Refugee Resettlement and the Hijra to America, Paperback

U.S. refugee resettlement policy badly needs comprehensive review and a major overhaul. Ann Corcoran, whose focus on this issue long has been featured at the 'Refugee Resettlement Watch' website, here turns her scholarship to a superb study of how refugees are selected and who decides which refugees and how many come to the U.S., as well as where they are placed and who pays the bills for them. Equally as important, she reveals how collaboration among the UN, U.S. government, local charities, and churches too often puts local communities on the receiving end of refugee resettlement out of that decision-making process. This is a critical and timely look at a program whose impact increasingly is affecting American society across the nation.

About the Author:

Ann Corcoran was educated at Rutgers and Yale Universities and is a grassroots activist who was busy raising children and rescuing senior horses on her farm in Western Maryland in 2007, when she learned that the Virginia Council of Churches had been quietly dropping off Muslim refugees from Russia (among others) in Hagerstown, the county seat of Washington County, Maryland. She began researching the program, simply motivated by wanting to better understand the governmental process of the federal Refugee Resettlement Program and how it was possible for a non-profit "church" group to choose a rural community in another state for resettlement of impoverished and culturally/religiously diverse people without any local approval or discussion. To help keep track of what she learned and to help others around the country with the same concerns, she began writing the Refugee Resettlement Watch blog, which has now become the go-to place on the internet for anyone wishing to understand the UN-federal government initiative to "change" cities large and small across 49 states. She reports on these states rights issues and the unfunded mandates with their impact and costs on communities and citizens. Legal immigration programs like this one are in desperate need of reform. Mrs. Corcoran also reports on refugee and asylum seeker problems world wide.