President Obama recently raised the number of refugees admitted to the United States from 70-thousdand to 85-thousand a year. There are many millions of people with certified refugee status around the world. From Syria alone, some 11-million people are in that category -- half the country’s former population. Debate continues over how best to respond to the refugee crisis. A forum this Wednesday at Virginia Tech will explore the issues. The public is invited. Robbie Harris reports.
The Center for Peace Studies at Virginia Tech, and a host of other organizations invited a panel of speakers to discuss a variety of refugee crises. History Professor Carmen Gitre is part of the Middle East working group on campus and one of the coordinators.
“I think the biggest problem is that there’s a tremendous amount of misinformation about who they are, how they’re vetted and what happens to them when they come to the United States in particular.”
Mac McEachin, who handles national security for the International Refugee Assistance Project will speak at the conference.
“The United States has the most stringent security requirements of any country in the world.”
McEachin says the chances of a person with official refugee status even coming to the United States is extremely low to begin with.
“ Because not only do you not get to pick the country you’re resettled to, but your chances of being re-settled at all are so extraordinarily low and would take such a very long time, that it would be the silliest way to possibly attempt to enter into the United States. It would be much easier to get a tourist visa or come to visit as a student, which hundreds of thousands of people do every year.
That’s how the 9-11 hijackers got into the country. And there’s another lesser-known aspect of the refugee crisis; thousands of Afghanis who worked along side American troops, as translators and contractor and were promised permanent resident status in the U .S. in return. If it’s not renewed by Congress, that program will expire at the end of this year.
Date: Wednesday November 3
Location: Goodwin Hall room 135
Panelists:
Mac McEachin, National Security Policy Associate for the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), NYC
Julie Kornfeld, Skadden Fellow and attorney for IRAP
Kee Jeong Kim, Associate Professor, Department of Human Development at VT, has
conducted the Syrian Family and Youth Development Project in Jordan
Deirdre Hand, ESL Instructor, works with resettled refuges in Roanoke and DC, spent last summer at Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya
Seida Sohrabi, Kurdish-Finnish Political Science Student at VT, spent her childhood in a refugee camp in Iraq
This panel is sponsored by the Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention, College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, The Institute for Society, Culture, and Environment, Middle East Working Group, Women’s and Gender Studies, and the Departments of History, Human Development, Foreign Languages and Literatures, Political Science, Religion and Culture, and Sociology.