BRATTLEBORO — U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., has seen many hopeful stories of refugees fleeing oppression for new lives in her home state.
On Monday, she heard the flip side.
Take the Afghan mother and father now in Bennington who’ve waited a year and counting to be reunited with two of their children still half a world away.
“Boys, ages 14 and 15,” they said through a translator. “There is no one to take care of them.”
Or consider the Guatemalan woman, trained as a lawyer, who arrived in Brattleboro to learn she had to delay English lessons to find a job or risk deportation.
“Right now, I’m working as a packer,” she said in Spanish. “I can’t look for better opportunities because I can’t speak the language.”
Southern Vermont has welcomed almost 120 refugees in the past year with the help of the Ethiopian Community Development Council, a resettlement agency funded by the U.S. State Department.
A cross section of the new arrivals, meeting with Balint in her hometown Monday, expressed appreciation — and anxiety over a slow bureaucracy pushing them for fast assimilation.
“There’s a lot of fear now,” Joe Wiah, the ECDC’s Vermont resettlement director, said for many of his clients who are yet fluent in English. “You can’t plan your life. It’s just waiting and wondering, ‘What’s going to happen next?’”
Refugees have found local and state support through such organizations as the Brattleboro Development Credit Corp., which is helping coordinate employment options, and World Learning, which has offered its dorms for up to 90-day stays.
But trying to land a good job and affordable housing with little knowledge of the locality or language is a challenge — let alone in a matter of weeks, refugees told Balint.
The only thing worse: Seeing the very system pushing you to speed up so bogged down, leaving separated individuals and families in limbo with no information, they said.
“We really need your help on the federal level,” Wiah told Balint.
In response, the first woman to hold the state’s congressional seat acknowledged the difficulty of legislating amid a fractured U.S. House Republican majority that needed 15 ballots to elect a speaker.
“We have sham hearings about issues related to the border, and we’re not doing the hard work of really passing comprehensive immigration, migration and asylum policy,” the Democrat said. “You see it directly on the ground here.”
Balint nonetheless vowed to work with Vermont’s two U.S. senators, Bernie Sanders and Peter Welch, as the ECDC aims to resettle 100 more refugees in Brattleboro and another 50 in Bennington this year.
“I don’t want to overpromise,” she said. “But I want you to know that I have heard you.”
Balint told the audience she was not only the mother of two school-age children but also the daughter of a World War II refugee.
“My father lost his father in the Holocaust,” she said. “It is not easy to start a new life. You are courageous and strong, but I know you can’t continue to do that if you don’t have the support you need.”