Easing entry for new Americans serves entire community

Helping central Ohio’s many refugees and immigrants truly become “new Americans” is a smart use of public resources, for reasons both humanitarian and practical: Welcoming newcomers is the decent thing to do, and helping them contribute their talents and industry is good for our economy.

Because available resources are limited, local leaders should pay attention to a recent report that spells out some of the greatest needs and offers approaches most likely to work.

A key takeaway from the research, conducted by Ohio State University’s College of Social Work on behalf of the city of Columbus, is that immigrant and refugee communities should play a bigger role in helping newcomers make their way.

While most traditional social-service agencies have programs aimed at immigrants and refugees, the people who need them have trouble using them. Perhaps they don’t know about the agencies or don’t know how to make contact. Perhaps the agencies don’t have strong enough contacts in the new communities to get the word out.

On the other hand, groups formed within ethnic communities to help their fellow immigrants or refugees are well equipped with the language skills, community trust and cultural understanding needed to help newer arrivals settle in, but they generally don’t have the funding or organizational experience that traditional mainstream groups have.

A sensible solution is to invest in those community-based groups. Offer leadership training to their founders and boards; pair them with mainstream groups to form effective partnerships.

Such partnerships could help build bridges between new Americans and the larger central Ohio community. For a newcomer, seeing one’s own community leaders working with an established organization could build a sense of belonging.

Some other key points of the report:

• While central Ohio has plenty of foreign-language speakers willing to act as interpreters, too few are skilled enough and understand enough about the foreign culture to give an accurate understanding of what the person is saying.

• Post-secondary training is needed to equip newcomers for the skilled jobs going unfilled for lack of candidates. This is especially true for refugees; many come with skills and experience that they aren’t able to use here because their credentials aren’t recognized.

Refugees and immigrants, both documented and undocumented, are part of the social fabric of central Ohio. Making their integration as smooth as possible is the only smart strategy.

Columbus City Council shouldn’t delay too long in setting new tax-break rules aimed at boosting the city’s stock of affordable housing.

New rules, which would require developers in all but the most blighted areas to either build affordable housing or pay fees that would allow others to do so, were supposed to take effect July 31. That date is being pushed back because the rules haven’t been approved yet.

Getting the details right is important; one change that may be in the works is to increase the fee paid by those developers who opt not to provide any affordable housing. Too low a fee might simply be regarded as a cost of doing business; it should be high enough to prod developers to include lower-cost units in their own projects, which could make for stronger, more diverse communities.

Undue delay would undermine the intent of the new rules.