Name: Armant

Social Justice Group: Refugees

Date of Fieldwork: December 8, 2017

Name of Organization: Office Of Refugee Resettlement

Person (people) with whom I met and their job titles: Robert Carey-Former director of ORR, the Office of Refugee Resettlement

Type of Fieldwork: Interview

What I did:

We interviewed Bob Carey, the former director of the ORR under Obama’s supervision. The Office of Refugee Resettlement plays a huge part in welcoming refugee’s to America. What they do is they look at the portion of people applying for refugee status divided for America by the U.N. Then they divide the refugees into smaller non profit organizations who look at them further and decide if they can come into the U.S. Bob Carry was taken out of his job by President Trump and now works for another organization focusing on refugees.

What I learned:

I learned about the process of how refugees are chosen to come into the United States. We also learned about the hardships of getting into the States with a family, as anyone over the age of 21 is considered a different family and does not get priority like someone younger would if a family member is accepted. We learned that refugees come from all over the world and people often neglect them (they don’t just come from the Middle East). It takes many years to become gain refugee status and different countries do it differently. For example the U.S. tries to bring in as many refugees as possible but does not supply them as well as some of the countries in Europe, who work hard to educate their refugees, but can not take in as many.

What I learned about Social Justice “work” and/or Civil and Human rights “work” from this fieldwork:

I learned that to solve a problem, you need to know the ins and outs of it. If you need to solve the refugee problem, you can’t be lost information-wise, you have to know what to fix and what to keep. It’s important to know what’s good about it too, so you can learn from it.