The Crux of Refugee Resettlement by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic

Chapter 7

Refugee Perspectives on Social Networks and the Resettlement Information Landscape in the United States

Kathryn Stam, with commentary by Chris Sunderlin

Resettled refugees continue to experience shifts in their understandings of their sense of belonging to a new community long after they start their new lives in the United States. In this chapter, three different refugee groups living in Utica, a small city in upstate New York, are viewed through the lens of their information landscape, by which we mean the details of what, where, when, and how they get information about community news and events and through which social networks. The communities will be described here in order of their beginning arrival years: Somali-Bantu (2003), Karen ethnic group from Burma (2005), and Bhutanese-Nepali (2009). There is diversity in terms of religion, language, and culture between and within each group. Their behavioral and attitude differences manifest themselves in a variety of ways large and small, from house decorations and food choices to the naming of soccer teams and ethnic organizations. Through participation in a long-term ethnographic study and informal interviews with adults from each community, the author studied three refugee groups and their social networks, perspectives on their ethnic communities, and access to information. The study reveals the overall resettlement information landscape and compares features that affect their levels of social inclusion. I also address refugee policy related to group size, inclusion of disabled and elderly, poverty alleviation, and support for refugees beyond the first ninety days of arrival.

In terms of resettled refugees, community refers to the sense of connection with the people who came together from the same place, lived through the same conflict, and group themselves or have been grouped together due to ethnicity and culture. Community may refer to the entire group of refugees who were resettled from camps in the same country or to smaller groups such as families from a particular caste or religion, with whom a person feels a sense of belonging regardless of any internal conflicts that might be found. For example, within the 300 individuals from Somalia and Kenya who came to Utica, New York under the label Somali, the community itself marks differences between the Somali-speaking Somalis, the Somali-Bantu ethnic group that speaks Af Maay, and the Kizigua who do not consider themselves Somali. The Karen community is religiously diverse, with most affiliating with Christianity and Buddhism. Speaking different dialects of the Karen language, such as Sgaw and Poe, reflects ethnic differences as well. Salient for the Karen are relationships to the former military officers in Burma (respondents rejected the name Myanmar) who were involved in fighting for a Karen state. The Bhutanese-Nepali community is divided by three religions (Hinduism, Christianity, and Buddhism) and the vestiges of the strictly stratified Hindu caste system. There are also marked differences between those who identify as Bhutanese and those who identify as Bhutanese-Nepali or Nepali, which often depends on age and commitment to a desire to return to Bhutan someday, however unlikely that may be.

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