First Bhutanese refugee advocacy day on Capitol Hill; they would like Congress to help them get home
In 2007, just as RRW was getting off the ground, the Bush Administration said that the US would “welcome” 60,000 Bhutanese (mostly Hindu) here over 5 years (read one of many accounts, here).
We are now up to 80,000 of the Bhutanese (really Nepali people) who were booted out of Bhutan after living there for a generation or two. Nepal didn’t want its ethnic people back, so they lived in UN-run camps on the edge of Nepal before Bush said, let them come (The contractors need ‘clients’ and we need more docile laborers anyway! Bush didn’t exactly say that, but that is the reality).
Their arrival here was traumatic for many and news is plentiful about their hardships in the land whose streets are (NOT!) paved with gold. Their high rate of suicide in the US has not gone unnoticed by health officials (here is one recent story on that subject).
Refugees as pawns!
When I saw this news, my first reaction was ho-hum now they want some special favors for their people, so I was surprised to see that they want the US to pressure Bhutan to let some of them return to Bhutan from the camps and to let some of those resettled here to return as well!
This is not the first time we have seen “refugees” beg to go home after they learned the harsh reality of life in America. (See a post from 2010 here about how we brought thousands of Kosovars here in 1999, paid resettlement contractors to get them ‘settled,’ and then airlifted them ‘home’ within a year).
There is no incentive to slow the flow! ...
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