American
Dreams: Helping Make Newcomers at Home in a New World
By Kate Jackson
Social Work Today
Vol. 5, No. 1, Page 19
Strangers in a strange land are welcomed by a
network of organizations seeking to ease the struggle of making it
in America.
A key requirement of social workers is to meet clients
where they are. For social workers who tend to America’s burgeoning
population of immigrants and refugees, that place may be neither here
nor there. For victims of war, hunger, torture, terror, and political,
religious, or racial persecution who are fleeing one place and hoping
to find a home in another, social service professionals must work
with them in place—and that place is transition. Across the
country are loosely affiliated agencies where dedicated staff, including
social workers, reach out to stir newcomers into the melting pot and
ease the transition.
The International Institute of Los Angeles (IILA)
and the International Institute of New Jersey (IINJ) are part of this
loose chain of approximately three dozen organizations that had their
beginnings in the national YWCA movement that began around the time
of World War I when, says E. Stephen Voss, president and CEO of the
IILA, the association was serving a growing number of immigrant women
and girls. Recognizing a need to strengthen its focus to better serve
this swelling population and more specifically meet its needs, the
YWCA set up these international institutes.
In the 1920s and 1930s, in response to some now-forgotten
policy shift, explains Voss, “virtually all of those institutes
spun off from the Y movement and became separate independently incorporated
organizations with no religious affiliation or agenda.” The
Los Angeles organization, he says, traces its roots to 1914, when
the YWCA founded it. The IINJ was established by the YWCA four years
later. Although not linked to it in a corporate way, the institutes
are all dues-paying members of a national organization, the Immigration
and Refugee Services of America.
With their unique local immigrant and refugee communities,
each institute works to help individuals in flux become settled and
comfortable in American society and overcome barriers to acculturation.
The needs of newcomers have varied greatly throughout the life of
these organizations.
The profile of the immigrant population, explains
Nicholas V. Montalto, PhD, president and CEO of the IINJ in Jersey
City, has changed from generation to generation, and these agencies
have evolved to reflect the shifting needs of the predominant immigrant
communities in their areas. Their individual programs and strategies
also reflect the very specific needs of the people in their geographic
areas. What’s crucial in one state may have little relevance
in another. Consider the differences from coast to coast—between
the needs of Californians and Jerseyites.
The East Coast
At the Hudson County location of IINJ, not far from Manhattan, the
staff can communicate in more than 20 languages to help the diverse
populations they serve, which include people from across the map,
particularly in Haiti, Cuba, West Africa, and India. Also requiring
assistance are Ecuadorians, Salvadorans, and Mexicans. Explains Montalto,
the number of immigrants or refugees from a given area doesn’t
necessarily correlate with the greatest amount of need for services.
There are probably more Asian Indians in Hudson County, he says, for
example, but the needs of the Haitian community surpass those of the
Indians.
Credentialed professionals work alongside case aides,
caseworkers, and Americorps program participants. “Our particular
niche is to recruit people from the immigrant communities themselves
who have bilingual and bicultural skills and are willing to devote
one year to community service,” says Montalto. This allows the
agency to supplement the resources on staff. The institute also relies
on “language links,” a resource bank of credentialed interpreters
and translators to help out when staff is not enough. It also depends
on credentialed social workers and psychologists who can provide clinical
services in foreign languages in its cross-cultural counseling center.
Although the organization assists both immigrants
and refugees, in light of funding restrictions, its efforts go disproportionately
to the refugees. “One of the biggest frustrations that everyone
in this field faces is that most of the targeted sources of funding
available to work with the newcomer population [are] reserved exclusively
for refugees”—a term he uses in the broadest possible
sense.
The government allows the agency to establish programs
to work with refugees, but, says Montalto, “the frustration
occurs because there are immigrants who have similar needs, but we’re
barred from serving them because they’re not eligible, particularly
when it comes to resettlement services.” While the Haitian community
is very large and extremely needy, for example, they can’t be
served by the institute’s employment service or resettlement
programs. Their needs actually outstrip those of Cubans, says Montalto,
but Cubans qualify as refugees and are, therefore, eligible for more
services.
The institute has some nongovernment sources of funding,
so it is able to assist Haitians in at least some capacity. A staff
psychologist, for example, helps the Haitian community with issues
of trauma, and the institute has state funding to address issues of
child abuse, which it does through Haitian radio. “We’ve
tried to overcome this hurdle,” says Montalto. “We’ve
been working very assiduously over the years to try to identify other
sources of funding so that we can broaden the pool of clients for
each of our programs, but it’s a major hurdle.”
Different immigrant and refugee communities have greatly
divergent needs and are served in different ways. The institute’s
large West African clientele, for example, says Montalto, tends to
be better educated than its Haitian clients, and some have the advantage
of speaking English. To meet their needs, he indicates, staff must
take into consideration differences in class, education, and linguistic
background. Also affecting the programs and services geared toward
each specific group are the size and resources of the local ethnic
community. He points, for example, to New Jersey’s small population
of Iranians. To assist Iranian clients, it would be helpful to enlist
the support of the kinds of Iranian community organizations that exist
in places such as Los Angeles that have larger populations. “Therefore,”
says Montalto, “the strength of the local immigrant or refugee
community is an important factor in designing a service strategy for
incoming members of that community.”
The overwhelming needs of the individuals the institute
serves involve assistance with legal status in the United States.
Also crucial is information about resources—a demand that the
institute is addressing through a new service strategy. “Part
of the problem for many immigrants is that they simply do not know
what resources are available to them, what their responsibilities
are as members of our society, and what their rights might be in terms
of access to an interpreter,” says Montalto.
While not deemphasizing direct services to these people,
the institute is trying to find ways to convey information to the
newcomer population in a manner it can understand. To this end, it’s
saturated the various communities with and posted to the Internet
a resource and tutorial for immigrants that it’s published in
English as well as 14 languages. In addition, it’s holding a
series of community workshops in foreign languages cosponsored by
religious, civic, or fraternal organizations within the community
to provide training resources.
The West Coast
The IILA, says Voss, offers assistance to people from all over the
world, but the largest population it serves is Latinos, particularly
Mexicans. In addition, it brings programs and services to people from
China, Africa, Iraq, and other Middle Eastern nations. “We’re
still actively working with Vietnamese people who came as refugees,
as well as those arriving now as permanent residents and converting
to American citizenship.” These groups have very similar needs—most
of which, says Voss, are intuitive. Their key objective in the first
year that they’re here is to find a job, and the manner in which
they enter the United States has a large bearing on how that is achieved.
If they enter the country with documents, they can be employed legally.
Otherwise, while they’ll likely find employment in Los Angeles,
it will typically be under the table. Also at the top of the list
of needs, he explains, is learning enough English to get by, getting
oriented to the community, and gaining access to healthcare. Many
ultimately will want to be reunited with their family members who
are not here, and that requires first citizenship and second the ability
to petition for a reunion.
Some, including those who enter the country without
a visa or with a student or tourist visa and who have what is called
a well-founded fear of persecution if they return home, have special
needs, including seeking political asylum in the United States. At
the institute, attorneys and paralegals develop submissions on their
behalf to the Immigrations Service to request political asylum for
some and defend others against deportation. Even greater numbers of
clients are among the world’s millions of refugees—those,
says Voss, who end up in refugee camps, others who are stateless and
undocumented, and some who have fled their homes because of intertribal
atrocities.
The institute, for example, is about to resettle more
than 1,000 Hmong refugees—those from a tribal group from Laos,
many of whom, says Voss, contracted with the United States during
the Vietnam War to rescue downed U.S. pilots behind enemy lines. The
institute will help reunite those who’ve already settled here
with some of their family members who may have been in refugee camps
in Thailand for 10 or 20 years. “By American standards, they’re
a very backward people,” says Voss. “They traditionally
lived in a ‘slash-and-burn’ type of society in the hills
of Laos, so they have little formal education and their lifestyles
have little similarity to ours.”
Meeting their acculturation needs, he says, is a tall
order. Many don’t speak English. “They’ve probably
never lived in an apartment, set up a budget, had a bank account,
or paid bills. Just orienting them to life in the United States is
a huge initial task.” The institute’s staff members begin
by helping individuals petition to have their relatives in refugee
camps resettled here, expediting the paperwork, and arranging for
charter flights.
They meet the newcomers at the airport and help them
get housing, healthcare, and education. “[We tend] to the hundreds
of things that are needed for their initial arrival and work with
them for the short period of time that funding allows, until we can
connect them with services and resources that will assist them on
a longer-term basis,” says Voss. Helping the institute’s
staff are what are known as anchor relatives—people who had
come in earlier waves as refugees who are now living and working in
the United States.
The Challenges
While social service agencies such as these institutes tend to the
concrete needs of refugees and newly arriving immigrants, it’s
a challenge—if not an impossible task—to meet their broader
needs because our society is not conducive to quick or thorough acculturation
through ongoing vocational or social advancement. “We’re
not set up as a society to enroll people full-time in school for years
and years to learn what they might very much value or benefit from.
They have to get jobs right away, and that means their acculturation
process and their ability to learn English may not be rapid,”
says Voss. “This is especially true, he points out, for those
who take jobs that don’t require them to speak English.
Another significant challenge is to address interpersonal
issues that arise during the experience of immigrating or seeking
refuge. “There can be really significant clashes between older
newly arrived immigrants and refugees and their children,” says
Voss, “because the children acculturate very rapidly and take
on values that sometimes challenge the traditional culture and values
of the parents and grandparents.” Consequently, he says, there’s
dysfunction in those families, and the parents and children can be
miles apart.
Advocating Change
Institute representatives on both coasts point to a strong need for
a shift in national policy that will enable social service agencies
to improve the lives of displaced individuals and help them successfully
assimilate. “We need a much more coherent federal policy with
respect to people coming across our borders to find work,” explains
Voss. “We’re really ambivalent about that. We say that
they shouldn’t enter without a visa, and they shouldn’t
have a job without a visa.” On the other hand, he observes,
“we structure our economies—especially in areas such as
Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago—on massive numbers of undocumented
people working at below minimum wage so that we can have inexpensive
products.” What’s needed, he insists, is a national policy
that recognizes that this is a global situation and allows for the
movement of people across borders in a lawful manner that protects
their families.
One of the overriding needs of clients, agrees Montalto,
is help with issues pertaining to legal status. The institutes struggle
to provide aid to the large number of undocumented immigrants who
leave their homes because they cannot get work and come to the United
States for employment. “They’re doing the kind of jobs
that most native-born Americans don’t want to do,” says
Montalto, yet they can’t qualify for services and benefits if
they’re not legal. “We have a marginalized class of people
that are in desperate need and for whom, especially after 9/11, it’s
increasingly difficult to survive, so we’re really pushing in
our advocacy efforts for a new legalization program.”
An Opportunity for Social Workers
Voss and Montalto believe social workers can play an important part
in improving immigrants’ and refugees’ lives yet acknowledge
that there are limited opportunities. The IILA, says Voss, is funded
to provide the more concrete services and offers very little in the
way of clinical services, so it has only a few MSWs on a staff that
is complemented by interns from the University of Southern California
School of Social Work. When the clients’ greatest needs are
finding housing or employment, the more advanced skills of social
workers aren’t always essential.
On the flip side, he says, “the formal training
that social workers get generally equips them to do things that we
don’t ask our staff to do, such as in-depth psychosocial assessments
or counseling and therapy.”
Social workers who are motivated to find a way to
use their skills in service to immigrants and refugees, says Voss,
should be sure that they have “actual cross-cultural experiences
that can prepare them for looking at the world differently and understanding
their clients.”
In most big cities, he insists, there’s plenty
of opportunity to have such experiences. For example, if they work
in a setting with a caseload that doesn’t allow them a cross-cultural
experience, there are numerous organizations that can and will welcome
volunteers. Even if they volunteered to work with only one client,
he says, it would be appreciated by the organization, and it would
give the social worker an opportunity to gain valuable experience
about cultural difference.
“It’s also important that they work in
a setting where they have access to someone that might be described
as a cultural broker—someone who knows enough about both cultures
to help interpret the issues to the social worker,” says Voss.
“There’s a huge need for people who have
the necessary cultural sensitivity and language skills,” agrees
Montalto, who nevertheless acknowledges a dearth of employment opportunities.
He’s encouraged by signs of change, however, noting that there’s
been some improvement in recent years, with foundations expressing
more interest in supporting work with immigrants.
Montalto is quick to link the work of these newcomers
with the fact that New Jersey is one of the most prosperous states
in the nation. He’s hopeful that the state will increasingly
step up to fund research and services for these individuals who have
been so important to its economic development.
Voss also advises those interested in working with
newly arriving populations to take advantage of academic opportunities
to explore clinical issues and cultural differences that affect service
delivery.
Through their work, the staffs of the International
Institutes, as well as other social service personnel, support the
promise of our nation: to be a beacon to people in need.
— Kate Jackson is a staff writer for Social
Work Today.
For more information, visit the following:
• The International Institute of Los Angeles
www.iilosangeles.org
• The International Institute of New Jersey
www.iinj.org
• Immigration and Refugee Services of America
www.refugeesusa.org
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