Two years ago today a public meeting on refugees was held in our county seat, Hagerstown, MD. We actually have a whole category for posts about it entitled September forum here (you may also need to use our search function for ‘Hagerstown’ to get the full story). It was the culmination, as it turned out, of about a year of political turmoil about refugees brought to Hagerstown. I’ve been thinking about that meeting recently as I prepare to give a talk about it at an upcoming meeting in Washington.
I’m not going to rehash the story except to say that the Virginia Council of Churches (VCC) had quietly begun resettling refugees in our rural county, and our local political leaders had no clue about what was going on. Some of us were initially open-minded, but wanted to understand how the program worked. How was it that a non-profit group (from another state!) could just decide to add more poverty to the poverty we already had? Who was going to take care of the refugees? Where would they work? Would the cost of adding to the schools fall on the county (unfunded mandates issue)? Those were the sorts of questions we wanted to have answered. So we supported the idea of holding a public meeting so that officials from Washington, the state of Maryland and the non-profit groups could explain it all.
The public meeting happened on September 19th, 2007. The US State Department sent two women who run the program in DC, the Maryland office that handles refugee issues participated as did Church World Service (one of the top ten government contractors) as well as its subcontractor Virginia Council of Churches—a group almost entirely funded with tax dollars. A couple hundred residents of Washington County attended.
You can read all about what happened in the posts in the September forum category, but the gist of what happened is that many of us felt we did not hear straight answers and the worst part was that the citizens were treated to a condescending tone from several speakers who felt the need to waste time and remind us that we were all immigrants once. The sort of questions I wanted answered are listed in this post. These questions were ones I wanted our local paper, the Herald Mail, to answer for the public. They didn’t, so we have been writing this blog ever since.
The refugee resettlement program of the US State Department needs to be reformed. We will just keep hammering away until it is. I’m not saying there is corruption in the program as deep and profound as the one now being exposed with ACORN, but I believe very strongly that when non-profit groups continue to reach into the pockets of taxpayers there is a very real possibility that waste, fraud and abuse (abuse possibly even of the refugees themselves) is going to happen.
I encourage all of you in communities receiving refugees or about to receive refugees to do research, ask questions and demand a public meeting so that officials can inform everyone of what is happening to your community. If it’s a good program it will stand up to public scrutiny!
So, what happened in Hagerstown after that public meeting where many citizens went away even more annoyed? Ten days later the announcement was made that the Virginia Council of Churches would be returning to Virginia and more refugees would not be brought to Hagerstown. Their parting shot to our city was that we were “unwelcoming.” But, there was a lot more to the story and it’s my contention that the State Department and Church World Service were unhappy with how VCC didn’t take very good care of the refugees they brought to Hagerstown in the first place and that they had royally screwed up the public relations aspect of the program.
Again, the moral of the story is, if refugee resettlement is good for your town or city those promoting it must tell the public ALL THE FACTS and then let the citizens decide, afterall that is how good government is supposed to work!