By Effie Caldarola | OSV News
It was Christmas time when I stopped by to visit our new Syrian friends in Omaha, my home then. That’s when I spotted it: the Christmas card I’d sent them, with photos of my granddaughters, framed and hanging on the wall.
Other members of our Ignatian Associates community had received the same honor. I laughed to myself — I don’t know much about Syrian customs — but I was also deeply touched.
The Syrian family was a gift to us.
By “us” I mean our Ignatian Associates community. The Associates, devoted to the spirituality of St. Ignatius of Loyola, became volunteer mentors to the Syrian family through their official placement agency, Lutheran Family Services. We cleaned and furnished their new apartment, befriended them and did what we could to help them transition to America.
But “us” also refers to the wider American community.
Every nation needs to enforce order and balance at its borders. Nothing contributed more to this orderliness than the refugee resettlement program (created by Congress officially as the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program), which has recently been paused by the new administration.
Here’s how it worked. When the Assad regime launched war against their own people in 2011, the father of this Syrian family was a skilled technician, and the family showed us pictures of their attractive home in Aleppo.
But those were the “before” pictures. Before the Assad regime, which routinely imprisoned, tortured and gassed its citizens, bombed Aleppo. The “after” pictures were a pile of rubble.
The family fled as refugees into Turkey, where the United Nations maintained refugee camps. They were there long enough for their bright children to learn Turkish.
The United Nations High Command runs these camps and finds homes for displaced peoples. Each refugee is thoroughly vetted. Countries around the world, including until recently the U.S., have a quota marking the number of refugees they’ll admit, and the refugees themselves often have no clue or choice where they will be resettled.
They arrive in their new country legally, and are welcomed by a placement agency which has contracted with the government for this purpose. Lutheran Family Services is one of about 10 designated agencies in the U.S. Working through Catholic Charities, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) is also a resettlement agency.
We met our family at the airport, and welcomed them to Omaha, a world away from Germany, where the wife’s parents had been sent. Such is the uncertain life of a refugee.
Agencies are provided with limited funding. Our family needed to find employment quickly. The father of the family couldn’t find work in his profession because of the language barrier. Nevertheless, he quickly accepted employment at a low-paying “big box” store.
Many Americans don’t know that many refugees had flights scheduled, tickets in hand, when they were abruptly canceled by the new administration, leaving their lives once again in limbo. Many don’t understand that this program has nothing to do with “illegal” immigration.
The USCCB has criticized some of the immigration policies of this administration. In response, Vice President JD Vance, in a CBS interview, suggested, with no proof, that the bishops perhaps had a financial motive for backing the program.
My reaction was, “How dare he?” This well-audited, well-managed program is, as the bishops said, “a work of mercy.”
The USCCB issued a statement saying although they receive federal funding for this program, it’s not enough to cover the costs they incur.
As Catholics, and as Americans, we have a moral obligation to those at the margins. In that sense, the Refugee Resettlement program was a gift to us all.
Effie Caldarola is a wife, mom and grandmother who received her master’s degree in pastoral studies from Seattle University.