A United Nations refugee camp from which hundreds of Shariah-compliant Somali migrants are sent to the United States every month for permanent resettlement has been ordered shut down by its host country.
The government of Kenya has said “no more” to the burgeoning refugee movement that has been spilling across its borders since the 1990s.
It announced it will take action to close two camps, including the Daadab camp near its border with Somalia that is considered one of the world’s largest refugee centers, housing 328,000 Somalis. The other at Kakuma houses 190,000 refugees from South Sudan.
The Kenyan government also disbanded its Department of Refugee Affairs, which worked with humanitarian organizations for the welfare of the refugees.
“The message is clear; we are closing the camps and we will not accept more refugees in the country,” Mwenda Njoka, interior ministry spokesman, told DW.com.
Njoka added that the new regulations were primarily aimed at Somali refugees, who are coming from a nation with an active jihadist uprising being carried out by al-Shabab, an affiliate of al-Qaida.
The government said the camps have been a drag on its economy and a threat to its national security.
Human rights groups have responded with condemnation.
But the government, which threatened to shut down the camps a year ago after al-Shabab terrorists launched an attack on a group of 147 Christian students at a Kenyan university, appears determined to follow through this time in the face of enormous pressure from leftist human rights groups to keep the camps open.
Kenyan Interior Ministry official Karanja Kibicho called Dadaab a “breeding ground” for al-Shabab terrorist fighters and Kenya has been trying to close it down since 2013. But the United Nations and its army of human rights activists counter by saying the Kenyan government has never presented any proof that terror attacks are actually being launched from the camp.
On Friday, Kenyan officials said the international community should take responsibility for the needs of the refugees. That could mean the United States and other wealthy countries will be saddled with the burden of taking in even more Somali refugees than they are currently absorbing.
Kenya has hosted refugees since 1991 in response to people fleeing Islamic-inspired civil wars in neighboring East African countries.
But with no end in sight to those wars the burden on Kenya has been crushing. Not only in terms of national security but economically and environmentally.
“Imagine the environmental impact of 600,000 indigent human beings with their trash and sewage and water needs all in one place in Africa? You can’t just dismiss that,” says Ann Corcoran, author of the Refugee Resettlement Watch blog.
The U.S. already takes in 700 to 750 Somali refugees per month or about 8,000 per year and has taken more than 132,000 since 1983. The arrival of 10,000 Syrian refugees this year has also sparked heavy criticism and resistance from more than a dozen states, making it difficult for the Obama administration to fulfill its goal on time, although it says it does not need the permission of state governments to seed U.S. cities with refugees.
Obama plans to resettle 85,000 foreign refugees in the U.S. this fiscal year from all countries.
As soon as the refugees arrive in some U.S. towns they are brought into the fold of the far left groups and Muslim groups such as CAIR, the Council for American-Islamic Relations.
In St. Louis for instance, CAIR recently put on a luncheon for newly arrived Syrian refugees providing food boxes and other essentials along with information about the area, even sending a bus to come pick them up and drop them off at the event.
“CAIR is just trying to co-opt them quickly, bringing them into the political system, to just suck them into the local mosque the local political scene,” Corcoran said. “The Syrians were somewhat frightened, they didn’t know what this was all about.”
Refugees are given a green card within one year of arrival and placed on a fast track to full U.S. citizenship within five years.
The largest chunk of funding for the refugee program flows to the Office of Refugee Resettlement. It has a budget of 2.2 billion for 2017, but that does not count the massive welfare expenditures required by refugees. No less than 91 percent of refugees from the Middle East are on food stamps, according to government statistics.
The Somali government has also been working in recent months to encourage Somalis who have left the country to return and rebuild the nation. Signs of an increasingly stable government have been talked about in diplomatic circles for months but al-Shabab still carries out periodic deadly attacks.
“The Somali government is gradually trying to encourage everyone to come back to Somalia, and that would be tough on Somalia but it would push out al Shabab,” Corcoran said. “In Somalia you have all these clans warring against each other so they don’t ever advance their society because they don’t stop fighting each other. So we’re taking them into Western societies, the U.S., Canada, Britain, Sweden. That’s what it boils down to is we’re taking them because they can’t get along with each other.
“But if Somalia wants to bring back it’s people, then why are we still taking them to the U.S?”
That’s a question every American ought to be asking their congressmen and congresswomen, she said.
According to the U.S. State Department’s Refugee Processing Center database, Kenya is in the top three countries from where the U.S. gets its refugees. The numbers for the first seven months of fiscal 2016 are as follows:
- Malaysia (4,694)
- Kenya (3,280)
- Turkey (2,692)
All three of the top refugee processing countries – Malaysia, Kenya and Turkey – involve primarily Muslim refugees.
And the U.S. takes Somali refugees from other places besides Kenya. They come from Malaysia, Malta, Austria, Turkey and just about anywhere to which Somalis have fled.
If the Kenyan camps are indeed closed down, Corcoran believes that will lead to a surge of even more Somalis coming to the U.S.
Human rights activists told DW.com that they want Kenya to integrate its refugees rather than keep them holed up in camps.
Closing the camps and sending the refugees back would be “reckless,” they said.
“But integrating 328,000 Shariah-compliant Somali refugees into a largely Christian Kenya would prove more than reckless. It would amount to national suicide,” Corcoran said.
“That’s just like wiping your own country out, to integrate that many people, and then they would eventually become voting citizens of Kenya. Pretty soon there would be no Kenya because they would outvote the Kenyans,” she said.
“We’re going to see enormous changes in Europe in the next decade or two because of this same trend.”
“The government of the Republic of Kenya, having taken into consideration its national security interests, has decided that hosting of refugees has to come to an end,” said a statement released by Kibicho, the Interior Ministry official.
Kibicho said the voluntary repatriation process of sending Somali refugees back to Somalia has been very slow.
