According to a report on refugee resettlement, Arizona has settled almost 1,800 refugees in the past five months alone.
The 1,764 refugees that have been sent to the state are represented by people from some of the most brutal and war-torn nations on earth.
A total of 747 refugees, 42 percent of the state’s total refugee intake, are from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
As The Tennessee Star reported Tuesday, 264 Congolese refugees have been imported to Tennessee, also the most by national origin.
“Congo has been engulfed in turmoil since it gained independence in 1960,” The Star reported. “The Second Congo War, which raged from 1998 to 2003 resulted in the deaths of nearly five and a half million people. The country’s only successful peaceful transfer of power occurred in 2018, though the country is still involved in military conflict in its eastern region. It is the fourth poorest country on earth.”
Arizona has also taken a significant amount of refugees from the Middle East.
The state has taken 241 refugees from Syria and 175 from Afghanistan. The latter country was plunged into chaos in 2021 when the Biden administration hastily withdrew American troops, leaving hundreds of Americans behind and handing the country over to the Taliban.
Arizona has taken in 189 refugees from Burma, which was subject to a military coup in 2021. A reported 3,000 people were killed, and more than 1,700 were detained during that incident.
More than 60 Somali refugees have been resettled in Arizona. That country, dominated by Sunni Muslims, is one of the poorest in the world and has a tenuous relationship with governance of any kind. It has been engulfed in civil war since the 1980s and has been controlled by various rebel groups for most of the past 40 years.
Some Central American countries are represented among refugees in Arizona.
Thirty-nine Guatemalan refugees now call Arizona home, along with 14 from Colombia and eight from both El Salvador and Venezuela.
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Pete D’Abrosca is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Pete on Twitter/X.
Photo “Joe Biden” by President Joe Biden. Background Photo “Congo Refugees” by UNICEF Sverige. CC BY 2.0.
