Somalis in Ft. Morgan, CO say they can’t assimilate without a mosque
This is just one more story about Ft. Morgan, Colorado (we have been following their experiment with a growing Somali population for years, click here for our Ft. Morgan archive). See also Leo Hohmann at WND on Friday—why are we still taking Somali refugees after three decades?
Ft. Morgan has Somalis because it is a meatpacking town. If they had no meat packer, there would be no Somalis clamoring for a mosque.
BIG Meat is changing the face of the American heartland!
From AP at the Santa Fe New Mexican:
FORT MORGAN, Colo. — For the last decade, Somali refugees have flocked to this conservative farm town on Colorado’s eastern plains. They’ve started a small halal mini-market and a restaurant, sent their children to the schools and worked at a meat processing plant run by Cargill Inc.
As much as Fort Morgan’s small town feel reminds many of their rural villages back home, some say they will feel like outsiders until they get what has so far eluded them: a permanent mosque. They are renting two small rooms for a makeshift version, for now.
They say they’ve tried to buy property to build a mosque but believe no one wants to sell to them.
“If we can own a mosque here, we will be more a part of the community,” said Abdinasser Ahmed, a local Somali leader and public schools teacher who fled war-torn Mogadishu, Somalia, in 2003, arrived in Fort Morgan in 2009 to work at the plant and is now a U.S. citizen.
Some longtime residents say they don’t want one in their city of 12,000, a step too far especially at a time when fears of terrorism have grown following the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif.
Putting a mosque “right in the center of town” would be a symbol “as if to claim the town,” said Candace Loomis, who runs a coffee shop and whose grandparents settled this country of sweeping horizons in a two-room sod house. [Loomis is right, the mosque will mark their Islamic territory. That is what mosques are!—ed]
Continue reading here. Montanans and Wyomingites pay attention!
If anyone was really serious about assimilation, it would require a moratorium on mass migration to America right now. Just as in the 1930s when America wisely closed the spigot to allow the masses already here to assimilate, we should be doing the same now (if anyone in leadership positions had guts).
In fact, if Republican leaders had ten years ago worked to close, or at least slow, immigration, instead of following the likes of Senator John McCain off a cliff, there would be no Donald Trump in 2016.
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