June 20 is World Refugee Day. The Fox Valley will celebrate after a year of unprecedented Afghan evacuee resettlement.
APPLETON – Refugee families that have newly arrived in the Fox Valley are invited to a celebration June 28 involving two very American activities: baseball and a picnic.
The event, organized by World Relief Fox Valley, is called "Take Me Out to the Ball Game." Attendees will enjoy veggie burgers, hot dogs and brats and an evening at a Timber Rattlers baseball game to celebrate World Refugee Day.
Annually held on June 20, World Refugee Day was first established in 2011 by the United Nations, on the 50th anniversary of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. It's a holiday meant to recognize and honor refugees from around the world.
The event will be World Relief Fox Valley's first in-person outing since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, said Tami McLaughlin, executive director of World Relief Fox Valley.
"We've invited ... all of our refugees who've arrived throughout this year — beginning of 2021 and '22 — and some of the volunteers who've welcomed them and worked alongside them," McLaughlin said. "We'll have a picnic-style meal and watch the game together. We're very excited about that."
This year's celebration also stands out for another reason: 181 people arrived in the Fox Valley from Afghanistan within a span of about five months. It's been an unprecedented refugee resettlement process for World Relief Fox Valley, which was first established in 2012.
Since its start, World Relief Fox Valley has welcomed a total of 1,202 evacuees from a variety of nations, including Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan, Syria and South Sudan.
McLaughlin said the Fox Valley is the second highest location for refugees in the state, after Milwaukee. But the mass evacuation of more than 120,000 people out of Afghanistan was the U.S.'s largest evacuation effort since 1975, when more than 110,000 Vietnamese refugees were moved out of their country to Guam.
Resettlement organizations in communities across the U.S. had to quickly pull resources together to welcome so many newcomers in such a short period of time.
Building community in a new home
World Relief's upcoming outing is not the first time the resettlement agency has hosted events to celebrate World Refugee Day.
For a few years after World Relief Fox Valley's start in 2012, the organization hosted an annual fishing day in Oshkosh, organized and led by a community member. All refugees who had arrived within the previous year were given a fishing pole, tackle box and fishing license, and the community member would teach everyone how to catch, clean and cook the fish they caught. The fishing day was followed by a cookout and picnic.
For previous World Refugee Days, World Relief Fox Valley has also had events, including a dinner where refugees told their stories and a concert at The Refuge in Appleton.
These sort of events allow people to build community in a light-hearted, fun environment, McLaughlin said.
Aside from special events, World Relief's Good Neighbor Teams help people adjust to their new homes. The teams are made up of volunteers, usually local church members, who are each assigned to a newly arrived family. The teams help from the early days of move-in, with things like furnishing homes and cooking meals, to months later, with assistance like neighborly support and transportation if needed.
Ali Faqiry, who evacuated his home in Afghanistan in September and arrived in Appleton at the end of January, said his family's Good Neighbor Team has been a major help with their adjustment.
"They made life easier for everyone. They helped — still they are helping us — getting us to grocery shopping, wherever. Sometimes if they have time, helping us, taking us anywhere we are asking," Faqiry said.
Faqiry now works as an IT user experience engineer in a downtown Appleton office. His wife, Farahnaz, works as a community ambassador with World Relief, where she works with Afghan women who have also recently arrived in the Fox Valley, and their 3-year-old son sometimes attends day care at the Appleton YMCA. Faqiry now has his driver's license and a car.
Faqiry said he and his family adjusted to their new lives quickly. He credited that to the fact that they both knew English and were able to land jobs similar to what they did back in Afghanistan; Faqiry previously had a decade of experience working in IT, and Farahnaz did similar programming work as she is doing with World Relief at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.
Most of the Afghan evacuees in the Fox Valley have now been in their new homes for around six months. McLaughlin said many have said their adjustment is going well. All 181 new arrivals have permanent housing, and nearly every person who is considered the head of the household is employed.
"We think most are doing very well, initially. There's still a lot to learn, a lot of challenges and obstacles to overcome. But we feel like people are in a good place for just having settled here a couple months ago," McLaughlin said.
Moving forward, McLaughlin said, some goals a lot of Afghan evacuees are moving toward include getting their driver's license, purchasing a car and finding jobs for a additional members of each household.
As newly arrived families and individuals settle into daily routines and establish their lives in the Fox Valley, it becomes less beneficial to distinguish refugees from other members of the community, said Khurram Ahmad, public affairs director of the Oshkosh Ahmadiyya Muslim Community.
The Oshkosh Ahmadiyya Muslim Community has been a support system for refugees moving to the Fox Valley from countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria for years. Community members have volunteered services to new arrivals, including creating translated documents, rides to doctors' offices and assistance with acclimating to cultural differences for new arrivals.
But Ahmad said this spring, the community has made a conscious decision to shift their focus from volunteering to help refugees to offering broader support and education to the community as a whole.
"Once they are in the society, that's it. They are Wisconsinites, they are Appleton residents, they are Oshkosh residents. They're just residents. And we don't keep talking about them as refugees," Ahmad said.
Ahmad has been organizing workshops with community members aimed at having conversations around justice. These conversations have incorporated discussions on what sort of assistance will be most beneficial to people who have had their lives uprooted and moved to new homes halfway around the globe, due to circumstances entirely out of their control.
"Justice means understanding other's needs and approaching them in a just manner. So, when we understand that concept, everything else kind of fits into place," Ahmad said.
Ahmad said an important part of integrating newcomers into the community is for people to recognize that refugees are really no different than they are.
"We need to understand that; that if it can happen to anyone, then anyone can be us too," Ahmad said.
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Still seeking permanent security
While McLaughlin said most Afghan evacuees are well into their journey of settling in, an ongoing concern is immigration status.
"We were hoping Congress would have passed the Afghan Adjustment Act, which would allow (Afghan evacuees) a pathway to permanent residency very similar to refugees, which is a pretty streamlined process," McLaughlin said. "However, about 70% of the ... Afghans that we welcomed are here on parolee status, which means they have to petition for asylum, which is a much more complicated and lengthy process."
Humanitarian parole, according to the National Immigration Forum, is a tool under the Immigration and Nationality Act that allows people to enter the United States and temporarily stay without an immigrant or non-immigrant visa. Its use is usually limited, reserved for things like receiving medical treatment, visiting a sick family member or attending a funeral; but in major humanitarian crises, like the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan last year, parole was used to relocate tens of thousands of Afghan evacuees to the U.S.
Evacuees that petition for asylum are encouraged to do so within one year of their arrival in the U.S. — including their time at military camps. For many, that one-year mark is approaching soon, McLaughlin said.
Large-scale uses of humanitarian parole have historically been followed by the passage of an adjustment act, which is legislation that would provide parolees a streamlined path to permanent immigration status, according to the National Immigration Forum. In 1966, an adjustment act was passed that gave Cuban refugees a path to permanent residency in the U.S. In the '70s, after the Vietnam War, and in the '90s and early 2000s, multiple pieces of legislation passed for refugees. But Congress has yet to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act.
McLaughlin said World Relief Fox Valley is confident nearly all petitions for asylum will be approved. However, the organization is working with a local immigration attorney who is helping with processing and options for each evacuees' circumstances. Besides asylum, certain groups are able to apply for Temporary Protected Status, which offers temporary protection but doesn't grant people the permanent residence that asylum and a green card would.
"What we ultimately desire for every one of the people we've welcomed is a green card, which is permanent resident status, which then allows people to apply for citizenship," McLaughlin said.
Faqiry sent in his paperwork a month ago to apply his family for green cards through SIV. Now, all he can do is wait.
Why the Fox Valley?
While evacuees have little choice in what part of the U.S. they are resettled in, the Fox Valley has an appeal that many people are drawn to, Ahmad said.
"You have to understand, coming from outside of the U.S., the vision of USA is through movies, television, and so on. You have never seen Appleton or Oshkosh in any movie; it is all New York, L.A., things like that," he said.
Ahmad said he has spoken with evacuees who landed in the Fox Valley, and asked what keeps them in north-central Wisconsin as opposed to moving to a more fast-paced city. The common answer, he said, is that the Fox Valley offers relaxation, limited traffic, more time to see family and a welcoming, friendly Midwestern culture.
McLaughlin said she has been grateful for the Fox Valley's receptiveness as so many evacuees have been welcomed into the community during the last few months.
"It's what refugee resettlement should look like, I think it's what refugee resettlement was meant to be. The welcoming community is so involved and cares and wants to learn," she said. "It's going to change our community, I know it. It probably already has, but I think we'll start seeing visible signs that we're more welcoming, that ... the new community members certainly change the face of who were are, the face of the community and just make it so much better."
Contact Kelli Arseneau at (920) 213-3721 or karseneau@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter at @ArseneauKelli.
This article originally appeared on Appleton Post-Crescent: Fox Valley celebrates World Refugee Day after Afghan resettlement
