Two Orange County supervisors envision better coordination of services, resources and advocacy efforts to support the county’s immigrant and refugee populations and are proposing the creation of a new office.
The OC Board of Supervisors will consider an Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs proposed by District 1 Supervisor Andrew Do and District 4 Supervisor Doug Chaffee on Tuesday, April 25.
“I think it’s about time,” Chaffee said of the need for a central hub to coordinate services. “We should have, in my view, done this maybe sooner. We have had waves of different immigrants come in … and they come here, they have nothing. They need housing, they need food, they need medical services for their children. We as a county did a pretty good job, but it was kind of piecemeal.”
More than 10 million refugees settled in California between 2017 and 2021, with more than 937,000 in Orange County, according to the Migration Policy Institute. And, the American withdrawal from Afghanistan did not occur until August 2021 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine until February 2022, adding even more refugees looking to stay in Orange County.
If established, the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs would be responsible for strengthening partnerships with community organizations, coordinating outreach and educational opportunities, and improving language access services for immigrant and refugee communities, officials said.
The ultimate goal would be to “enable immigrants’ and refugees’ self-sufficiency and their productive assimilation into the community,” a report to the board on the proposal says.
Although county leadership and local nonprofit groups have worked together to help immigrants and refugees in Orange County, the goal of a county office would be to make resources more accessible, officials said.
“We definitely would welcome something like that,” said Saman Hamidi-Azar, board member of the nonprofit Afghan Refugee Relief, which…
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