At a time when the European Union is debating plans for dealing with a major refugee influx from the Middle East, a UNM professor is helping refugees feel at home in the United States.
Jessica Goodkind, associate professor at the Department of Sociology, is pairing up refugee families with UNM students to help them resettle in the U.S. as part of the “Refugee Well-Being Project.”
Goodkind said she believes that for many refugees that are coming to the United States, their reasons for their seeking refugee status are related to U.S. interventions in their countries.
“I think we have even more of a responsibility to welcome people who have been uprooted, often due to policies of the U.S. government,” she said.
Goodkind has been working with refugees for the past 22 years. In 1993 she worked at a refugee camp in Thailand, where she helped prepare refugees who were going to be resettled in the United States. During her work she visited several Mong refugees in the U.S, and often found that they were isolated and not welcomed by many Americans, she said.
“I wanted a way to connect refugees with Americans and build on the strengths that refugees bring, and have students learn from refugee families, but also (have) families able to learn from students about life in the U.S.,” she said.
According to a BBC report, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker announced plans for resettling refugees on Wednesday, saying that the plans will offer a “swift, determined and comprehensive” response to Europe’s migrant crisis.
“Under the proposals, 120,000 additional asylum seekers will be distributed among EU nations, with binding quotas,” the report said.
Thousands of people from war-torn Middle-Eastern countries have been trying to flee to Europe by sea in search of better living conditions, according to BBC reports.
The problem intensified when thousands of migrants entered Hungary and were stopped from moving to other countries. Meanwhile, a photo of a 3-year-old child who died while traveling from Turkey to Europe by sea circulated in the media and brought the issue to public discourse, according to Guardian newspaper.
Goodkind said she believes the recent refugee influx in Europe will have a major impact on the continent.
She said she was pleased to see that there have been many countries, like Germany, that have agreed to resettle a large numbers of refugees.
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“It is nice to see German people who are out welcoming refugees and giving them food and offering them places to stay,” she said. “People in other countries like Iceland are also doing the same.”
Goodkind said she is aware of a movement in the United States requesting that the government increase its influx of refugees, Syrian refugees in particular. Even though the United States resettles 70 to 80 thousand refugees a year, this number is small compared to the country’s population, she said.
Currently, Goodkind is working with some of the larger populations of refugees resettling in Albuquerque, she said.
“We have refugees from Iraq, Afghanistan, The Democratic Republic of Congo and other African countries,” she said.
In the past two years, the project officials enrolled 93 adults, their families and their children.
“We are about to start a new group of families in the project,” she said. “We are meeting families right now and planning to enroll 60 more adults and their families this year.”
She praised the courage of refugees who resettle in the United States.
“They are, for the most part, very resilient people, because they have been through war or conflict situations and had to leave their homes,” Goodkind said. “They managed to go first to a country of safety, and then apply for refugee status and come to the United States. I would say most refugees coming here bring a lot of strength and a lot of resilience.”
She said that refugees arriving from different countries deal both with overcoming past traumas and the stress of resettling in a new country.
“Often, in the United States they need to learn a new language,” she said. “They can be really isolated, since they leave their families and friends behind. They usually cannot bring a lot with them, so they are really often starting from the scratch. They need a place to live and find a job.”
She said that many refugees are highly skilled, but that it is difficult for them to transfer their credentials or educational backgrounds to work in the U.S.
Kerstin Kalke, a communication and journalism student from Germany, said that the refugees face many health issues, including psychological problems. Germany has been taking on a significant number of refugees, according to BBC reports.
“No one leaves home without any reason. They are leaving their homes because they cannot survive in their home countries,” she said. She said she appreciates the role of Germany in helping the refugees, and that it was great to see how her country was greeting them.
Goodkind said it is the time for U.S. citizens to devise actions they can take locally, nationally and internationally to address the refugee crisis.
“We don’t want to wait and look back years later and wish that we had done something more,” she said
Sayyed Shah is the assistant news editor at the Daily Lobo. He can be contacted at assistant-news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @mianfawadshah.
