Cambridge, Mass: No refugees for you! Neighborhood
is too wealthy! by Ann Corcoran, 7/9/17
Waahhhh! The Harvard kids want
refugees, but there isn’t any low income housing in Cambridge so the US State
Department and its contractors send refugees to working class communities
elsewhere in Massachusetts!
Tony Cambridge, Mass. home to
Harvard University won’t see refugees placed there anytime soon!
Moral of the story: Wealthy
communities don’t get refugees, but working class communities do. And, if
you build low income housing, your town becomes a refugee magnet!
From the Boston Globe: “Help us welcome local refugees to our community!” read a
flier advertising the carnival in Cambridge, where attendees would later pose
at a photo booth, mingle, and munch on baked goods inside a balloon-festooned
gymnasium.
“We wanted to have an opportunity
for refugee families to come and have a fun time, relax, play games,” said
Caitlin Nichols, a Harvard PhD student who helped organize last month’s event. But
notably absent from the event? Refugees.
In September 2015, after watching
the number of Syrians displaced by violence soar, Cambridge City Councilor
Nadeem Mazen decided the council had “a moral and economic imperative” to act.
He won passage of legislation calling on city officials to determine
Cambridge’s capacity to take in Syrian refugees and then provide those families
with the housing and support they would need.
But when peace commissioner Brian Corr — the local official charged
with promoting “peace and social justice within Cambridge and in the wider
world”— began reaching out to refugee resettlement agencies and government
officials, he was told, politely, no thanks.
“I spoke to a lot of people and got
a lot of e-mail information. Long story short . . . Cambridge is not the place
where refugees get resettled,” Corr said.
Where refugees end up is largely at the discretion of the State
Department and nine resettlement agencies nationwide.
From 2014 to 2016, 233 Syrian refugees arrived in Massachusetts. More
than half went to Lowell, Springfield, or West Springfield, according to State
Department records. None wound up in Cambridge.
Financial support is limited for new
arrivals. Representatives of the State Department and Massachusetts
resettlement agencies said they consider two factors when placing refugees, in
addition to family ties.
“The key factor is a combination of
cost of living and employment opportunities that will allow them to become economically
self-sufficient quickly because the support that the federal government
provides is extremely limited,” said Jeffrey Thielman, president and CEO of the
International Institute of New England, the area’s largest resettlement agency.
Here they are admitting it again, the contractor pockets half of the
per head payment the refugee gets from the feds (no mention that all forms of
welfare are available to refugees upon arrival). BTW, the contractors’ primary job is to get
the refugees signed up for their services and then they move on to the next
batch of paying “clients.”
Each refugee receives a
one-time stipend of $2,075 from the federal government, and nearly half of that
goes to the resettlement agency to help finance their work, according to a State
Department spokeswoman.
Agencies sometimes provide refugees
additional cash assistance, and some refugees can receive $428 per month from
the state for up to 18 months.
Such small sums don’t go far in
Cambridge, where two-bedroom apartments rent for around $3,000 a month. That’s
twice as expensive as housing in Springfield or Lowell.
Throughout Greater Boston, inexpensive housing options are few and
shrinking. Thielman said the only places in the area where his agency can find
housing for refugees are shared units for single individuals in Lynn or
Dorchester — places where they can pay $350 or less in rent per month. Continue reading here because some refugee advocates have a new angle. See
what it is!
This is my ‘laugh of the day!’ post
but it isn’t so funny! The International Institute of New England (aka
International Institute of Boston) works as a subcontractor for the US Committee for Refugees and
Immigrants (USCRI). Don’t forget to write to the White House!
Federal
contractors/middlemen/lobbyists/community organizers paid by you to place
refugees in your towns and cities. Because their income is largely
dependent on taxpayer dollars based on the number of refugees admitted to the
US, the only way for real reform of how the US admits refugees is to remove the
contractors from the process.
https://refugeeresettlementwatch.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/cambridge-mass-no-refugees-for-you-neighborhood-is-too-wealthy/
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