Dining with refugees and immigrants inspires hope for America | Opinion

I hate to admit it, but if you’d asked me a year ago about the work of the International Rescue Committee, you’d have gotten a pretty blank look.

I probably wouldn’t have predicted that I’d be buying a ticket to a gala to support them. I did that Thursday night. And I’m glad I did.

The IRC is charitable organization that helps refugees from around the world when they immigrate to our country. In Wichita, it pairs new arrivals with American volunteer host families and assist with arranging housing, jobs, language classes and other services they need to settle in and start feeling at home in this strange land we call Kansas.

The most prominent co-founder of the IRC was Albert Einstein — who we tend to forget was himself a refugee.

In 1933, he fled the Nazi tyranny that was starting to overtake Europe. He and others formed a committee to help take care of other Jewish refugees while they got acclimated to America. During World War II, that committee merged with a similar group helping people displaced by the Nazi conquest of France, creating the IRC.

Our local IRC organization formed in 2011. Since then, it’s helped settle 5,000 refugees and immigrants.

It’s particularly impressive during a time when immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers are under attack by a growing nativist movement.

But the conservative-libertarian Cato Institute, co-created by Wichita’s resident billionaire Charles Koch, has done some groundbreaking research on immigrants and crime, and it directly refutes the nativist narrative.

The data used in the Cato study is Texas-specific, because Texas is the only state that routinely records the immigration status of people in its criminal justice system.

Writes Cato researcher Alex Nowrasteh: “I discovered unique crime data from Texas that showed illegal immigrants have lower criminal conviction and arrest rates than native‐born Americans and that legal immigrants had the lowest of all.”

Nowrasteh’s gotten a lot of pushback from the Center for Immigration Studies — which operates under the head-scratching slogan “Low-immigration, Pro-immigrant” — along with Fox News talking head Tucker Carlson. But Nowrasteh has showed his work and his numbers appear to be legit.

My first personal contact with the IRC came late last year when The Eagle started a project called Unheard Voices.

With funding from the American Press Institute, we set out to identify and commission a dozen guest columns by people who are a part of this community, but also apart from the mainstream.

The IRC was instrumental in helping us find people who could share Wichita’s refugee/immigrant experience — their stories, their voices.

Now, I’m not usually a gala kind of person. Generally, when I find a worthy cause, I just write a check or donate online. I will occasionally attend galas my wife is interested in, but I can’t remember ever going to one by myself, except as a journalist covering an event.

I wanted to see what the people of the IRC would do with an evening, and I wasn’t disappointed. It was a celebration of diverse cultures, cuisines and arts from every continent — and it was the best beef empanada I’ve had in years.

It was my honor to sit with Tumba Kabengele, whom I met when she wrote a column for Unheard Voices.

At age 24, she’s encountered more adversity than I’ve faced in my 60-plus years.

Tumba was born in a refugee camp in Zambia, where her family had fled from a bloody war in their homeland, Congo. Her mother was murdered in the camp when she was 17 and her education was interrupted while she sold root vegetables on the roadside to survive.

Today, she works cutting meat in a Wichita food plant and has resumed her education, with the goal of one day becoming a nurse and midwife.

She is one of the toughest and most determined people I’ve ever met, and mark my words, she will make this community proud. Check that, she already has.

Another thing I seldom do in this column is quote the Bible, out of respect for faiths other than my own.

But there’s Scripture from Apostle Paul that I think is particularly appropriate to this situation: “We know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character, and character, hope.”

Surrounded by the workers, volunteers, clients and supporters of the International Rescue Committee Thursday night, I felt hope. And it felt good.