UNAR Refugee Project 2012

 

The UNAR Refugee Project objective is to work with refugees in the Rochester region on a mutual and collaborative ground, striving to enhance education amongst those refugees that lack basic training. We have recently begun to work as tutors at Mary’s Place Refugee Outreach Center on Thursdays from 1:30PM until 3:00PM. Also the UNAR Refugee Project has broke ground on a refugee education brochure with Mary’s Place and Rochester Refugee Resettlement Services which will be published in English, Burmese, Nepalese, French and Spanish. This is to make refugees in Rochester more aware of the educational opportunities available to them. Lastly, the UNAR Refugee link on the main UNAR website will act as a resource for all things refugee in Rochester and the broader community.

Program Coordinators: Jessica Gilbert & Jarred Jones.

Refugees History in the United States

The first refugee legislation in the United States was the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, which brought 400,000 Eastern Europeans to the United States. Other refugee-related legislation included the Refugee Relief Act of 1953 and the Fair Share Refugee Act of 1960. The United States used the Attorney General’s parole authority to bring large groups of persons into the country for humanitarian reasons, beginning in 1956 with nationals of Hungary and culmi-nating with hundreds of thousands of Indochinese parolees in the 1970s. The 1967 United Nations Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees (which the United States ratified in 1968) prohibits any nation from returning a refugee to a country where his or her life or freedom would be threatened. Congress enacted legislation to bring U.S. law into compliance with the principles outlined in the Protocol in passing the Refugee Act of 1980, which established a geographically and politically neutral refugee definition. The Refugee Act of 1980 also made a distinction between refugee and asylum status and allowed certain refugee applicants to be pro-cessed while in their countries of nationality.

The refugee data presented here was obtained from the Worldwide Refugee Admissions Processing System (WRAPS) of the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) of the U.S. Department of State. For more information click here.