Rohingya Muslims arriving in Malaysia in large numbers, how many are headed to the US?
This is a story I never got around to last week (traveling), but wanted to be sure you see it and understand that….
….we are probably taking some of the illegal migrants that arrive in Malaysia as ‘refugees’ to your towns and cities.
Rohingya in Malaysia. Are they getting in line for America? (European Pressphoto Agency)
We haven’t written much about the Rohingya issue in Burma and Bangladesh lately, however we followed it for years because initially the US State Department was not accepting as refugees Rohingya Muslims (at one point some of their Islamic groups were actually on a State Dept. list of potential terrorist groups).
They are now being resettled in the US among the tens of thousands of Christian Burmese people we have brought in over the last ten years.
US Conference of Catholic Bishops: we want some Rohingya to resettle!
One of my big surprises occurred when I attended a State Department “scoping meeting” and heard the US Conference of Catholic Bishops representative tell the State Department we needed to bring in more Rohingya Muslims, here in 2013. By the way, here is a pretty good summary post if you would like more background on the Rohingya problem. For ambitious readers! see that we have written 175 posts archived in our Rohingya Reports category.
Also, readers may want to review our posts on Esar Met, a Burmese Muslim convicted of raping and murdering a Christian girl in Utah shortly after his arrival in the US. Met and the girl had lived in separate parts of the same UN refugee camp in Thailand because Muslims and Christians are not housed together. In America they were put in the same apartment complex most likely by one of the resettlement contractors working in Salt Lake City. Here is one of many posts on the murder case.
Here is the AP story at the Los Angeles Times that I wanted you to see. Rohingya are on the move.
Brave Burmese monks (2013) protest the Organization of Islamic Cooperation attempts to get a foothold in Burma (aka Myanmar) in order to demand Rohingya rights.
About 1,600 Rohingya and Bangladeshi refugees have landed illegally in Malaysia and Indonesia in the last two days, apparently after human traffickers abandoned their virtual prison ships and left them to fend for themselves, officials said Monday.
One group of about 600 people arrived in the Indonesian coastal province of Aceh on four boats on Sunday, and at about the same time a total of 1,018 landed in three boats on the northern resort island of Langkawi.
How many Burmese refugees are we taking?
The mostly Christian Burmese are one of the largest (if not the largest) ethnic group of refugees we have resettled since 2005 (I checked the data from January 2005 until May 1, 2015).
This is what I learned: We resettled 140,812 Burmese refugees since 2005.***
This surprised me: In that number were 12,615 Burmese Muslims! The word Rohingya is not used, but most certainly the Rohingya represent a large portion (if not all) of that number.
We process (into the US) large numbers of supposed refugees in Malaysia! Who are they?
In the first seven months of FY 2015 (from Oct. 1, 2014-April 30, 2015) we actually admitted 5,727 “refugees” from Malaysia (see processing country data here). Who are they, and why are we admitting them?
If these Rohingya make it to Malaysia they are supposed to apply for asylum in that safe Muslim country.
Malaysia should not be simply a way-station on the road to the West.
I hope that we are not doing what we are doing illegally in Malta and that is bringing some of Malta’s illegal alien boat people to America!
***Addendum: I went back to data bases to see how many Burmese refugees we admitted in this fiscal year (from Oct. 1, 2014 until May 1, 2015). That is seven months. We admitted 9,040 Burmese and 1,649 of those are Muslims (about 18%). If they continue at that pace this will be the top year for the entry of Burmese Muslims into the US.
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