Refugee agencies prep for policies after Trump
At just 16 years old, Fuad Hassan escaped war and persecution in Somalia and fled to Hong Kong with one goal in mind: get to the United States safely.
Then, he waited. He met the woman who became his wife and they had a son, and he applied for entr y to the U.S. He waited some more — for so long that he began to think “maybe I don’t have a chance to go there. Maybe I can’t go to America anymore.”
Eleven years after leaving Somalia, he made it to Colorado in September. He suspects politics played a role in the delay.
President Joe Biden has already taken action to reverse some of former President Donald Trump’s decisions on immigration, and has proposed an increase in the number of refugees allowed into the countr y by Oct. 1 to 62,500 after a historic low of 15,000 set last year.
Colorado’s refugee ser vice programs have stayed busy during the downturn in arrivals, helping the refugees and immigrants who were already here weather the pandemic. While the programs don’t expect a large number of refugees to resettle in Colorado this year, they are preparing for significantly more arrivals in the coming years.
“(W)e know that it won’t happen overnight,” Colorado Refugee Services Program Coordinator Noyes Parker Combs said. “We are still in the middle of the pandemic and critical infrastructure needs to be rebuilt in order to welcome newcomers to our state.”
Between Oct. 1, 2019, and Sept. 30, 2020, Colorado had 417 refugees arrive — compared to 1,956 from federal fiscal year 2015-2016, according to the state’s program. The coronavirus pandemic complicated matters even fur ther, putting refugee settlement programs on pause nationally; only 63 people landed in the state between Oct. 1, 2020, and Jan. 31, according to Combs.
“Colorado has had a long histor y as one of the states with one of the most robust refugee resettlement integration programs,” said Ming Hsu Chen, director of the Immigration and Citizenship Law Program at the University of Colorado Boulder. “… I know that a lot sadness in the communities is about the refugee system essentially being shut down so that the good services and the good people you have in Colorado who are wanting to welcome refugees into their communities didn’t even have an opportunity to do that because there weren’t refugees entering the countr y.”
The state gets about 2% of refugee arrivals nationally, and most resettle in the Denver metro. Others end up in Colorado Springs, Greeley and Fort Morgan, where there are refugee resettlement agencies.
A 2018 study by the Colorado Department of Human Services provided an economic snapshot of 2,700 refugees between 2007 and 2017, showed that for every dollar spent on refugee assistance, $1.68 was generated for the economy.
In 2019, Gov. Jared Polis announced the New Americans Initiative to address some of the barriers immigrants and refugees face, including assisting them find jobs to further stimulate the economy.
Combs also noted there are many refugees now who are critical during the pandemic — essential workers in the health care and food-supply industries.
Helping refugees find their footing
In the last few years, refugee programs across the country have had to focus more of their efforts on supporting the people who are already living in the U.S., helping them integrate.
According to data from the Colorado Refugee Ser vices Program, in 2016, 35% of the refugees or immigrants served had been living in the U.S. for a year or longer, but in 2020, that was 63%.
“While we did have to reduce some budgets, we made commitments to maintain as much of Colorado’s resettlement and integration infrastructure as we could,” Combs wrote in an email.
The volatility in the number of arrivals over the past couple of years — and therefore fluctuation in federal money — made it hard for organizations such as the Denver office of the International Rescue Committee to plan ahead and staf f enough people for providing services, executive director Jennifer Wilson said. Because fewer new refugees were arriving, the group focused its work on immigrants already in Colorado, helping with things such as educational courses, coaching on finances and health and reaching beyond the traditional refugee population.
The pandemic made things more difficult, she said, because refugees and asylum seekers who had stable jobs found themselves unemployed and without savings. Those people turned to the IRC for help in hordes, and staff became overworked. Combine that with underfunding, and the IRC lost workers who had critical cultural, linguistic and technical skills, Wilson said.
“It’s been hard … when it’s become a job or a line of work that people were not really sure that they could make work, or that would be sustainable, because it was under constant threat,” Wilson said of refugee resettlement services during the Trump administration.
Aurora-based Project Worthmore, which provides ser vices for refugees, saw a big uptick in the need for emergency food, rental and utility assistance. The nonprofit’s dental clinic was “bursting at the seams,” Executive Director Frank Anello said.
The agency said on Thursday that it’s in the process of buying the building it rents space in order to expand its services.
“Am I safe?”
The anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, anti-muslim rhetoric added another layer of complexity to refugee services these past few years, the IRC’S Wilson said.
Refugees and immigrants were having to consider, “‘Am I safe?’ ‘Is it OK to get on the bus while I’m wearing my hijab?’ ‘Do my neighbors actually want me here?’ ” Wilson said.
Refugees such as Hassan were concerned for their families. Hassan is also from Somalia, one of the seven majority-muslim countries in Trump’s travel ban that Biden repealed.
But after coming to Colorado and working with the International Rescue Committee to secure work and housing, Hassan is filled with praise for his new home and the agency that helped him get there.
“I’m so lucky to be here,” said the 27-year-old, who now works for a baggage claim company at Denver International Airport and has big dreams for himself and his son’s future.
Anello hopes that with the shift to more refugees being let into the U.S., there’ll be a similar shift in the tone of conversations about the refugees and asylum seekers.
“People need to realize that what refugees and immigrants bring to our country is so valuable in so many different ways, making our countr y beautiful and diverse and bringing different cultures together,” he said. “People need to stop being afraid of people who don’t look like them.”