Toronto's Armenian community sponsoring refugee resettlement

PanARMENIAN.Net - The Armenian community of Toronto spares no effort to resettle the Syrian refugees, arriving in the city, the Globe and Mail reports.

Willowdale is the target destination for almost as many Syrian refugees as Toronto’s core. And almost all the 1,127 refugees going to Willowdale, according to federal documents, are attached to a single address: the Armenian Community Centre.

With no public funding, its members are privately sponsoring more than a tenth of the refugees expected in the coming weeks, opening their spare rooms to usher fellow Armenians to safety and – almost as important – familiarity.

The private sponsorships allow the community members to name specific Armenian families or persons, who then file their part of the refugee-resettlement application from Lebanon or Jordan, where the Christian minority community has been living since fleeing Syria.

Toronto’s established Armenian community is about 10,000 families strong and mostly middle class. The new arrivals could add up to much more than 1,127, said Apkar Mirakian, who is directing the settlement project for the community center.

There are already more than 1,300 approved sponsorship applications, he said. About 350 people have already arrived, with 1,000 expected, and applications are still pouring in for about 80 people a day. The pace of arrivals has picked up to the point that staff are sometimes only told in the morning that a family will arrive at the airport at night.

Canada’s eased refugee rules have made the country an easy choice for many Armenians in the Middle East. Other than Armenia itself, Canada is the only place where they can easily move right now and also integrate into an existing cultural community, Mirakian said.

All newly arrived children will begin school with free tuition at the private Armenian school attached to the community center, and when the school inevitably overflows, the community center will start converting its rooms into classrooms, Mirakian said.

The federal government has told sponsors it costs about $25,000 to sponsor a family for a year. But the Armenian Community Centre asks for only a $100 application fee, trusting the sponsors to sort things out, whether that means offering their own home or lining up a job.

“Responsibility falls on the community if anything goes wrong in that first year,” said Shahen Mirakian, Apkar Mirakian’s son. “We take that with eyes open, very willingly.”