When Refugees Become Immigrants: Policy in Action

In the heart of Indianapolis, a sizable international grocery purveys food for people familiar with the cuisine of nearly every continent -- fufu made from yam and plantain, dal in every color, mochi, and labna. The fish market on one side creates the welcome odor that is familiar to Indy’s considerable immigrant and refugee populations. Sometimes I drop in for black fungus, a dried mushroom I can’t find in my local Kroger. For years, it was the only place I could get goji berries, candied fennel seeds, gojuchang, vegan fish sauce, and a Crunchie bar. Now I go there for half a jackfruit, a vegetable I’d been barbecuing and putting into tacos long before it showed up on restaurant menus. I like shopping there. It’s one place in the city where I can hear Spanish, Urdu, Swahili, Polish, Romanian, and Korean as I squint at ingredients roughly translated into English if I’m fortunate. Many of the immigrants and refugees who’ve settled in Indy shop there.

In the past year, my home state has welcomed post-war Afghanis and hundreds of Burmese, Congolese, Haitian, Sudanese, and Syrian refugees. We have 360,000 immigrants and refugees. They have a collective spending power of $8.1 billion dollars and pay $2.8 billion in taxes. They represent a cultural and economic wealth to our community. Yet there’s a billboard along the highway leaving our small town that reads: It’s the border, stupid. 

Something shifted in the past six years, noted my husband, Fr. Joel Weir, who is a priest for a small Orthodox Church of America parish in our rural Hoosier town. He’s been fundraising and working intermittently with Exodus Refugee (taking our youth group to set up apartments and support families) and Faith in Indiana, which protects immigrant families from separation due to deportation. Fr Joel felt the project was an expression of both his American and Christian duty. “We’re the wealthiest country in the world. It’s an important use of my privilege, being born in the U.S. and not having to flee my country.” 

Initially, our congregation, which is made up mostly of Protestants who converted to Orthodox Christianity, supported his efforts. In many ways, we “converts” have retained some of those evangelical, Protestant ideas that formed us. In the past, the whole parish council backed his vision of service, so recent kerfuffles about helping resettle one of the Afghan families temporarily housed at Camp Atterbury surprised him. These Afghan refugees had aided American troops in the twenty-year war the U.S. waged. The parish council members who opposed helping the family said it was about working with Exodus Refugee. They read into the lines about referring women for healthcare, saying the agency might be pro-abortion, though there was no evidence that the organization supported abortion providers. 

If their new opposition was a surprise, the worst part was that their reasoning was bombastic, not only lacking in evidence but suggesting another objection—in 2021, Religion News reported that “75% of Protestant Republicans believed immigrants were invading the nation” and “68% of white evangelicals believe the United States does not have a responsibility to house refugees- a significantly higher percentage than the national average” whereas in 2013, 56% of white evangelical Protestants supported immigrants’ path to citizenship. Doug Pagitt, who wrote the piece, wondered if Christians were having a crisis of faith or are being politicized. Whatever the reason, it’s clear that many American Christians neither identify with the aliens and strangers as the Apostle Paul intimated in his epistles was natural and good for Christians, nor do they take literally the many verses in the Old Testament saying to treat the alien and foreigner as one of us, to love them, to leave the corners of their fields for the needy and alien, and not to oppress them. 

Meanwhile, conflict around the world and increasing climate crises are driving people out of their homes and countries. According to the U.N. Refugee Agency, about 108.4 million people in 2022 have been forced to flee their homes: 6.5 million Syrians, 5.7 million Ukrainians, 5.7 Afghans, 5.4 million Venezuelans, 2.2 million South Sudanese, 1.7 million mostly Rohingya from Myanmar. Immigrants, their compatriots, often arrive under the gun, so to speak, fleeing gangs, natural disasters, seeking treatment for life-threatening illnesses, or simply a sustainable job.  At times, the motivation to leave may appear so similar, that U.S. citizens don’t consider the difference between refugees and immigrants because it is so narrow.

There used to be a tonal difference in how Americans approached the two groups. Those forced to leave once engendered compassion. In the past, when refugees arrived, Fr. Joel noted that Americans, especially religious ones said, “We’ll help, it’s what we do as Americans, it’s what we’re built on.” But they followed that response with two confusing messages: we helped you come here, now assimilate and we helped you now stay in your quarter. At some point the public sentiment tends to shift to “Help yourselves. Stand on your own feet. No more handouts,” but many Americans don’t know how little financial aid is available to both refugees and immigrants and how much money migrants contribute to the economy. In Indiana alone “immigrant-led households in the state paid $1.9 billion in federal taxes and $1 billion in Indiana’s state and local taxes in 2018, according to a report by New American Economy,” and “undocumented immigrant Hoosiers paid an estimated $151.7 million in federal taxes and $111 million in state and local taxes in 2018,” as the IndyStar reported in 2021. That’s just one small state. These same populations cannot access most of the emergency social support available to the rest of us. Not SNAP, not Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, or HUD, among other options. 

Regardless, under the previous administration, many Americans celebrated the significant reduction in immigration and refugee-resettlement quotas, indicating isolationism and self-protectiveness that almost seems linked to a scarcity mindset and threat-response. “In the last five years, it became We can’t help everybody, we have enough problems in our own country, let’s help ourselves,” said Fr. Joel.” That’s a scarcity mentality. There’s only so much of the pie to go around. It’s more of an isolation, a protective stance, so the narrative gets lost, and we go from we are a nation of immigrants and refugees to where we have to protect this thing (nation). We tell ourselves we have been too generous, too giving, and we need to dial that back.” 

That impulse has echoes in a long and often dark history. “Our immigration quotas lead to the astronomical numbers of deaths in the Holocaust,” noted Chandler, who works for the Ernie Pyle World War II Museum. “The immigration act of 1924, which set firm quotas based on existing demographic formulas, led to a higher death toll of the Holocaust due to quotas on Jewish people from eastern European countries not being granted asylum.” The U.S. turned away ships full of Jewish refugees, leaving thousands stateless. That would not be the last time US policy left vulnerable people in the lurch. Chandler also noted that our current system is fraught with profiteering. Low-income immigrants fill jobs but are easily exploited, particularly when their ability to come and go for seasonal work is restricted. Staying legally is exorbitantly costly in time and money, more than the risk of being smuggled or trafficked into the U.S., which exacerbates those problems. 

American voters know the system is broken, though they may not grasp what a functional and humane immigration approach would look like. We need a unified policy that celebrates the U.S. for what it is: a nation of indigenous people as well as immigrants and refugees. It should embrace the fact that what makes U.S. democracy exemplary is that it is a peaceable system of self-governance for a diverse population. Throughout our history, we have adapted to changing times and the changing fabric of the nation. What makes us unique is that we can adapt again. We are a nation accustomed to and with the processes for change, but we need a policy for the present to lead us through it.