Christopher Coen
Melissa Sogard
nancylee1
World Relief announced that they are pulling out of Fort Wayne two years after opening an office in the city. World Relief claimed they opened the office to relieve strain from the other refugee resettlement agency in the city, Catholic Charities of Fort Wayne-South Bend, but it became clear that World Relief arrived in town to resettle more refugees and not to help care for those who were already there. When the State Department tried to restrict resettlement to the city in response to a large influx of Burmese refugee secondary migrants that the city and county have had trouble absorbing, World Relief attempted to convince the State Department to reverse course, and thereby make the crises even worse. When they were unsuccessful at that they decided to abandon ship altogether. An article in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette gives more details:
FORT WAYNE – One of Fort Wayne’s two refugee placement offices will close, a consequence of the federal government’s limitations on the number of refugees sent to the city.
World Relief, a faith-based international humanitarian aid organization, opened an office at Simpson United Methodist Church on South Harrison Street less than two years ago in anticipation of an increased flow of refugees.
The U.S. State Department resettled about 800 Burmese refugees in the Fort Wayne area the year before the office opened. Refugees have been fleeing persecution in Myanmar, as Burma is called by the ruling military government, for years.
The high number being sent here had social services agencies seeking help, and World Relief said it hoped to ease some of the strain on Catholic Charities of Fort Wayne-South Bend, the sole agency tasked with placing refugees in the area.
But the State Department has since severely restricted the number of refugees who can be sent to the Fort Wayne area, and World Relief’s local office has welcomed only about half the number of refugees for which it was approved.
Calls to World Relief’s headquarters in Baltimore and Midwest office in Illinois were not returned Thursday. Dan Kosten, World Relief vice president of U.S. Programs, said in a statement the organization has tried to have the restrictions loosened.
Without more refugees, keeping the office open isn’t viable, he said.
Officials at the non-profit’s headquarters told Jeff Keplar, executive director of the Fort Wayne office, on Oct. 15 that his office would close...
…After World Relief Fort Wayne opened, the State Department limited refugee placement in the city to those who have parents, grandparents, children, grandchildren or siblings already living in the city.
Fort Wayne and Detroit were the only two cities to have such restrictions. In June, at the request of placement agencies, the State Department modified Detroit’s restriction to allow the placement of any refugees in the Detroit metro region who have ties there.
“This change should have the positive effect of strengthening family reunification and lessening secondary migration from other placement sites to the Detroit area,” a statement from the Department of State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration said.
Secondary migration occurs when refugees are resettled in one city and leave for another. That has contributed to a Burmese refugee population in Fort Wayne that has been estimated to be the country’s largest.
Keplar thinks the restriction did not lessen the influx of refugees; instead, it might have contributed to secondary migration of refugees who arrived in the city without the support system of a resettlement agency… Read more here
So what we have here is private refugee groups whose goal is not to help the local community and the refugees already resettled, or refugees who have migrated to town from other areas, but to bring in more refugees. Fort Wayne has been in dire need of private groups with private funding to help with refugee secondary migrants, but World Relief has made it clear that they only do business when they can tap government funding, i.e. bring in more refugees for resettlement and collect government resettlement funds. This is what the private resettlement agencies sell as the “private sector contribution” — in which resettlement “charities” no longer just contribute private resources, but only get and stay involved if they can feed off of public funding. It’s almost hard to imagine a worse arrangement for the U.S. refugee resettlement program.
It’s also hard to imagine what would have happened if World Relief had suceeded in pressuring the State Department to discontinue the reduction in flow of refugees to this already overburdened community. Its clear, however, that World Relief has no interest in responsible refugee resettlement. I believe that their involvement in the refugee resettlement is detrimental to the program.
By the way, here is a report on some of World Relief’s funny numbers from a 2005 audit by the State Department’s Office of Inspector General. (Part 1 and Part 2)
