4 minute read
Last Call
Veer Mudambi
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Worcester Magazine USA TODAY NETWORK
Last month, Worcester welcomed its first group of Afghan evacuees fleeing the Taliban takeover of their home country. Local volunteers, in coordination with state and federal services, are working to get the families settled. Last Call sat down with Professor Anita Fabos, Professor International Relations and Social Change at Clark University, who has conducted research on refugees and forced migrants across the Middle East, Europe and the United States. Fabos discussed how refugees are vetted, what this means for Worcester and how we can be more welcoming as a community.
What’s the difference between this and normal refugee assistance?
Normally, it starts with the State Department — Bureau of Population, Migration and Refugees who works with international partners to identify people in very vulnerable and perilous situations. U.S. officers work with these partners to identify which cases might be needing resettlement, but the tiniest group of people are eligible. It’s a drop in the bucket.
Once those cases are identified, there’s an extraordinarily long vetting process that can take years. U.S. government officials and security personnel will come and re-interview them before the IOM will arrange for them to come to the U.S. It’s not that the process necessarily takes a long time, just that there are backlogs because of the way our infrastructure was very thinned by the previous administration.
This process is an emergency evacuation that has accessed different categories of resources in the United States. My big picture understanding here is some of the people who were evacuated actually were in line for one of the categories for people who were helping the U.S. government in Afghanistan and considered to be most at-risk for being targeted by the Taliban. Those people would have already been in the process — having been vetted and their paperwork already viewed. Don’t know the exact percentage but I expect it would be considerable.
How would you suggest we go about changing public perception on this contentious issue?
Different governments have different policies towards refugees and despite what you see in the news, those policies have been more and more resistant to people crossing borders — refugee movement in particular — especially in the last 15 years. Claiming asylum is getting more and more difficult and resettlement is one of the few remaining pathways to citizenship. There’s this international framework in which the U.S. is a signatory to support people who have been displaced by conflict and it was a bipartisan issue for many years.
In the U.S., we’re just taking such a tiny little drop. I was asked to speak to the influx and said “can we talk about that word?” A few hundred people over the course of the year in a city the size of Worcester seems like such a small number, especially in a college town with thousands of students who arrive each year. Some people’s movement is OK and other’s is not OK — it’s hard to characterize but I would say race and racism and the fear that some people are more culturally distant than others in the United States.
Is resettlement what applies to the Afghan refugees?
They are humanitarian parolees and not part of the usual resettlement program. There’s a bill in the House to designate them as part of a major resettlement program so they would have access to the services from the Office of Refugee Resettlement. That’s why there’s such a volunteer movement because a lot of these people are not eligible for the ORR services.
If you could clarify something about this situation, what would it be?
I think that Americans have a long history of stepping up and helping refugees in emergency situations, and we can look back at the Indo-Chinese resettlement program. People coming from Vietnam and Laos over a period of eight or nine years, about a million, and that was the beginning of our modern resettlement system in the U.S. I think over time the volunteer aspect has fallen away. What I would say would be really important is that people do need help but they don’t need a charitable approach. What I’ve seen is that refugees are put into these situations where they are obliged to feel grateful for any help that they get and I think if we thought of refugees as people whose rights have been violated by circumstances and if we thought of it as helping them access those rights again, the helping hands would be less patronizing. People coming to this country have skills and we want to help them achieve a dignified life.
Would you say that acknowledging trauma is important in this dialogue?
Absolutely. Listening to people is really important too — not just to instruct newcomers but to be able to listen. My father was a resettled refugee in the ‘50s. He came from Hungary as a political dissident after six months in a refugee camp. People were very gracious and there was a warm welcome from the Hungarian community but he said that people were not interested in what he had gone through. They wanted him to fit in right away and learn to be an American. It wasn’t until 20 years later that people actually wanted to listen to what happened to him. He said it was so meaningful to be able to share his story. Just listening can be really helpful beyond the amazing resources that Americans are able to provide — we’re very good at pulling together to give material resources.
Anita Fabos, a professor international relations and social change at Clark
University. CLARK UNIVERSITY
