'Bring them here!' shout St. Louisans seeking to help Syrian refugees
Linah Elnasha, 28, immigrated to the United States from Egypt in 1997. She doesn’t think she is more deserving of the life she has found here than anyone else.
“The life I’m living, it’s not a privilege,” she said to a reporter on Sunday. “It’s necessary that everyone get this lifestyle of peace.”
It was that belief that brought the young woman from St. Charles to University City Sunday evening to participate in a rally with at least 200 others. The group’s message, chanted repeatedly, was: “Bring them here! Bring them here!”
They were referring to the millions of Syrian refugees who are fleeing the humanitarian crisis in their country and seeking shelter elsewhere. In recent weeks in St. Louis, a growing chorus has called for that new home for some refugees to be here.
Mayor Francis Slay, whose paternal grandparents were Lebanese immigrants, last week said accepting Syrian refugees was “the right thing to do”.
He spoke at the International Institute of St. Louis, where president and CEO Anna Crosslin hosted a senior adviser for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to talk about the crisis.
Supporters say St. Louis has proved to be a welcoming place for immigrants; they cite the 10,000 Bosnians who resettled here in the mid-1990s as they fled the former Yugoslavia. The Bosnian population in the region is today estimated at more than 50,000.
This year, 28 Syrian refugees have come to St. Louis; an additional 20 are expected by the end of the year.
Greg Johnson, a pastor at the Memorial Presbyterian Church of St. Louis, wrote a column recently on the website nextSTL.com that spurred talk about what resources could be utilized locally. With a microphone in hand on Sunday, he elaborated, pointing to 40,000 vacant units of housing in the city of St. Louis alone.
“We have the room, we have the resources,” he said. “St. Louis is a city where we are always willing to pull up another chair at the table.”
Then he pointed to Slay’s family history:
“That’s what St. Louis does for Arab-Americans,” he said. “They don’t just come and are tolerated as a minority group. They assimilate … and they improve the community and they become political leaders.”
President Barack Obama last week told his administration to take in at least 10,000 displaced Syrians over the next fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1.
Faizan Syed, executive director of the St. Louis chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, one of several groups sponsoring Sunday’s rally, says that number needs to be higher. He’d like to see the U.S. welcome around 65,000 refugees — about the population of the city of St. Charles.
Rouba Kaziz, 17, who came to St. Louis from Syria two years ago, sees “a big chance” for that right now. St. Louis is where nearly 60 of her family members have settled over the years. Many others, she said, including an uncle, hold hopes of eventually making it here.
Crosslin has said the number of refugees selected for a city is based on available housing, jobs and support services. There’s no way of knowing what the number will be, but she has estimated it would likely be in the hundreds, not thousands.
Whatever it is, there won’t be an influx overnight. All refugees undergo a rigorous background check that takes an average of 18 months.
Maysa Albarcha, whose parents were among the first wave of Syrians to settle in St. Louis in the 1970s, has family members who have come to live here as recently as four years ago. But there is an urgency now, she said, and the need for help won’t end once they get here.
The promise from St. Louis, she said, is an open ended one: “We are here in St. Louis waiting for them, and when they get here we will take care of them.”
Source: www.stltoday.com