Refugees from Iraq in new war

After surviving war, after seemingly unending days in squalid refugee camps, solace for the stateless lies in the journey to America. Smiles are reborn when the jet touches down in the land of opportunity.

Atlanta welcomes more than 2,000 refugees every year, many of whom are fleeing terror or have lived the bulk of their years without a homeland. But amid a severe recession in this country, the struggle to begin anew is greater than ever.

Expectations dashed and pocketbooks quickly emptied, jobless refugees are left to ponder whether the lives they left behind, though mired in fear, might have served them better.

“What do I have to expect? Being homeless? This is the United States. Life should be better than that,” says an angry Zainab Ibrahim, an accountant who fled to Jordan from her native Iraq and was resettled in Atlanta last June.

She came with hope, as did her compatriots Jabber Mohammed, Abdulkadir Ahmed and Imad Yakoub, middle-class professionals who expected to find suitable employment here.

Some aired their frustrations one April afternoon at the Decatur office of the International Rescue Committee, a nonprofit agency that resettles refugees. George Rupp, president and CEO of the global organization, was visiting the Atlanta office to hear from Iraqis like Ibrahim, now dependent on the generosity of friends and family to pay her bills.

Rupp says American resettlement agencies feel a moral responsibility for Iraqi refugees because of the 2003 invasion and subsequent U.S. involvement in Iraq. It took the United States several years to open its doors to Iraqis displaced in the war that began in 2003. It’s unfortunate, Rupp says, that when they finally began arriving in America, it was in the midst of an economic downturn.

Current joblessness among refugees is the worst ever in the 30-year institutional memory of the International Rescue Committee. Regional Director Ellen Beattie says the job placement rate in 2008 was 74 percent, a drop of 20 percent from the previous year. The first quarter of 2009 has been even more grim, especially for newly arrived Iraqis. Only 25 percent have a job after the first six months.

Job developers at the committee, many of whom were settled here as refugees themselves, try to assure the newcomers.

Naima Abdullahi pleads with the Iraqis: Don’t abandon the American dream.

She says her Ethiopian father earned a pittance working at a meat company 150 miles away when her family first arrived from Africa.

“I understand where you came from,” she says. “I have walked the same path. America is a great country. Anything is possible. But it’s up to you.”

Ibrahim remains unconvinced. She wants to know why anyone would want her to work as a maid when she is college educated.

“Don’t tell me to lower my expectations,” she says.

Others in the room are frustrated that they cannot find any job.

“Not even as a cashier,” says Abdulkadir Ahmed, who was a commercial aviation pilot in Iraq.

He blames the economy but ends his comments on a note of optimism.

“I think the situation will be solved soon because of [President Barack] Obama’s stimulus plan.”

Atlanta’s six resettlement agencies receive $450 per refugee from the federal government. Agency staffers find apartments for newcomers and pay the first month’s rent as well as a deposit on utilities, MARTA cards, furniture, clothing and food.

Sandra Mullins, director of World Relief in Atlanta, says the resources were already incredibly small —- $450 ran out fast and allowed little time for a person to learn English and the lay of an unfamiliar land.

But in more prosperous times, Mullins said it was still possible for refugee families to become self-sufficient within 120 days, after which agencies cut off assistance dollars.

These days, Mullins says it’s taking six months or longer. It used to take four or five applications to land a job. Now it’s more than 20.

Families are running out of money. So are the agencies, whose private donations from churches and communities have fallen by as much as 50 percent because no one has change to spare.

“We’re seeking emergency funding to prevent homelessness,” says Beattie of the International Rescue Committee.

She doesn’t know of a family who is on the streets yet, but is concerned about the high number of eviction notices. Refugees in Georgia are not immediately eligible for subsidized public housing, prompting some to migrate to states such as Maine where such housing is available.

The recession has hit in other ways as well.

Some big employers in the metro area that provided entry-level jobs attractive to the unskilled or non-English speakers have vanished, Beattie says. One was Wayne Farms LLC, a poultry processing plant in College Park that once employed 600 people. Service jobs, too, are disappearing.

Parangkush Subedi, who grew up in a Bhutanese refugee camp in Nepal, arrived in Atlanta with his wife and mother last July. By October, he had found a job at the Four Seasons Hotel as a server. Even though he has a master’s degree in food engineering, Subedi was happy to have a job earning $7.50 an hour so that he could buy groceries and pay his $600 a month rent in Clarkston.

The posh hotel is one of 30 or so businesses that the International Rescue Committee commends for hiring refugees. But with low occupancy, the hotel had to lay off Subedi. He has been unemployed since February.

Four Seasons also laid off Imad Yakoub, 54, a civil engineer from Iraq who worked as a steward. He is struggling to fend for his wife and three children and often reflects back on the five-bedroom house and once-comfortable life he left behind in Baghdad.

After his brother was kidnapped and killed —- his body was tossed out with garbage on the streets —- and his own life was threatened, Yakoub fled to Jordan and finally arrived in Atlanta in June 2008.

“We came with promises that we would be supported for eight months,” he says. “But we only got four months, which is a very short period. Then I worked for five months and did my best. I stood on my feet for a long time.”

For highly educated refugees, the road to assimilation has always been tough, even humiliating. Doctors who are forced to accept work as chicken packers. Professors who clean hotel rooms.

Underemployment is prevalent especially in the Iraqi refugee community, comprised of many middle-class professionals forced from their homeland by violence and intimidation.

Masooda Omar, a refugee from Afghanistan and a job developer for the International Rescue Committee, tells the panel gathered to hear Iraqi grievances that five years ago the agency would never have considered entry-level jobs for skilled workers. Now there is no choice.

Economic desperation surfaces at the meeting in Atlanta. Everyone in the room knows that sometimes it can manifest itself in extreme ways.

Earlier this month in Binghamton, N.Y., a laid-off Vietnamese immigrant still struggling to learn English killed 13 people at an employment center.

“With the Iraqis especially, there were already high levels of anxiety from years of violence and fragmentation of trust,” Beattie says. “All that is exacerbated.”

They might have escaped civil war, the Iraqis say. But they landed in a different war here in America.