It seems that numerous refugees, from countries where celebrating birthdays isn’t customary, end up with January 1 as a birthday when resettling in the United States. Following is an excerpt from an article by Sherri Williams that was published in in the Columbus Dispatch – on January 1, of course.
About 6,000 refugees who resettled in the United States in the federal fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 were assigned a Jan. 1 birthday, according to the U.S. State Department. That includes 54 in Ohio.
About 80 percent of the nearly 5,000 refugees resettled in Columbus by Community Refugee Immigration Services in the past five years have Jan. 1 as their birthday, said Angie Plummer, the agency’s director.
That can cause problems, said Ahmed Kamil, a caseworker at the agency. “It happens sometimes that people share the same date of birth and the same name. There are a lot of Abdis, Ahmeds and Hassans.”
Read the full article in the Columbus Dispatch.