At least one Atlanta-based refugee resettlement agency is forming a “contingency plan” for a possible Donald Trump presidency, given the billionaire businessman’s proposals to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the U.S. and his plans to send Syrian refugees back home.
How to handle immigration overall and refugees in particular have been lightning rods in this year’s presidential campaigns, especially in light of Islamic terrorist attacks like the coordinated bombings that hit Brussels this week, killing more than 30 and injuring more than 200 people.
Mr. Trump has ridden a wave of support in the Republican primaries part based on his plans to build a wall on the Mexican border and repeated pledges to block Muslims from entering the country, including American citizens and Syrian children who have gone through the stringent screenings required by the Department of Homeland Security.
On the same morning as the Brussels bombings, the French-American Chamber of Commerce and the World Affairs Council of Atlanta Young Leaders held an event in Atlanta discussing how governments can form refugee policies that balance the seemingly competitive ideals of openness and security.
The U.S. government turns to private, nonprofit resettlement agencies — many of them faith-based — to help refugees integrate into their new communities and achieve self-sufficiency through work and education.
But the U.S. president sets refugee quotas, which are directly tied to the funding available to resettlement agencies like New American Pathways, based in Clarkston, Ga.
“It takes a year to train a case manager, and our staff is proficient in 21 languages, so a reduction in funding, a reduction in staffing, can be devastating to organizations like us if it’s a temporary lull, because we will have lost all of that great skilled workforce,” said Paedia Mixon, the organization’s chief executive.
Ms. Mixon said she doesn’t believe the U.S. will reach the goal of 10,000 Syrians that President Obama proposed to allow into the country this year. It takes at least a few years for new applications to go through the system; some have been languishing in camps for nearly a decade before their case is even brought up.
But Ms. Mixon does expect a major increase in refugees from conflict zones in the Middle East in the coming years. (Now, Georgia hosts 2,500-3,000 refugees annually from all nations, so the numbers are still relatively small).
For the last five years, Asia was the largest source region, with Nepali-speaking Bhutanese and the persecuted ethnic and religious minorities of Myanmar finding a sympathetic host in the United States.
But the civil war in Syria has sent millions of migrants fleeing the country, with hundreds of thousands arriving in Europe, straining infrastructure and spurring a backlash that has fueled nationalist political movements. (One in four of the world’s more than 19 million refugees are Syrian.)
Similar fears have arisen in the U.S., despite the fact that the country has agreed to host just 85,000 refugees this year. Germany alone is hosting 66,000 Syrian refugees and received 159,000 asylum claims last year. Turkey is a temporary home to nearly 2 million displaced Syrians.
After the terrorist attacks on Paris in November, more than 30 Republican governors including Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal announced state-level bans on Syrian refugees, calling on the federal government to tighten security and provide more information about their whereabouts. President Obama had announced that the U.S. would take in 10,000 more Syrians in the coming year.
While the state has no authority over who comes into the country and where they end up, the governor directed state agencies to deny them benefits funded federally but administered by the state, including food stamps. Mr. Deal later backed down after state Attorney General Sam Olens said his order wouldn’t withstand a legal challenge.
This climate of fear is largely unfounded in the view of the resettlement agencies who know the people beneath the headlines, Ms. Mixon said.
“If you meet the families, you really will not feel the same level of fear that you hear on the news, and I feel like it’s my charge to be their representative,” she said, noting that her organization and others have received death threats for bringing in Syrians.
Syrian families often help each other in metro Atlanta. So far, the community has bought each new family a used car, Ms. Mixon said, setting a high standard she’s not sure they’ll be able to keep when more begin to arrive.
She added that the assertion that “We don’t know where they are,” something that Mr. Deal and Mr. Trump have both said, is at best inaccurate and at worst a incitement to fear.
“We know where they are. We put them there,” Ms. Mixon said. “Nobody asked us. Nobody called us during that entire process of banning Syrians. We were never contacted and asked any questions whatsoever.”
Ted Terry, mayor of Clarkston, Ga., has taken up a banner of hospitality and integration, despite opposition he has faced from vocal critics worried about things like job displacement and even the establishment of Shariah law on U.S. soil.
Clarkston, a city of 8,000 in DeKalb County, is the epicenter of refugee resettlement in metro Atlanta, and the community is starting to coalesce around its identity as a hub for immigrants of all stripes, Mr. Terry said on the panel, noting that they contribute to the economic vitality of the city. Many start businesses like the ethnic grocery stores and restaurants that dot the city’s 1.4-square-mile footprint.
He related a story about being hosted for a sweet, hot tea by a Bhutanese grandmother dressed in traditional garb at one of Clarkson’s many apartment complexes. Later her daughter came in, followed by her grandson, who “was dressed like Justin Bieber” and invited the mayor in English to connect on Facebook, where he still has a few Burmese and Bhutanese followers.
Assimilation is real, and cross-cultural integration isn’t going anywhere, he said.
“In Clarkston, we are providing sort of a microcosm of what the world may very well look like in the future,” Mr. Terry said.
Dabney Evans, a public health expert and executive director of the Emory Institute of Human Rights at Emory University, is also doing her part to help displaced persons in Atlanta.
She helps run the Atlanta Asylum Network, which conducts medical, gynecological and psychological testing that asylum seekers and their lawyers can use as evidence in court that they face a “well-founded fear” of persecution should they be sent home. It’s not about advocacy for its own sake; it’s ensuring that they don’t get dismissed for the wrong reasons in what could be a matter of life and death, Dr. Evans said.
It’s notoriously hard for asylum seekers to get positive outcomes in Atlanta, where the judges grant asylum in only about 4 percent of cases, a much lower rate than the 20 percent average nationally and higher rates in major metros.
Those who have been tested by the asylum network, either mentally or physically, have been approved at a rate of about 64 percent, a significant improvement even correcting for some gaps in the data compiled from following its cases over the last 12 years, Dr. Evans said.
This is vital because fewer people than ever even have the option of going home safely, according to the United Nations High Commission on Refugees.
“We have to get it out of our minds that people are just coming here seeking the American dream,” Dr. Evans said.
As for forcing them to go back?
Refugees would be one thing, but Atlanta immigration attorney Robert Banta, a sponsor of the event, said that one of Mr. Trump’s more drastic proposals, to round up and deport an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants, is not going to happen for legal and practical reasons.
The only way to find them would be to go door to door, and even some Americans can’t present documentation supporting their citizenship claims, he said.
“We may be able to send 12 million people out of the country, but not all of them will be illegal, though. We may be shipping some Americans out of the country as well.”
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