How to deal with immigrants

Once we have decided that someone is a safe immigrant and opened our doors to them, what should we do?

The US has had a very strict program in place in which immigrants (legal immigrants) have had to be sponsored by a US based charitable agency. These agencies agree to care for immigrants who enter the US. They promise to help with financial costs, as well as with cultural assimilation: finding housing, finding work, helping people learn English, learn to shop in the US, learn to use the bank (and write checks – something hardly known outside English UK US culture), etc.

One such organization is HIAS, the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society. When I was in seminary in the early 1980s living in the far north side of Chicago, HIAS sponsored many Russian Jewish refugees. A program set up by President Jimmy Carter, but instituted during the Reagan presidency, allowed Jews in the Soviet Union to move generally either to America or Israel, though a few managed to remain in Europe. Europe, particularly camps in Austria and Italy, were transit points.

It was quite a shock for Russian Jews to come to America. The first shock was that they remained poor. They thought America was a place where the streets were paved with gold. They expected big homes. Many found themselves stuck in small apartments – three or four families to one apartment. They tended to do this to make their monthly checks go further.

HIAS helped these immigrants find places to live. They helped the immigrants to find work. They helped in other ways as well, even finding psychiatric help for those who fell into depression.

I met one Russian Jewish man who had been the major editor of a newspaper in his large city in Ukraine. However, because he couldn’t speak English. he was reduced to working as a dock worker in one of the Chicago ports. It was too great a shock for his system. He became depressed.

Another immigrant, a Russian Jewish woman, refused to pay a rent increase. She argued that the government gave her only so much money and it was impossible for the landlord to expect her to pay more. We attempted to explain that the landlord was free to charge what he liked, but she remained steadfast in not paying the rent increase. As a result, as soon as the weather and law allowed he put her things on the street corner and changed the locks. He also took what he judged to be his due from her things.

Being an immigrant is hard. There is so much you don’t understand. So many things seem backwards or even wrong.

In the US immigrants at least had an agency like HIAS, or the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services (LIRS) or Church World Service to help. In other countries this sort of help falls on government assigned bodies or directly on government agencies. Some counties do better and others do worse. Next time we’ll consider some of these cases.