Thanks to the efforts and advocacy of Gov. Huntsman, Utah has a new refugee office and money to run it (and a new board too).
The office needed to be created, DePaulis [director of Utah department of community and culture] said, because of “structural gaps and barriers to successful refugee resettlement.” The former Refugee Working Group was funded with federal money and was overseen by the state’s Department of Workforce Services. The funding was never enough, Brown [head of the new office] said, and the creation of the office will facilitate cooperation with state and county leaders without losing the federal money or disrupting the program’s position under Workforce Services.
Read the rest of the story here.
See our previous posts on Utah here and here. Note that it appears the direct resettlement numbers have gone down in Utah but there are more and more refugees coming, so I suspect that Salt Lake City is “welcoming” and they are getting secondary migration.