Tuesday, October 5
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NOORANI'S NOTES

 

Refugee admissions hit a record low in fiscal year
2021 despite President Biden's promise to "reverse the sharp
cuts made by the Trump administration," reports Julie Watson of
the Associated Press
.  

A total of 11,445 refugees were admitted to the U.S. during
the fiscal year that ended Thursday, per an anonymous source familiar
with the matter. Watson notes that the number excludes the tens of
thousands of Afghans who have been brought to
the U.S. under humanitarian parole
 following
the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. 

"If we are to reach President Biden's [fiscal year 2022] goal of
welcoming 125,000 refugees, the administration must be aggressive and
innovative in ramping up processing," said Krish O'Mara Vignarajah,
president and CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. (Krish
will also be speaking at our Leading The Way
 convening later
this month.) 

Krish, as always, is spot on: We must rebuild our resettlement
infrastructure - fast. 

BTW, have you registered for Leading the Way 2021
 yet? You don't want
to miss conversations with UNHCR High Commissioner Filippo Grandi,
Rep. Adam Kinzinger, World Relief's Jenny Yang and so many more.  

Welcome to Tuesday's edition of Noorani's Notes. If you have a
story to share from your own community, please send it to me
at [email protected]
.  

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AFGHAN REFUGEES - Samuel Benson, one of our former
interns, details for Deseret News
 the
incredible story of how a makeshift team of
veterans, nonprofit organizations and volunteers helped Afghan
allies escape. For example, veterans "formed an Underground
Railroad-style operation that pulled together the disparate work to
evacuate over 1,000 refugees," Benson writes. Now, efforts are
shifting to resettlement: More than 3,900 eligible Afghan refugees
were recently vaccinated for COVID-19 at the Holloman Air Force
Base in New Mexico, Nicole Maxwell of the Alamogordo Daily News
 reports. "The
ultimate goal of Operation Allies Welcome is to successfully resettle
vulnerable Afghans into local communities while prioritizing national
security and public health," said Robert Fenton, Senior Response
Official for Operation Allies Welcome. 

Here's today's collection of local stories of support (plus a few
from abroad): 

* Veterans and local residents in New York's Hudson Valley donated
goods to a Veterans of Foreign Wars post for Afghan refugees on a
military base in New Jersey. (News 12 The Bronx
) 

* An Army ROTC student at Syracuse University "created a petition
 asking SU's administration
to offer scholarships to Afghan refugees." As of Sunday, it had more
than 150 signatures. (Richard Perrins, The Daily Orange
) 

* Goat Salon in Calgary, Canada, coordinated with the Calgary
Catholic Immigration Society to provide free haircuts for Afghan
refugees. (Colleen Underwood, CBC News
) 

* A group of cyclists raised the equivalent of around $81,000 for
grassroots refuge projects after spending nearly a month biking
through England to spell out 'refugees welcome' via GPS map. (Kieran
Graves, Sussex Live
) 

'

**LET'S** FACE REALITY HERE

**'** - Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN Sunday that unvaccinated
immigrants are "[a]bsolutely not" driving an increase in U.S. COVID-19
rate infections, reports Alison Durkee for Forbes
. Fauci's
comments come after a new Kaiser Family Foundation poll
 found
that 55% of Republicans and 40% of unvaccinated respondents blame
immigrants and tourists for the COVID-19 surge. "When you have 700,000
Americans dead and millions and millions and millions of Americans
getting infected, you don't want to look outside to the problem. The
problem is within our own country," Fauci said. "Certainly immigrants
can get infected, but they're not the driving force of this, let's
face reality here." 

[link removed]

IMMIGRANT WOMEN - In partnership with Documented, The Fuller Project,
and THE CITY
,
Tanvi Misra tells the stories of four New York City
immigrant women who fought for their communities throughout the
pandemic, despite their own financial hardships. Often without
access to a government safety net, women like Veronica Leal, Rumana
Sayeed, Goma Yonjan and Arlette Cepeda helped their respective
communities access aid, advocate for legislation, and document their
pandemic experiences. "When you talk about women being excluded, I also
think about it in a larger context of brown, Black, Latinx and
Indigenous women's domestic labor," said Sanjana Khan, co-founder and
executive director of the Bengali community organization Laal. "They
don't have that data to show they're employed... but they're
constantly working." 

HISTORY LESSON - America's history with Haiti is complex. From
Reagan-era discrimination against Haitian asylum cases to former
President Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies - not to
mention the recent events in Del Rio, Texas - America owes
Haitians a great deal, writes Michael Posner, lawyer and director
for the Center of Business and Human Rights at NYU's Stern School of
Business, in an op-ed for The New York Times
. "The
Biden administration needs to prioritize human rights and democratic
governance in Haiti, which are essential if the island nation is ever to
escape its familiar cycles of domestic chaos and mass migration," writes
Posner. "More immediately, the Biden administration should allow all
Haitians who arrive at our borders and have a credible fear of
persecution in their home country the right to enter the country to
pursue asylum claims." 

STORM LAKE - As many parts of northwest Iowa grapple with slowing
population growth, Storm Lake, Iowa, "is in a very different position
than its counterparts" thanks to immigration, Elijah
Decious writes for The Cedar Rapids Gazette
. "[Businessowners]
need to understand, these people are making your economies stable in
your counties," said Emilia Marroquin, who serves migrant workers at
farms and plants around northwestern Iowa. "Diversity is something
that's going to enrich the communities." Storm Lake Mayor Mike
Porsch added, "I'm a strong proponent that if you want to grow and
bring industry and jobs, your work force is going to have to come from
the diverse population. The (native) workers aren't here." 

Thanks for reading, 

Ali 

 

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