FORT WAYNE – Officials for the U.S.
State Department and the United Nations will visit Fort Wayne this week
to learn more about refugee resettlement efforts.
Larry Bartlett,
director of refugee admissions for State, and Shelly Pitterman, regional
director of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, plan to meet
Thursday with those described by Bartlett as “stakeholders” –
resettlement agencies, service providers, advocates, Mayor Tom Henry and
refugees themselves.
“We try to go to communities on a regular
basis to really try to understand where the nuances are, how communities
are coping and how we might, if we can, adjust some of the programs,”
Bartlett said from his Washington, D.C., office in a telephone interview
last week.
The last time a State Department official came to Fort
Wayne to evaluate refugee resettlement services was in 2009. Bartlett
also will visit refugee communities in Indianapolis and Detroit next
week.
“Part of the responsibility we have is not just to see how
our programs are faring but to see how the community is supporting
refugees, to see where there are issues, challenges, weaknesses in the
programs that we can be helpful with,” Bartlett said.
“We really do see this as a partnership with the community,” he said.
Catholic
Charities of the Fort Wayne-South Bend Diocese has helped people exiled
by political, religious and ethnic persecution – in Bosnia, Vietnam,
Iraq, Somalia and many other nations – to resettle in northeastern and
north-central Indiana. By far the most resettlements are the more than
2,700 Burmese refugees who have arrived in Allen County since 1993 after
fleeing oppressive military rule in the Southeastern Asian nation of
Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.
Refugees “aren’t coming to America as an economic opportunity or as a migration opportunity,” Bartlett said.
“Refugees
are coming here because they can’t go home. Our country’s government
and our communities have all kind of assumed responsibility to help
those people. We offered them an opportunity to rebuild their lives, to
become citizens, to become permanent residents of this country.”
Minn
Myint Nan Tin, executive director of Fort Wayne’s Burmese Advocacy
Center, said she wants Bartlett and Pitterman to “see the people, talk
to them, listen to them and what they have to say.”
She said the
Burmese community’s biggest challenges include a shortage of good jobs
for adults, a lack of higher-education options for teenagers and a
prevalence of diabetes and heart disease among older residents.
Many workers are stuck in low-wage jobs, she said.
“It’s not enough to provide for their families,” Nan Tin said. “Most refugees have large families.”
No
more than 20 percent of Burmese who graduated from high school last
year are attending college, she said. Many of the rest fall into two
categories: those who need to work to aid their families and those whose
parents are unfamiliar with the college application and admission
process.
But economic prospects are “getting better,” Nan Tin
said, and she noted that more than 20 small businesses are run by
Burmese refugees.
Bartlett said refugees, particularly
first-generation arrivals, often start in low-wage jobs because they are
not proficient in English or their foreign training does not fit U.S.
certification requirements. Successive generations generally fare
better, he said.
Eric Schwartz, then an assistant secretary of the
State Department, discovered what he called “heartening and dismaying”
conditions for newly arriving refugees of various nationalities when he
visited Fort Wayne, Chicago and Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minn., in 2009.
In
a 2010 message to State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration
that carried the headline “Doing Right by Newly Arriving Refugees,”
Schwartz wrote that he had witnessed “the deep and abiding commitment to
refugees among overworked and underpaid agency personnel in the field,
the determination of new arrivals, and the welcoming spirit of local
school, healthcare and government officials.”
But Schwartz also
wrote: “I heard from refugees threatened with eviction after only months
in the United States. I learned that refugees often had to choose
between buying food or diapers for their children. And I spoke with
agency field staff overburdened by the number of refugee families they
serve and the complexity of the resettlement needs of recent arrivals.”
Schwartz
ended his dispatch by saying the State Department would increase its
resettlement grants from $900 to $1,800 for each new refugee, an amount
that has since grown to $1,875. Roughly half the money goes for
administrative costs of resettlement agencies, Bartlett said, and half
pays for rent, food and other necessities for the refugee.
Refugees
do not receive federal financial assistance to return to their
homelands – a distinct possibility for Fort Wayne’s Burmese in light of
democratic reforms enacted by Myanmar in recent years.
“In theory, when it is safe for them return, they will. And they will want to,” Bartlett said.
Thanks
to secondary migration – refugees moving to Fort Wayne from other
American cities – the 2010 U.S. census counted 3,877 Burmese in Allen
County. Only four U.S. cities were home to more. Some people involved
with the local Burmese community, including Nan Tin, believe the number
of residents is at least 6,000.
In some instances, she said,
households might have been tallied as a single person and not as
multiple family members. There also has been speculation that a number
of Burmese might have identified themselves according to their ethnic
groups – Myanmar has many – rather than their nationality.
The
State Department has a nationwide ceiling of 18,000 refugee arrivals
from East Asia in fiscal 2013, which ends Sept. 30. It expects 17,500 of
them to be ethnic minority Burmese who have been living in refugee
camps in Malaysia and Thailand.
The department has approved Catholic Charities for 170 refugee resettlements in fiscal 2013.
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