Posted on 03/02/2009 3:55:25 PM PST by BGHater
A Bhutanese refugee died recently in his Vickery Meadow apartment in Dallas, within walking distance of Lal Subba's home. The family had no money for a burial, so Subba and the other Bhutanese families in the complex took up a collection to ensure the elderly man received appropriate honor for the life he led.
"If we live, too much difficult. If we die, too much difficult," said the 21-year-old who grew up in a Nepal refugee camp and came to Dallas in October, only to find a flailing national economy instead of the idealized American dream.
That reality is now hitting Texas, where laid-off workers and legal – and illegal – immigrants are vying for a declining number of jobs in blue-collar industries.
This leaves even fewer opportunities for Dallas' expanding refugee population – people from Myanmar (formerly Burma), Bhutan and Iraq who already struggle to find employment and housing with limited language skills, no support network and only a basic understanding of American culture.
The release of President Barack Obama's federal budget on Thursday outlined a nearly 10 percent increase, to $51.7 billion, in funding for international development and diplomacy. That has further ignited debate over the nation's ethical and political responsibilities to those who can no longer claim a homeland – and whether the refugee stream should be trimmed.
Refugees, unlike immigrants, leave their home country not by choice but out of fear of persecution. The Iraqis – the most educated of the three major groups currently coming into the U.S. – are a prime example. They have left their lives as lawyers, doctors and professors for political reasons and have been designated refugees by the United Nations.
(Excerpt) Read more at dallasnews.com ...
Those feet got you here ...
Throw these foreign welfare bums OUT OF MY COUNTRY
Legal = sympathy; Illegal = no sympathy
These legal immigrants are using WELFARE.
They are no better than illegals who suck up MY tax dollars during a Depression.
Refugees arent the only ones facing expensive death bils. A funeral here averages $12,000 dollars. Thats a lot of money for one days rent in a funeral home and a truck ride to a hole in the ground.
That barely covers the $555 in rent and utilities each month for himself and his mother. Food stamps leave enough for rice and vegetables. They choose sweaters over heat.
The $445 he receives monthly from the International Rescue Committee will trickle to $187 next month and stop in July, along with the Medicaid for his sick mother.
“I see people under the bridge and I think, ‘Will that be me?’ “ he said in the halting English he learned in the camp. His Nepali ancestry put him at risk in Bhutan, and his refugee status left him shunned in Nepal.
“We are in the right place at the wrong time. This is a good country, but when we arrive here, it’s too much difficult to get a job for all people, not just us.”
About 60,000 refugees arrived in the U.S. last year – 8,000 more than in 2007. The number is expected to grow in 2009.
The State Department provides each refugee a $900 initial resettlement grant, intended to cover expenses for the first 30 days after arrival. About half goes to the overseeing agency for case management, travel and other logistics.
The solution is not to decrease the flow of refugees but to overhaul the entire system during the new administration, said Lavinia Limón, president of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants and the former head of the Office of Refugee Resettlement under the Clinton administration. She wants more resources channeled toward housing assistance as well as programs that focus on the increasingly diverse pool of refugees entering the United States.
“This is a decision to rescue people in extraordinarily dire circumstances,” she said, citing the nation’s longstanding history of moral obligation.
The U.S. took in more than 90,000 refugees in the early 1980s when the economy teetered just as precariously as now, she said.
But Limón worries that the resettlement process will remain on the back burner with a housing crisis to solve and pending confirmation of a new secretary of health and human services.
Like real estate agents and car dealers, funeral directors and cemeteries are typically very well connected to state politics.
They make sure to have laws in place to protect their control of the market.
And yet they managed to get from one side of the planet to the other, and presumably were in worse shape then than they were now. No tears here.
>> nation’s longstanding history of moral obligation
Obligation my eye.
This is the problem with government. They pervert our longstanding Christian CHARITY into taxpayer “obligation”.
And the recipient need not be grateful; they can instead be demanding. Because after all it’s a US “Obligation”!
And the recipient need not be grateful; they can instead be demanding. Because after all it’s a US “Obligation”!
And our schools will no doubt poison their minds with anti-Christian antiEuropean propaganda on top of the welfare we are payin them.
Aren’t we generous!
My ex-mother-in-law paid for her ex-father-in-law’s funeral (yes, confusing divorced family) when his family couldn’t afford it. It’s expensive. WA requires you purchase a coffin, even if you choose cremation, and even the cheapest one isn’t.
typical MSM lib-victim-nonsense
Being in poverty in the USA is 100 times better than being well-off in Nepal, and they know it.
Excerpt:
In 1979, Deng Xiaoping arrived here on an official visit. China was emerging from the Cultural Revolution, and poised to embark on the capitalist road. When President Carter sat down with Mr. Deng, he told him he was concerned over the right of the Chinese people to emigrate. The Jackson-Vanik amendment, Mr. Carter said, prohibited granting most favored nation trade status to regimes that did not allow their people to emigrate.
“Well, Mr. President,” Deng cheerfully replied, “Just how many Chinese do you want? Ten million. Twenty million. Thirty million?”
Deng’s answer stopped Carter cold. In a few words, the Chinese leader had driven home a point Mr. Carter seemed not to have grasped: Hundreds of millions of people would emigrate to America in a eyelash, far more than we could take in, far more than our existing population of 270 million, if we threw open our borders. And though the U.S. takes in more people than any other nation . . .
Patrick J. Buchanan Speach:
“To Reunite a Nation”
January 18, 2000
Richard Nixon Library
Deport the illegals. That’s a good start.
“WA requires you purchase a coffin, even if you choose cremation,”
Whoa. That is ridiculous!
WA requires you purchase a coffin
Okay, deliver it to my address and I’ll destroy it there.
A good bet that those coffins are reused many times.
Only a dingbat liberal could come up with that statement. There's no money or jobs to take care of the ones that are here but we don't need to decrease the flow of refugees??? Duuuuh!
What’s wrong with you? Don’t you understand that American taxpayers are a bottomless pit of funds pilfered from elsewhere and it’s only right that we “spread our wealth” by taking in the third world rather than teaching the third world how to create their own wealth from capitalism?
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