The stream of passengers off an evening flight Friday looked like any other, towing baggage and drained. But an 8-year-old girl with her mother beamed as she jumped to her waiting father and his outstretched arms. There was no crying or shouting, only the big smiles, eyes shut tight, murmured greetings after a full day of flying.
The father, a refugee six years ago from Myanmar's political oppression who's now a citizen, had been obsessively cooking, and cleaning the truck and house for this moment, the second time he had ever seen his daughter. After years of waiting, the trio went down to baggage claim, where they picked up two bags. The father kept touching the others' shoulders and pulling them into a hug, as if they might float away if he didn't keep the contact.
Meeting information
Canopy Northwest Arkansas is hosting a Benton County town hall to explain its work and take questions.
• Where: Bentonville Church of the Nazarene, 220 NW A St.
• When: Thursday, 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.
Refugee arrivals in Northwest Arkansas resumed briefly last week, though the local organization helping them resettle says it doesn't know if or when more will arrive in the next several months after President Donald Trump curtailed the annual cap on admissions.
Canopy Northwest Arkansas last week also welcomed a woman and her adult son and nephews from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where decades of conflict have cost millions of lives and fighting persists today. The family waited 16 years for approval. They and the pair from Myanmar bring the group's total to 24 people resettled in Fayetteville out of a yearly goal of around 100.
"Everyone's just so relieved that they finally made it," said Emily Linn, the group's resettlement director. "I think now it's time for folks at a way higher level to decide" what happens next.
The group withholds the arrivals' identities out of concern for their safety and that of family members still in their homelands.
The Congolese family had been waylaid after Trump in January suspended all refugee arrivals for 120 days, saying the lengthy scrutiny of refugees for security risks needed improvement. More than 20 million refugees around the world are fleeing war or persecution against their religious, political or ethnic group, according to the United Nations.
That portion of Trump's actions was put on hold by several federal courts after opponents claimed it and a ban on visitors from several countries harmed states and universities with no benefit. Trump has said a revised travel order could come this week.
No refugee has killed an American in a terrorist attack since the vetting system that includes review by multiple federal agencies was put in place in the 1970s, according to the conservative-leaning Cato Institute.
But the courts left alone Trump's decision to limit refugees to 50,000 in the fiscal year that ends this October, down roughly 35,000 from the previous fiscal year under the Obama administration.
More than 34,000 refugees have been accepted into the country since October, according to the U.S. State Department, most of them from African nations or the Middle East and south Asia, including Myanmar. The Wall Street Journal reported Friday the department slowed refugee approvals to a relative trickle to spread the remaining spots over the next eight months.
"I'm not really sure where that leaves us for the rest of this fiscal year," Linn said, though Canopy originally expected several more arrivals from Central America and elsewhere during the coming months.
Meanwhile the refugee families' children are in school, and the adults continue cultural, English and job-hunting classes to help them adjust and integrate into the community, Linn said. Several have gotten jobs in food service or other entry-level jobs.
Several Arkansas Congressmen last fall objected to the resettlement without a more stringent vetting process, and a handful of local residents have criticized the group's work on its social media pages, including Rebecca Morman, a stay-at-home mother of four in Stilwell, Okla. She said local issues like homelessness should be higher priorities.
"I know that America is a place of opportunity, a place for freedom, but until all of our homeless veterans and homeless children are off the streets, I think we should stop bringing new people in," Morman said in a Facebook interview, adding she worked with area nonprofit groups tackling homelessness in the past. "I am just one of the millions of Americans who share this view and belief."
Canopy members point to the contributions refugees and their families can give to communities for generations. Dozens of volunteers have joined up, including Holly Shacklett, who joined with about a dozen other members of Fayetteville's Vintage Fellowship church. Shacklett said she knew next to nothing about refugees or the vetting process and was vaguely uneasy about them until she learned more through Canopy.
Shacklett's group co-sponsors one of the first three families that arrived late last year. They gathered donations of furniture and thousands of dollars for the family's immediate housing costs, matching a comparable amount of federal assistance. They give rides to appointments or interviews and often have the family over for dinner or bowling.
Language and culture can be challenging, but the connection is worth the effort, Shacklett said.
"It's frustrating because you both want to learn so much about each other. There's so many things you want to learn. But they're learning English so quickly," she said, adding there's no question the co-sponsors will keep their relationship with the family going beyond the volunteers' three-month commitment.
"I obviously think this is one of the best things I've ever done in my adult years," she said, urging others to learn more about refugees or get more involved.
The help for refugees is nothing short of lifechanging, former refugees and their relatives have said.
Farah Abu-Safe, a political science graduate student at the University of Arkansas, told a Canopy town hall earlier this month her parents were refugees from the Palestinian-Israeli conflict two decades ago who fled to Jordan. Her family is Palestinian, which at the time in Jordan meant few educational opportunities and difficulty getting jobs or loans. The family came to the U.S. in the late 1990s.
The Sept. 11 attacks prompted waves of prejudice against people like her, Abu-Safe told the group, but she and her parents also have access to higher education. In a later interview, she said she hopes to go into international diplomacy, either for the U.S. or the United Nations.
Abu-Safe also recalled the woman who administered the oath of citizenship for her a few years ago.
"She didn't tell me, 'will you stop being Arab, will you stop being Muslim,'" she said at the town hall. "I'm Arab by blood, but America is my soul."
NW News on 02/19/2017