Twin Falls, Idaho welcomed nearly 3,000 refugees in
ten years, by Ann Corcoran, 10/11/18.
I
was very interested to see the list of top cities in the US that ‘welcome’
refugees when I published The
Tent Foundation/Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service Refugee Hiring Guide the
other day.
Where is Twin Falls? Today
I had a chance to look at the list more carefully and I’ll be darned, I don’t
see Twin Falls, Idaho. (If you all check for me and see if somehow I
overlooked it, see page 17, 18, and 19 at the guide, here.)
You
would think that since The Tent Foundation is
Chobani Yogurt CEO Hamdi Ulukaya’s foundation that Twin Falls would be on the
list.
Is
it possible, I wondered, that Twin Falls welcomed less than 100 refugees in the
ten years being analyzed by the Lutheran contractor for the hiring guide?
Important note to readers: I hear from
some of you referring to refugees as illegals. They are not. The
immigrants we discuss mostly on these pages come to the US through the Refugee
Admissions Program signed in to law in 1980. The numbers I’ll be giving
you below are primary refugees placed directly in Twin Falls. The data comes
from the State Department’s Refugee Processing Center.
The numbers below do not include:
asylum seekers, asylees, Special Immigrant Visa holders, Diversity Lottery
winners, etc. They also do not include secondary refugee migrants.
Those are legal refugees placed in another location who have moved, (possibly
in this case to Twin Falls) for work or to be with others of their ethnic
group. Again, secondary migrants are not included below.
These
are all the primary refugees placed in Twin Falls by the US State Department
and its local resettlement contractor during the ten year period, 2007-2016
presented in Tent’s
Hiring Guide. Data is from Wrapsnet (Refugee Processing Center).
A total of 2,723 were placed in Twin Falls, population 48,260, from
2007 to 2016. (Boise
by comparison received 6,918 in the same time period placing it at #29 on the
Tent list of top resettlement locations.)
The
Twin Falls number of 2,723 should have placed it on Tent’s list (where to find
refugees) between Richmond, VA and Lincoln, NE
Greensboro NC 7125
Philadelphia PA 6966
Boise City ID 6918
Omaha NE 6596
San Antonio TX 6550
Rochester NY 6336
Cleveland OH 6333
Tampa FL 6256
St. Louis MO 6237
Charlotte NC 6071
Erie PA 5980
Austin TX 5938
Baltimore MD 5764
Bowling Green KY 3653
Fargo ND 3479
Albany NY 3190
San Jose CA 3184
Durham NC 3045
San Francisco CA 3045
Burlington VT 2992
Fort Wayne IN 2979
Modesto CA 2815
Rockford IL 2739
Richmond VA 2731
Lincoln NE 2490
Hartford CT 2480
Twin Falls should be here. I am
wondering now how accurate the other numbers are!
When I analyzed the data at Wrapsnet, I learned that Twin Falls
‘welcomed’ refugees from 17 different nationalities during that time period
with the largest numbers coming from the following countries:
Bhutan
(650)
Burma
(620)
Iraq
(382)
Eritrea
(242)
Iran
(229)
DR
Congo (217)
Sudan
(179)
Afghanistan
(85)
Smaller
numbers came from 9 other countries surely making it challenging for the school
system, the health system and the criminal justice system there to deal with
the language barriers and requirements for translation services (just one more
cost being passed on to local and state taxpayers!).
I’ll be red-faced, but please let me know if you find Twin Falls on the
Tent list of top cities in which employers can find refugee workers. This post is filed in my ‘Where to find information’ category and in ‘Refugee statistics.’
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
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