Transcript:

Thank you representatives. I'm here to testify on House Bill 135 and I'd also like to briefly share support for House Bill 197. My name is Alexandra Weber and I'm the senior vice president of the International Institute of New England, a refugee and immigrant service provider supporting 8000 immigrants in Massachusetts this year alone. Every day at IINE we see the human cost of our broken federal immigration policies and their inequitable treatment of those legally present and seeking safety in the US. An Afghan family may receive 36 months of food, housing, language, and employment support. An unaccompanied Guatemalan child reuniting with her mother may live with hunger and be forced as a minor to work in order to eat.

I'm also a social worker and when I was providing direct service, I worked with Marie, an asylum seeker from Haiti. Marie was referred to me because she was having terrible nightmares about the violence she suffered in Haiti and the grief she felt in leaving her children behind when she was forced to flee to save her life. As an asylum seeker, Marie, was ineligible for food and basic assistance and was living at the mercy of a roommate who offered her a couch in her apartment and one meal a day in exchange for 12 hours of labor. Marie was a mother seeking a better life and what she found in Massachusetts was hunger, exploitation, and pain. Every day IINE helps newly arrived families apply for food stamps, cash assistance, medical benefits, and other support to get them on their feet while they adjust to our communities and seek jobs in our workforce.

But while some immigrant families are eligible for our services others are not though they have similar needs. I urge you to pass an act establishing basic needs assistance so that more of our vulnerable community members, our children, and our mothers can receive the most basic humanitarian support. While I'm before you and on the topic of immigrant integration, I would also like to urge you to consider Bill House bill 197, an act creating a special commission to study the current refugee resettlement infrastructure sponsored by Senators Kennedy and LeBoeuf. There are significant gaps in this state's refugee and immigrant integration infrastructure which have been highlighted by our current state of emergency. The federal government does not provide adequate support and funding to support refugees and immigrants in their first steps in Massachusetts. And if we want to turn the arrival of newcomers into opportunities for stronger communities and economies across our commonwealth, we need to create a better statewide strategy for support and coordination. The establishment of a stakeholder commission is a necessary first step. I'm happy to take any questions.

DOHERTY - Thank you very much for your testimony. And certainly in the midst of the current immigration crisis that we are facing here in the Commonwealth, would you expect that, should this bill be successful it would affect the entire system including the crisis that we are, it's not ending, that we are going through at the moment to address the needs of refugees who come into the commonwealth?

WEBER - I think the passage of this bill will absolutely support families who are now, you know, reaching out far and wide for basic needs, shelter, and food. Most of the families that we serve in the Institute we are keeping out of the shelter system, and that is because they have access to these federal benefits that some don't. So if we provide access to everyone and we add supplemental funding in Massachusetts, I think they would do a great deal to support families and keep them sheltered and, you know, food secure.