Christopher Coen
Melissa Sogard
nancylee1
USCRI says moratorium in Manchester makes no sense – refugees are “family reunion” cases
Posted by Christopher Coen on July 22, 2011
Lavinia Limon, the head of the USCRI national refugee resettlement agency, says that the moratorium on refugee resettlement in Manchester, NH makes no sense, as all the refugees destined to Manchester are family reunion cases, not “free case” refugees (refugees with no ties to the area), so refugees will move to Manchester no matter where the State Department resettle them. Yet, a Manchester city council member and a Quaker organization claim that the refugees are not being taken care of. The World media outlet has more:
…Lavinia Limon heads the U.S. Committee of Refugees and Immigrants, the agency that oversees the contract to resettle people in Manchester. She said people need to understand the only refugees who are being resettled in the city have family there, so a moratorium doesn’t make sense. “We can put those people someplace else. And then they will come there on their own to be with their family. Just like you or I would. So we think it’s better to do it initially and have the funds with their resettlement, rather than put them in Indiana and have them show up two weeks later.”
Everyone from the State Department on down agrees refugees need more resources to get on their feet. But Limon knows, at a time when Congress is embroiled in a nasty debate on paying off the nation’s debt, the refugee issue is way down the totem pole…
and
…William Gillette, who chairs the agency’s board, claims refugees are making new lives here. “Under any definition, the refugees are better here, than they were, where they were coming from,” he said.
But Manchester Alderman Pat Long disagrees. “You know what, that’s a nice sound bite, but I don’t accept that,” Long said. He said that some refugees in the city are living in terrible conditions. He described the bedroom of one nine-year-old boy he visited. “There was a mural on the wall of blood from bed bugs being squashed. It’s lines, there were 200, 500 lines of bed bugs, when he squish it, he would drag it, and there were lines of blood on the guy’s wall. It’s stuck in my head forever.”
Long said Manchester should stop taking in refugees until it’s clear that there are adequate resources for them…
…Maggie Fogarty, a refugee advocate with the American Friends Service Committee. “Refugees are being placed into poverty. There are refugees who have been here five, six, seven years and cannot earn their own income to live independently, which is what they want to do. There are refugees who are passing through the school system with their language needs unattended to. We are not doing a good enough job.”
But Fogarty doesn’t think Manchester should shut the door on refugees… Read more here
If we always use the conditions from which refugees are escaping (horrible) as an excuse for any poor conditions we resettle them into, won’t that always be an excuse for substandard refugee resettlement? I think it’s a copout.
