Inside Report for March 12, 2008

• By SANDY DAVIS
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Mar 12, 2008 - Page: 7B - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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For Toe Myat, his wife and seven children, Baton Rouge seemed like paradise when they arrived in December.

More than nine years earlier, the Myats fled Burma — Myanmar — to escape a brutal government that had turned on its own people.

“My own country’s soldiers would come to our village and shoot anyone, everyone. They told us they were going to kill everyone in my tribe,” the former farmer said through an interpreter during an interview at a Baton Rouge restaurant.

“If we wanted to live, we had to leave.”

To escape Burma, Myat, his wife, three young sons and infant daughter walked out of the rugged Burmese mountains to a refugee camp on the Thai border.

“They were very vulnerable in that camp because they were so close to the government that was trying to kill them,” said Diane Chisholm, director of Migration and Refugee Services for Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Baton Rouge.

It was Chisholm’s organization that found the Myats and agreed to sponsor their resettlement.

In 1999, Chisholm brought 288 refugees to Baton Rouge. This year, she hopes to bring in 51.

“Each year since 9/11 it’s been harder and harder to get people into the United States,” she said.

Each October, the president determines how many refugees will be invited to relocate to the United States. “Last year, President Bush invited 70,000 refugees to move here,” she said. “But only 46,000 made it.”

The holdup, she said, comes from the Department of Homeland Security.

“The language in the PATRIOT Act has made it very difficult,” Chisholm said.

“One of the things required is a waiver that declares the refugee is not a terrorist or a person who has provided material support to a terrorist organization.”