For decades, this conservative, predominantly white capital city has played host to refugees from around the world.run the register at Arbys, clean the Holiday Inn and drive for Uber.“Life was getting better,” said 20-year-old Tresor Mugwaneza, who settled here four years ago after fleeing war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and eventually enrolled at the University of Mary.
“These people come and destroy everything they touch,” said a post on a local Facebook group, Bismarck’s People Reporting News, which gained thousands of members and became an outlet for concern as well as fear and misinformation. North Dakota sits roughly 1,300 miles north of the Rio Grande. Here, most of the refugees are from Bhutan, Iraq, Somalia orThey arrived over the years with the assistance of Lutheran Social Services, which partners with one of just nine nonprofits across the country that are federally authorized to resettle people who receive visas as refugees.
The numbers arriving in North Dakota have fallen dramatically. In 2019, it took in 126, including 25 — all Congolese or Ukrainian — who landed in Bismarck. The reaction surprised Turdukan Tostokova, a resettlement coordinator at Lutheran Social Services who immigrated here from Kyrgyzstan 20 years ago after marrying a local elementary school teacher and eventually became a U.S. citizen.
Yuliia Kulybchuk, center, waits with her older children for the school bus in Bismarck. She and her husband, Anatolii Kulybchuk, and their five children emigrated from Ukraine in November. Because they are members of a historically persecuted religious minority, Pentecostal Christians, they qualified to relocate in the U.S. as refugees.
Yuliia Kulybchuk, 33, holds her son Tymofii, 20 months, during worship at Calvary Free Lutheran Church in Bismarck.Mugwaneza and his two brothers fled the Democratic Republic of the Congo after their father was killed and they ended up in an orphanage in neighboring Burundi. “If these people want to come to our country,” Barb Knutson, 71, testified, “wait their way through the legal way of getting here, get a job, make a life for themselves, become citizens, adopt to our country’s way of doing things. ... More power to them.”
“I’m against Islam that comes up again and again,” he added, saying he feared the “ideology” of Muslim refugees.
Pathetic ... just pathetic. Immigrants bring so much to the country. Who is going to fund the social security funds for current 20-30 year olds Hardworking immigrants, especially Mexican immigrants.
This country stands for absolutely nothing any more Trump has ripped the face off of all of the wickedness in country once and for all.