Conn. volunteer matches Ukraine refugees, sponsors

Connecticut has seen just a few families seeking refuge from the war in Ukraine, among them Simon Bobrovskii and Daria Sakhniuk, who fled Kyiv, married in a refugee camp in Mexico and arrived in Rocky Hill this spring.

We might start to see many more under new federal rules that make it easier for victims escaping the Russian invasion to enter the United States — if they can find sponsors to take them in. One person making it happen: Dana Bucin, a prominent immigration lawyer and Romania’s honorary (read: unpaid) consul general to Connecticut.

Bucin has spent much of this spring working as a matchmaker between Ukrainians seeking refuge in the United States and families willing to take them in, under a complex and evolving system that’s unlike earlier refugee resettlements, most recently for Afghans.

Bucin traveled in mid-April with another immigration lawyer to a refugee camp for Ukrainians in Tijuana — as it happened, just as Bobrovskii and Sakhniuk had their wedding. She met them, matched them with a Connecticut sponsor and brought them home along with another refugee from Ukraine.

And she’s been at it ever since, filling a need for U.S.-bound refugees who don’t have families, close friends or ties to a Ukrainian church in the United States.

“It’s up to people like you and me to take these people in,” said Bucin, a Portland resident who emigrated in 1998 from the Transylvania region of Romania to attend college in Ohio, then law school in Boston. “I’ve matched about 25 people so far.”

That’s too small a number for the need, but it’s a good start and a huge task.

Jumping into the crisis

Isn’t refugee resettlement something the government does through nonprofit agencies?

In the past, yes — as with the tens of thousands of Afghan refugees, upwards of 1,000 of whom have made their way to Connecticut. In this latest humanitarian crisis, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is asking American families and groups to step up directly by applying to become refugee hosts.

The plan, known as Uniting for Ukraine, has been hailed as a way to welcome victims of the war faster, though it comes with serious pitfalls. It requires that sponsors and refugees pair up on their own, somehow, and navigate an already traumatic time without the usual supports.

It’s madness for the Feds to not use resettlement agencies. They know how to do this work — training for host groups, helping refugee families in crisis with a zillion mundane and big issues, an on and on. That, too, is evolving; nonprofit agencies such as New Haven-based Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services are finding ways to join in an effort that didn’t give them a central role.

For now, Bucin has made herself into a lifeline, one of a very small number across the United States. A U.S. citizen for about a decade, she heads the immigration practice at Murtha Cullina and she came from a country, Romania, that has seen more than 1 million Ukrainians flood south across its borders.

With that skill and background, Bucin knew she could help people from her perch in Connecticut — and jumped into the matchmaking role. She’s driven by a crisis that’s hitting her own family, not uniquely.

Her parents, in their 60s, live in a town in Transylvania, just three hours from the Ukraine border. “There were five refugees so far in my parents’ home,” Bucin said. “Them and every other Romanian that I know.”

Not a job for one woman

U.S. sponsors are stepping up slowly in the system that’s not well publicized by the government, but they’re stepping up — some with no ties to the Ukrainian community. Maybe their families survived the Holocaust. Maybe their ancestors came here from some nation torn apart by famine, war or ethnic violence.

The federal forms ask would-be hosts why they’re helping.

“I cry whenever I see their explanations,” Bucin said. “And that’s when you just lose it because you just see the goodness of this world.”

Trouble is, it’s not a role that she can scale up to find temporary homes for thousands of Ukrainians in limbo in Mexico and Europe. She can match up maybe 100 people, she figures — and not all of the matches pan out.

That’s a tiny dent in the 100,000 Ukrainians the Biden administration would like to bring to the United States with a refugee status known as humanitarian parole.

“I would love to hand over the responsibility,” Bucin told me. “I want this to be taken out of my hands and taken over by somebody that has the institutional capacity to do this.”

That would be agencies such as IRIS, in New Haven — which typically arrange for the full cost of resettling refugees, maybe $30,000 to set up a family in an apartment and into a new life. One solution would be for the federal government to keep what I call this “thousand points of light” system that relies on private sponsors, but pay resettlement agencies to make it work more smoothly.

“That’s great that ordinary Americans can step forward and welcome Ukrainians,” said Chris George, the IRIS executive director. “IRIS has always been a big believer in the capability of volunteers to resettle refugees … But people should know what it entails, people should do it as a group, the group should should get some training, and they should be connected with an experienced refugee resettlement agency that can help them when they need help.”

George is optimistic that IRIS and other agencies will be able to step in and work their magic, based in part on a separate federal initiative called Sponsor Circles, which was founded in the Afghan crisis. And IRIS has a grant through a foundation created by George Soros, so it doesn’t need an immediate flow of federal cash.

‘Investing so much love’

A host-family system has never, at least in anyone’s memory, been put to work as the main bulwark of widespread resettlement.

“There’s a reason why the State Department doesn’t allow refugee resettlement agencies to place people with host families,” George noted. “There will inevitably be some problems.”

Speaking of Bucin, he said, “She’s a one-person refugee resettlement matching agency” — but clearly that’s not enough.

Bucin wasn’t sure as of late Monday how many of the families she has connected with sponsors have made it to Connecticut. Once she makes the match, she leaves it to them to come together, but will step in to help if she can.

She’s focused on the people fleeing Ukraine. “We’ve been investing so much love in them,” she said. “These people are welders, they’re health care professionals, they’re IT specialists, musicians, artists, bodybuilders, fitness instructors, construction workers...There was a doctor that I talked to who felt very, very guilty but she had to leave because she couldn’t take the bombardment.”

She connected that woman with a doctor in California.

One sponsor in Connecticut told me he and his wife drove to JFK Airport after arranging for a Bucin-introduced family to travel to the United States to live with them.

For how long? That’s impossible to know. Even with looser rules under the Uniting for Ukraine program, work permits take months. “Our laws and regulations have only gotten stricter and stricter,” Bucin said. “It’s more difficult for new immigrants to get driver’s licenses and work permits and bank accounts.”

A broken immigration system

The battle in Congress over immigration policy hasn’t made matters easier. President Joe Biden was set to drop a Trump-era rule, known as Title 42, under which the United States sent all refugees crossing the border back to Mexico to apply for refugee status — a rule the former president put in place ostensibly because of public health during Covid, though critics charged racism and anti-foreign sentiment.

On Friday, three days before the rule was to expire, a federal judge in Louisisna barred Biden from ending it. As an earlier workaround, for six weeks in March and April, the Department of Homeland Security allowed Ukrainian refugees — but only Ukrainian refugees — to cross the border for speedier processing.

“We are reluctant to get involved in resettling Ukrainians who received special treatment crossing the border from Mexico,” George said, “on the basis of nationality and maybe skin color, allowing them to move to the front of the line… ahead of people who have been waiting for months.”

Bucin disagrees that the Ukrainian carve-out at the border was unfair, saying it addressed an immediate global crisis, and that, unlike the varied circumstances of refugees from other counties, all people from Ukraine were clearly displaced by war.

They both agree, and they are 100 percent correct, that the border rules need to be loosened and reformed for all refugees. Even setting aside the moral imperative to help, the United States needs a lot more immigrants.

Connecticut, for example, has had 100,000 jobs unfilled since the pandemic shutdown ended. She credits Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., with helping Ukrainians enter the United States; and she hopes an influx of refugee immigrants from Ukraine will fill some of those open jobs.

“This person can cook,” Bucin said. “Can I match them with someone who’s in the restaurant business?”

Daria Sakhniuk, the newlywed in Rocky Hill, is a dental office manager and Simon Bobrovskii worked in Kyiv as a hearing aid technician. They’re likely to find jobs as soon as they receive work permits, but will they want to stay in Connecticut?

Bucin hopes so. That’s one factor she looks for — a match with Connecticut, not just with the sponsors.

“You have to filter human nature so there’s a match. It’s an amazing work that I’ve never done before but I’m forced to do it because no one else is doing it,” she said Monday night. “And it’s an honor.”