 Greetings. I'm Kathy Cody Hudson, Director of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Vermont. We're so pleased to have you join us for today's OLLI Distinguished Speaker Series presentation, Refugees and Immigrants in Vermont with Pablo Bose. A special thank you to AARP for again sponsoring seats in our series. Welcome AARP members and a special welcome to our new and returning OLLI members from across Vermont, the country and even into Canada. We really appreciate your continued participation in and support of OLLI. Before we begin, a couple of virtual housekeeping reminders. We encourage you to enter your questions in the chat box and we'll do our best to get to each one at the end. Please refer to the instructions in the chat box to activate live captioning on your screen if you'd like that. And we are recording this presentation and we'll be sending it out to participants in a day or two. So today we welcome our distinguished speaker. Pablo Bose is a Migration and Urban Studies Scholar in the Department of Geography and is Director of Global and Regional Studies at the University of Vermont. His research focuses on four main areas, refugee resettlement in North America and Europe, environmental and forest displacement across the world, cities of the global South and food security and sovereignty in diverse communities. Over the past decade, Pablo has worked extensively with community member partners to assess the effectiveness of youth programs, healthcare access, food security and urbanization strategies in various resettlement sites. He is currently working to support the rebuilding of the U.S. Resettlement Program and in particular new locations in rural areas through community partnerships. So please join me in welcoming Pablo Bose. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. I'm going to share a PowerPoint presentation here and hopefully that is visible. Okay, so thank you again. This is my I think fifth or sixth lecture in this series. And I think the second time that I am presenting on refugees, but about seven years after the first time I did so much has changed through that period and I'll talk a little bit about that. So today I'll talk about three things. I'll talk about forced migration and the U.S. I'll talk about resettlement in smaller cities and locations across the U.S. And then I'll reserve the bulk of my time to talk about refugees in Vermont. As Kathy mentioned in her introduction, I'm a migration and urban studies scholar. I have looked a lot at the reasons that people are pushed out of the places in which they live. So that may be because of conflict, persecution, development projects. Increasingly, I've been looking a lot at environmental factors, climate change, a number of things like that. And on the other side, I'm really interested in the ways in which refugees resettling in new countries in new places and cities in particular really changes them. And the kinds of impacts there are on the people who are doing the moving. Most recently, some of my work has focused on resettlement in new destinations in the U.S., in Canada, in Germany, in France, in a whole range of different places. I just published a couple of years ago a book looking specifically at resettlement in Vermont, but also at other places across the U.S. So to contextualize kind of where we are when we're thinking about global displacement, we've gone through a period in which the number of people who are being forced out of their homes, out of their livelihoods, out of their their homelands, those numbers have grown and grown and grown, especially over the last decade. In 2010, the UNHCR categorized just under 35 million people as populations of concern, people who had been displaced from, again, their homes, their livelihoods, their homelands, etc. By 2020, that number had more than doubled. And if we look at the numbers today, they're even higher. So we have a great deal more people who have been forced to be on the move. And yet at the same time, it's important to recognize that this only captures a small portion of those who have been forced to flee. This only counts the people who really, for the most part, it only counts the people who are forced to leave their homes because of conflict, because of persecution, because of a fear of harm that is conflict based. It doesn't count some of those other categories I mentioned, environmental people displaced by environmental change or by development projects and things like that. It's also important to remember that out of this number of people who are displaced, only a very small number will ever actually be resettled into a third country like the US or Canada or Australia or somewhere else. That's because of a number of different reasons. But first and foremost, if most people who are displaced had the option, they wouldn't want to be displaced. They would want to be able to return to their homes, their livelihoods, their homelands. They would not want to be displaced. But of course, we know that in many cases, that is simply not an option. One cannot return either because there is no safe home to return to. Sometimes there is no home to return to no home to return to. Therefore, for some people, the only real solution is to be resettled to a third country. But that's always a very small number. Out of this 35, just under 35 million people in 2010, roughly 200,000 people were resettled into a third country like the US and much less than that in the US. By 2020, that percentage, even though you see many more people being displaced, the percentage who were being resettled was less than 150,000 worldwide, not the US worldwide. It's the entire globe. But of course, we also see this in the case of the US. We see that numbers have fluctuated throughout the history of the US refugee admissions program from historic highs in the 1980s and the 1990s that were tied to other kinds of commitments that the US had. Geopolitically, the result of foreign interventions and wars. The blue line you see there is the number of people that the US said that it could admit in a given year. The orange line is the number who are actually here. You see that very rarely have we actually even met the targets that we set as a nation that these are the number of people that we could accommodate. Those numbers, of course, declined drastically under the previous federal administration. Again, to historic lows, both in terms of the actual number of people who showed up, for example, the pandemic obviously had an impact on that, but also as a result of federal policy that simply cut and cut and cut the number of people who could come, as well as support locally for the different kinds of resettlement agencies that do the work of resettling people. Under the current administration, the plan has been to rebuild the refugee program. Initially, there was talk of resettling 125,000 people this year, that from a low of roughly 15,000 people last year. Really, there was a sense that that was not a possibility to resettle that many people. Then eventually, the administration came in with the number around 60,000, 62,500, and then the Afghan crisis happened. Now again, there is a hope or a desire that we could resettle, as you see on that graph, a much larger number of people. I'm going to return to that particular issue as I close out this talk. This trend of a backlash against refugee resettlement is visible all across the world. We've seen movements that have been formed against immigration most broadly, and refugees in particular, whether it's in France, it's in Italy, in the UK, in Hungary, in South Africa, in Brazil, in India. There's been this growing backlash, especially with the rise of populist movements, right-wing movements, for many of whom the refugees have become a symbol of what they don't want to see. Yet despite that, we still see the need for some solution to the refugee crises that have erupted in different places across the world, as well as an unambated growth in refugee flows in multiple different places for multiple different reasons. I've been doing this work looking at various aspects of this. I mentioned already the work I've done on resettlement, which is what I'll focus on today. I've also been looking at asylum policies, for example, between the US and Canada, in Europe as well. These are ongoing and deeply charged politically and culturally charged issues. I'm going to focus here on this one particular thing that I've been really curious about, the policy of placing refugees outside of the major metropolitan cities. When I first moved to Vermont, I came here from Toronto. I had worked in New York, in London, in Vancouver, and I was very much used to the traditional pattern of immigrants, most generally, and refugees in particular, settling in large metropolitan areas, in the large cities, the so-called immigrant gateways like London and New York and Toronto. But when I first moved to Vermont, I was thinking, well, where am I going to find, if I'm a person who works on large cities and immigrants, where am I going to find either of those in Vermont? What I found instead was this really interesting pattern, which was that I could see that for decades refugees had been resettling in Vermont. And I was really curious as to why. And as I began to investigate this further, I saw that this was a trend not only in Burlington and in Vermont, but across the country, that if you look at it, there's a greater proportion of refugees, not just in sheer numbers, but in proportion of population who are going to these smaller places, the Uticas and Bowling Greens and Twin Falls and Concordes versus the Chicago's New York's LA's and Miami's. This is also something that you can see if you go to Canada, if you go to France, Germany, these other places as well. There's been a very intentional shift of refugees to these other places following along a longer trend in immigrant movement outside of these traditional cities. And in the US, for example, Latino migration has gone to the south, to the Midwest, to parts of the Pacific Northwest. And so a lot of these places are seeing over the last 20 years a larger influx of immigrants. But focusing on the refugee programs, I was really, you know, focused my work on these three central questions. One, why are refugees being placed in smaller cities and towns? Refugees, unlike other immigrant groups, there is much more involvement by the federal government and its partners in that initial placement of refugees in a given location. There's a lot of factors that are taken into account, but by and large, refugees themselves don't have a lot of say on when where they go initially. They can move after that, but there are a number of inhibiting factors to that movement. The second question I asked is what happens to them when they go to those places? And thirdly, what happens to the places that take in refugees? Again, to dig down a little bit deeper from that graph I showed you a moment ago, if we look at the US refugee program, between 2012 and 2015, there were roughly 75,000 people a year who were being admitted into the country. These are primarily people from the Bhutanese communities, some Iraqis, Somali and Congolese, other groups as well. But those were some of the large groups. In 2016, there were an additional 10,000 Syrians added. In 2017, there was a proposed 30% increase all the way up to 110,000 people, but this was right at the height of a lot of concerns around global terrorism, the rise of populism. The Trump administration here targeted the refugee program in particular, as did a number of Republican governors, candidates during elections, all these sorts of things. And so we then start to see a whole number of cuts to the refugee numbers and the programs that support them. So travel bans, halting and restarting resettlement through kind of court challenges. And that first year, instead of 110,000 people, just over 50,000 actually enter. By 2018, a lower number is going to be admitted. Even fewer are resettled. 2019 numbers go down again. 2020, 15,000 people are slated to be admitted. So it's been cut after cut after cut, not only of the numbers, but for the resettlement agencies, because much of their own funding is tied to these numbers, they have been cut and cut and cut. A whole number of these different partners of the federal government, there's nine of these not-for-profit partners, large organizations. There's faith-based ones like the Catholic, the Lutheran, the Church World Service, a number of these. There's others like the one here in Vermont, the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, the International Rescue Committee. A number of these have had to lay off staff and cut offices, close down offices. And so when we then turn around in 2021 and look at rebuilding the program, it takes a lot of work. As I said before, the numbers this year are meant to be 125,000 people with a focus on Afghan refugees. And additionally, as I'll say as I end this talk today, there's a real focus on rebuilding the refugee program in a different way, and in particular to focus on community partners and sponsorship. I will come back to that. So just to really give you a little snapshot of what resettlement between 2012 and 2016 looked like before we endured all of these cuts, refugees over that period were pretty much in sheer numbers, still going to a number of those states that have been traditional immigrant receiving states, so California, Texas, New York, Florida, for example. But when we start to look at that as refugees as a percentage of the overall population, we start to see other places begin to appear, the Dakotas, Idaho, Vermont, Arizona, and Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia. And as a percentage of the foreign-born population here, you see that the darker colors represent that for a lot of these states, refugees represent a significant portion of the foreign-born population. And especially if you look at recent foreign-born immigrants, it's really refugees who are overrepresented in all of these states. Of course, people are not coming simply to states, they are coming to cities. And so this is one of the things that I have been looking at in some of my work, what of the different cities that people were being resettled in. Now, when I first started looking at this in that early period, there was about 220 different sites where refugees were authorized to be resettled. Those are the main sites. Now, people do obviously, you know, settle sometimes in the surrounding areas or, you know, kind of suburbs, etc. Those numbers declined drastically during the Trump administration, I believe, went down to roughly 150 sites from 220. A lot of the smaller sites were forced to close for a variety of different reasons. But another trend that was really apparent, even in that earlier period, if you looked at where people were going, is if you drill down within particular states, once again, it isn't that old traditional immigrant hub that was the only place, or in some cases at all, the main place that refugees were going. In New York, for example, it wasn't New York City, but rather parts of Western and upstate New York that were being utilized for the refugee program. In Pennsylvania, we see more parts of central Pennsylvania than the Philadelphia area. Boston remains a fairly strong resettlement area, but Western Massachusetts also plays a similar significant role. And we see this pattern play out in related, although not identical, ways all across the US. Thus, I began to look at, you know, how do these patterns kind of develop over time? What use is the refugee program making of larger versus smaller versus mid-sized cities? And I found that there were still some people being sent to these large cities, in some cases, at a much higher rate than in others. This is cities between 50,000 and 1.5 million, obviously quite a range there in terms of what we've classified as large cities. In the kind of mega city arena, we see certain locations like Phoenix, San Diego, Houston, Dallas playing a much larger role than, say, a New York. But what I found was particularly interesting was the outsized role that mid-sized cities, smaller cities were really playing. So smaller locations, even cities smaller than 50,000. And I began to bunch some of these into these buckets and looking at who is playing the most important role. And here's where I make the argument that it's really cities that are in that mid-sized band between, you know, 100,000 and a million people where we see, you know, a significant number of refugees going. At the same time, these much smaller locations have as much of an impact, as much importance, as do these much, much larger mega cities. And really, the distinction there is those much, much larger mega cities, in many cases, have a longer history of immigrant incorporation. And they have more resources that could be shared across types of, for example, nonprofit organizations. With smaller communities, that's a bigger, bigger challenge. So why, why this focus on smaller cities, smaller locations? As part of the research I did, I went across, I interviewed every state refugee coordinator, every state health coordinator. I visited a number of locations, some for shorter visits, some for longer visits, interviewed people, refugees themselves, resettlement agency staff, city officials. I did about 300 interviews in total, 250 specifically in these kind of smaller communities. And I asked these questions, you know, why, why in these particular locations? Housing was mentioned, affordable housing. That was tended to be much more the case in Rust Belt cities in the Midwest, in the South, certainly not in the Northeast and not on either coast. Nor, same kind of thing with cost of living, much more in the Midwest and in the South. The availability of certain kinds of jobs, manufacturing, agriculture, construction were mentioned. One of the key reasons was reconnecting, reuniting with family, especially when people did not necessarily have a ton of control over where they were originally settled. Different kinds of opportunities, including education, were mentioned quite a bit. And finally, the idea of being in a city of a manageable size, one where someone had more opportunities to get connected either with others within their own community or simply getting to know the new country better. The interviews I mentioned a moment ago, when I asked people on, especially within city government and within the refugee resettlement networks, why these particular places, there were three themes that were particularly prevalent. One was that refugees brought diversity to areas that didn't have a whole lot. Two, that refugees were drivers of urban renewal. And this was especially true in, you know, Rust Belt areas that cities were on the decline and this was going to be a way to turn things around. As prevalent was not just the idea of like, well, we can renew a city, but that a city lacking an influx of new people were going to die. So there was really this kind of sometimes fatalistic language around, you know, how are we going to deal with the fact that there's youth out migration, that cities are aging, there's a declining tax base, the infrastructure is falling apart, we need new people, new blood. And so that was a common theme repeated again and again. All right. So let me turn at that point to talk about Vermont in particular. So in Vermont, obviously, when we think about immigrant settlement, you know, it's not a traditional immigrant receiving area, especially since the second half of the 20th century, it certainly has a long history of immigration, particularly from, from, you know, Quebec and from parts of Europe, etc. But, you know, what in migration there has been has tended to be either from other parts of the US, or really focused on Chittenden County. In terms of refugee arrivals, when the US refugee program becomes formalized in 1980, if we look from that period onwards, for the most part, the trends in Vermont mimic the national kinds of patterns of who comes into the country. There are some people you don't see really represented here. There's not a large Cuban or Haitian refugee or asylum population here. But what you do see is mainly from the 1980s, refugees from Vietnam, in the mid to late 90s from Bosnia and Kosovo. From the early 2000s, we begin to see a number of refugees coming from various parts of Africa. One of the largest resettlements happens from between 2008 and roughly 2016, which is Nepali speaking La Champa from Bhutan. We also see the arrival of some Burmese. There's been a few different points in which Iraqi refugees have come in, both refugees and those known as SIVs or special immigrant visa holders. These are people from Iraq and Afghanistan who served as translators and worked with the US military and US government and come in through a special program. Currently, the main groups that we see arriving here, there are some refugees who've come in from Syria. Again, that got wrapped up in all sorts of controversy in a stalled resettlement in Rutland, a place that fits so many of the things that I mentioned earlier about why Rust Belt cities may want to have refugee resettlement. Refugees from Congo, the DRC, and then of course the Afghan refugees who are coming in most recently, both to Chittenden County, but also to a new resettlement site in Brattleboro. And by new, I mean over the last two months, this is what we're seeing right now. One of the things that I began doing when I started some of this work in Vermont was taking a pulse of Vermonters on attitudes towards refugee resettlement. And I thought that this was particularly important given how fraught the national conversation had been, how fraught the conversation in Rutland seemed to be. And so I added questions to the annual Vermonter poll, asking what people's, I asked four questions. Do you support refugee resettlement at the current levels, at an increased level, at a decreased level, or are you completely opposed to it? Where should refugees be resettled? What are the most important factors behind someone's successful resettlement? And finally, who is most responsible for the success or failure of resettlement? And what I found was that when asked just that basic question of do you support resettlement at all, those numbers overall actually increased over the course of the five years that I did this polling. It went from if you add those first two columns, which are yes, resettle refugees at the same rate, yes, resettle them, but at a higher rate, it actually grows and grows and grows. And so that those are sorry, the first three numbers are either at the same rate or at a higher rate. That last number, the somewhat teal bar is do you oppose resettlement? And that number has gone down from 21% to 13%. When I asked where refugees should be settled in Vermont, overwhelmingly, the answer was evenly across the state. And there are all sorts of reasons why traditionally, refugees have been resettled only within the Burlington metro area. There have been earlier attempts, there was an attempt to resettle refugees in Bury. There's been conversations about other places when Rutland was actually selected. There were a number, I believe, seven different towns in Vermont that had applied to be considered for resettlement, but that did not happen. So, okay. So let me turn now to talk about some of the challenges that happen in resettlement in smaller locations. This is something I've observed here in Vermont, and it is something I've seen all across the country. In some cases, it may be simply that you are resettled with very few people who are from your same ethnic background, racial background. There may be, you know, the number one challenge I would say is language, language access. Are there people who speak the same language as you in that small community? You know, one of the first questions I raised when we started having this conversation about Afghans in Vermont was how many Darian Pashto speakers can we find? But, you know, what is the capacity to provide that? Beyond those sorts of immediate and long-term needs around language, we see the fact that social alienation may arise because of a sense of being kind of adrift in a new country, in a new space without a lot of familiarity around you. And this is perhaps even more marked in small cities and in rural locations. I think of the experience of Hmong refugees in Wisconsin and Minnesota and this original plan to put them in these kind of more rural communities because they came from a rural background, not really having a lot of nuance to that question of how different rural spaces can be. I also think that there's a real challenge for service providers. I work a lot with local service providers. I see this in the case of schools, especially that there is, you know, schools are such a linchpin of, you know, social support in our communities but are just in general not provided enough resources. But I find that especially true in the case of refugee resettlement, that they're expected to step up and provide all sorts of services not only for children in the K-12 system but for their families. And I think that, you know, I've seen some admirable programs, the multicultural liaison programs in Winooski and Burlington, the, you know, the homeschool liaison programs, the parent universities, things like this that have attempted to not simply provide short-term kinds of supports but really how do you acclimate people to an entirely different system. You know, for me moving here from Canada, it was hard enough for me moving from a university system in Canada to a university system in the U.S. and seeing how different it was. It is, you know, that kind of disconnect is magnified many, many times when you look at what happens for refugees coming in here. So there are a number of integration challenges, racial hierarchies that people are sort of slotted into, people being marked by the very clear racial hierarchies in the U.S. I mentioned before the lack of resources, the decline in funding and how this affects, especially the service providers, the culture clashes that may result from the lack of knowledge of the nuance of different, the different communities that are coming in. I did a really interesting interview with a very successful local business that has integrated refugees into their workforce, but we're talking about the fact that they did not know about some of the challenges that some of these groups had within themselves amongst each other and how these were being replicated on the factory floor because they simply didn't know about them. And housing and transportation continue to be the same challenge they are for the general public, but I would say even more. Having served as a commissioner on both the Burlington Housing Authority and the Green Mountain Transit Boards, you know, I see this as I said in the general population, but again, these are magnified and amplified the kinds of opportunities not available for many refugees because of a lack of access to these things. So one of the things I've also found is a real challenge in Vermont and across the U.S. is really answering that question of how do we know whether or not people are successful in this process of resettlement? What are the measures that we use to kind of understand this? And one of the things I found is, you know, in the U.S. system, we really only ask a couple of questions and those questions have to do with employment. Are you employed after 90 days? Are you employed after 180 days? We ask very little about the nature of that employment, whether it matches with the education people have, whether it's what people want to do, and so on. And so I developed this model of kind of inquiring about aspirations and outcomes by creating a set of surveys where I go and I interview people within three months of arrival and I ask them a series of questions about 60 questions in a number of different categories and I ask them what they, so like this question, how much did you expect to pay in rent? And then I re-interview them a year later and ask them how much did you pay in rent? So I did this survey with about 100 people in the Burlington area over a three-year period and then I was about to expand this survey, that model, to about a thousand people in Boston and Manchester and another location in Massachusetts, which I can't remember right now, but then the pandemic, yet that didn't happen. Right now one of the things I am doing is I am going to be assessing a number of the refugee programs, resettlement programs across the country that are resettling Afghan refugees, so I'll be doing that this summer and initially I thought I was just doing Brattleboro, then it was five locations and now I think it might be 40, I'm not sure, but so I'm working with a couple of these national foundations that are sponsoring this, so I'm going to do a version of this with that, with those evaluations. So I ask questions like wages, whether or not people are willing to work overnight or late shifts, here was a question about education, so these are all results from that survey and what they essentially allow you to do is see, well, what are people hoping for and is it happening and it allows you to calibrate both like, how do you prepare people for what living in Burlington might look like? What are their expectations for rent, totally unrealistic given the context here or how do we think about these things? And then on the flip side, if we continue to see that things are simply not being met, what is going wrong there? How do we align things a different way? I have somehow, I am not somebody who's trained to do evaluation in, or I mean I am not formally trained to do evaluation, but it seems to have become something that I do a lot of now, so right now I am for example evaluating the refugee agriculture program. I am evaluating the youth program in Winooski and Burlington schools. I am evaluating a mental health treatment program that the Association of Africans Living in Vermont are doing and then also this Afghan refugee resettlement program. And so again a lot of this builds on this work that we've done trying to look at what's the impact of people on the landscape. So here for example we were looking at Burlington's Old North End and Winooski, two of the main hubs within the Burlington area refugees have been resettled and so we were looking at things like what are community centers that are frequented, what are community spaces that have been created, new businesses, groceries, other kinds of businesses, public spaces, religious spaces, etc. And there's some great work that is available that you can look at this. There's a wonderful exhibition that the New England Historical Society has just put on called More Than a Market which looks at these kind of turn of the last century ethnic groceries and markets mostly run by Italian, French, Canadian, and other immigrant families and looking at some of those similar spaces and places right now run by African, Asian, and other immigrants. And this is another wonderful community space, the Old North End Community Center in Burlington where, which hosts not only the Association of Africans Living in Vermont, which is the other major refugee serving organization in Vermont besides USCRI, it also hosts the Vermont Hindu Temple, a church, the family room, another daycare, they host music classes, dance classes, a community kitchen, mental health services, there's other things I'm forgetting, oh the parks and rec has a big gym space that kids use, the clinics have been there, the vaccination clinics, all sorts of stuff. So we see a lot of successes locally in Vermont and in Burlington, the Burlington area, we see that a number of people, despite all those challenges that I mentioned before and they are very real and they continue to exist, we've also seen a lot of successes, so home ownership by a number of people within the refugee communities, significant student achievements in schools, starting new businesses, and increasingly either wanting to or being involved in civic life, and that has taken all sorts of different forms. The possibility of non-citizen voting, and I think more than the voting, the ability to serve on things like municipal boards, I think is a really, really important thing as a way of engaging people who otherwise are waiting years to have the opportunity to get engaged in the communities in which they already live. I'll just end by showing a few, before I talk a little bit about the Afghan situation in particular, a few other sort of notable spaces that I think really stand out to me, this is down at Ethan Allen and the Intervale, there's a really, really wonderful farm down there, there's another one in Pine Island in Coldchester, these are refugee farms that run growing local crops, in this case it's rice that was planted and harvested by folks mostly in the Bhutanese community, there's African eggplant grown by some farmers, there's healing gardens that are run by some really, really interesting ventures, there's a goat farm and a chicken farm in Pine Island and this is a growing trend all across the US, I have another job where I'm involved with the USDA and one of the things that we see now is there are nearly 50 different refugee agriculture sites all across the US and they're really pretty remarkable. All right, so let me just in the last few minutes talk a little bit about what's going on right now, as I mentioned at the outset there had been this sort of belief that we would have a slow attempted rebuild of the refugee programs in the US because they had been so badly cut over the last four or five years that it was going to take some time to restaff them, build them back up to capacity and really see what sort of makes sense and not simply rebuild what we had before which had its share of problems but to rebuild it in a better way. But what throws that all into turmoil is obviously the mass exodus out of Afghanistan, primarily of people who are in some way connected to the US as allies or were going to be targeted for their own identity in Afghanistan. Nearly 120,000 people are airlifted out of Kabul and Afghanistan of whom roughly half would qualify for some version of refugee status either as that SIV category I mentioned earlier. That's a fairly small number, maybe 2,500, 3,000 people. But the other about 50,000, just under 50,000, 60,000 people would be what is known as an asylum paroli, somebody who was admitted into the country but not with exactly the same level of kind of authorization as a regular refugee. So all of that meant that people were sort of in this limbo for a while. They were housed on military bases but the vetting process that kind of saw, okay, are these people that we're going to allow into the US and allow to resettle, that finished up quite some time ago. The problem was there really wasn't a capacity to then resettle them all across the country. There were two main reasons. One was, as I said, the resettlement program had been cut and cut and cut and so there just wasn't the capacity to go out there and do that resettlement. And two was the crisis that we find more generally across our country which is housing affordability. And that housing crisis meant that there really weren't places to put people in. I remember having this conversation more than a year ago with the national affiliate that wanted to or national organization that wanted to look at another resettlement site in Vermont and they'd come and they'd had a conversation with me about Burlington and I said, yeah, I really don't know that Burlington can sustain another group of refugees until you get your handle on the housing issue. And I think that that is something. And so they looked at Brattleboro, that's where they were kind of building up there. At the same time, USCRI has been focusing on rebuilding its program in Chittman County. But in these two places, as with everywhere, housing remains a kind of ongoing concern. So, you know, the other thing that the refugee programs have begun to look at, not only in the US but worldwide, is whether or not a new model needs to be engaged with. And there's a range of different reasons that this new model has become as significant as it has. This new model is community sponsored resettlement. And the idea is get much more engaged with community partners, have people co-sponsor and host a family, have them step up and put money into the process. And in some ways, this builds on the very successful experience in Canada. So at the same time that the US was shutting down the entry to Syrians, Canada in fact resettled about 55,000 people across the country. And that resettlement in Canada was in large part, less than half of them were resettled directly by the government. The other half were through these communities sponsored, a group of four people, a church, a university, a mosque would get together and say we're going to sponsor this family. They put money up, they hosted them. And you know, the argument is that it creates a denser network, a more long lasting network that can support people through this transition to new homes and new families. And so that is something that in many ways we are seeing being done in Vermont. And this builds on this kind of model that's taking place all across, all across the world right now. So with that, I'm going to stop sharing my screen and open it up for questions. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Pablo, for sharing your insights, great data research and your knowledge about the refugee program in the US and more importantly here in Vermont. So we are going to move to our Q&A and Krista has joined us. I think we have several questions that have come through in the chat. So if you want to go ahead, Krista, read the first question. Certainly. Thank you, Pablo. Okay, and we have some questions that did come in and continue to come in. Are Palestinian refugees a subset of refugees or in addition to the count of refugees? Yeah, I mean, I think that was one of the things that I showed up front in the statistics. Palestinian refugees in the UNHCR, the Palestinian refugees are a separate category. They're actually Palestinian, there's specific UN organizations that deal specifically with Palestinian refugees. To be clear, those are really just in the occupied territories and in the established refugee camps that exist from 1948. So, yeah. Okay, great. Why are there refugees from Bhutan? So the refugees who were forced out of Bhutan dates back to a conflict in the late 80s and early 90s when the Kingdom of Bhutan essentially adopted an ethno-nationalist policy that you had to speak only the majority language, you had to speak, you had to wear, I think, ethnic clothes in government buildings and public spaces. And it became a discrimination against specifically a Nepali-speaking primarily Hindu minority. By a minority, I mean a sixth of the country. And then eventually what they did was they just expelled them and they sent most of these people out of the country. They ended up in a number of refugee camps primarily in Nepal and some ended up in India as well. And eventually they languished there for decades. And that logjam where it was a protracted conflict was finally broken because the US, Australia, Canada, but primarily the US accepted a number of those refugees. That is one of the much more successful refugee resettlements in the world. The camps have been closed down because they've been emptied at this point. Great. What are your best hopes for refugee resettlement in Vermont and how can we help bring them about? That is a big, long, challenging question. So my best hopes are that people are resettled in ways that give them the best opportunity to succeed. And I think the best opportunities to succeed mean building on the capacities that already exist within communities. I think that's one of the biggest mistakes we always make is we squander the considerable human capacities that there are. So we have a mismatch between people's talent skills and desires and what it is that they're actually doing. The challenges of accreditation, the lack of... We all hear about this, the doctor who is forced to work in... She works as a custodian because she cannot have her qualifications recognized, the engineer who is driving a cab, et cetera. All of these kinds of things. So minimizing those kinds of mismatches, trying to provide stable housing, stable employment. We have some really good examples of good practices in Vermont, places like rhino foods, twin craft. There are local employers. One of the things that I did was I connected some of the people opening up the Brattleboro sites with some of the local people here in Burlington and we did some tours and stuff in saying like, okay, so what has worked and what hasn't? And so I think building on some of those things that have worked and then also learning from the things that haven't, we don't have to continuously reinvent the wheel. But I think that building on that knowledge is crucial for improved outcomes. Thank you. Is there a centralized place to find language, ESL, education resources for refugees and other new Americans in Chittenden County? Yeah, so the new state refugee coordinator, Tracy Dolan, is wonderful and she actually just sent out a bunch of stuff on that. There are ways in which some of this is pulled together. I think you can contact USCRI, you can contact ALV. One of the things I'm actually trying to do, because I get calls from, you know, church groups and like community groups and different people saying asking exactly that. So I'm actually working with my students to pull together a resource list so that we can make that more accessible to people who want to do this. Like how do you grow about learning some of that? Yeah. We would love to get our hands on that and then we can distribute it to the attendees. That would be great. Are there, you were sort of touching on sort of business partnerships and businesses that will welcome to develop relationships with refugees. Are there any examples of community sponsorship in Vermont? So this is a new, new thing that we're doing right now. I mean, there's certainly been a whole range of different interesting partnerships that have existed already with community organizations. You can look at everything from the Interveil and Ethan Allen or Winooski Valley Park District working with refugee agriculture programs or city market works with USCRI to put on a really interesting, I think it's called Mosaics of cooking or something like class. There's lots of different kinds of partnerships that larger and smaller scales. ALV works with the city. There's all sorts of partnerships that already kind of exist. As far as community sponsorship itself goes, that is the sort of the building, the airplane while you're flying it. We're doing that right now. And I think there will be missteps along the way. I see in the chat a couple of really, at least there are questions that have come to me directly, but there's really, really good questions around housing, right? Like that is a big, open question because there are things you can do in the short term. And because you're sort of like, how do you square the question of affordable housing? How do you deal with affordable housing in a place like Burlington that has the low vacancy rate that it does? And what do you do if your solution to that is, so in Brattleboro, for example, their short term solution to housing is using SIT dorms. Now that gives you access to a certain kind of housing, which is great, but it also means you are not walkable to other places that people need to get to. So you have a transportation issue that comes up right away. You have an issue of are dorms suitable for families in the long term, right? In a place like Burlington, and this is one of the other challenges for smaller communities that I found, a lot of the smaller communities that are very like pro resettlement are also college towns. Who is the biggest competitor for some of the new Americans who would settle here as college students, right? Multi-use dwellings or multi-family dwellings. So some of those kinds of challenges, you know, we're still dealing with temporary fixes right now. So yeah, that issue of low being low on affordable decent housing is endemic not only here but everywhere. You must have gotten that directly. Yeah, I did. Sorry. I'm glad you're addressing. How many refugees can Vermont realistically resettle each year? That is such a central question. Way back, I remember in 20, maybe between 2012 and 2014-15, I used to participate in, we had these consultations. So every year you're supposed to have a consultation that asks exactly that question. And the metrics that go into that is how much housing is available, how many ELL classrooms are there, how many, you know, what did the doctors think and this and that. And it's very subjective. I mean, in some cases it's less subjective because you're saying like, okay, so how many ELL teachers are there, how many spots in the classes are there. But there are other kinds of things where, you know, what's the waiting list for mental health services, what's the waiting list for a Section 8 voucher, like these kinds of things. Historically, it's been, you know, the high has been about 450 when the Bosnian resettlement happened for 450 people a year. I think the intention here is the governor has said that Vermont could take 650 people. I am not sure what that is based on. But if that's the calculation they have made, I would find that hard to imagine in Burlington. Because I think that like, it goes back to what I mentioned before is like, I think that there's more people you could take, but are they people that you could take and then set up to succeed. One of the things that Yakuba Jacob Bogre, who's the executive director of the Association of Africans living in Vermont, often says is he said, I do not want to resettle people into poverty. You want to resettle people. And Amila Merzanovich, the director of USCRI says something very similar that like, she wants people to succeed when they come here. So I think that the question should be not just what is the capacity of Vermont to resettle refugees, but what is the capacity of Vermont to resettle refugees for success. What are some things you've seen have worked well in other resettlement locations that Vermont might consider? Yeah, I mean, there's good things that are done here. One of the challenges I find, and this is a quirk of Vermont that is both endearing and lovely, but also challenging, is not being able to think regionally. I feel that the focus on that individual or that autonomy at a local level is really important in so many ways, but it makes sometimes doing things that require more regional responses more difficult. And so sometimes the fact that across a river, you know, or whatever between Burlington and Winooski, there are certain kinds of things that are not shared that I think might be more, they would work better if that was able to be done. I want to answer another quick question on the direct, which is about the difference between refugee and migrant issues. And I just want to say that, you know, one of the challenges is that we're actually seeing right now with asylum with the Afghans is that this whole status question is arbitrary in many ways. And it has to do with what the U.S. federal government and policy deems to be legitimate and not legitimate refugees. Usually the only difference between an asylum seeker and a refugee is a refugee has been approved overseas. They've already been approved as an official refugee here. An asylum seeker comes to the U.S. and asks for asylum, often fleeing similar reasons. There's no less legitimacy in the claim than an asylum seeker can make. For the Afghan refugees, they were given parolee status, which actually doesn't give you access to a lot of the benefits that a refugee has. In this case, Congress passed a specific package of benefits that would attach to the Afghan parolees because it's not their fault that they're in the situation that they are. But I would say that it highlights the fact that we almost never give similar kind of consideration to migrants at the southern border, migrants, you know, who are coming from, especially Central America or Latin America. So, yeah, that question of like who is a migrant, who is a refugee is a very, very challenging one. Well, I think we are at time. I know we could go a lot longer than this, and we really do appreciate your time. And thank you for joining us, Pablo, and thank you all for joining us. And I'll pass it over to you, Kathy. Great. Yes, I'll second that. Thank you, Pablo, for presenting amazing information and really appreciating great questions from the audience. So, thank you all for joining us. You will receive an evaluation, a link for an evaluation form. We value your feedback, so please take a few moments to fill that out. And we hope that we will see you next week at our second lecture in this series, The Taliban Then and Now, History and Current Conditions with Daniel Miller. So, stay well, everyone. Thank you, everyone. I think I'm going to join the talk. That sounds fascinating. Right. Yeah. Thank you. Absolutely. Bye-bye, everyone.