What happened to the Afghan refugees?

6 comments

1. https://www.rescue.org/article/what-next-afghans-who-fled-united-states

   https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/8/15/afghan-refugees-struggle-to-adjust-to-life-in-the-us

   https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2022/09/15/afghanistan-refugees-catholic-243727

   More personally my Church has been helping to raise funding for refugees from Afghanistan through Catholic Charities Maine. The Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine has also been doing a lot. Both are licensed resettlement agencies. They together have resettled over 200 Afghans (a drop in the bucket I know, but we are a small state population wise).

   Apparently the biggest hurdle is finding property managers and landlords willing to take a leap of faith because these people don’t have a credit score. JCSM and CCM help with that. When a landlord is in your church or synagogue they are often willing to take that leap and just having a licensed agency backing the resettlement effort helps larger companies also take that leap.

   Most families get settled in the greater Portland area but Brunswick has also been very welcoming and Waterville has a handful.

   It is worth noting that Waterville and Brunswick are both college towns and that has been a help to promoting resettlement.

2. Had one as an uber driver. /shrug. Figure they do the normal refugee thing.

3. Honestly haven’t heard much from them either but I’m not in a major city. I’m guessing they don’t have a lot of money and the language barrier is a problem so probably swept under the rug & forgotten about like the rest of our poorer communities.

   Edit: My maybe controversial opinion.. This country has so many people and is so based on capitalism & consumerism, we don’t really do as much of a good job as taking care of refugees or immigrants as Germany (took in a lot of Syrians 2014-2015 and Ukrainian’s recently due to the Russian war) and Canada. Some people may agree or disagree with it, but we as a nation don’t really believe in higher taxes to support people of lesser backgrounds as compared to other countries imo. It works for people crossing the southern border because people from Latin America have strong family values and are likely to have family/friends in major sun belt states (Southern California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico) – and even if they don’t, Latino/Hispanic communities tend to be pretty tight knit and work together to bring themselves up for the most part. This country is based on individualism and consumerism. You can go from having $28 to your name to becoming a millionaire 10 years later in this country but it’s also possible to lose a lot of wealth in 1 generation. Once you’re here, it’s just kinda on you what you do.. that’s the American definition of freedom (to me) 🤷

4. Some of them came to the Bay Area but we have a huge community of Afghan people here for them to join in, so I’m going to assume the people who settled here may have an easier time when they are joining an established immigrant community. I presume joining a group of 30k+ people in one city makes it a lot easier.

5. Most refugees just arrive and get to work like everyone else. You don’t hear about them often because there’s no drama.

6. (The) Davenport, where all afghans go.

   (I’ll see myself out.)