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www.washingtonpost.com Ethnic Albanian refugees wait in a border area near Blace, Macedonia. The day this photograph was taken, the UN warned refugees that there was no room for more of them.

Ethnic Albanian refugees fleeing Kosovo will not only find havens in countries surrounding their homeland. Under a recent agreement made by the U.S. government, they may find temporary homes within U.S. borders, including areas of the Midwest.

Earlier this month, when the United States agreed to accept 20,000 of the displaced refugees, tentative plans were to place them at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had commented on NBC news that she believed it was ideal for the refugees to be placed close to their homeland for easier post-war reinfiltration. Albright said, however, that the United States should house some of the estimated 600,000 refugees.

Recent developments in the settlement discussions have raised the possibility of placing refugees in the Midwest, not Cuba. The Detroit Free Press has printed articles presenting the possibility that a large number of the United States’ allotted refugees could take refuge in the Detroit metropolitan area. The region has an Albanian-American population of 40,000. The hope is that many of these families will open their homes to refugees.

One of the foremost organizations in the U.S. Refugee Resettlement Project is the Catholic Church. The Archdiocese of Detroit is searching for Albanian-American families willing to house refugees. This is part of a two-step resettlement plan implemented by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.

Under the plan, the first priority for resettlement goes to family reunification cases, where resettlement organizations (including the Catholic Diocese) seek to reunite refugees with family members living in the United States.

The second step in the process of resettlement is to house refugee families deemed “most vulnerable.” This term is vaguely defined since the Kosovo situation changes frequently.

Organizations speaking for Grand Rapids’ Catholic Diocese said they are preparing for the possibility of refugees coming to this city.

Alyssa Morillo-Scheidt of the Catholic Human Development Outreach (CHDO) in Grand Rapids stated that the CHDO has been accepting refugees from around the world for 20 years and is preparing to find homes for ethnic Albanians if they are called to do so.

Currently the Grand Rapids Diocese is sending out a call for American-Albanian families willing to house family members currently settled in camps in Macedonia and Albania. But, said Morillo-Scheidt, a Case Manager for Refugee Resettlement at CHDO, the Grand Rapids area has a very small number of Albanian-Americans. Grand Rapids will likely be involved in the second phase of the resettlement program, providing housing to highly vulnerable families.

According to Jim Radmaker, Director of the Secretariat for Social Justice of the Grand Rapids Diocese, it is hard to tell what Grand Rapids will do. “Everything is changing so quickly now,” he said. “If we had a bigger population [of American Albanians], we would be taking in more people immediately, but more likely it will be over a period of time.”

No one knows yet what the response will be to the first step of the resettlement program. If the 20,000 slots allotted by the government are filled during the family reunification stage, the second step could be bypassed. These numbers could change, too, said Morillo-Scheidt, if the United States agreed to house more refugees.