The woman could have fled into Poland to escape the onslaught of Russian military forces. But fearful that her elderly parents couldn’t make the trip, she decided to stay in Ukraine, sending her young daughter to live with relatives abroad.
“The last I heard from her, she and her husband were holed up in a small town outside Kyiv,” said Dina Birman, a professor in the University of Miami School of Education and Human Development, speaking about her Ukrainian friend with whom she regularly communicated in the days just after Russia invaded the Eastern European country.
During one of Birman’s last conversations with the couple, they told her that they had to bike to a store to get food and were apprehensive and unsure of what was to come.
Such emotions are common not only among Ukrainians who have elected to stay behind even as Russian shelling continues to bombard their cities, but also in many of the three million who have already fled their homeland since the start of the war, creating what is now the largest displacement of Europeans since World War II.
After crossing into neighboring countries such as Poland, Romania, and Slovakia, Ukrainian refugees face a myriad of daunting challenges in the months and, perhaps, years ahead, according to Birman, who studies the acculturation and adjustment of immigrants and refugees and designs interventions to improve their mental health and well-being.
“Being separated from family members is one of the biggest challenges they’re encountering,” she explained. “It tends to be a very complex issue. We’ve seen this happen with Central American migrants and with unaccompanied minors who were sent here without parents. Family separations are always part of the migration experience, but in this case [the Ukraine-Russia conflict] seems like it’s more extreme.”
After Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy issued a decree to conscript reserve soldiers, men aged 18 to 60 are now prohibited from leaving the country. As such, women and children constitute the bulk of those fleeing war-torn Ukraine, as the men are being told to stay behind and fight.
“That’s always tough on the children,” Birman said. “How will they adjust to the uncertainty, as it looks like these families are going to be separated for quite some time? That’s a type of loss and grief that is particularly difficult to manage. There’s no permanence right now because they’re waiting and hoping that the conflict will end so they can go back home.”
Birman heads up the School of Education’s Refugee Collab. Working closely with U.S. refugee resettlement programs, community-based organizations, and schools that serve refugees, the initiative conducts research “to understand the educational, vocational, social, and psychological experiences of refugees,” its website states. Her team’s research contributes to scientific literature that can inform efforts to intervene on behalf of marginalized groups.
The Ukraine-Russia crisis especially hits home for Birman. Her family immigrated to the United States in the 1970s when she was 12, leaving the former Soviet Union because of unfair policies that were directed at them and other Jews.
“When we left, we thought we would never be able to go back because the relationship between the countries was such that there was really no contact, no travel back and forth,” Birman recalled. “We were separated from our extended family. My grandmother died after we left, and I never saw her again. It was a difficult way to say goodbye. Then the Soviet Union opened up in 1989, and we were able to go back. I was able to go back and reconnect with my extended family, most of whom are in Moscow.”
Birman has friends in Ukraine with whom she tries to keep in contact. But with the infrastructure in many Ukrainian cities having been obliterated by shelling, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to communicate.
In addition to the many challenges they already face, such as family separation and loss of employment, Ukrainians fleeing the war face another threat: human trafficking. Credible reports have surfaced, for example, that Ukrainian women crossing into other countries are being targeted by sex traffickers.
“Prior studies on human trafficking from Ukraine demonstrate that human trafficking victims are most likely to be females under 40 years of age. Economic hardships often play a role in them becoming victims of this type of crime,” said Olena Antonaccio, a professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology in the College of Arts and Sciences, who was born and raised in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv.
“As we can see now, current refugees from Ukraine are predominantly women, and they are obviously in great economic distress. All of this, unfortunately, means that many of those who are fleeing now fit well the profile of possible victims of human trafficking, as well as find themselves in an extremely vulnerable situation with hardly any economic and social resources,” she said.
Meanwhile, Ukrainians who were already living abroad before the Russian invasion are experiencing similar emotions as those now fleeing the war, not knowing what the immediate future holds or if it will ever be safe to return to their country.
For tens of thousands of Ukrainians who have resided in the U.S. since March 1, some measure of security, albeit short-term, came two weeks ago, when the Biden administration offered them Temporary Protected Status (TPS), allowing them to remain here for 18 months without fear of being deported and to apply for work permits.
The designation is based on both ongoing armed conflict and extraordinary and temporary conditions in Ukraine that prevent Ukrainian nationals from returning to their country safely, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
The designation, however, is not a pathway to citizenship. “It means just that—temporary,” said JoNel Newman, professor of clinical legal education and director of the Health Rights Clinic at the School of Law. “It means they are being given license to live here lawfully while there is a recognized crisis in their country to which it would be a humanitarian disaster if they were returned.”
Immigration advocate groups have applauded the Biden administration for the move. But now, the question becomes whether the designation will be extended after a year and a half.
“Sometime before the 18 months is over, the administration will review current conditions in Ukraine to determine whether TPS protection is still needed for Ukrainians living in our country. Typically, we have extended TPS multiple times,” Newman said. She noted that after TPS was offered to Haitian refugees in the wake of the devastating earthquake that hit their island nation in 2010, the status was extended multiple times under the Obama administration.
The Health Rights Clinic that Newman directs was on the front lines during that crisis, processing hundreds of TPS applications for Haitians in South Florida. And today, the clinic continues to offer clinical legal aid to that group.
“What we learned doing all those cases was that there were a number of Haitians eligible for TPS who were also eligible for better immigration status but had never had a lawyer or a law student to look at their case,” Newman said. “So, our project, on behalf of the Haitian community, actually spun off a number of individual cases in which individuals did have a pathway to permanent residency or citizenship.”
Ukrainians now fleeing the war could seek refugee or asylum status in whatever country they arrive, Newman said.
On a broader scale, Biden’s decision to grant TPS to Ukrainian nationals in the U.S. “is a first step toward recognizing the particular horrific conditions in Ukraine right now, and it certainly doesn’t preclude looking more closely at the total immigration picture,” Newman said. “We are opening our arms to the Ukrainians who are already here, and one would hope that the world will do the same for the ones that are having to flee.”
