Terror’s Fallout

Slowdown in entry visas for foreigners imperils charities that aid new immigrants

When James D. Lual was 7, the national army came into his family’s village in southern Sudan and killed his father and elder brother. James ran away, along with three friends and his cousin, Isaiah Manyok, beginning an odyssey that would see the five of them grow up together — and grow up quickly.

Chased by armies in war-torn Sudan and Ethiopia, hounded by hyenas and lions, and emotionally distraught from witnessing the deaths of fellow refugees by drowning and starvation, the five boys managed to survive together, finally landing in a United Nations–run refugee camp in Kenya.

There, the United States government did what gun-toting soldiers, wild animals, and years of drought couldn’t: It pulled the boys apart. After nine years in Kenya’s Kakuma camp — where they lived under a plastic sheet and survived on meager rations of corn meal — Mr. Lual, now 22, and his three friends were given permission to emigrate to the United States. In June 2001, they were flown to Philadelphia, then moved into a house in Quakertown, Pa., by an affiliate of Lutheran Immigrant and Refugee Services, in Baltimore.

But Mr. Manyok, now 20, didn’t come with them, nor did he join them later in the year as planned. He is still believed to be at Kakuma, one of tens of thousands of refugees whose entry into the United States has been held up in the wake of last year’s terror attacks — even though many of them had already cleared the required bureaucratic hurdles. In the year following the attacks, only 27,000 of the 70,000 refugees scheduled to make the United States their new home were admitted into the country.

Officials at the U.S. State Department say the slowdown is necessary. Refugees now undergo intense screening to determine if they are linked to people or organizations that want to cause harm to Americans. Adding to the government’s concern: evidence that some refugees who were being admitted weren’t family members of people currently living in the United States, as they had claimed.

Charities Hit Hard

While leaving would-be arrivals and their families in the lurch, the refugee slowdown has also imperiled the charities that serve them. Charities generally help refugees with short-term needs after they arrive — such as getting housing, furniture, and food — and with long-term aid, such as helping them land jobs, obtain job training, enroll their children in schools, and learn English. Because many of the refugees have been tortured or persecuted in their homelands, they generally need specialized services, such as counseling and health-care treatment, that go well beyond what nonprofit groups provide to other immigrants.

Now, many organizations have been forced to cut programs they have spent decades developing, the result of cutbacks in the amount they receive to serve refugees. The federal government provides charities with $800 per refugee, but with fewer refugees being admitted to the United States, refugee charities have seen their payments slow significantly. As a result, some charities have laid off staff members who specialize in foreign languages. Charities’ efforts to link newcomers with American citizens are in danger of being trimmed or abolished, while cuts in staff threaten services to many refugees who have already arrived in the United States and still depend on charities for help. What’s more, many of the charity workers at risk of losing their jobs were once themselves refugees.

The slowdown in refugee admissions has put charities in the awkward position of challenging some of the steps federal officials are taking to guarantee security at home. Many charity leaders are stepping up their advocacy efforts, in the hope that they can persuade members of Congress to put pressure on the State Department to admit refugees at a speedier pace. But many of the nonprofit leaders say they are not optimistic those efforts will work. They say they also fear that the Homeland Security Act that President Bush signed last month may further slow the refugee flow. By creating a large bureaucracy, charity leaders say, the act may make federal agencies less sensitive to the needs of those who seek to relocate to the United States.

Many of those refugees still waiting, such as Mr. Manyok, had already been screened by federal agencies and cleared for arrival in the United States before last year’s terror attacks. For family members who expected them in the United States, the wait seems interminable.

“The situation Isaiah is in now is very bad,” Mr. Lual says, adding that many people in Kakuma suffer from chronic lung diseases and hunger. “My friends and I are troubled because one of our brothers is in pain.”

Declining Numbers

Even before the terror attacks, the pace of refugee resettlement in the United States had slowed. In 1992, the government admitted 132,000 refugees, and the numbers have generally declined since then. Government officials attribute the reduction to a dwindling number of refugees from countries, such as the former Soviet Union and Vietnam. Charity leaders say a turning tide against immigrants by elected officials has also been a factor.

After the attacks things got worse. Charity leaders say the government is taking months longer than it has in the past to identify people who are eligible to resettle in the United States, and they complain that the State Department has put strict limits on the numbers of refugees to be admitted from certain regions.

Heightened security has also taken its toll. Only 2,000 of the 20,000 refugees scheduled to come from Africa arrived in the United States this year. Government officials say that a fear that terrorists from some African countries may want to carry out violent acts has forced them to step up security measures that delay refugee processing.

President Bush has promised that at least 50,000 refugees will be resettled in the United States in 2003, but charity officials are skeptical.

“They were supposed to allow in 70,000″ in 2002, “and we got less than half of that,” says Hiram A. Ruiz, spokesman for Immigration and Refugee Services of America, in Washington. “When the president says the country will take 50,000 next year, you wonder how low the numbers can really go.”

State Department officials say charity leaders are overly skeptical. “We think we have a good shot at reaching the 50,000 level next year,” says one official, who requested anonymity.

Cuts Necessary

In the four months after the terror attacks, while the federal government stopped all refugees from entering the United States, charities suffered financially. The State Department provided the groups with $22-million to keep their programs afloat. But now the government has returned to its policy of providing money only when a charity has been assigned to take care of particular refugees.

Since the number of refugees entering the United States has been far smaller than in past years, some charities have begun to cut positions or plan reductions in services. Lutheran Immigrant and Refugee Services cut 14 positions earlier this year and is now bracing for more reductions to compensate for a 30-percent decrease in its budget over the last two years, says Anne P. Wilson, the charity’s executive vice president.

Other groups say the lack of clarity about how many refugees will end up in the United States is making it hard to plan. “There’s a lot of uncertainty out there,” says Tsehaye Teferra, president of the Ethiopian Community Development Council, an Arlington, Va., charity that resettled 600 refugees last year. Already, Mr. Teferra’s group has cut its full-time staff from eight people to four.

The largest refugee resettlement organization in the country, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, in Washington, survived 2002 by tapping its endowment and using the money the State Department provided during the refugee hiatus. The charity, which typically resettles 25 to 40 percent of the country’s refugees each year, served 18,000 refugees in 2000, but only 6,700 last year. The charity may cut up to 35 percent of its services to accommodate a projected $10-million reduction in its 2003 budget caused by the loss of government funds as fewer refugees arrive.

The result may be that refugees have fewer options about where they go when they land in the United States, as some of the group’s 106 affiliates around the country might have to close, says Mark Franken, executive director of the charity’s migration and refugee services program. What’s more, he says, his group will probably have to slash programs that link parishioners and other volunteers with newly arriving refugees.

“That will have a devastating effect on refugees,” says Mr. Franken. “The relocation experience is much more effective for refugees when local volunteers befriend and help them.”

Former Refugees Laid Off

Other groups are also making cutbacks, including those that operate solely on the local level.

World Relief Chicago, one of 26 groups affiliated with World Relief, a national refugee services organization in Baltimore, recently cut its staff of 88 in half because of reductions in federal and state funds. It put on hold a program for disabled refugees, scuttled a program to help refugees start small businesses, and discontinued another that helped link local companies to foreign workers.

Many of those laid off were Bosnian refugees who had become staff members after the charity had resettled 8,000 Bosnians in the Chicago area during the 1990s.

Dori Dinsmore, the group’s executive director, says loss of income forced her charity to focus almost exclusively on maintaining its basic resettlement programs, such as helping refugees find food and shelter. The charity also began to step up its fund raising to make up for the loss of government funds, and has enlisted many employees in seeking donations, not just those on its development staff.

In addition, World Relief Chicago started an advocacy campaign in hopes of persuading the federal government to admit more refugees. It mailed 8,500 postcards to those who attend churches that provide the charity with most of its volunteers, asking parishioners to contact their members of Congress. The charity also encouraged former refugees to write letters urging House and Senate members to pressure the White House to increase the flow of refugees into the country.

Other charity leaders say they are maintaining or increasing their outlays for advocacy work.

“Advocacy is job one right now,” says Mr. Franken, of the U.S. Conference of Bishops. “We want to make it clear to the public that the United States can guard against terrorism while accepting more refugees.” Toward that end, the charity has lobbied the House of Representatives and begun to organize a fact-finding trip abroad for senators.

Ralston H. Deffenbaugh Jr., president of Lutheran Immigrant and Refugee Services, has asked the House and Senate to hold hearings on the pace of refugee admission to the United States. “We want some accountability on this,” he says. “We find that when people in our churches weigh in, there’s real consternation about this.”

Restoring the Flow

The lobbying effort appears to be having an impact on public debate. The ranking Democratic and Republican senators on the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration stated in November that they would like to see the decline in refugee flows reversed.

“At a time when the refugree program should be more vibrant than ever, the resettlement program continues to wane,” says Sen. Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, who is likely to be named chairman of the immigration subcommittee in January. “Admissions continue to fall at a disturbing rate. Considering the enormity of the world’s refugee population and the gravity of our humanitarian obligation, no refugee slot should go to waste.”

While Senator Brownback and others see declining refugee numbers as unsatisfactory, at least one nonprofit group believes they should remain low. “We’ve always felt that resettlement of refugees in the United States is a misallocation of resources,” says David Ray, associate director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an advocacy group in Washington. The group favors accepting only those refugees who can prove they were persecuted in their home countries.

Courting Donors

Refugee groups aren’t focusing only on persuading government to change its approach. Some are also turning to private donors.

Ms. Dinsmore, of World Relief Chicago, says her group has received assurances for $115,000 for next year from a handful of small foundations — almost twice as much as last year’s total of $60,000.

It has been harder for her charity to persuade more individuals to give, Ms. Dinsmore says. The group has received a total of $65,000 to $75,000 from individuals in each of the past three years. But increasing those amounts has been hard because the refugee slowdown has also reduced the charity’s numbers of volunteers, who typically are also financial supporters of the organization.

Some refugee groups have also succeeded in tapping money from community foundations and other grant makers in small cities — many of whom hadn’t previously supported resettlement programs. The Sioux Falls Area Community Foundation, in South Dakota, for example, made a recent grant of $26,000 to pay for English tutoring for 25 Sudanese refugees.

For Sudanese immigrants such as Mr. Lual and his three friends, charity has helped lead them to opportunity.

Mr. Lual credits Lutheran Immigrant and Refugee Services and its volunteers with getting them started on a new path, which for him includes attending community college during the day and working at a meatpacking plant at night.

Still, Mr. Lual says, he and his friends live each day realizing that something is missing in their busy lives. “Isaiah has traveled everywhere with me,” says Mr. Lual. “Everywhere but here.”