Editor: This week the President challenged local Democrat elected officials to fix their decaying cities with special attention to Baltimore. But, I am seeing no mention of the unsuccessful push there for more than a decade to rebuild Baltimore with immigrants.
This is a post I wrote in May of 2015 at Refugee Resettlement Watch as Baltimore was in flames.
Changing American cities by changing the people (pushing out African Americans!)? Is it possible that diversity doesn’t build economic strength, but in fact further destroys African American communities?
Baltimore: Thousands of impoverished refugees poured into city in last ten years; fuel for the fire?
Is Baltimore a failed social experiment in the government’s (and big business’s) push for more diversity in your towns and cities?
Can we call it a first spectacular failure for Obama’s Task Force on New Americans plan to seed communities with third-worlders?
In fact, Baltimore is a preferred refugee resettlement site according to the Office of Refugee Resettlement!
Baltimore, a majority African American (63%) city where we hear jobs are scarce and poverty is profound, with by several accounts amounting to 25% of the population living below the poverty level, the US State Department and its refugee resettlement contractors have nevertheless been pouring more diversity and consequently more poverty into the city for at least a decade.
Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake fell for the feds ‘progressive’ scheme here in 2012 when she said that bringing more refugees and immigrants to the city would boost the economy completely failing to understand that, just because African Americans are black, they wouldn’t simply ‘welcome’ the rainbow colors of the world to compete with them for jobs, housing and scarce social services.
The hard truth was revealed in the New York Times of all places. African Americans don’t take kindly to diversity!
Here is one shocking little fact that was buried in a New York Times story about the recent riots:
Black gang leaders directed angry rioters to Asian and Arab shops while protecting stores owned and run by fellow African Americans.
Then he described how he and some Bloods had stood in front of black-owned stores to protect them from looting or vandalism. He said they had made sure no black children, or reporters, were hit by rioters. They pointed them toward Chinese- and Arab-owned stores. Charles said Mr. Gray had brought gangs together.
So much for the diversity-is-beautiful myth!
How much diversity has been brought to Baltimore to compete with poor African Americans?
This morning [in May 2015—ed] I went to the data base and checked out the numbers of refugees deposited in Baltimore since 2005. I’m listing only countries of origin if there were more than 10 refugees resettled there. There were many other countries represented by smaller numbers.
Baltimore’s new diversity (these are newly resettled from abroad since 2005 [to May of 2015.—ed], not secondary migrants from elsewhere in the US):
Azerbaijan (10)
Bhutan (1,352)
Burma (1,109)
Burundi (11)
Cent. African Republic (16)
Congo (26)
DR Congo (253)
Eritrea (374)
Iran (136)
Iraq (404)
Liberia (99)
Nepal (10)
Pakistan (13)
Palestine (19)
Russia (196)
Somalia (217)
Sudan (225)
Syria (26)
Uzbekistan (36)
Vietnam (15)
All are in direct competition with African Americans for jobs, education, housing and social services. And, these numbers do not include the thousands of illegal aliens welcomed to Baltimore in the last decade!
(End of 2015 post.)
Afterthought: Can we conclude that pouring ‘new Americans’ into impoverished and decaying US cities is not the panacea the Progressive social engineers want you to believe?
If it works then we should see Baltimore as a shining city on the bay by now, right?
You might want to revisit Robert Putnam’s work about how diversity in fact destroys community cohesiveness.
