Now those phones and apps are taking on another role for refugees: anchoring their financial lives. Basic banking apps, like those offered by Bank of America and Wells Fargo, can be used to pay bills and check account balances. Mohamed, who came to the US as a refugee in 2009, uses an app called SendWave to transfer money to his homeland. "You can send money from anywhere," Mohamed tells me, demonstrating how to use SendWave. "I can send it from my office, home, wherever."Using these financial apps can be a huge challenge for those with little experience with formal banking. The Hassan brothers earned money in the refugee camp by delivering firewood by donkey. They never had bank accounts, let alone experience managing them through mobile apps.
But basic cell phones are now used in developing nations to help people like iphone case you can throw against the wall the Hassans store and send money, Vodafone's M-PESA service, which launched in Kenya in 2007, lets anyone with a mobile phone transfer funds via text messaging, When coupled with international money-transfer apps such as SendWave, PayPal's Xoom and Western Union, these programs help immigrants send money across borders, How big a deal are these money transfer apps? In a June report, Juniper Research estimates international remittances via mobile phones will top $25 billion by 2018, That's up 67 percent from an estimated $15 billion in 2015..
Of course, immigrants also need internet access for daily life, for everything from locating public transportation to accessing government services. And those with school age children are increasingly being asked to use the internet to submit homework and communicate with teachers. "Even making an appointment to get a drivers license in some states requires internet access," said Jill Bronfman, director of the Privacy and Technology Project at the University of California Hastings College of Law in San Francisco. "People without such access are considered to be on the fringes of society."Royce Hutson, who teaches social work at Boise State University, said the benefits of tech aren't lost on refugees as they reestablish themselves in the US.
Nearly half of the 169 refugee families who resettled in the Boise, Idaho, area owned a computer within their first year of arriving in the US, according to data that Hutson collected in 2013, By the third year, nearly 93 percent did, Almost all had internet access, Many of the families earned less than $20,000 a year, he added, The Obama administration expects 85,000 refugees will have entered the country by September 30, the end of iphone case you can throw against the wall the US 2016 fiscal year, Late last month, the administration said it had reached its goal of admitting 10,000 Syrian refugees, On Tuesday, President Barack Obama hosted a Leaders' Summit on the Global Refugee Crisis at the UN where he announced the US will accept 110,000 refugees in the next fiscal year..
The UN estimates that conflicts and persecution have "forcibly displaced" 65.3 million people worldwide, the biggest forced displacement since World War II. The UN considers 21.3 million of them to be refugees, defined as someone forced to flee a country because of persecution, war or violence. More than half are younger than 18 years old. Many of the refugees reaching the US will get help with internet access through a three-decade-old telephone subsidy program known as Lifeline. Earlier this year, the Federal Communications Commission expanded the program to cover wireless and broadband services.