Others have covered the reaction to the Syrian refugee crisis, and the bigotry it has sadly unleashed, even in Massachusetts.
This is a link to proven charities working to help Syrian refugees in Syria or in refugee camps. This is the official UN program that provides them with food aid in a dignified way. A great program covered by 60 minutes for those interested.
Here are three groups I am more directly familiar with that are working to help refugees resettle in the US.
Catholic Charities and the Jesuit Relief Services. Both groups have received special collections at my parish, as has this Methodist group at my father in law to be’s parish. All of these programs resettle everyone without a sectarian or religious test, and are part of the 9 officially vetted agencies that work with the US State Department, which include a variety of religious and non-religious affiliated organizations.
If you want to help particular families, feel free to get in touch with my friend Nicholas Lund-Molfese who is the Director at Trinity Hills, a Catholic Worker cooperative that has started taking in Syrian families. He has been doing a great job telling his neighbors in rural Missouri that these families are just that, families, they are not terrorists. They have to wait 2 years to be vetted before they can come over here, and if we want to help our friends in Europe out, we should use our greater capacity to vet and also to resettle to take in even more than the 10,000 we are committed to.
nopolitician says
I’d like to start by saying that I have no problem with Massachusetts taking in Syrian refugees.
I do have a problem with the way the resettlements are being done. The refugees are being sent to poor urban cities. Charitible organizations get money to resettle them (I think a lot goes to provide intangible “services”). Once they are settled, they are on their own, basically thrown into the state’s social safety net.
A resettlement effort has the immediate impact of adding hundreds of poor people to already poor urban communities.
Is that really the best we can do here?