There are more pyrotechnics ahead in this election cycle according to Tuesday’s Rasmussen Poll: it showed the January 10 New Hampshire GOP primary race tightening significantly (Romney 33%, Gingrich 22%, Paul 18%)—right on top of Public Policy Polling’s report of an even tighter race in Iowa (Gingrich 22%, Paul 21%, Romney 16%).

But there’s one firecracker no candidate has dared throw, although it could clearly blow the race wide open: New England’s emerging refugee disaster.

Last winter, fourteen-year old Somali refugee Ali Abdi approached twelve year old Morgan Graveline in the school cafeteria, and thrust a hard elbow into her jaw. Morgan fell instantly to the floor whereupon Abdi then leapt on top of her and began to pummel her face with his fists.

It took four teachers to pry Abdi off of Morgan. They then carried Morgan, her face gushing with blood, to the nurse’s office, before she was eventually taken to the hospital.

Abdi had knocked out Morgan’s two front teeth and dislocated her jaw. She was babbling incoherently and couldn’t remember her own name or telephone number, the obvious victim of a concussion.

In the weeks prior to this assault, Abdi and another refugee boy had made several graphic sexual propositions to Morgan. When she repeatedly declined their advances, they called her a “bitch” and a “ho” and threatened to “f*** up her face so she isn’t pretty anymore. .” [Parents Outraged After 12-Year-Old Daughter Suffers Vicious Bully Assault, The Blaze, March 6, 2011]

Morgan told her guidance counselor and the school headmaster about these threats, but they twiddled their thumbs and did nothing. In fact, even after Abdi put Morgan in the hospital, the school decided not to report the incident to the Manchester Police.

It was only after Morgan’s mother took her story to the local media that the police and the school department even bothered to look into the matter. (Morgan’s mother has set up a web page mydaughtersassault.blogspot.com.)

The “official inquiry”, however, was all for show. Manchester School Superintendent Tom Brennan [Email him] claimed that after a “thorough investigation”, he determined that the assault did not qualify as a case of bullying. Superintendent Says Action Taken On Bullying Allegations | Brennan Says Incident Was Not Case Of Bullying, WMUR New Hampshire, March 4, 2011]

In fact, Abdi even asserted that he was the real victim and that it was Morgan who initially assaulted him. He only knocked out her teeth in self-defense.

Ali Abdi walked off with a two day suspension and the police never pressed charges.

Now you might say that if the boy had been white and the girl a Somali, that this would have been national news. But there’s more to this story than just the usual double standard when it comes to violence against whites.

The real reason that so many public officials wanted to bury this story is to avoid addressing a reality that is so very obvious to everyone around here: The refugee experiment in New England has been a complete disaster.

It all started most infamously in Lewiston, Maine, a then-respectable community of some 40,000 people primarily of French descent. In 2002, Somali Bantu began virtually invading the town, taking advantage of Maine’s generous welfare benefits and the city’s cheap housing.

Today, some 10% of Lewiston’s population is now Somali Bantu.

There are growing refugee populations in other picturesque New England cities like Portland, Maine; Burlington, VT; and Concord, New Hampshire.

These refugees are typically illiterate even in their native language. They bring with them no skills, but plenty of bizarre cultural practices such as polygamy, female genital mutilation, and the wearing of the face-covering niqab by Muslim women.

Moreover, because of our policy of so-called family reunification, refugees can petition to bring their relatives over from their homelands. This is why, whenever refugees are placed in a particular city or town, it always starts off as a trickle, but eventually turns into an overflow.

The Refugee Industry has many familiar culprits, such as Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services. But in New Hampshire, the most pernicious organization may well be the International Institute of New England.

The International Institute claims that its mission is to rescue refugees from dire circumstances and integrate them into “the social, political, and economic richness of American life.”

In reality, once the International Institute [Send them mail] brings these refugees over and places them in a city, they pretty much kick them to the curb. It’s then up to local taxpayers to pick up the slack.

For example, the International Institute claims that it provides $1,100 cash to each refugee and that the vast majority of refugees become employed and self-sufficient within six months of arrival. An investigation by the New Hampshire Union Leader has revealed this claim to be completely false. [Data Show that International Institute of New England sends more refugees to NH, by Ted Siefer, New Hampshire Union Leader, August, 2011]

The Institute actually provides only $652 in cash to each refugee, and many of them never find any work and simply end up on welfare. They also typically place refugees in squalid housing that they make no effort to upgrade. In 2004, dozens of refugee children in Manchester contracted lead poisoning after being placed in shoddy dwellings. [City’s refugee flow is unsettling, Manchester Union-Leader, August 21, 2011]

Meanwhile, the taxpayer-subsidized International Institute is headquartered in a posh office outside Boston’s Faneuil Hall which they rent for $47,000 a month from a company they actually own.

Just as businesses pass the cost of immigrant labor onto taxpayers, so too does the refugee industry pass the costs of their good deeds onto cities like Manchester who must pay for refugee healthcare, the schooling of refugee children, and the increased demands on their systems of criminal justice that refugees invariably impose.

Sadly, many charming New England cities used to enjoy enviably low-crime rates. But not anymore, as refugees here have been committing crimes ranging from rape to robbery to murder.

Indeed, despite professional claims to the contrary, there are no credible background checks performed on refugees. Refugee contractors generally take these people at their word, even though their word is very often false. 

In 2008, the State Department determined that Somali “anchor refugees” routinely lie when petitioning for their Somali relatives to join them stateside. Subsequent DNA testing performed on refugees found that fewer than 20% of those coming over from Somali to be reunited with their relatives were legitimate. 

In 2010, the Justice Department indicted a Rwandan refugee who had been living in Manchester for having participated in the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

In fact, despite claims of having suffered persecution in their native lands, many refugees periodically return there for vacation. Others have returned to wage jihad against the United States.

Naturally, those New Englanders who complain about any of this are usually vilified as bigots.

In 2002, Lewiston mayor Laurier Raymond published an “open letter” to Somali refugees asking them to stop inundating his city. Many liberals eviscerated Raymond over this simple attempt to speak up for his constituents. A Muslim filmmaker named Ziad Hamzeh [Email him]even made a pro-Somali documentary centered around the incident called “The Letter.”

The assault on Morgan Graveline, however, appears to have strengthened the political spine of many Manchester voters and politicians, who have finally decided that enough is enough.

Manchester Mayor Ted Gatsas, with support from the city council, recently called for a moratorium on new refugees, and even called out the International Institute for its phony acts of charity.

Far from placing him outside the mainstream, such political-correctness has made Ted Gatsas one of New Hampshire’s most popular politicians. In the state’s most diverse city, Gatsas recently crushed his mayoral opponent by a 2 to 1 margin and is already the GOP frontrunner in the next gubernatorial election.

The Sailer Strategy seems to be working very well for Ted Gatsas.

Now here’s my question: Why has no one raised the issue of refugees during the GOP presidential campaign?

Keep in mind, Manchester has always been the nucleus of the New Hampshire primary. Every candidate bases his campaign here. So I find it impossible to believe that the GOP contenders haven’t heard plenty of complaints from local voters about refugees.

This highlights what, in my opinion, is the real problem with the New Hampshire primary.

Liberals often complain that it is fundamentally unfair for a nearly all-white state to have such a huge impact on the presidential election because the concerns of minorities will inevitably be overlooked.

In reality, the special status of the New Hampshire primary has actually served the Left’s racial preferences lobby very well.

The people of New Hampshire have long taken for granted that they get to live in a homogeneous environment. The subject of race, therefore, can usually be safely avoided during the campaign season. When it does come up, whites here can afford to take liberal views of race because they rarely have to face the consequences for them.

Affirmative Action is great—as long as it happens in New York and not New Hampshire.

Things would be different if the first presidential primary took place in Texas or California.

Now, however, New Hampshirites have finally begun to realize that they too are in danger of losing their way of life.

New England has long been famous for its town meetings, where every citizen has an opportunity to speak and vote on public affairs—a tradition of pure democracy famously depicted in the Norman Rockwell painting.

But the real reason small town democracy works so well in New England is because its population is largely homogenous. If these towns were more diverse, then the meetings would surely degenerate into shouting matches, and eventually the Justice Department would be called in to monitor them to ensure that no one is disenfranchised.

Thankfully, more New Englanders have begun to realize that they are the ones who are really being disenfranchised not only through mass immigration, but through the refugee racket that they have been forced to endure and subsidize.

Just ask Morgan Graveline, who had to eat through a straw for weeks after having her jaw wired.

Now is the optimal time to put the refugee issue on the front burner in the GOP primary. The good news is that the voters here are already talking about it. The bad (but utterly typical) news: the candidates, the media, and the Conservative Establishment would prefer to talk about almost anything else.

Not that we should be surprised. The current GOP frontrunner, Newt Gingrich, has been a lifelong champion of the refugee program.

But if any Republican candidate wants to challenge Newt Gingrich on an issue where he is highly vulnerable, this is most definitely the one.

What are they waiting for?

Matthew Richer (email him) is a writer living in Massachusetts. He is the former American Editor of Right NOW magazine.