Michigan to get walloped with refugees this fiscal year « Refugee Resettlement Watch

Michigan to get walloped with refugees this fiscal year « Refugee Resettlement Watch:
Michigan to get walloped with refugees this fiscal year

Posted by Ann Corcoran on March 20, 2016

It wasn’t too many years ago that the US State Department made a point of not sending new refugees to Michigan because of the poor job prospects for everyone there.  But, all that has changed and now Michigan is regularly in the top five resettlement states in the nation.  See here.  These numbers would move Michigan to the #3 spot behind Texas and California in national ranking.

Michigan will get over 5,000!!! Lutherans are lead agency. Security concerns to be ignored!

From the Detroit News:

Michigan is expected to take in more than 5,000 refugees this year, the highest number since 2002, amid renewed concerns about security and the latest effort in Congress to overhaul the U.S. Resettlement Program.

Since 2002, the earliest year for which U.S. officials say they have reliable state-by-state data,*** Michigan has resettled between about 500 and 4,500 refugees annually. State social service agencies say they plan to take in about 5,100 this year.

The expected influx comes as intelligence officials warn Islamic State members posing as refugees will likely launch an attack on U.S. soil this year...

And, by the way, it isn’t just security that concerns local resettlement restrictionists.  The Refugee Admissions Program is costly to state and local taxpayers as well—think schools, medical care, subsidized housing.

See our entire Michigan archive by clicking here.  Our post of just last week on the testimony by Jeh Johnson is here.

And, one last thing, if your city or state has been a “welcoming” one, expect a jump in your numbers.  The resettlement contractors had a hard time finding places to seed 70,000 refugees in the 2015 fiscal year and this year Obama has instructed them to find locations for 85,000 third worlders.  That means there will be very aggressive campaigns ongoing to expand existing sites and find new ones (like Montana).

***For diligent researchers: They have the data going back to the early 1980s. You can find it by laboriously looking through ORR annual reports to Congress. They just didn’t transfer the data to the new data base.