Refugee School Impact Grant (RSIG) funding is a program of the US Department of Health & Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement which helps to offset added costs to schools to educate refugee children. Both refugee resettlement agencies and local government units can apply for the funding. Last year the two resettlement agencies in Louisville received around $35,000 each in RSIG funds for services such as helping refugee school children pay for backpacks, school uniforms, other school supplies, summer school, case management and field trips. This year the two agencies received around $30,000 in RSIG funds. The local school district received almost $200,000 in RSIG funding, which it used to hire a part-time youth staff person and to expand its tutoring program. It seems like Springfield, Massachusetts should be asking its local refugee resettlement agencies if they applied for RSIG, as well as apply for its own funding. I see from the list of grantees that the Massachusetts Office for Refugees & Immigrants received $420,000 in school impact funding. An article at WFPL in Louisville (an NPR affiliate) explains how RSIG is being used to aid refugee school children in that city: more
How Many Refugees Are in the World?
According to a 2009 report by the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR), 42 million people around the world were uprooted from their homes due to conflict or persecution. Of this number, 16 million were considered refugees, while 26 million were displaced within their own countries or were considered asylum-seekers in other countries. Approximately 45% of the world’s refugees are under 18-years-old. About 80% of the world’s refugees are hosted by developing countries. The largest refugee producing countries at present include Afghanistan, Iraq, Somali and Sudan, while Colombia, Iraq, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have the largest internally displaced populations.
To learn more about the world’s refugees, visit the U.S. Committee for Refugee and Immigrant’s (USCRI) annual World Refugee Survey, or UNHCR’s “Statistics” Web page.
When did U.S. Refugee Resettlement Begin?
The U.S. admitted more than 250,000 displaced Europeans following World War II, after which the U.S. Congress enacted the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 allowing an additional 400,000 European refugees to resettle in the U.S.This legislation was followed by later laws admitting refugees from Communist countries such as China, Cuba, Hungary, Korea, Poland and Yugoslavia.
Zentrum fur Antisemitismusforschung, Berlin
Summary: This essay looks particularly at the social organisation of the Displaced Person camps and the cultural activities organised by the DPs themselves, both Jewish and non-Jewish. It draws on evidence from personal testimonies as well as more official documents and histories.
The number of Displaced Persons liberated by the Allied armies – six and a half to seven million – suggests the dimensions of the problems faced by the liberating troops. Yet, in spite of all the difficulties involved in transporting and providing for this mass of humanity in war-ravaged Europe, the military managed to repatriate over four million DPs [1] by the end of July 1945 and nearly six million by September 1945.[2] There were around a million DPs who, for one reason or another, were non-repatriable. These people may be roughly divided into three categories: (1) non-Jews from Poland and the USSR whom the Nazis had forcibly brought to Germany to be used as slave labourers but who did not wish to be repatriated because of their political differences with the new regimes in their home countries; (2) Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, and Balts who had willingly come to work for the Germans during the war and were for the most part sympathetic to the Nazi regime, often volunteering to join the SS. These individuals feared being prosecuted for treason or war crimes in their countries of origin and felt more secure living in the chaotic conditions of post-war Germany than in their homelands; (3) Jewish DPs,[3] who were totally debilitated, having survived the horrors of the concentration camps or, more rarely, lived out the war in hiding.
UNITED STATES POLICY TOWARD JEWISH REFUGEES, 1941–1952
The modern refugee resettlement program traces its roots to the 1975 admission of over 100,000 Southeast Asian refugees under an ad hoc resettlement program called the Refugee Task Force. In 1980, Congress formalized the refugee resettlement program in the Refugee Act of 1980, which included the UN criteria for refugee status and set the legal basis for the Refugee Admissions Program. Today this program is operated by the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) of the U.S. Department of State in conjunction with the Office of Refugee Resettlement in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and offices in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). For more about the U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program, see theRefugee Council USA Web site.
How Many Refugees Live in the United States?
Since 1980, when formal U.S. refugee resettlement began, 1.8 million refugees have been invited to live in the United States, with recent annual refugee arrivals typically falling between 40,000 to 75,000. The number of individuals granted asylum in the U.S. over the past decade has ranged from a high of 39,000 in 2001 to just below 23,000 in 2008. About 35 to 40 percent of refugees resettled in the U.S. are children. The vast majority of refugee children—about 95%—resettle in the U.S. with their parents.
REFUGEE INTEGRATIONINTHEUNITED STATES:
CHALLENGES &OPPORTUNITIES 20106
© Church World Service 2010
developed. The process facilitated transforming tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge that can
be then easily understood and disseminated.
The most common themes present in almost all definitions of the CWS-IRP staff included:
• The process of integration includes adaptation of both refugees and host communities.
• It is a long individual process, which depends on levels of education, preparedness to
integrate, cultural background, age and family situation of the refugees.
• Feeling of satisfaction and capacity to become a full member of the society.
• Achieving a balance between preserving your own culture and contributing to the new
culture.
• Language and ability to communicate.
• Functionality within the community.
• Expanded employment and economic opportunities.
• Positive attitudes, behaviors, and respect for diversity and cultural differences.
• Community participation and involvement.
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