And, older African refugees have a hard time culturally. Those are the basic themes of a story we have heard all too often.
From PhxSoul:
While Arizona continues to make headlines as a hotbed for immigration issues, concerns about African immigrants in Phoenix do not always garner the same attention afforded to the larger Latino population, or the predominant African American community.
African immigrants residing in the Phoenix metropolitan area—many of them refugees resettled here by the U.S. government–are a compact pan-African group of less than 20,000, according to the 2008 American Community Survey. They enrich Phoenix culture from an impressive array of nations, from West Africa (Sierra Leone, Liberia and Nigeria to East (Sudan, Somalia and Ethiopia), and from the central continent (Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Tanzania), to South Africa—plus many other countries.
Life in this arid new land is especially trying for many older African immigrants. They find themselves far from often strife-ridden homelands, unable to find work and facing barriers of language and mobility. Adding to their stress are daily confrontations with a generation of Americanized children, who seem to turn traditional values upside down.
[….]
Among the African immigrants in the Valley, the main population increase has come from refugees escaping brutal circumstances at home. According to the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, the overall refugee population in Arizona more than doubled from 2006 to 2009 to 4,327.
Refugees resettled in the Phoenix area are not only from multiple African countries, but include large numbers from Iraq and Burma, as well as other strife-torn nations.
Jobs Are Scarce
The recession is having a strong impact on employment for Arizona’s refugees. Finding jobs for immigrants is a primary concern for the state-contracted refugee resettlement agencies, which bring a large portion of Africans to the Valley.
Only one in three of people in the refugee caseload entered the workforce in 2009, the lowest level in three years for the Office for Refugee Resettlement. Those who landed work received an average hourly wage of $7.17.
Read on.