Refugee Resettlement

Dec 15, 2022 by Brian Zumhagen HIAS.org Odessa residents Max and Yuna* fled Ukraine on the day the Russian invasion began, February 24, 2022. It took them 7 days to reach the Polish border. The couple, both in their early 20s, spent the next several months in Poland. In September…

Dec 14, 2022 by Sharon Samber HIAS.org A year ago, as 2021 wound to a close, one could have hoped that 2022 would turn the page on what had been a difficult year, one dominated by the pandemic and the Afghanistan refugee crisis — and there might be some peace…

Nov 22, 2022 By Ayelet Parness HIAS.org Until this week, the Shamaun family had never tasted turkey or attended a Thanksgiving celebration together. Shammas Shamaun, 52, arrived in the United States in 2017 after fleeing persecution for his Christian beliefs in Pakistan. He had not seen his wife Sittara, 51…

Nimo Hashi nervously adjusted her hijab as she scanned the passengers arriving at the Salt Lake International Airport terminal last Friday, hoping to catch sight of her husband in the crowd. …

Don’t Let Opportunity Go Unused — On Tuesday, September 27, 2022, President Biden announced the fiscal year 2023 Presidential Determination for Refugee Admissions. This annual process allows the President, in consultation with Congress, to set targets for refugee resettlement from specific regions around the world while also allowing for a pool of unallocated slots to respond…

Sept 9, 2022 by Matt Schiavenza HIAS.org Since the Taliban recaptured Afghanistan last August, nearly 80,000 Afghans have found temporary refuge in the United States. One was Mohammed. A fluent English speaker, Mohammed’s employment with the U.S. government during the previous Afghan regime had made him a target of Taliban…

Intro My latest two articles recommend changing our attitude towards refugees from passively waiting for people to irregularly arrive via smugglers, to handling proactively via organized relocation and evacuation. For refugees, being dislocated from their culture and frequently facing cultural communication differences in their new environment, interaction is complicated. There…

Aug 31, 2022 By Ayelet Parness HIAS.org Wali Khan Ahmadzai, 38, arrived in the U.S. on October 10, 2021 with his wife and four children, a backpack full of papers, and little else. The papers, which documented his work as an interpreter for a Provincial Reconstruction Team and the U.S…

July 5, 2022 Bill Swersey — Vice President, Communications In 1985, a young filmmaker working on a documentary about the Statue of Liberty, was interviewing recent immigrants on the boardwalk in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, when he came upon a grandmother and her twin grandsons. …