I never thought I would see the day anyone would have the nerve to call for a moratorium on refugee resettlement. Here is a lengthy article from The Olympian in Washington State describing how difficult it is for refugees to find work and get by in America. It begins:
The country is in a recession, jobs are hard to come by, and cash-strapped states are looking for all kinds of ways to cut back.
In the midst of that, more than 60,000 of the world’s most vulnerable people arrived on the nation’s doorstep between September 2007 and September 2008 – poor and in need – fleeing political upheaval in their home countries.
Some of the most recent arrived with few or no job skills, having lived years and sometimes decades in refugee camps. Few speak English; some, in fact, are illiterate even in their native tongues.
In Washington state, where 2,247 refugees settled, they are competing for work with a growing number of jobless Americans who have a strong home-court advantage.
With rents rising in the region, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for agencies to find them affordable places to live. And as the state looks for programs to cut, there’s concern they could lose critical services, such as help with English or finding work.
Refugees urge others not to come:
In the meantime, some refugees are trying to temper the expectations of friends and family in the camps, in line to reach the U.S. over the next few years.
May Wah, a Burmese refugee who arrived here in July with her husband, tells them: “If you don’t speak English, don’t come.”
But they don’t want to hear it. So they respond, “You are already in America. … What does it matter?”
Traditionally, even the staunchest immigration critics have tended to accept the country’s long humanitarian practice of taking in refugees from trouble spots around the globe – from people fleeing war and political persecution to victims of ethnic cleansing and, recently, Iraqis who have helped the U.S. military.
The United States leads all other countries in the resettlement of these refugees, with up to 80,000 to be allowed in through next September.
But now, given the current state of the economy, some are starting to suggest a moratorium on refugee resettlements until conditions here improve.
“We’re broke. Millions of Americans are losing their homes,” said Leon Donahue of Washingtonians for Immigration Reform. “We don’t have jobs for our own people,” let alone the immigrants who have arrived in the past few years.
“Under these conditions,” Donahue said, “I can’t imagine they’ll be any better off here.”
Read on and hear how refugees are very scared about not finding work, or losing the little bit they have now.
We have written many posts recently on jobless Iraqi refugees and although this article doesn’t discuss Iraqi refugees per se, we can assume it has few jobs for Iraqis either, so Washington becomes state number 13 in our parade of states with few jobs for refugees.
The first 12: Arizona, Maryland, New Hampshire,Virginia, New York, Michigan, Ohio, Georgia, Idaho, Connecticut, New Mexico, and California.