BANGOR, Maine — A top ranking United Nations official who grew up in the Orono area was in Maine over the weekend to take part in a series of events focused on the growing global refugee crisis.
“It is by far the largest global displacement in decades now,” Kelly Tallman Clements, the United Nations deputy high commissioner for refugees, said Sunday afternoon in a telephone interview.
“It’s the largest movement of people since World War II and there are 65 million people on the move — people that are forced to flee because of war, persecution and other reasons,” said Clements, a 1984 Old Town High School graduate, who went on to earn her bachelor’s in international studies in French and master’s in urban affairs and public policy at Virginia Tech.
Clements said that of those people on the move, about 21 million are refugees who are crossing international borders seeking protection and another estimated 40 million are displaced and living in refugee-like settings in their own countries. Three more million or so are asylum seekers and more than half of them are coming from three countries — Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia, she said.
“But we’ve got large displacement areas in Colombia, Yemen, Sudan, South Sudan and Nigeria so obviously there’s a lot of focus on the front pages with what’s going on in Syria — that’s probably the largest driver of displacement but this is not unique to the Middle East,” she said, adding that Africa is seriously affected as well so the crisis is touching nearly every region, including the Americas.
While those who come to the U.S. make up less than 1 percent of overall refugees a year, they are “the most extremely vulnerable people. They’re either female heads of households or have serious medical issues. They’re under threat in [their native countries] and they need immediate safety and that’s something that the U.S. has traditionally provided, going back to the 1970s,” she said.
Clements, however, said that the United Nations has not taken a position on President Donald Trump’s ongoing efforts to ban travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries.
“We tend not to do that,” she said. “We tend to focus on the reasons that people are fleeing and we ask all governments to do their very best, to provide as much support and protection as they can, whether that’s funding or political support or concrete things like I’ve seen over the last few days in Maine, where people are opening up their communities to allow people to restart their lives safely.”
Currently based in Geneva, Switzerland, Clements assists the U.N. in protecting and supporting refugees at the request of governments and helps refugees integrate, resettle or return to their own country.
While in Maine over the weekend, Clements was one of 20 volunteers who on Friday participated in a Catholic Charities of Maine’s Refugee and Immigration Services training program in Portland called “ In Their Shoes,” a role-playing session in which refugees run into a series of problems, including corruption, unstable border situations and having to give up valuables.
She visited the Scarborough Wal-Mart, which employs several refugees, and a health care center operated by a resettled Congolese refugee in southern Maine that focuses on trauma and mental health issues and has a clientele of primarily refugees and asylum seekers.
Clements also took part in a community conversation at the University of Southern Maine with high school and college students and Portland officials, she said.
On Saturday and Sunday, she was among the speakers at the 30th annual Camden Conference. This year’s theme was “Refugees and Global Migration: Humanity’s Crisis.”
Clements said she currently doesn’t spend much time in the U.S. but did offer some observations about Maine.
“I have to say this is a very welcoming place. I think it’s something that the refugees that are coming here need in terms of that environment but they’re also giving back in terms of employment and economic benefit to the communities and that sort of thing so it’s not only humane but it makes other sense, too.”