How the Refugee Crisis Unites Americans: The Untold Story of the Grassroots Movement Shattering Our Red and Blue Silos

By Kate Rice

Are you looking for something you can do, right now, to help refugees here and abroad? Meet your unexpected allies: conservative Christians. It's a new silent majority, one that doesn't wave the flag or preach hate. One that practices what Jesus taught: taking care of the other.

We kid you not. Kate Rice went looking for unity in a polarized nation and found it in a surprising issue: refugee resettlement. And even more surprising was where these hot spots of refugee support are: the Bible Belt and other red states. Kentucky. Texas. Iowa. Arkansas. North Carolina. Utah. Idaho. No wonder anti-immigrant politicians are running scared. They see chinks in what they thought was their base: conservative Christians.

For how-tos, inspiration and hope, please buy this book!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kate Rice
• Release date: Dec 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393645610

Kate Rice

Kate Rice is a prize-winning reporter, mother of two and descendant of immigrants who fled starvation and collapsing economies to find opportunity in America. She is from a purple-to-red corner of the state of Wisconsin.  She is an enthusiastic traveler, runner, newbie rock'n roll singer, standup comic, bookworm, java junkie and Green Bay Packer fan.  But most of all, she is an American who believes being a citizen of this great country is a gift and a responsibility. 

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Introduction

I didn’t realize until I had nearly finished this book that I was made to write it.

There are three dates on my great-great-grandmother Mary Rice’s tombstone in Tomah, in west central Wisconsin: the day she was born, the day she died, and the day she arrived in America with her children, leaving famine and her husband’s grave back in County Louth, Ireland.

Two generations later, my daughters’ great-grandmother, Tillie Cooperschmidt, at age 12, traveled across Siberia and the Pacific with her mother, Rachel, and four siblings, because World War I blocked the route across Western Europe and the Atlantic. As with the majority of refugees today, they were all women and children.

My grandparents, Vena and Zel Rice, who lived in Sparta, about 15 miles from Tomah, hosted a couple from Eastern Europe after World War II. They came to the U.S. from a displaced persons camp in Europe.

As kids in Sparta, most of my siblings and I attended summer religious school at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church. It wasn’t all about reading our catechism books. The nuns took us out to practice reading with the children of migrant workers who made the seasonal trek north to pick cucumbers and other crops. They might not have fit the UN Refugee Agency’s definition of refugees, but they were strangers in a strange land. We spent as much time practicing English with them as we did reading.

One of my first big stories as a young reporter for the Tomah Journal was covering the 15,000 Cuban refugees brought to Fort McCoy, Wisconsin, after 125,000 Cubans fled their country in a flotilla of boats and rafts in the spring and summer of 1980. As would happen in the Mediterranean 35 years later, men, women and children packed onto overcrowded vessels, many of them of questionable seaworthiness; dozens died on the 125-mile trip. As they poured onto the shores of Florida, Governor Bob Graham declared a state of emergency in Monroe and Dade counties. Numbers were so overwhelming that the Immigration and Naturalization Service (which became the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in 2003 and now is part of the Department of Homeland Security) processed these arrivals in makeshift facilities like an old Navy seaplane hangar in Key West.

The exodus riveted the nation. Fear wrestled with compassion. In 1980, it wasn’t extremists that frightened Americans; it was, instead, the fact that Fidel Castro had emptied his prisons and mental institutions, releasing inmates to join the flow of refugees.

The federal government sent thousands for additional processing to federal installations across the United States. Fort McCoy, a military base on 60,000 acres of rolling hills covered with pine woods, streams, and ponds between Sparta and Tomah, became one of those processing centers.

I’ll never forget interviewing a man turning over the waist band on his pants to show where he’d written the telephone numbers of friends and relatives he hoped would help him and his family resettle in his new home. They had come with nothing but the clothes they were wearing—not even an address book.

My dad, Monroe County Judge James W. Rice, took on the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) that year. He heard troubling stories coming out of Fort McCoy—reports that unaccompanied minors were being physically and sexually assaulted. As a county judge, he had no jurisdiction on a military base—but off the base, he did. Two courageous good Samaritans, a civilian worker and an Army major, smuggled a couple of kids out. Bingo. They became children in need of protection and services from the state of Wisconsin. Dad placed one in a local shelter and sent the other to the child’s relatives in Florida. The INS was outraged and threatened to arrest the kids as illegal aliens. But Dad stood firm.

When Fort McCoy military police started to stop and search cars on Highway 21, which cuts through McCoy, Dad refused to allow the MPs to search his 1963 Studebaker truck. It’s a state highway. Not your jurisdiction! he barked at the young MP who’d flagged us down. He shifted gears on the truck and it chugged off. I sat beside him, gasping with horror and delight as he, a staunch Democrat, asserted state rights over federal from his rattle-trap old truck.

He had begun preparing for the refugees’ arrival as soon as we heard that Fort McCoy would be a processing center. He contacted U.S. Attorney Frank Teurkheimer in Madison for all the information he could get on federal immigration law. Dad was a constant and outspoken critic of the refugee center and, along with Judge Ness Flores of Waukesha County, presided over hearings for 49 juveniles. His only regret: that he could not help more.

Dad always said the civilian worker and the Army major were the real heroes. They were subpoenaed to testify about their actions before a federal grand jury. The case ultimately was dropped. He always chuckled about the reporter from Time magazine who interviewed him one summer night on the deck at the family cottage that sat on the border of Fort McCoy. We were so close we could hear the sounds of military maneuvers—tanks and jeeps revving up, machine gun fire and mortar practice—mingling in with breezes blowing through pine trees, singing birds and the occasional coyote howl. The reporter, clearly a city boy, kept looking over his shoulder into the dark woods behind us—another stranger in a strange land.

That fall, refugees frustrated by the slow resettlement process began trying to escape. One broke into our cottage’s bunkhouse, which originally had been a home for those same migrant workers I’d tried to help as a kid. Cold weather had hit. Hilariously enough, Dad saw the poor guy sprinting through the woods; we later discovered he’d made off with Dad’s favorite sweatshirt. Dad loved it—it was fodder for great jokes among his (mostly conservative) cronies who routinely met at a downtown Sparta coffee shop Dad called the Golden Girdle, a comic twist on its actual name, the Golden Griddle. Ultimately, refugees were resettled, and many remained in Monroe County and the surrounding area.

Time passed. I went to grad school in New York and stayed. I fell in love with a guy. He and I bought an apartment, talked about having kids and got married. He was Jewish—which did not faze anyone in my family, since two of my dad’s five siblings married Jews.

My Jewish and Catholic aunts and uncles opted to raise their children in the Roman Catholic Church. As a child, I thought it would have been more fair to raise one child as a Catholic and the other as a Jew. When my husband and I decided to have kids, I felt we should raise them as Jews—the Rices had already provided the world with plenty of Catholics. I hadn’t planned on converting. But, as I studied Judaism in a class for couples like us—one Jewish, one not—I fell in love with the religion, and I converted. Coming as I do from a family in which both a priest and a rabbi presided at one aunt and uncle’s wedding, it was not a big deal. And it means that I live in a big tent, religiously speaking. I hear God through priests, rabbis, other people, and, occasionally, our dog.

We had two beautiful daughters. Life was fun. I traveled the world as a reporter for British and U.S. travel magazines. We traveled as a family. And New York is such a city of immigrants that you’re always surrounded by people who come from some place else. Those people made up our social circle. Whether it was Thanksgiving or Passover, we were always hosting friends from other lands and of other religions. My life was focused on my family, friends and work. What volunteer work I did was in my daughters’ schools—coordinating cooking for the homeless, making costumes for school theatre productions, helping out in the school library and working on fundraisers.

But things were happening beyond our front door that bothered me deeply. And one of those things was the civil war in Syria, which began in 2011. It was distant and I saw no way to help. So I did nothing.

Then, the refugee exodus began, and worsened as war waged. In the summer of 2015, millions of refugees poured into Europe. Like so many others, I finally saw an opportunity for action. I called my synagogue, B’nai Jeshurun (BJ for short). What are we doing to help refugees? I asked. There was a pause on the other end of the line. Nothing, came the answer. But, the woman on the phone took my name and number. We might call you, she said. And barely a week later, I got a call. All of a sudden I was a charter member of the B’nai Jeshurun refugee committee.

Most of us on the committee wanted to adopt a Syrian refugee family. But, we quickly learned, helping isn’t that simple. One refugee family, the Hotaks—whose young father Turyalai had been an interpreter for the U.S. military in Afghanistan—fell into our laps, and we began working with them. We built from there. Now, two-and-a-half years later, BJ’s refugee committee has helped nearly 20 families one-on-one, set up an employment counseling service and job bank that has helped more than 20 refugees, and branched out into helping the undocumented with legal assistance, ICE encounters, and more.

It was a slow build at BJ. That was why I was so wowed by Rutgers Presbyterian Church, a mere block from our apartment. I started working with Rutgers, thanks to one of my neighbors, Lena Wong, a member of Rutgers’ refugee task force. While BJ was still figuring out how to help refugees, Rutgers had already co-sponsored one Syrian family through Church World Service, one of nine U.S. resettlement agencies sanctioned by the U.S. Department of State. It was planning on co-sponsoring a second family. Rutgers was incredible! A congregation of just 100 people was accomplishing an amazing amount—and a lot of it involved attracting people from outside the church. Other churches and congregations were contacting Rutgers to see how they did it.

You should really write this down, I kept saying to them, thinking of how long it had taken us at BJ to really start to help refugees. But they were too busy. And then it dawned on me.

I’m a reporter. I could write this down!

The two Rutgers chapters, Chapter 9: Some Wild and Crazy Presbyterians, and Chapter 10: The First Executive Order, are very different from the rest of the book—because I’m one of the players. I was there. So those chapters have a different tone and are longer than the others.

Exciting and inspiring as Rutgers was and remains, I couldn’t just write about a cool church on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. I wanted people from across the country to read this and see themselves in it. I knew there was a major faith-based movement in refugee resettlement across the nation. My gut told me that a lot of it was where my liberal friends wouldn’t expect: in the Bible Belt and other red states. Like any good reporter, I jumped on the phone. So most of the chapters of this book are based on interviews with the players.

Thanks to all of my Norwegian Lutheran friends back home, I went first to Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS). They sent me to Zion Lutheran Church in Des Moines, Iowa. I wanted Southern Baptists, because they are so solidly Republican and would show that refugee resettlement is a bipartisan cause. Pretty soon, I was talking to Sing Oldham, vice president for convention communications and relations for the Southern Baptist Convention, who started me on a path that led me to Refuge Louisville in Kentucky.

I wanted Texas, again because I was looking for stereotypes to shatter. Texas always does things big and Texas, it turns out, is huge when it comes to refugee resettlement.

I wanted a state where cowboys drive pickup trucks with gun racks, and that led me to that hotbed of refugee resettlement, Boise, Idaho.

I found Catholics working with refugees in Pleasanton Parish outside Oakland, California. Someone told me about Jews and Baptists working together in North Carolina.

I came to Utah through my sister-in-law, Angie Rowland, who founded and is now principal of the Utah International Charter School in Salt Lake City, a school specifically for refugee children. Angie introduced me to a powerhouse in Utah refugee circles, the delightful and modest Amy Wylie. Wylie’s family has been part of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints since the 1850s, when her ancestors were still living in England. Wylie now says her best friends all worship God in different buildings—and inspire her with their faith.

As happens with any good story, my source list grew with every phone call and interview. And every once in a while, some meaningful coincidence would pop up. I learned that Refuge Louisville runs an economic incubator program to empower refugee women from Nepal. They make colorful little fanny packs. It rang a bell. I checked my own records, and sure enough, the doggy treat bag I bought for our then puppy (herself a refugee, or at least a displaced dog, since she was a rescue from a kill shelter in North Carolina) had come from Refuge Louisville. Okay, God, I said, I got it, I got it!

Chapter 1

Shattering Stereotypes

If you’re not from the Midwest, Des Moines, Iowa, might surprise you. It’s no sleepy Midwest capital that rolls up the streets after five o’clock. This metropolis in the heart of America’s agribusiness corridor is home not just to the World Pork Expo, but also to Facebook, Apple and Google data centers. It’s also a major center for insurance, biotech, healthcare, and publishing. The riverfront city’s agrarian heritage shows in its Saturday Farmers Market, considered one of the best in the country. But Des Moines has more fresh things than produce to offer. Its lively downtown, and its historic East Village, now flaunt boutique shops and award-winning restaurants packed with young hipsters. Its fastest-growing demographic is 25- to 35-year olds.

Ty Dunker personifies much of the new spirit of Des Moines. He is a classic low-body-fat techie who often bikes 27 miles (each way) to his job as a manager at a data center for Facebook. Dunker is a member of Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church, whose very name sounds like vintage Iowa. Through the efforts of its volunteers, Zion has changed the lives of hundreds of refugees in Des Moines. Dunker helped a Karen ¹ refugee from Myanmar (also called Burma) find a well-paid job at one of Facebook’s fiber optics vendors. Only a year earlier this young refugee, who just graduated from high school, was working at a McDonald’s.

That young man is just one of dozens of refugees Dunker has been able to help through Zion’s refugee programs, which run the gamut from tutoring school kids to coaching their parents on how to get home mortgages. Dunker has helped with homework, busing kids to and from after-school programs, job hunts and home ownership. He and his wife, Jessica, who have three daughters in their twenties, have just adopted twin 13-year-old boys from Colombia.

Shortly after the 2016 election, Dunker sought out a Muslim woman who said she was afraid to send her sons to school after the sharp increase of racist and anti-Muslim acts that mushroomed across the country. He took her out for coffee to tell her that many people welcome her and her family. I hope you don’t believe we’re all that way, he told her. They’ve become fast friends.

Hearing all of that, you might expect that if Dunker were to put a political sign on