the resettlement agency, the
Lutherans in this case, then gets paid by the government to resettle the family
members of the initial refugees.
Louisville, Kentucky
The
Louisville Courier-Journal reports
that Kentucky Refugee Ministries Executive Director John Koehlinger said an
Iraqi-American in that city has started an Arabic newspaper to serve the “large
number of refugees from Iraq” in Louisville. That’s a trend that started around
2008 — and now Louisville is preparing to aid the first wave of refugees from
Syria in 2015, the Courier-Journal reported.
“Refugees have been coming from Iraq in large numbers for
five years,” Koehlinger told the Courier-Journal. “I think that the time is
right for a newspaper for that (Arab) community.”
Spokane, Washington
Spokane, Washington, has already welcomed one family of
Iraqis that had fled to Syria under pressure from ISIS.
In addition to the Iraqi family
arriving from Syria, World Relief Spokane
told KXLY-TV that a Syrian family will be coming
in the next couple months “with many more to follow.”
North Carolina, Texas and Ohio
As
previously reported by WND, the cities of
Greensboro, North Carolina, and Cleveland, Ohio, are also primed to receive
Syrian refugees.
If established patterns hold, Texas could also be a hotspot
for Syrian refugees. It has already received 50 Syrians over the last
year-and-a-half, according to State Department figures.
Lincoln, Nebraska
Nebraska is also primed to receive
Syrian refugees. At least four Nebraska resettlement agencies have said they
are preparing to help the effort, reported the McCook
Gazette of McCook, Nebraska, although no numbers
have been released yet for Nebraska.
Nebraska agencies pledging to help deal with the refugees
include Lutheran Refugee Services of Lincoln, Lutheran Family Services,
Catholic Social Services and the Southern Sudan Community Association.
More than 3 million Syrians have fled their country because
of the ongoing civil war between forces loyal to President Bashar Assad and
several Islamic rebel groups including ISIS, the al-Qaida-affiliated al-Nusra
and the Free Syrian Army. Assad is a member of the minority Alawite sect which
is fighting the coalition of Sunni Muslim rebels. Christians have been largely
protected by the Alawite regime, worshiping freely in centuries-old Syrian
churches, many of which now lie in ruins.
Watch brief historic perspective on the indigenous Christian
population in the Middle East and the threats it faces today.
Syria part of broader Christian genocide in Mideast
Greek Catholic sources have said more than 300,000 Syrian
Christians are among the refugees driven from their homes. But neither the
United Nations nor the Obama administration has shown a willingness to bring
large numbers of Christian Syrians to the United States, focusing instead on
Muslim refugees which pose a greater security risk.
Peter Jesserer Smith, Washington
correspondent for the National Catholic Register, recently filed
a story from a refugee camp in Lebanon in
which a Catholic nun, who runs a relief effort serving Christians and Muslims
from Syria, told Smith that she is well aware that ISIS has its “infiltrators
within the Sunni refugees.”
“If they kill me, it’s not a problem,” the nun said. “Maybe
another sister … will have the courage to continue the mission.”
The
Canadian government said in December
that it was considering giving priority to Christian and Yazidi refugees
fleeing Syria and has since come under strong condemnation from the U.N. and
non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty International. Canada’s
left-leaning Liberal Party also roundly criticized the plans by conservatives
to focus on non-Muslim refugees.
Watch video clip showing backlash by leftists against
Canadian government’s attempt to select Christian minority refugees.
“As far as global needs go, the
Middle East has plenty of safe refuges for Sunni and Shiite Muslims; it has
none for Christians and Yazidis,” writes
Daniel Greenfield, a New York-based journalist and
fellow at the Freedom Center who focuses on radical Islam. “It only makes sense
that the West should fill the need for safe refuges that don’t exist in the
Muslim world for non-Muslims, while the Muslim world takes in its own
refugees.”
The situation for Syrian Christians has only grown more dire
since a 2013 report by Global Catholic Network.
“Many Christians in the region fear
Syria will become another Iraq, where poor security after the U.S. invasion in
2003 has allowed militant Islamic groups to target Christians for intimidation,
killings and kidnappings that helped drive hundreds of thousands of Christians
out of the country,” reported
the Global Catholic Network more than a
year-and-a-half ago.
That fear now appears to be coming
to pass. Sister Agnes-Mariam de la Croix, mother superior of the Greek Catholic
Monastery of St. James the Mutilated in Syria, said the Syrian uprising has
been “hijacked by Islamist mercenaries who are more interested in fighting a
holy war than in changing the government,” according to the Global Catholic
Network. She said the conflict turned into “a sectarian conflict” in which
Christians are “paying a high price,” the Daily Mail reports.
At least 80,000 Christians were forced from their homes in
the Homs region, said the nun, who was forced to flee to Lebanon when militants
wearing the black bandanas of al-Qaida laid siege to her monastery between
Damascus and Homs for two days to try to prevent Christmas celebrations. She
blamed the U.S. and Europe for supporting rebel groups whose stated goal was to
create an Islamic state.
The British think tank Civitas, in a
December
2012 report titled “Christianophobia,”
warned there is “a serious risk that Christianity will disappear from its
biblical heartlands” in the Middle East and north Africa due largely to
violence and intimidation from members of the Islamic faith.
“In the large area between Morocco and Pakistan, for example,
there is scarcely a country in which church life operates without restrictions.
Syria has been one of the exceptions until now,” writes the author of the
report, Rupert Shortt. “As I write, however, the country is enduring full-scale
civil war, and tens of thousands of Christians have been ousted from places
including Homs and Qusayr.”
Civitas estimated that up to two-thirds of Middle East
Christians have left their homelands or have been killed in the past 100 years.
Obama creates task force on ‘New Americans’
The U.S. State Department places
refugees in 180 cities across 49 states with help from nine contractors, most
of them affiliated with Christian denominations. See
the list of resettlement offices in all 180 U.S. cities where U.N.-selected
refugees are being resettled.
WND
has reported that mayors in Georgia,
Massachusetts and New Hampshire have been outspoken in their opposition to the
State Department sending any more refugees to their cities, saying the refugees
have been a drain on social services and taxpayer dollars.
The cost of resettling the refugees has been estimated at $1
billion a year. Yet, the Obama administration maintains that refugees and
asylum seekers are good for the U.S. economy. The U.S. has brought in nearly 2
million refugees from Muslim countries since President Jimmy Carter signed the
Refugee Act of 1980 into law.
With the massive increase in U.S.
immigration, both legal and illegal, President Obama announced
on Jan. 12 he is creating a “White House Task Force on New Americans” under the direction of Cecilia Muñoz, one of his trusted
aides and a former vice president for National Council of La Raza or “the
Race.”
“By March 2015, the Task Force will submit a plan to the
president that includes recommendations for federal actions to promote the
integration of new Americans,” the announcement states. “In developing this
plan, we need to hear from you. You know best what is working to support
immigrant integration in your community. Send us input on promising practices
and examples of model programs that help immigrants and refugees to contribute
to your communities and our economy.
“We also need your input to ensure that federal programs and
policies continue to reflect our ongoing commitment to welcoming and
integrating newcomers into the fabric of our country.”
The White House asks for ideas and examples to be emailed to
NewAmericans@who.eop.gov by Feb. 9.
The White House said it wants ideas to “Help Shape a Federal
Immigrant and Refugee Integration Strategy.”
Ann C. Richard, the deputy Secretary of State in charge of
immigration, said the United States had resettled nearly 70,000 refugees from
nearly 70 countries around the world last year, and is reviewing 9,000 to
10,000 recent referrals from the United Nations high commissioner on refugees.
The State Department receives about 1,000 new referrals each month from the
U.N. agency and takes 18 to 24 months to screen each applicant for security
purposes and possible ties to terrorist organizations.
Last month’s State Department announcement was careful to
explain that the U.S. will take in only those Syrians who are “persecuted by
their government.” Christians in Syria are being killed by ISIS and other
Muslim rebels, not by “their government,” but the Sunni Muslims are being
killed by the Shiite-led government.
It also would not take 18 to 24 months to vet Christian
refugees for security purposes.
“There is no doubt the majority of Syrians to be admitted to
the U.S. will be Muslims because it would be unlikely there would be a
‘security risk’ with the Christians,” according to Corcoran.
The number of refugees from Syria is expected to surge in
2015 and beyond, Richards said, and the U.S. accepts the majority of all United
Nations referrals from around the world.
Refugees accepted through the United Nations refugee program
are put on a fast track toward U.S. citizenship and are eligible for a full
range of government welfare programs, including housing subsidies, Medicaid,
food stamps, Women, Infants and Children as well as refugee assistance loans
and tutoring from language experts who will help them bridge the language gap
in public schools.
The nine resettlement agencies all have strong presences in
Washington and often lobby on behalf of the U.N. high commissioner on refugees,
pushing for more foreign refugees to be resettled in America, which results in
more federal grants flowing into their coffers.
The nine contractors that lobbied for more Syrian refugees
are:
• Church World Service (CWS)
• Ethiopian Community Development Council (ECDC)
• Episcopal Migration Ministries (EMM)
• Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS)
• International Rescue Committee (IRC)
• U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI)
• Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services (LIRS)
• U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB)
• World Relief Corp. (WR)
• Ethiopian Community Development Council (ECDC)
• Episcopal Migration Ministries (EMM)
• Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS)
• International Rescue Committee (IRC)
• U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI)
• Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services (LIRS)
• U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB)
• World Relief Corp. (WR)
WND has documented in previous stories that more than 90
percent of the money used by Lutheran Social Services, the Catholic Bishops and
other religious charities for their refugee resettlement work comes from
government grants.
http://www.wnd.com/2015/01/secret-planting-of-up-to-75000-syrian-muslims-begins-in-u-s/
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