How Asian American organizations in Sacramento are helping Afghan and Ukrainian refugees

A week before Russia invaded Ukraine in March 2022, Violetta Shcherbachuk’s father let out the family’s dog, a German shepherd named Shaman, to play one evening after work.

Shaman didn’t come home that night – a surprise for Shcherbachuk, who said that the dog was “so smart” and always found his way home. The family started searching their neighborhood the next morning.

The search didn’t last long. When war broke out, Shcherbachuk had to forget about Shaman and flee Dnipro, the fourth-largest city in Ukraine, to come to Sacramento with her parents and older brother. Her family arrived first in Mexico, where they could fly without a visa, before receiving U.S. humanitarian parole and crossing the land border into California on March 28, 2022.

Shcherbachuk, now 20, didn’t speak English when she came to the U.S. The California Department of Human Assistance referred her to Asian Resources, Inc., an organization founded in the 1980s to support Southeast Asian refugees, for classes and employment services.

Eight months later, she was able to confidently hold an hour-long conversation about her experiences and hopes. Previously pursuing an economics degree in Ukraine, she plans to resume classes at American River College in the fall, working five hours per day as a DoorDash driver in the meantime – both opportunities ARI helped her find.

Ukrainian churches and community organizations bore the brunt of meeting Ukrainian refugees at the border. They brought as many as 20,000 refugees to Sacramento since last March, according to a spokesperson for the Ukrainian American House, a Sacramento-area nonprofit that has assisted the state with its refugee support programs.

After securing housing, getting jobs and help with English – which UA House estimated only 5-10% of Ukrainian refugees speak upon arrival – are the biggest challenges the refugees face. That’s where a network that began with the Asian American movement of the 1960s and now encompasses refugees of all stripes steps in to help.

While its headquarters in south Sacramento continued to provide various services to Chinese and Vietnamese communities, ARI opened an office in Citrus Heights in 1992 to serve Serbian and Slavic refugees fleeing the Yugoslav wars. Between last September and June, the office’s staff – now consisting of one Ukrainian, one Russian-speaking Kazakhstani and two Afghan caseworkers – served 296 Afghan and Ukrainian refugees.

Today, ARI is one of ten refugee employment services providers to receive federal funding through the Sacramento Employment Training Agency, a joint city and county agency. The ten providers – including several other originally Southeast Asian organizations – will together serve around 3,400 clients by September, refugee services director Michelle O’Camb said.

‘Help them stand on their own feet’

ARI helps refugees “stand on their own feet” instead of relying on cash assistance and other initial support provided by the California Department of Human Assistance, ARI’s Citrus Heights site director Farhad Noorzada said.

Clients’ backgrounds vary widely, from those who speak little English and are open to any job to doctors, engineers, and other highly educated people from various industries.

ARI helped one client do on-the-job training at a gas station, which then hired him as a stocker and later promoted him to be a cashier. Three months later, the man is still working there and “is very satisfied with his job,” Noorzada said. Many clients have similar stories, being placed to do basic service work starting out.

Experienced clients can be more reluctant to accept entry-level jobs, but ARI encourages them to “just get started somewhere.” Many are promoted quickly, Noorzada said. One client became a manager at a technical company just three months after starting in an entry-level position.

Noorzada himself was a refugee who quickly climbed his organization’s ladder after fleeing Afghanistan in October 2021, just months after completing an MBA in the country.

The DHA, where Noorzada went for help with food, healthcare and other benefits, referred him to ARI for job help services in July 2022. As it turned out, ARI had a job for him as a caseworker within the organization, hiring him in August 2022 and promoting him to director of the Citrus Heights center just four months later.

From the Asian American movement to modern refugee programs

SETA’s refugee program has a direct connection to the Asian American movement of the 1960s and 70s, a wave of student and grassroots efforts to create a pan-Asian identity and pan-Asian institutions. The term “Asian American” itself was created by student organizers in 1968 as part of the movement.

Several UC Davis students set up an organization called Asian Community Services in 1969, providing English classes for older community members along with other programming such as children’s after-school programs. The organization eventually merged with the Japanese Community Center in Sacramento and became the Asian Community Center in 1979.

The JCC hired Sacramento State social work masters student May O. Lee as its first paid employee in 1976. In 1980, she became the founding director of ARI, founded to address an increasing demand for English classes and job placement services for immigrants.

The Vietnam War drastically affected that country as well as Cambodia and Laos, where 540,000 tons of U.S. bombs killed as many as 500,000 civilians in the CIA-led “secret war” to disrupt Communist supply lines. Refugees fled the three Southeast Asian countries in the 1970s and 80s, and today Sacramento is home to the third-largest community of Hmong people – an ethnic group whose members the U.S. recruited to fight in Laos instead of sending in its own troops – in the U.S.

In the 1980s, ARI helped form the Sacramento Refugee Forum, a coalition of around 25 community groups, mutual aid associations and churches coordinating support for the influx of Southeast Asian refugees. When federal funding for refugee employment services became available in the following years, SETA used the forum to build its network of providers.

ARI and other established organizations are uniquely capable of serving refugees due to the community and employer relationships they have built over time, O’Camb said.

“They’re going to Chamber of Commerce meetings. They’re sharing the good word about hiring refugees, the work ethic that you get, the integrity, the loyalty … it really does separate them from other organizations,” she said.

Today, ARI has expanded to provide COVID testing and vaccination, hate crime prevention and language access services, and even has an advocacy branch for healthcare equity.

In addition to its South Sacramento and Citrus Heights centers, ARI currently operates a job center in midtown Sacramento that mainly serves Black, Latino and white Sacramentans. But employment services are still a “core bread and butter” of the organization, Lee said.

Stay or return? Refugees face unclear futures

Ultimately, employment services can only do so much for refugees, who face uncertain futures affected by limited parole periods and job prospects.

In Ukraine, Shcherbachuk’s mother worked as an accountant at a large firm and her father as the assistant director of a large company. Though they also came to ARI’s English classes, the language didn’t stick like it did with Shcherbachuk. Her father got a job at a church through a family connection, while her mother worked as a waitress at a restaurant.

It was enough money for the family to rent an apartment of their own. But the difficulty of rebuilding a career in the U.S. means Shcherbachuk’s parents hope to return to Ukraine once the war ends.

“My mama come and she start to work as waiter. My mama don’t like this at all,” Shcherbachuk said. “If in the future (my mother can get a similar-level job as) in Ukraine here, of course she wants to work accounting here … when you come here and you start again for at first level, it’s kind of hard.”

Shcherbachuk and her brother Alexis, on the other hand, are hopeful about building a life in the U.S. Shcherbachuk watched many American movies in Ukraine and dreamed of coming to the country, she said.

The standard of living is also higher in the U.S., allowing Shcherbachuk time and money for travel and shopping, she said. She’s been to Las Vegas, Miami and Hawaii since arriving in the country last year.

“In Ukraine, if you work, it’s so small salary for starting, so you cannot have something to enjoy,” she said. “I don’t travel (alone) in Ukraine at all, only with my family. Here I can do this by myself.”

Noorzada says he is happy at ARI and wants to stay for at least a few more years before getting an MBA in the U.S. and building a career in business. Noorzada sees his work as helping not just refugees in the U.S., but also “families back in their country.”

“A lot of the people, including myself, whatever I earn I divide to send and support my family back in my hometown,” he said.

While Afghan refugees who worked with the U.S. military are eligible for Special Immigrant Visas, granting them permanent residency and work authorization, many other Afghan refugees and most Ukrainian refugees are on humanitarian paroles that will expire within the next year.

Shcherbachuk’s one-year humanitarian parole was extended until March 2024, while a separate “Temporary Protected Status” residency and work authorization expires this October. Her family has not applied for permanent asylum because it is a long process for which she is not sure they are eligible.

Until a clear pathway to permanent residency appears, her only option is to keep applying for re-parole and TPS extensions as they become available. She wants to stay in Sacramento, after all.

“I like everything here. I don’t want go back,” Shcherbachuk said. “(My brother and I) want stay here. We want work here. We want see our live(s) here.”