Kentucky would spend up to $50M to welcome Ukrainian refugees fleeing attack by Russia
Kentucky would provide up to $50 million in state aid to help resettle international refugees fleeing war under a bill advancing to the Kentucky Senate.
Senate Bill 195 is aimed at the massive refugee crisis in Eastern Europe caused by Russia’s attack on Ukraine, although it’s not limited to helping Ukrainians, said its sponsor, Sen. Chris McDaniel, R-Ryland Heights.
“In the past three weeks, three million folks who otherwise were going about normal lives have been displaced into the adjoining nation of Poland,” McDaniel told the Senate budget committee on Wednesday.
“That would be roughly the equivalent in three weeks of 450,000 new people entering the commonwealth with nothing but the clothes on their back,” McDaniel said. “As this year advances, there are probably going to be significant opportunities to help with the resettlement of these people who wanted nothing but to be free.”
The committee approved the bill and sent it to the full Senate.
McDaniel’s bill would provide state aid through a new refugee support fund at the Department for Community Based Services. The fund would pay up to $10,000 for the relocation to Kentucky of each family fleeing an armed international conflict, for up to 5,000 families, McDaniel said.
The $50 million necessary for these grants would be included in the next two-year state budget currently being crafted by lawmakers, as would $10 million for the Kentucky Office for Refugees, to help it administer the grants.
The bill also includes language authorizing Kentucky public universities to waive tuition and fees for students whose families received aid through the relocation program.
“We believe that over the course of the next six to nine months, the opportunity to resettle people from Ukraine is going to be pretty dramatic,” McDaniel said.
Apart from humanitarian concerns, there also could be an economic advantage to welcoming new Kentuckians to the labor pool, the senator added.
“As we know, we have a workforce problem in the commonwealth,” McDaniel said. “And we are not going to get out of that anytime soon. In fact, last year for the first time in recorded history, we had more deaths than births in the commonwealth.”
Kentucky has a “deep history” of accepting international refugees, including about 460 people escaping the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan last year, John Koehlinger of Kentucky Refugee Ministries told the Senate committee.
“Doing so, we’ve had overwhelming community support,” Koelinger said. “A good number of the Afghans who settled here in Kentucky in October, November, December are already working.”
The federal government is in charge of deciding who can enter the country, Koelinger added. This fiscal year, the presidential determination on international refugee admissions is capped at 125,000, he said. The largest number of refugees Kentucky has accepted, in 2016, was 2,385, he said.
Sen. Danny Carroll, R-Benton, said he supports assisting Ukrainian refugees, but he’s uncomfortable because other asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexican border have been “demonized” despite the fact that they, too, are fleeing armed conflicts in their Central American countries. The immigration process moves too slowly for them, Carroll said.
“They live in danger every day,” Carroll said. “It’s very difficult situations that they come from.”
