Refugees look for belonging in Idaho
One afternoon in early September, Niyonshuti Claude, a 16-year-old sophomore, sat in an empty classroom at Canyon Ridge High School in Twin Falls, Idaho, wrestling with a history homework question: “What was Francisco Vázquez de Coronado trying to find in the southwestern part of the U.S.?” The 16th century Spanish conquistador explored Mexico and the Southwest U.S., seeking the mythical Seven Cities of Gold.
Claude flipped through his textbook, American Vision, cracking his knuckles, overwhelmed by the amount of information on the pages before him. His tutor, Lexie Cottle, offered a suggestion: “You want to look for key words.” But there were so many that Claude didn’t know — words like “canoe” and “colony” — that sometimes Cottle struggled with how to help him without just giving him the answer.
Claude is one of Cottle’s best students, bright and studious, with a charisma that comes through in his style — diamond studs and a white headscarf. He told me, grinning, that he wears it “just for fashion,” even though he’s convinced his teachers it’s a religious garment.
That Claude is even in this classroom is a small miracle. A little over two years ago, he was living with his parents and six siblings in Uganda, a refugee from Congo. Attending school there was expensive and difficult. For 25 years, the family waited for the United Nations to process their application for resettlement. Finally, they were accepted in Twin Falls, an agricultural town of roughly 50,000 in south-central Idaho.
FOR NEARLY 40 YEARS, the Twin Falls Refugee Center has helped resettle thousands of refugees like Claude and his family here in Idaho’s “Magic Valley,” the high-desert area around Twin Falls. They come from some of the world’s worst dictatorships and war zones — places like Democratic Republic of Congo, Burma, Iraq and Eritrea — often speaking no English and with little education. Almost without exception, they’re economically self-sufficient within eight months — the time they’re eligible for federal assistance — generally by securing jobs in agriculture, the industry that drives Idaho’s economy.
Despite its success, the program has faced serious challenges in recent years. In the lead-up to the 2016 election, a militia group backed by conspiracy-minded media outlets like Breitbart News Network tried to smear it by drawing attention to a local sexual assault case involving three boys from Sudan and Iraq. Many of the story’s details turned out to be wrong, but the headlines lingered, turning some locals against the resettlement program.
Since then, the Trump presidency has overseen record cuts to the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (which encompasses the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, as well). Previously, the Twin Falls Refugee Center had helped resettle about 300 refugees every year, but today it is now bringing in less than half that number and operating with less than half its former budget of $1.5 million.
Read the rest of the story on our website: https://www.hcn.org/articles/immigration-refugees-look-for-belonging-in-idaho
