This story originally aired on Keystone Edition Radio on April 24.
In April, the Department of Homeland Security expanded its temporary protected immigration status for Ukrainian, Sudanese and Cameroonian refugees. But when asylum seekers and refugees enter the United States, where do they go?
The reception and placement of refugees in the United States is managed by a State Department agency. The U.S. Refugee Admissions Program determines where in the country the resettlement takes place. Then, the Reception & Placement Program provides the initial services that those refugees receive.
United Neighborhood Centers (UNC) of Northeastern Pennsylvania is considered one of a few remote-placement refugee resettlement agencies in Lackawanna County that collaborates with other groups, including the Catholic Social Services and the University of Scranton.
Daysi Carreto is UNC’s Assistant Director of the Community Education Department in Scranton. The organization has several community health and education arms, but Carreto’s department also helps with refugee resettlement.
“We’ve been able to create quite a nice network of organizations to assist us with welcoming newly-arrived refugees, and it’s been really great to be able to count on those services,” Carreto said.
Carreto noted that other organizations with whom they collaborate, like the Ignatian Volunteer Corps, have been working with refugees and their families for much longer than her own agency.
United Neighborhood Centers has been resettling families since 2019. She said UNC has handled 16 cases in the last three years. A case can be a single person, or an entire family.
Carreto described UNC’s services for refugees as "far-reaching." Such services include helping with airport pickup, securing housing, finding a job, applying for benefits, and registering children for school.
“We try to provide cultural orientation so that the families know a little bit more about what life in the United States will be like,” she said. “The goal is that they become self-sufficient and are able to provide a better life for their families and to have better opportunities overall.”
One of UNC’s partners, the University of Scranton, offers language-learning services to refugees, newly-arrived immigrants, and foreign students. Hannah Jackson is the Director of the Language Learning Center at the University of Scranton.
“One of the things that we’ve done to serve the Scranton community is that we’ve started doing community ESL,” Jackson said. “[It’s] part of our World Languages Department… We have a number of about 15-20 tutors who work here.”
Jackson said the number of participants was nearly twice that size, but there was less interest when the pandemic forced the program to go virtual. She’s staying optimistic that next semester will bring back more people when they are hopefully in person.
Jackson said there’s been a wide range of people who have used their services. Her department has worked with people from Iran, Indonesia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Serbia, Ecuador, and Turkey.
Marilyn Pryle, an English teacher and conversation group organizer, has been doing similar language work. But her meet-ups aren’t tied to a specific organization. Five years ago, she and other community members realized just how large the refugee population is in Lackawanna County.
“We were asking ourselves, what could we do?” Pryle said. “A couple of us are English teachers, so we thought to ourselves, we could try to organize a conversation group maybe that would meet once a week.”
Pryle and others had the plan, but they still needed a place. They asked the Lackawanna County Library System for support. Pryle and her group began meeting at the children’s library in a basement room. She said the turnout brought more people than expected.
“They were bringing their whole families, so we had all these children at the library, kind of all over the place,” Pryle said.
So, Pryle had an idea. She’s a 10th grade English teacher at Abington Heights School District in Clarks Summit. A few of her students found out about the conversation group, and wanted to lend a hand.
“[The students] would come on Sunday and take care of the children and play games with them, help them with their homework, and help them look for books in the main library section. And it just became this wonderful thing,” Pryle said.
The conversation group had to pause due to the pandemic, but Pryle and her group kept in contact with the families over the last two years.
Next month, the language group will start meeting again at the Albright Memorial Library. For now, they want to get back on their feet, but hope they can expand soon.
“All the statistics point to this: we’re heading toward more of this, not less of this,” Pryle said. “The kind of global problems we’re facing including climate change and increased conflict in some areas, it’s just going to create more refugee populations unfortunately."
