Refugees Must Adjust to Time Travel as Well as Relocation

Many refugees arriving in Southern California from foreign lands find that they must adjust not only to a move of miles, but to a transfer in time.

They also find private citizens and agencies willing and able to help them make both adjustments.

“These people come in new, so the only thing we try to do is give them a basis to get started, to re-create their lives as well as they can,” said Lavinia Limon, director of the International Rescue Committee.

“You’re not just moving space, you’re moving time,” Limon said of a refugee’s flight to Los Angeles from Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe or Africa.

“You’re talking 150 years of progress in the time it takes you to fly from there to here.”

The committee’s Los Angeles chapter, one of 14 nationwide, is among nine agencies in Southern California that receive $560 from the federal government for each political refugee they help. The chapter resettled 776 political refugees during their last fiscal year, nearly half of them from Vietnam.

More than 60 other private-sector agencies also help new arrivals, many of them concentrating on those considered “out of status”--or illegal--by immigration guidelines. Most of their money comes not from the government, but from private donations.

The role of the resettlement agencies is to find the immigrants a place in the community--first a place to live, and then a place to work.

“Refugees are survivors,” Limon said. “The others are either dead or they’re still there.

Difficulties Persist

“These are people who’ve gone through incredible stuff to get here, so really, finding the Social Security office in downtown Los Angeles isn’t that much of a problem.”

But there are problems despite the fabled California “good life.”

“The first three to six months are what we call the honeymoon period--it’s like, ‘America, wow!’--and then there’s another six to 12 months of disillusionment, and slightly after that there’s a period of dissatisfaction,” Limon said.

“Eventually comes hope, but it’s a lot of hard work, and a lot of people break.”

Many resettlement organizations offer counseling for mental disorders, not only to help the immigrants live with their past experiences, but also to teach them to accept the future.

Despite the overwhelming numbers of illegal immigrants from south of the border, those areas are barely represented among those officially classified as political refugees.

Of the 68,045 political refugees admitted to the United States last year, only 138 came from the area that includes Mexico, Central and South America. Limon’s office in Los Angeles resettled only seven of them--all Cubans.

“It’s pretty rare to have Central Americans declared refugees,” she said. “In order to be a refugee you must be declared so outside the United States. If you come to the United States and apply as a refugee, what you are actually doing is applying for asylum.

“When we get calls from Central Americans, the best we can do is offer them to other agencies.”

One of the agencies that aid illegal aliens seeking political asylum is El Rescate.

It provides legal and social services to “help respond to the emergency need of the Central American refugee,” said Roberto Alfaro, a spokesman for the organization founded in 1981 by the Southern California Ecumenical Council.

“It’s very frustrating,” Alfaro said. “They put all the burden on the individual to prove they are being persecuted for their political beliefs. That’s very difficult to prove.”

Close-Knit Communities

Once settled in Southern California, most immigrants locate in close-knit, homogeneous communities where they can continue many of the customs of their homelands.

Long Beach, for instance, has received about 25,000 Cambodian refugees, about 95% of them since the Vietnamese takeover of Cambodia in 1979.

“Cambodians tend to interact and socialize within themselves rather than reaching out to the community,” said Than Poc, executive director of the United Cambodian Community, the largest Cambodian refugee assistance group in Southern California.

“Most of them that come here either did not have any skills in Cambodia, or their skills were not suited to the market here.”

Despite immigrants’ differences in skills and legal status, Limon said, most of them have made a common sacrifice to follow their dream of coming to America.

“You have people who come here and basically they’ve sacrificed their lives for their children,” she said. “They may have been fine living in the conditions of Vietnam and could have lived their lives out under those circumstances, but their children would not have the opportunity.”