The Long Road Home: 

What You, Your Community, and Your Government Can do to
Help Refugees both Here and Abroad

February 24, 2005

 

Resources 

Speakers' Bios

 

Even before he finished high school, Khalid Hassami was forced to escape persecution by the Taliban first in Afghanistan, then in Pakistan, where his houses were bombed and his mother and sisters killed. The 19-year old is now thriving, working and attending a community college in a Phoenix, Arizona. He spends his free time talking with Americans about the refugee experience.  

 

His story is a familiar one for refugee advocates, who held a town hall meeting on the campus of Arizona State University Feb. 24 to help educate Arizona residents about the plight of refugees overseas, their struggles resettling in a new country, and what they can bring to their communities.   

 

"The Long Road Home: What you, your community and your government can do to assist refugees both here and abroad" was hosted by InterAction and the Arizona-based Institute for Cultural Affairs, a global network of 30 nongovernmental organizations working to promote social innovation through participation and community-building.

 

Fifteen other organizations, including the International Rescue Committee and Refugee Resettlement Volunteers of Arizona State University, also participated. 

 

Organizers hoped to provide a basic understanding of how and why refugees come to the U.S., and what their lives are like once they get here. There are about 2.5 million refugees living in the U.S., and about 14,500 living in Arizona.  

 

The town hall meeting was a culmination of three smaller group forums held earlier in the month, where participants crafted practical suggestions about ways to provide assistance to refugees abroad, and help newcomers adjust to their new lives in America.  

 

Agnes Umuligirwa, a refugee from Rwanda who presented findings from one of the smaller forums, said education and increased community awareness are key to helping refugees make that transition. She stressed that refugees need to be viewed as assets to their new communities. 

 

"One thing everyone needs to know is that refugees, all of them or most of them, they come with nothing," Umuligirwa said. "But these people have been educated in their own country. These people are smart. These people have a heart, courage and the ability to learn. In spite of their fears and their misery of the past, these people can do almost everything ...they only need a little bit of direction and language assistance." 

 

That guidance, in the form of a community structure, is as important to a refugee's successful integration and productivity as the donation of funds, said Merrill Smith, Editor of the World Refugee Survey at the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. 

 

"Let's face it. How did we get our jobs? How did we get to know where to go to school? We know people. We live in a community where people help one another. That's what refugees lack." 

Simple steps can make a huge difference in pubic awareness and public funding, advocates said, such as writing to a legislator or placing an editorial in the local paper.

 "We all have some way we can raise awareness," said Melinda Alexander, an ASU graduate student and IRC volunteer. Global ChangesForum participants suggested the federal government should engage in international crises earlier, try to find diplomatic solutions, and increase the ceiling for the number of refugees allowed into the U.S. each year.  USCRI's last survey counted 12 million refugees in the world, mostly in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Less than one percent of refugees are resettled in new countries. 

 

 Scores more languish in camps for years, Smith reporting that more than 7 million refugees have been in camps for at least a decade.  "We are talking about situations where people cannot work, they cannot move, they cannot live normal lives," Smith said. "Their lives are on hold."  He challenged donor countries such as the U.S., Europe and Japan to change the structure of refugee assistance so that refugees have basic rights, and host countries receive the funding they need. "Host country governments will tell you, you put the refugees in camps, we get assistance. The refugees go out of the camps, and they are not visible anymore. We don't get the same assistance."

 

 Looking Forward Deo Baranska, an employment coordinator for the IRC and native of Burundi, said the powerful testimonials by refugees at the forum reminded him of his own experience as newcomer to the U.S.  "Nobody chooses to be a refugee," he said. "Nobody would think that someday he or she would wake up in the middle of the night and realize that peace, security and freedom are over," he said. Baranska said if Americans would take time out of their lives to be "ambassadors" to new refugees, and help them with simple things like cashing a check or choosing a school, it could develop and enrich the community. 

Komi Lokossou, a refugee from Togo, took it a step further and said that Americans need to teach refugees the meaning of freedom, so that they can then pass on to their children what it means to be American.

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Speakers' Bios