State refugee bureau will shut down as funding ends

Afternoons at Anh's Tailor Shop are quietly productive, the only sounds coming from a Vietnamese-language satellite TV channel and the soft whir of owner Tu-Anh Ngo's sewing machine as she alters another prom dress.

“Actually, this is my hobby,” she said.

“I try to get a helper to help her, but it's not easy,” said husband Ro Ngo. “Customers just trust her.”

The Ngo family's Iowa story was one of the first launched by the state's Bureau of Refugee Services. The bureau's last will be a refugee who arrived in Iowa this winter. The bureau, the only state agency in the nation certified by the U.S. State Department for resettlement work, will close for good June 30.

Its director said the bureau is a victim of a sick economy and its unique status as a state-run agency.

“The recession forced the issue,” said John Wilken, “but the issue has probably been there for a long time.”

Since 1975, Iowa has been the first stop for as many as 28,000 refugees arriving directly here from overseas refugee camps and home for up to about 10,000 more who moved here from other U.S. states. Wilken estimated that 15,000 to 20,000 remain in Iowa, with a few hundred arriving annually in recent years.

In December, the State Department notified Iowa that $134,000 in annual funding for the Iowa office would end this fiscal year.

The bureau doesn't meet State Department requirements that funding recipients be non-profit agencies with some private funding and to operate nationwide. Wilken said federal officials have for years finessed that by considering the bureau an “affiliate office.”

Wilken said the bureau could file as a non-profit and seek private donors, but the requirement of a national presence would be impossible to meet.

“It wasn't a reflection on the service; it wasn't a reflection on whether Iowa is a good place to settle refugees,” Wilken said of the decision. “I have said for a long time that we existed at the goodwill of the Department of State.”

Unlike immigrants, who may move to the United States for personal or economic reasons, refugees can't return to their home country because of persecution for their race, religion, ethnicity or political affiliation. The State Department designates groups for refugee status and decides how many are allowed into the country.

The State Department provides a resettlement grant, currently $1,800 per person, at least half of which must directly benefit the refugee. The bureau contracted with Lutheran Services in Iowa and Catholic Charities to find local sponsors to help new arrivals through their first months.

As a result of the State Department's decision, Lutheran Services is shutting down its refugee operations.

“Everybody's hoping Catholic Charities is at least staying in the game” to aid refugees who may come to Iowa to live near relatives, Wilken said.

Anne Marie Cox, spokeswoman for the Diocese of Des Moines, said the charity's board is expected to reach a decision this week.

Without the refugee bureau, it's doubtful the Ngo family would have come to Cedar Rapids in the summer of 1975. The couple and their three children were living at a refugee camp at Fort Chaffee, Ark., after fleeing Vietnam a week before the fall of Saigon. Ro Ngo was doing maintenance work around the camp when he took a call from Iowa's new bureau.

“They looked at my credentials. They called me in the office and said, ‘Cedar Rapids needs a teacher like you,' ” he recalled.

Already seeing an influx of Vietnamese students, the school district needed a translator. Ro Ngo, before the war's end an associate principal at a Saigon high school - he'd also been wounded while a lieutenant in the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam - fit the bill.

The bureau found the family a sponsor, First Lutheran Church of Cedar Rapids, to pay the Ngos' first month of rent and otherwise help them get on their feet until Ro Ngo's first paycheck. To bring his educational background to American standards, he enrolled at the University of Iowa, attending classes on nights and weekends and graduating in 1979.

“I said, ‘I was an educator there, I want to be a teacher here, too,' ” he said.

Tu-Anh Ngo learned tailoring while working at Armstrong's Department Store. Ro Ngo became a math teacher at Washington High School, from where he retired in 2001.

Even before becoming a teacher, Ro Ngo became a go-between for refugees and local institutions.

“If they needed to know about refugees, they would consult me right away,” he said. “Police department, the courts, churches - the first 10 years I helped them a lot.”

Esther Lees of Cedar Rapids is still close with another Vietnamese family sponsored by First United Church of Marion when they came to the United States in July 1988.

“When they had something going on at their home, they would invite us,” said Lees, 76. “I'd go to their house and try to teach them a little English.”

Lees' friend Van Tran, 56, has struggled with American culture. An assembly worker at Whirlpool's Amana plant, she said her own children “are American kids, you know. They're born here, they live here, they grow up here, so they don't follow my culture.”

Ro Ngo agrees that refugee kids adjust well. “I would say 80 (percent) to 90 percent (are) very successful,” said Ro Ngo, whose four grown children now live in New York, Los Angeles and Texas. “I could count for you three American doctors from Vietnam, three high school teachers, a couple dozen computer science engineers, a couple pharmacists ...”

The closing of the bureau is a “loss for the state,” said Amy Weismann, deputy director of the University of Iowa's Center for Human Rights. “When you consider how much new immigrants and refugees contribute to their new communities economically, culturally and socially, the resettlement program has been a very important way of sustaining and revitalizing parts of the state.”