Making refugees feel welcome: Start with a smile


May 16, 2012

Want to help resettled refugees feel at home and integrate fully into their new U.S. communities?  You can start by offering them a friendly “Good morning!” and a smile.

The importance of social networks – including simple neighborliness – for refugees’ successful integration was emphasized repeatedly during Church World Service’s annual national refugee resettlement conference, held May 8-10 in New York.

The conference drew 185 participants, including staff of CWS’s 36-city, 21-state resettlement network.  They met under the theme “Building Bridges to Integration.”

That network’s first task is to help refugees achieve “early self-sufficiency,” which the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program defines as having a job within three months post-arrival that pays enough to cover housing, food, transportation and other basic expenses.

“In this conference we want to look beyond refugees’ first job,” said CWS Immigration and Refugee Program Director Erol Kekic.  “We are seeking to build a continuum of care that begins with case processing and pre-arrival cultural orientation and continues through the initial resettlement period all to the way to citizenship.  Furthermore, we want to celebrate all the benefits integration brings both to refugees and receiving communities.”

While a decent roof over their heads and enough food in the cupboard certainly contribute to quality of life for refugee newcomers, their sense of well-being is also tied to very basic, ordinary things like minimal politeness and respect on the part of the receiving community, said Dr. Alistair Ager, Columbia University Professor of Clinical Population and Family Health.

Ager and Alison Strang have identified 10 interrelated “indicators of integration,”.  Remove one, and assuring the others becomes more difficult.

Their 10 indicators are employment; housing; education; health; language and cultural knowledge; security and stability; rights and citizenship – and social bridges, bonds and links, which are key to refugees’ long-term integration, because it is how they find out everything from where to buy furniture to how to join the PTA or participate in a community campaign for a new bus stop.

Conference speakers distinguished “integration” from “assimilation.”  Whereas the latter implies giving up one’s home culture, “integration” allows for resettled refugees to share the richness of their home cultures with their new friends as they become participants in their new country.

Ken Tota, Deputy Director of the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, built on the integration theme.  He said, “Integration needs daily interaction between refugees and receiving communities at work, school, neighborhoods, places of worship, and so forth.  Integration is two-way, long-term, moves beyond refugee self-sufficiency, and involves the entire community, not just its newest members.”

Anne-Marie McGranaghan, Associate Resettlement Officer for the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), also added to the discussion of integration, emphasizing that integration requires host communities’ readiness to welcome refugees and meet their needs.

Dorothy Wheeler, New York State Refugee Coordinator, focused on helping refugee kids acculturate to U.S. schools and schools to acculturate to and understand refugees, protect them from bullying and help them join in school activities and make friends.

Public policy advocacy that seeks to build welcoming communities also is important, said CWS Associate for Immigration and Refugee Policy Jen Smyers.

“Resettlement agencies should advocate for policies that support refugees and combat anti-immigrant measures at the national and state and local levels,” she said.  “After all, anti-immigrant laws hurt refugees, too.  They fled persecution for safety and now some get pulled over, even detained.”

In plenaries and workshops, conference participants had multiple opportunities to share their ideas and best practices for connecting their refugee clients to social networks early on, during the initial resettlement period.

This might be as simple as going door-to-door with new refugee arrivals to introduce them to their neighbors.  Or, refugees and community members might come together over coffee or a meal, or at a World Refugee Day event.  Children and adults alike can be connected to clubs and programs that fit their interests – whether soccer or Rotary – and be introduced to community services, such as the public library.

Resources referenced during the conference included:

  • Welcoming America, “building a nation of neighbors” – www.welcomingamerica.org
  • Upwardly Global, to help refugee professionals who must recertify to practice their trade (e.g. doctors, engineers) – www.upwardlyglobal.org
  • www.rainbowwelcome.org, resources for LGBT refugees, asylum seekers and asylees resettling to the United States and those helping them
  • “Success Stories and Refugee Voices,” linked from the Office of Refugee Resettlement homepage — www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/orr/