Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free....

maleficent · 08-27-2005, 02:21 PM

... and then what..

This was in the local newspaper yesterday...

A year later, Somalis to be refugees again

Quote:

Family says it can't afford life in the city

By ERIC MOSKOWITZ
In the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, Mohamed Mohamed harbored no illusions about the wealth that might greet him in America, only a vision of a place where his children could be safe for once, and where - if he was willing to work hard - he could earn enough to support his family.

After 10 months in Concord, Mohamed, a resettled Somali Bantu refugee, has learned he was half right.

His family has felt welcome in Concord. Volunteers have helped him interpret his mail and enrolled his children in recreational programs. But now that Mohamed's front-loaded government aid has run out, he has discovered that his pay as a landscaper - $7 an hour, $280 a week, pre-tax - is not enough to cover his rent and utilities, which can exceed $1,100 a month.

Mohamed has relied on food stamps to keep his seven children and his pregnant wife fed, but his income has not left enough for staples, like soap and diapers. So Tuesday, against his family's wishes, he will move the brood to Maine. He has no job and no apartment waiting, but he has heard that life there is cheaper and easier for Somali immigrants.

"No one is happy to go to Maine, but they are forced to go," said Nasir Arush, a Somali translator who assists the Bantu communities in Concord and Manchester.

Lutheran Social Services, a federal subcontractor that resettles refugees in New Hampshire, has placed 68 Bantu immigrants in Concord since last Octo
ber. Although Mohamed and his family would become some of the first to leave the state, this is not an isolated case, said Arush. The Manchester-based volunteer sees the signs of a looming exodus. He is in the midst of trying to assist four Bantu families in Manchester who have received eviction notices, and he sees that others in that city and Concord are just barely holding on.

"It's an emergency," Arush said. "I think people will be on the streets soon."

After refugees - defined as people persecuted on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, politics or social standing - are selected for admission into the United States, local resettlement agencies provide on-the-ground services. The agencies obtain and furnish apartments and pay the first month's rent, and their case workers offer a range of orientation and integration services, from acculturation lessons to job-placement help.

But the offerings are limited by the federal funding, and most of the benefits to refugees run out within eight months, said Ann Dancy, director of refugee services for the Concord-based Lutheran Social Services of Northern New England. Although some offerings, like English courses, have no termination date, cash assistance lasts only until a refugee secures a job.

After the agencies turn their attention to newer arrivals, the refugees largely make their own way, which is where volunteers come in. Refugees have been coming to Concord only since the late 1990s, and the city's volunteer network is nascent.

But Mohamed and his family have been assisted by a group of devoted friends, locals who provide rides, read to his children, take the family swimming and call Verizon to negotiate complicated bills. Still, the biggest problem faced by Mohamed and other refugees - the high cost of housing - can't be readily addressed by volunteers.

"The big thing here is that rent is simply too high," said Ellen Kenny, who teaches English for Speakers of Other Languages at the Rumford School and one of the organizers of the Concord Multicultural Project, a confederation of volunteers who assist the city's refugees. "It's just not affordable for people with low income, and that's true of the Americans that live here in Concord as well as everybody else."

Six of Mohamed's children attend Rumford, where they are eager students, cheerful, a pleasure to teach. Kenny will miss them dearly. But she said she respects Mohamed's decision to remove his family from a place where the people are friendly but life is not tenable.

Dancy said Mohamed is a unique case because his family is so large. Her agency has placed more than 350 refugees from a range of countries in Concord over the past seven years. Although rent has been an issue for all of them, most have stayed in the city, she said.

"I know of another family where they moved to Maine, but it's not typical," she said. "I think people really recognize that this is a good community and that it is a good place to live, and that there is a lot of support from the neighbors and the community - and that people have been really willing to reach out to the refugees and try to include them."

But the Bantus are having a harder time than other refugees at achieving self-sufficiency because their learning curve is steeper, Arush said. "You have to teach everything," he said, from how to cross a street safely to how to use a toilet. A persecuted minority in Somalia, the Bantus in Concord fled to refugee camps in Kenya after civil war erupted in 1991. Many of the adults had no education and knew only a circumscribed life; their children had lived only in refugee-camp tents.

Life here can be overwhelming. Mohamed attends English courses but finds it difficult to retain the lessons, he said.

"He said he goes to school, learns something in the morning, but when he comes home (after work) he has a lot of things to worry, he has a lot of things to think, and he forgets everything,"Arush said, translating.

Arush is an ethnic Somali who moved to this country five years ago to attend graduate school. In 2003, he became a case worker for Lutheran Social Services. He left last February to devote more attention to his studies. But while working subsequently as a part-time translator for Bantu refugees, he couldn't escape the difficulties they faced while being weaned from their transitional aid. He got permission to open a Manchester branch of Boston's Somali Development Center, and he now spends three days a week running a Bantu referral service on a volunteer basis - translating, pointing refugees to city and state welfare offices, arranging for medical appointments.

"I feel, really, this is my obligation. I have to do something,"Arush said. "You cannot close your eyes."

Increasingly, the Bantu refugees are telling Arush they dream of life in Lewiston, Maine -a Somali destination that, they have heard, offers cheaper living, more public immigrant aid and shorter waiting lists for Section 8 rental assistance.

But for those who do leave, the decision is difficult. Even without a translator, the strain it put on Mohamed and his wife, Habibo, was evident. At a gathering with friends the other night, he sat in a chair on one side of the living room, his eyes pensive, his mouth a tight line, his arms crossed. When he spoke, he kneaded his hands in his lap.

Habibo sat on the floor, some of her children lying next to her on a partially covered mattress. Most of the time she looked away, picking at the cloth of her wrap skirt, brooding. When she spoke, she gestured wildly, and her eyes were searing.

"She says that it will be a very hard transition and it is very hard to understand. The kids are very active (here). It will be very hard for them to leave in two to three days," Arush said, translating. "I think there was a big argument yesterday."

By ERIC MOSKOWITZ

Where does it say on the Welcome mat to the United States that you can live where ever the hell you want, have as many damned kids as you want, and expect the government to pick up the tab? Manchester is not cheap, seven children are not cheap... I'm having a tough time finding compassion for this story...

The question I have, to make a thread about this topic -- are people entitled to anything, either a citizen or an immigrant, once they arrive in the US?