Updates
Later, 9: 05 p.m. Central Time: completely unrelated but after posting the stories below with emphasis on amount states are paying for education, my wife tells me that one of the local school districts is asking voters to approve a bond proposition for $220 million for a high school football stadium here in north Texas. Those voters suggesting $220 million is too much for a football stadium are a) new to Texas; and, b) have not seen Friday Night Lights, the movie about Odessa, TX, and the Permian High Panthers. Just saying.
Original Post
One article, from The StarTribune:
The exact numbers of Somalis moving to Minnesota from other states are hard to track. But there’s little doubt their ranks have swelled, too. The federal Office of Refugee Resettlement compiles partial numbers showing about 2,620 total refugee arrivals from other states in 2013, up from 1,835 two years earlier — making Minnesota the state with the highest in-migration by far.
“This has always been an issue for Minnesota,” said Kim Dettmer of Lutheran Social Service, one of the agencies that helps resettle refugees who come directly to Minnesota. “We have in-migration. We don’t really have out-migration.”
After arriving from Kampala, Uganda, Ayan Ahmed and her nine children, ages 4 to 18, spent six months in Phoenix. There, Catholic Charities had lined up a furnished four-bedroom home for the family and a neurologist for Ahmed’s eldest son, who is blind.The article begins with a photograph with this caption:
Recent Somali immigrants Nur Ali, right, and his wife Mahado Mohamed, left, sit with their six children Shukri Shukri, from left, 9, one-week-old Ifrah Shukri, in her mother's arms, Ugbad Shukri, 7, Hafifa Shukri, 4, Antar Shukri, 10, and one-year-old Ikra Shukri in their apartment at Mary's Place transitional apartments in downtown Minneapolis. The family arrived in the United States four months ago, first landing in Connecticut before coming to Minnesota.And then the lede:
A week after the United States government resettled them in Connecticut this summer, Nur Ali and his wife, Mahado Mohamed, had decided: They were moving to Minnesota.
Tales of the state’s large Somali community had intrigued them back in the Kenyan refugee camp where they had married and had five children. Now, a Somali man they met in Hartford told them all recent arrivals head to Minnesota, home of “Little Mogadishu.”
It looks like they're going to have to widen I-98. The west-bound lanes.After a major dip in 2008, the yearly numbers of new Somali refugees in Minnesota have rebounded steadily. The number of Somalis resettled in the state has more than tripled in four years. As resettlements nationally have picked up, more Somalis are also arriving here after brief stints in other states — often trading early support from resettlement agencies for the company of more fellow Somalis.
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