'Looking for work': Why employment for asylum-seeking refugees is a long road in MA
FRAMINGHAM - For migrants seeking asylum who have come to Massachusetts and have been placed by state officials in MetroWest, the road to independence and more permanent housing starts with finding work.
"In the thousands of immigrants that I have worked with, every single one of them is seeking work," Matt Cameron, an immigration attorney with Cameron Law Offices in Boston, said. "People who are seeking asylum in the U.S. are mainly do so because they are fleeing persecution, but many of them are also coming to the U.S. because they are looking for work."
However, despite an eagerness to work and a demand from employers for their services, getting the migrants legally authorized to work can be a long and frustrating process, that keeps newcomers to the area in limbo and reliant on social services.
MetroWest has seen a recent increase in migrants seeking asylum, mainly from Haiti, so far this year. Families have lived at the Holiday Inn in Marlborough for months, with a total of 140 families expected to be placed in the hotel. In Framingham, 39 families moved into the Red Roof Inn in late July.
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The migrant families have been seeking asylum due to violence and instability in Haiti and other countries. Many of the migrants in Framingham are ethnic Haitians, who have spent time living in other countries in Central and South America before seeking asylum in the U.S.
Massachusetts is a right-to-shelter state, meaning that the state is legally required to provide some type of housing for homeless families that have at least one child under the age of 21. With more homeless families immigrating into the state, the state has turned to using hotels as a way to house migrants.
How long before a migrant can legally work in Massachusetts
In both Framingham and Marlborough, social service agencies are helping the migrants get settled, including the MetroWest Worker Center, a Framingham agency that helps migrants get authorized to work and handle potential workplace prejudices and mistreatment. However, many of the migrants may spend months in the state before they are legally authorized to work.
In the state, migrants are not able to be legally authorized to work until 150 days after they've been granted legal asylum. That means that a minimum, immigrants to the state who have been granted asylum will still have to wait several months before they are legally authorized to work, and that is usually if they are able to find an attorney who can help them through the asylum process.
"You can't even apply for a work permit until you have applied for asylum, which is a barrier itself," Cameron said. "You really want to put that together through an attorney, and those are hard to come by right now. After 150 days, after you have received the asylum application, you have the right to apply for employment authorization."
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Cameron said the process is frustrating since migrants typically want to get to work and to start earning independence after being granted asylum; instead, they legally cannot seek employment for months after they have been granted asylum.
"I understand the original purpose of the rule, to make sure that people just aren't showing up and immediately applying for benefits," Cameron said. "But it really doesn't make a lot of sense, they want immigrants to show that they are for real by sitting on the couch for six months?"
Why the migrants in Framingham are considered parolees rather than asylum-seekers
Diego Low, the Director at MetroWest Worker Center, said that the migrants living in Framingham are considered parolees, not official asylum-seekers, and that should allow them to be authorized to work quicker than typical asylum-seekers.
"The people in Framingham are going to get their work permits not as asylees, but as parolees. They were paroled into the country, and as such for a two-year period, they can be authorized to work," Low said. "They can apply for permits immediately, without having filed for asylum first."
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Having worked with the population in Framingham, Low said that seeking work is one of the main questions that the refugees have had.
"They are absolutely determined. Once they know that they have food on the table and a roof over their heads, practically the next question is asking about how they can have their affairs in order with immigration authorities, and to get a job," Low said.
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Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey said in an interview last week on WBUR that there is a need for more urgency from the federal government to speed up the work authorization process, saying that employers are reaching out to the state, looking to employ migrants, but the process to get them legally authorized to work is too slow to meet both the demand of employers and the number of migrants coming into the state.
"I think what we need to do is continue to push the Biden administration for work authorization; we need a streamlined and expedited process for getting people work," Healey said on WBUR. "We had offers when we put families at Joint Base Cape Cod (JBCC), we had employers begging to send up a bus to get people, to bring them back to the Cape to work, to put them to work. The numbers that we're seeing right now are unsustainable unless we figure out a way -- the federal government really needs to act here."
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The Massachusetts congressional delegation urged the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to streamline the process of getting recently arrived immigrants authorized to work.
"Stakeholders across the state, from local governments to housing nonprofits to legal aid groups are being stretched to capacity as they work tirelessly to meet the needs of immigrant families that are left housing insecure because they cannot work legally and support themselves during their periods of parole," lawmakers wrote in a joint letter on July 31. "The federal government can help relieve the strain on available resources in the Commonwealth by removing obstacles new arrivals face when trying to work legally."
This article originally appeared on MetroWest Daily News: Refugees in Framingham, Marlborough face long road towards employment.
