Inspiring stories about innovation and business, seen through the lens of design.
I was reading up on the process for refugees seeking admission into the United States. Holy crap – it’s almost easier to get a membership at Augusta National. Check this out
1. Refugees are screened by several different agencies:
All of the vetting, from interviews, health screening (have a communicable disease, than you’re out-of-luck), numerous background checks to fingerprinting, takes a while. How long?
2. It’s a lengthy process.
The total processing time varies depending on an applicant’s location and other circumstances, but the average time from the initial UNHCR referral to arrival as a refugee in the United States is about 18-24 months.
The U.S. has admitted some 1,800 Syrian refugees in the past two years, and President Obama wants to allow 10,000 more. The administration says half of those who have been admitted are children and about a quarter of them are adults over 60. Officials say 2 percent of the 1,800 (36 people) are single males between 18-40.
This vetting schedule seems like an amazingly thorough process — that I’m grateful I never have to undertake.
Resources:
4 Things To Know About The Vetting Process For Syrian Refugees | NPR
Here’s what the U.S. process for vetting Syrian refugees actually looks like | The Week
The U.S. Department of State Refugee Admissions Program
Design heads at 3M, Intuit, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, PepsiCo, Philips, and REI highlight 7 areas for future design leaders to consider.
Refugee Blues by W H Auden
Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.
Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you’ll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.
In the village churchyard there grows an old yew,
Every spring it blossoms anew;
Old passports can’t do that, my dear, old passports can’t do that.
The consul banged the table and said:
‘If you’ve got no passport, you’re officially dead’;
But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.
Went to a committee; they offered me a chair;
Asked me politely to return next year:
But where shall we go today, my dear, but where shall we go today?
Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said:
‘If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread’;
He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.
Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky;
It was Hitler over Europe, saying: ‘They must die’;
We were in his mind, my dear, we were in his mind.
Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,
Saw a door opened and a cat let in:
But they weren’t German Jews, my dear, but they weren’t German Jews.
Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay,
Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:
Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.
Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren’t the human race, my dear, they weren’t the human race.
Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors;
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.
Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;
Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.
Source Video: Refugee Blues -Â Created by Josh Freeman and Noah Davis.
It’s a modern-day iteration of the idea of character as a commercial value: companies going online to try to figure out your financial potential from posts and connections from Facebook, Twitter and, yes, LinkedIn (professional contacts there are “especially revealing of an applicant’s ‘character and capacity’ to repay,” another creditworthiness startup founder told the Economist, in 2013).
Source: Could Your Social Media Footprint Step On Your Credit History? : All Tech Considered