SACRAMENTO, Calif. — After the Russian invasion, Katie Nelha and her husband couldn’t safely return to their home in Mykolaiv, Ukraine, so they took their chances as refugees. Flying from Poland, where they were working, to Mexico in early April, they crossed into the U.S. at Tijuana, where they were granted a temporary visa for humanitarian reasons.
Once in Sacramento, Nelha, 24, relied on a county translator to help her enroll in Medi-Cal, California’s Medicaid program, to cover the cost of visiting an optometrist. “I need glasses to pass my eye test and get a driver’s license so we can start looking for work,” Nelha said through an interpreter. She plans to find a job in one of the city’s dozens of Ukrainian and Russian restaurants.
The thriving Slavic communities in the California cities of Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego, and San Francisco have become magnets for Ukrainians fleeing war less than a year after the state experienced an influx of Afghans in response to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Many refugees need health care immediately, for conditions such as pregnancy, high blood pressure, and diabetes or because of trauma they’ve recently experienced.
