Abu-Hassan 1

Halimah Abu-Hassan
Professor Cassandra DAlessio
UWRT 1102- 008
28 January 2016
Proposal
On the topic of refugees and their displacement across the world I feel like I have
little knowledge. I know about refugees because of my roommate who is Syrian and has
had many family members flee Syria because of ISIS, they are now in refugee camps in
Lebanon. My father is from Gaza City, Palestine and many people he grew up with are
now refugees and the area has produced alarming amounts of displaced civilians. In my
project I intend on doing research on Syrian Refugees, Palestinian and Somali. Having
family members on my fathers side who have ended up as refugees has always made me
interested in the topic. I know that many refugees stay in camps or they just remain
stateless and wandering. I would love to know what happens to these people.
What interests me most about this topic is that it is a huge humanitarian issue and
one day I hope to be reforming the United States immigration system to help refugees.
Every time I see news about refugees it breaks my heart and I wish I had a way to help. I
feel like the first step is to learn all about how the process of immigrating to the United
States works and from there I can learn how to help. I would like to learn specifically
about how the United States deals with immigration and how many refugees are actually
given refuge in the United States.
The most important questions I have are: what is the United States policy on
refugees, what happens to them once they enter a country where they are seeking refuge,

Abu-Hassan 2
how do they contribute to society once they are in another country, how do they begin the
citizenship process or do they at all, are they given visas, what areas are refugees most
highly concentrated in, and what money is used to fund the refugees?
I feel like I will find a lot of my information in government documents, I think
that will be the best source. The second place is probably news articles, maybe Google
scholar. I do not feel like film, movies, art or anything like that will be very helpful it
will just give me more background knowledge on how refugees got to where they are.
I have not done any initial research yet, but if I find it to be too broad I will just
stick to one group of refugees and what has happened to them in the past in relation to the
United States. I will try to look at only one group instead of three (Palestinians, Syrians
and Somalis) and try to find everything I can on them and make them the only group of
focus in my research. I will center it on only how the United States has dealt with them
without other countries involvement.
If my initial research is too narrow I will broaden it to how other countries deal
with refugees as well and not only look into the United States policies on refugees but
other countries as well. I will look into surrounding countries around these refugee
groups to broaden my research on policy. I will try to find, at least three groups of
refugees from different areas of the world three (Palestinians, Syrians and Somalis) to
see how their policies differ and if there is a particular race/group that is less accepted out
of the three.