 Every month we try to bring a speaker to the Capitol to talk about an issue of importance to not only government employees but also just citizens in Vermont. We're very fortunate to have partnered with Orca Media who records the lectures and then disseminates them through the magic of the cable world and all of that fun stuff. It is my pleasure to introduce Laurie Stavron today. So I have a little bio here for her. So the topic is really a focus on Vermont refugee populations and resettlement programs here in the state. The Vermont, let's see, you are the Community Partnership Coordinator at the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program. Yes, and this is part of a national network and what I sort of really responded to was the sort of mission to break through social, cultural and economic barriers for newly resettled populations. So it is my pleasure to welcome her on behalf of the Department of Libraries. Thank you for joining us today. So I put this poem up on the screen because I think it really speaks to a personal experience. If any of us did become a refugee what would it be like for us? And I think we would find that our culture, our history would continue to be very important to us and the older we are, the more significant that would be. So if you take away political rhetoric and a sense of judgment and you think about it on a personal level, I think this poem speaks very well to that. I would like to speak today about who is in Vermont? Who are refugees in Vermont? Why are they refugees? How did they get here? How does it work when they get here? And then what difference does it make to them and to our community? I'm here as a member of the staff of USCRI Vermont. I am not representative of our staff. Most of our staff are from all around the world. And I would like to start by showing you a very short video so you can hear from people directly. My name is Safari Pilino. I'm from the Democratic Republic of Congo. From South Kivu, that's the part of East of Congo. We have border with Tanzania, with Burundi. And that's where I was born and raised there. Since 1996, when they were broke out, my story is full with stress, full with harassment, full of bad behavior. You know, when the group of rebels invited your country, it's really a disaster. Those people who are guns, they are the king of the jungle. They control everything. We flew the country without anything. We crossed a lake called the Tanganyika. That was a disaster. We crossed from the Democratic Republic of Congo into Tanzania. That was almost five hours. And we were crossing night because you came on horse. In the morning, you can be caught by the rebels. They were everywhere in the lake. We went to spend a long time in a refugee camp, almost eight years. Life refugee camp is really a disaster. There are some people who spend there more than 20 years. And they have some kids to bomb there, rest there, they marry there. Now they're still there. We went through the process of immigration. And those process took almost four years. And in 2004, we got a letter from American Immigration saying, OK, you have asylum to America. And then everybody was happy to live the life of struggling, life of... I don't know how I can explain. It was really sad to see people how they live there. It's really complicated. Yeah. My name is Shilor Mu. I am from Thailand, a refugee camp. I moved here in 2011 with my family. In 1997, there was a war. The Burmese came to the village and just burned places and just started killing people, right? Out of nowhere, just civilians, innocent and civilians. The ethnic cleansing, Muslims, every ethnic group is not just Koran, there's Chin, Sean, Arkan, so many ethnic groups. They each have their own land, but the Burmese want to take over all the land, so they kick them out of their land. But those people fight back. And the civilians end up dying because they just started shooting and dropping bombs in people's houses. They burned, come in the village, they kill pregnant women, you know, raping, and it's horrible stuff. They're still killing people until these days. My parents, they have to move out of their original land and then they couldn't go back because it's dangerous. They could be killed at any times. There was no security whatsoever. So my parents, they ran with my sisters. They stayed between borders for two years and then they came to the camp in 1997 and they resettled there two years that I was born. They give us bamboo and trees to build a house. We have a bamboo house and a little garden to grow food. They give us rice, beans, a little salt, oil, no income, no job, so no money. A few years before I came, they started requiring students to pay for school. So that's when a lot of students started quitting school because their parents can't afford paying for their education. It was hard to get out of the camp. They grounded the camp with like a metal, so it's not easy to get out. But some people, they still do get out because they don't have enough food and they need more food. So they find ways to get out. But when they get caught, they get punished very bad. Hello, I'm Melita Sedic-Lotten. I'm from Bosnia and I was born in Croatia. And I grew up in Yugoslavia, former Yugoslavia. And now it's unfortunately split into seven different countries. My mother was an archaeologist. She worked in an archive. My father was an ethnologist and he worked as a curator in a museum. And they had pretty stable life. And my sister and I, we grew up, we had a great childhood. We lived in a two bedroom apartment. And I grew up with a lot of neighbors who came from different backgrounds. Some of them were Serbs, some of them were Croats, some of them were from other origins. And some of them were religious, some of them non-religious. We were all considered Yugoslavians at that time. So when nationalism started happening in former Yugoslavia, people started to be more focused on their ethnic group and their national origin. Then suddenly people started like just by hearing each other names, figuring out who you are in terms of like your background and the fear started spreading around and that created animosity and fear. And it just was very uncomfortable place to live in at that point. The war definitely was an aggression from the Serbian side. They occupied places in Bosnia and their army which kind of became the army from the Yugoslavian army kind of started like becoming more of a Serbian army. And then they occupied all the places in the city where I grew up, Banyaluqa. You could feel something in the air and you would see soldiers coming in and calling their families from the post office. You would never see so many soldiers and like tanks and like all these army equipment was just kind of coming and accumulating in the city. And to me that was really weird. And I talked to my parents and since they're historians they were able to explain to me what was going on. But many people didn't believe like when my parents told them like we're gonna have to move and we're leaving the country. We don't feel comfortable here anymore. Something's gonna happen. People would tell them, you're just adventurers, you know like you're not really, we can't like split. Bosnia is so mixed with so many ethnic people and we're all together and there's no way somebody can like split us up or separate us. But my parents, you know, knowing the history what happened in the past, they predicted. So my parents literally like left their jobs. They said, you know, we're leaving in like 10 days. We need to pack and we need to move to a different country. My parents didn't feel safe because they both were targeted because of their background. My mom is a crud, my father is a Bosnian Muslim. We took the bus ride that was I think one of the last bus rides that you could take. And I remember a sniperist, you know, inside of the bus with a gun, you know, just walking full power around, you know, and just making sure everything's okay. And kind of had a little like grin on his face. It was very frightening to me. And I was 17 sitting with my mom and my sister in the bus and didn't know like, you know, where are we going? What's happening? Later on, a lot of people had to move from the city and they didn't have place to go. And a lot of them were taken to concentration camp and tortured. So. Those three people that you just heard from are all Vermonters. And their experiences are unique to them, but there is a lot of similarity to people who come from the same cultures that they've come from and there's similarities and differences between them. I think it's important to understand who a refugee is. This is not somebody who has just made a decision that they're going to change their life. This is somebody who has to flee for their safety. And by definition, this is an international legal definition, they have to have fled their country in order to be eligible for refugee status. There are many people who are displaced who have had to flee their homes for different reasons. At this point, 2017 is the last time that the UNHCR was able to put all the numbers together. So there's a little lag in that. But the 68.5 million includes refugees and includes asylum seekers. These are people who do not have refugee status but are going to a country to seek safety and asylum. Initially, a refugee is someone who has sought that safety, that asylum, but hasn't gotten it and instead has been given refugee status to basically be in a legal limbo in a country outside their home country. And IDP, an internally displaced person, is someone who hasn't been able to get out of their country to get safety. So they've fled for the same reasons but they're still in their country, they're still controlled by whatever forces are in their country. Stateless persons are persons who don't fit any of these categories. Probably they should be able to get refugee status but they haven't for either reasons of politics or funding not gotten that. So they don't have a country. They're living on the margins. They're living and hiding. Palestinian refugees, that's a whole other class, that's a political decision. And then returnees, these are people who have gone back to their home country and once people go back it is not the same as when they left. If you've gone back to a place where you've lived before, of course things change, they've changed much more for people who've gone back after conflict. This just gives you an overview of where the US fits within the world in terms of the number of refugees that we have in our country compared to the population of our country. The first choice that people have and the first choice of the UNHCR and the countries that are members of the UN is for people to go back, to go back home because they never wanted to leave in the first place to return to their country, build their country. The second choice is local integration and that's something that you hear a lot about why don't refugees just stay in a country near their country, wouldn't that be a better solution? Oftentimes the culture, the languages, the climate are more similar but they're not the same. That is the second choice. It's often not, most often not available. And then the third choice is resettlement and this is only if repatriation and local integration are not a possibility is resettlement offered. And it is not offered to all refugees. As you can see less than 1% are resettled, that's because there just are not that many opportunities to be resettled. In the US, our government decides how refugee resettlement works. Each country that resettles refugees has their own way of doing things. The public-private partnership is actually a very strong model. It enables people to integrate into the community. It enables everybody to invest in community together. USCRI Vermont is part of a larger organization we're a field office of USCRI. We had been known as Vermont Refugee Resettlement but we have changed our name as people would recognize us to being USCRI Vermont. Being a field office of a national organization gives us a tremendous amount of strength, experiences, resources that in a time like today when refugee resettlement is under attack really gives us some continuity and ability to serve our clients and our alumni much better than we could otherwise. You can see how refugee resettlement has changed over time in Vermont. So this year, today, until today, since last October 1st, we've resettled 105 people. This is far down from what we had been doing, what our capacity is. The list of countries where refugees have come from, these are countries we've been resettling people from in recent years. You'll notice that we don't have arrivals from Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, and Syria because of the travel ban. Most of the people who are coming from DR Congo are coming because of conflict 20 years ago. So it's been 20 years since they left home and they've been in a refugee camp since that time. The same thing for Bhutan. The people coming now, this gives you a good sense that it's families coming. Most people are either working age or they have children who will soon be working age. There are some older people, there are not many older people in a family for various reasons, including health and access to medical care. If you're thinking about who a refugee is and what their life is like, in the news, in the media, there's a strong focus on that initial transition time, which is difficult. People have to come here and hit the ground running because in the United States, refugees are expected to be self-sufficient within three months. That tells you a little bit about what we have to do. What would you need, what help would you need in order to become self-sufficient in another country, another culture, a different language? The people coming knew everything about their culture. They were self-sufficient before so they're not learning to be self-sufficient for the first time. It's just learning it in the context of Vermont and the United States. Our case management program is very important. These are the people who are from the different countries and they really understand what it means. Most of them are former refugees, have a refugee background themselves. So they're able to meet and greet people usually in their first language and have some idea of what the challenges are people face so that they have empathy and they also can help people see the long view. Our employment department, as you can imagine, with the three-month deadline is incredibly important. People come here, they've worked before. If they've been in a refugee camp, they've had to figure out how to find work, make work because they haven't had opportunities. People who were older before they became a refugee will have had careers. Some people might have managed to have a career in the camp if they had an education that allowed them to say work for an NGO. But once people are here, they're working hard because they've come here for their family, for the future of their children and they want their children to have the opportunity to become an educated, well-respected giving member of the community. It's tricky because people have to be learning English or improving their English. They need access to public transportation. If they have young children, then we have to help them figure out childcare. Oftentimes, parents are working different shifts so that one of them can always be with the children. And sometimes we have opportunities for job training so that they are able to take their skills and then apply them in North America. A good example of that is the people who are now going into construction jobs. Construction is different in different places in the world. We do provide ongoing support to our clients and also to employers. The English language program is geared towards people who are multilingual. The concept of people being solely English language learners is a little bit of a misnomer. Most people who come to the US with a refugee background, they speak two languages, maybe they speak as many as seven languages. So they're gaining strength in their English language here. It helps them support their kids, communicate with people, engage in the community and helps them get better and better jobs. The refugee strengthening program we have acknowledges how stressful it is to be a refugee, to come here to start out a new life. If you think about what are some of the most stressful factors in someone's life, it's money, it's being able to manage your budget. The refugee program in the United States is set up to help people at a poverty level when they first come. It's very short term, very minimal. Oftentimes people will start at a manual labor job until they've kind of gotten their feet on the ground. They have to do a lot with very little. The cost of housing in Vermont is very expensive. So it's a very stressful start. So we're helping people in this program with strategies to take care of themselves and to take care of each other. Community partnership program, this is just a list of some of the activities we've had, some of the partnerships we had in fiscal year 2018. This enables us to really connect with the community. We engage people as volunteers, as family friends, as tutors, as youth mentors. We also collaborate on a lot of different projects. So for instance, you'll see that we collaborated on Babylon, which is a Sandglass Theater play. They interviewed our clients. We assisted them in writing that play, and we are now assisting them in taking that play around the country. So that expands our educational outreach. Another project here is Mosaic of Flavors Cookbook. We have ongoing cooking classes. We do in partnership with City Market, and it's a great way for people to connect with people and see the strengths that they have, and just come together around food, and we wanna share that even more in a cookbook. The youth program is where we really see a lot of need and a lot of growth in our program. If a family is coming here because of their children, you don't want the kids to miss opportunities. The systems are different here. Educational system, employment, finance, everything is different. So helping people understand what's possible, helping people understand what makes sense to them, what they might like to do, and then figuring out the steps of how to do it, and to feel good about who they are, what they're bringing to the US as a teenager, you get pushed and pulled anyway. It's even more extreme if you have a different culture at home than at school. So our youth mentor program is very important for helping kids be centered and to move forward. Interpretation and translation services are very helpful, especially in medical appointments. With school communication, especially with parents, without interpretation, it would be impossible to help people really make a life here because people need to understand how things work, understand each other, and the need for interpretation is something that's greater in the beginning, lessons over time. It really makes a difference for us being able to do a good job and to be welcoming. What is the future of the program in Vermont? It is tied to what's happening at the federal level. We receive people, we do not bring them, so we have no control over how many people come or where they're coming from. So we depend on the State Department and the President to provide new Vermonters to get settled here. At this point, there is some talk of zeroing out refugee resettlement for this coming year. There's a lot of pushback across the country. The reason is that immigration, refugees in Vermont, refugees in the rest of the country are incredibly impactful. They bring so much more than they take. One of the principles of an elementary school in Burlington was telling me how refreshing it was to her to have kids who couldn't wait to go to school instead of playing hooky. They really wanted to be there. The parents, this was their dream for their kids to get an education. So yes, generally kids want to be in school, but this is a different level of passion that these kids and these families bring to it. And the economics of it are quite clear. There's a lot of businesses in Vermont that have grown in ways they couldn't have grown without people working for them who have refugee backgrounds. And there are a lot of businesses that people have started, former refugees themselves. We have clients who have become landlords who are giving back and supporting people coming. It's really, it's a full circle. People come and then they pay back. This is an image from a world refugee celebration. And you can see the diversity and just the sense of community that we have in this celebration. We do this every June, International Refugee Day is in June. And it's important for us to come together and celebrate people being safe, people having a future, and also to remember people who haven't been able to come. One of the hardest things with what's happened with refugee resettlement in recent years, when it became political, when it had been a purple program, Republicans and Democrats had supported it, now that it's like a football being thrown back and forth. What that means is that people are separated from families, their families can't come and join them. And what it means is that some people just never even get that chance. So the numbers are not, it's not an abstraction. These are real people and it is significant. I'd love to field some questions if people have any questions. Yes. Refugee status, are they? So refugee status is one type of immigration status. So there's certain rights and responsibilities refugees have. They have been invited to the U.S. When they arrive, they are immediately eligible to work. So that's a privilege. It's also a responsibility. Not all immigration status, that doesn't extend to all immigrants, when they first come. After a year, refugees are expected to apply for permanent residency. And then at that point, they're no longer refugees. They have lost that legal status. They have a refugee background, but they're not a refugee. At five years, they're expected to take the exam and become citizens. If they don't, then a lot of the privileges that they have disappear. So there's a lot of pressure. The refugee program is focused on building citizens, building community members. It's not a transitional thing. This is permanent. People are making their home here. We also work with asylum seekers. These are people who have come on their own. They have not been invited by the government to come here. And once they come on many different kinds of visas, and they can then apply for asylum, they have to prove their case to the U.S. government. While they're waiting to be able to prove their case, after approximately four to six months, they're able to work. Before that time, they have to be able to support themselves. And then they have to keep reapplying for employment authorization until they're able to get asylum. Once they get asylum, then they're eligible for all the benefits that a refugee has. Do you anticipate that with the change in administration at the federal level, that the amount of refugees coming into the U.S. will change? It depends on who comes in. That is our hope. There has been an anti-immigration movement that is gaining strength and is incredibly well-funded with sustainable funding that is working against refugee resettlement and other forms of immigration. They're not gonna go away. So it's really important that we focus on what we want the policy to be and not think it just comes down to one person. There's no guarantee because you still have Congress that is a factor. When Obama was president, that was when the Syrian crisis was happening. It's continuing to this day, but Obama was increasing the numbers and then it was a sharp change when Trump came in. So everybody had really worked hard to be able to be helpful to a greater number coming. And so the change was all the more drastic because it went from a momentum of building forward to sliding back. Yes? Those graphics showing the economics of immigration to Vermont, those available on your website? No, but I could post them. Or put them on Facebook, yeah? Useful information to share the dollars. I'm not constantly doing that. I've worked with refugees from Bosnia myself. So it always saved the impact on the economy and it was greater than it was taxed. Every study has shown that to be true, yeah? Thank you for the suggestion. I have another question if you're a lot calm. Do you have a sense as to why this, it seems to be this national, I'll say fever of anti-immigration perspective is growing in this country so rapidly? In 1965, there was a law passed that changed immigration to this country before the immigration law in the 60s happened. Most of the immigration had been from Europe and it was changed to open our doors to the broader world to Asia and Africa. And so immigrants started looking different. And that was a point in time where people were starting to take notice. There was less interest for other people to come here at that same time and there was a lot of pressure from other parts of the world, especially where western governments had colonies because a lot of the issues we have now come from the colonial era, problems that were starting back then. As the number of immigrants have come and increased a number being non-European, some people have gotten concerned, worried. They're not seeing themself. And so a lot of specific focus groups have started. There's a renewed interest in eugenics and proving that people who are not European are subhuman. So it's a very complicated problem. I think the fact that our birth rate is slowing down and our population is raging and aging, not raging. Well, it's a little bit of both right now. It's also a factor. So there's this fear of scarcity. You know that there just isn't enough. A lot of times older people are more concerned about scarcity. So I think that plays into this. I don't think there's any one element that you can tease out. The percentage of the US population that are immigrants has increased since the 1960s and so it's become more evident to more people. And then people not looking, talking, acting exactly the same way makes that larger percentage all the more evident to people who are focused on fear. Some people think that a refugee is a certain kind of person. Like someone is born to be a refugee, there's something about them that makes them a refugee. When you look at the numbers and you see how entire populations have had to flee, it's clear that a refugee, it's not a nationality, it's not a descriptor of who somebody is. And one of the things that has been important in refugee resettlement in the US is that the people who have been coming are coming from cultures that are collectivist. So they really are focused on being helpful to one another. Within a family, the children, the parents, the grandparents, they function as a whole unit and they make their personal decisions in part based on what they need to do to help other people. It's different than the US culture where we're so individualistic. I think we would have harder time being refugees because we wouldn't be as helpful to one another. Sometimes there's a lot of urban myths about what kind of assistance refugees get. Each refugee who comes to the US at this point in time receives $975, that's it. So that's not a car, that's not a free apartment. You know, it's a little bit of money to work with to put together as a family to be able to rent an apartment, put down a security deposit, first month's rent. But what you see is that people work hard, they help each other and they save money so that they can get a car, so that they can buy a house, they can start a business. And when it's happening as quickly as sometimes it does, people think that there must be some magic and it's cooperation within the family that makes that happen. The educational level of refugees is actually pretty high. It's a good deal for Vermont. We haven't had to pay for the education of all these adults coming, the children coming, already have some education, that's free to us. Just looking economically, these are people who are joining our workforce. Yes, they are continuing to get educated in Vermont but they're already bringing a lot. College is about the same between people who have been in Vermont and college level, I mean. And refugees, the high school graduation rate is actually higher. So a lot of the factors that, a lot of the measurements of how people's lives are going here, I think bode well for how they're going to be contributing to our state over time. Yes. And to add to that though, I've seen many cases where a degree that someone has in another country isn't recognized here as a degree, so it doesn't qualify them for position whether or not they have English or that their girls are not. So there are creative ways of overcoming that. People be able to pick up their career, the professional career here that they've left behind is extremely difficult. And so it's actually relatively rare that a doctor can become a doctor here so they would generally work in the medical field but not necessarily in the same role that they have before. A few people are able to overcome all of the obstacles there are. There is a sense that in the United States, we're better the best, we know everything and you kind of have to prove yourself and become doing things the American way before there's some value to what you know. And that's a pretty stubborn trait we have that would have to be overcome to get over some of those hurdles. We have, for instance, now we have a client who, two clients who are studying accounting and I'm pretty sure they're gonna get back to working in accounting at the level that they were before. One of the factors that is very difficult for people to be able to put the time and energy into getting re-certified is that they have to support their families. And it's so much hard work for someone to do that and keep their family going that oftentimes people just consider that as a price they have to pay to get their family here and be safe. And what often happens is we see that their children then achieve what their parents had before and often exceed that because that is a drive of the whole family. If there are ways that people can be helpful and would like to contribute to helping people return to their field, that would be very welcome. Some states are doing much more than Vermont is doing. Yes. I had another, just another quick question. So what about your budget? How are you raised funded? Most of our funding has come from grants. From the federal government. Some of those grants are tied specifically to the people we're resettling. So it's, you know, they come with each refugee. They're eligible for certain programs. So therefore they come, we can get that funding. Other programs are competitive and through the years we've been pretty successful of expanding what we're able to offer to our clients and gain some of those grants. Some of those are federal. Most of them are federal. Some of them are private. All of that though is reduced as we have fewer clients coming in here. Going back about 10 years, we've really been building our fundraising effort to get more private donations, more private grants because there's so many things that are important that are not funded by the federal government. So the State Department and Health and Human Services have grants that support refugees. They're not focused on youth. That really is one of our major drivers now, like how can we be helping youth? How can we, which is helping the family? So we've been doing a lot of work to increase funding to support case management, employment counseling, academic counseling for youth. And I'm sure we're gonna, our dream is to bring that to the same level that we're able to provide services to parents and adults. For us, our staff is down from what it had been. And our staff are having to diversify what they're doing. So it's a lot harder if you're wearing more than one hat to do the work you've been doing. But people don't want to leave their jobs because it's a commitment they've made. It's a humanitarian commitment they've made to their work. So the people who are still there are, it's a sacrifice for them to stay. We really hope that we don't have to lose more staff, but we might have to. Some refugee resettlement programs have shut down entirely because they haven't had the diversity programs we've had. A lot of the work we do supports people who are already here. It's not tied to just the first three months or the first year. And we want to continue doing that work. It's important to our alumni and it's also important to the community. So it's a big concern for us now. And it's a concern that we could use the institutional knowledge, the talent, the commitment. You don't just post a job and automatically get someone who can be a refugee resettlement case manager. We have people who have been working in that role for 10 years or more and they're priceless. So we really hope that Vermont will recognize that. I know the state of New York has actually been funding programs for refugee resettlement so that staff can be maintained and programs can be maintained for the long term. And it's not paying people to sit at their desk. It's paying people to do really good, strong, hard work and keep the core group of people intact and be ready for the future. Because if you have somebody else come into office you have a different Congress and suddenly the doors are open, who's gonna do the work? You need to do the work well. And Vermont is special because we're a small community and the way we approach our work is neighbor helping neighbor. That's one of the reasons we have such a strong volunteer program. We have what's called family friends so you could be connected to someone who's come here an individual to an individual or a couple or family and you help each other just like you would your neighbor. It's not hierarchical. That's not a federal program. That's a program we have to fund entirely by donations and we do it because we're Vermonters and this is what it means to be a Vermonter to help each other. The same thing with the Youth Mentor Program. What it requires of people to educate somebody who comes from another culture or another educational system where English may not be their first language is to have an open mind. You cannot put students in a box. You can't say, well this student didn't speak English therefore I'm not gonna expect anybody to speak English or you can't say that they can't do math because their English level is low. So it's really helping our youth program is helping youth figure out where they are. What are their strengths? What are they bringing? Helping their parents understand what their strengths are and then helping them interact with the system in a way that the opportunities are expansive. They're not limited and part of that is it's just that personal one-on-one work with educators, with systems, that's really important to do. You can't say to a student, it's okay to speak up or a parent speak up if they don't even know what they can speak up about. So that's a direction we're going in. And I see the schools wanting to go in that direction also but it's hard work. So we need to be mindful and work together and it takes some resources but the payoff is tremendous. So please go to our website, like our Facebook page, see what's going on, I have some cards here if you want to get in touch. We are resettling refugees in Chattanoag County now and we'll continue to be doing it there. So if you want to get involved, hands on, face to face, that's where you'll need to go.