Waiting for Resettlement in the Age of Trump

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President Trump’s drive to keep refugees out of the U.S. recently weighed on the minds of Iraqis and Syrians at a resettlement camp in Jordan. President Trump’s drive to keep refugees out of the U.S. recently weighed on the minds of Iraqis and Syrians at a resettlement camp in Jordan.CreditPHOTOGRAPH BY PAOLO PELLEGRIN / MAGNUM

Recently, eleven men, mostly middle-aged refugees from Iraq and Syria, settled in on plastic chairs in a community center in the al-Hashmi al-Shamali neighborhood of East Amman, Jordan, waiting for their weekly support group to begin. Officially, there are seven hundred and seventeen thousand refugees in Jordan, but the real tally is thought to be much higher, and many of them live in this area, where rent is cheap, and the multistory, cement-block buildings are ramshackle. It was midday, but since refugees in Jordan are largely forbidden from working, their time is something to be filled. Some of the men in the group hold advanced degrees, while others were once farmers or builders in their own countries. Now they are all in the same situation, linked by poverty, unemployment, and uncertainty.

I was invited to sit in on the support group by my friend Samer Kurdi, a Jordanian painter, who set up the weekly sessions as a way for the refugee men to get things off their chests. It was the first time that they had met since President Trump banned citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries, including Iraq and Syria. The news had not yet arrived that a federal judge in Seattle had temporarily lifted the ban. (On Thursday night, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in San Francisco, decided not to reinstate the ban.)

“I saw something on the Internet yesterday,” Khalid, who was originally from the Syrian city of Homs, said. “A friend sent me a meme.” It showed, first, a photo of a man with a gun, a little girl, and a dead lion. It said, “This is the hero that saved the little girl’s life.” Then, in the next photo, they realize that the man is Muslim, and it says, “Terrorist kills lion!” The men laughed, but there was not much mirth behind it.

A man called Saad spoke, jangling a silver chain of prayer beads between his fingers. “We don’t know if we are affected by the ban or not,” he said. “I’d like to know my future. Am I going to stay in Jordan, or will I go back to Syria or be resettled somewhere else?”

Staying in Jordan, a poor country now jammed with refugees, may be their only choice, but it is not a happy one. Tensions abound. Some locals spit the words “laji,” which means refugee in Arabic, and “Syrian” as epithets. In Jordan, which is a country of first asylum, refugees are barred from becoming citizens; they will always be refugees. Resettlement, as it is called, means the chance to start a new life elsewhere, to gain citizenship—to no longer be a refugee. Still, most of the refugees in Jordan will never be resettled. Once they arrive, they register with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and then they wait. With so many migrants seeking haven, only one per cent of global refugees find a “forever home.” The most vulnerable—women and children, people with medical emergencies, and survivors of torture—have priority. Refugees generally do not get to choose a country, though family reunification is considered, and the International Organization for Migration sets up interviews with representatives of possible resettlement countries. The process usually takes two to four years. The men in the support group have all been in Jordan for many years, and feel frustrated with their futile attempts to find work either as volunteers or under the table. They try to find new ways to kill time. A Ph.D. student who had to leave Syria before he could defend his dissertation said he had taken twenty free courses, “even in subjects I am not interested in,” to fight the boredom.

“How can it be that we are sitting here, people with degrees and nothing to use them on?” Karim, who came from Iraq, said. He was worried about the abrupt change in American policy. “I am here because of Iraq and what happened there, but how do I know if I go to a new country what might happen? I want to know where I stand. I want to know the real policy of the great powers.”

Ahmed, who is fifty-four, with a strong nose and a thick mustache, dyed black, pulled a white plastic card from his wallet and held it out. “Fallujah Resident” was written at the top, and a postage-stamp-size photo of him, taken in 2007, was affixed. The biometric identification card was issued by the American military in Fallujah and had to be carried at all times. Not long after this I.D. was issued, Ahmed and his wife fled their country. He showed me his paper from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. It’s a photocopy, folded and worn, and it states that he has been recognized as a refugee and should be protected from forcible return to his country. “I used to have to renew it every six months, but now it’s every year,” he said. Ahmed has been in Jordan for almost ten years.

When I heard Ahmed was from Fallujah, I waited to talk to him after the group session ended. I had spent a few months in that city as a reporter. He asked me if I knew Haji Hussein’s, the best kebab restaurant in town. “Of course,” I said, “it was bombed,” we both said at the same time. “But he rebuilt it!” My reporting in Iraq also led me to join the board of a small charity and community center that helps refugees and houses the men’s group. We agreed to meet back at the center the next day.

Ahmed worked as a journalist at a newspaper in Fallujah when Al Qaeda began to take over the city, and he wrote about the murders and violence that ensued. The newspaper’s office was bombed, then one of his colleagues was shot to death on the main road. One day, as he walked home from the welding shop where he worked to supplement his income, three masked men stopped him, asked him if he wrote for the paper, and shoved him in the trunk of their black car.

“I knew then that I was dead,” he told me. They drove him to a basement and kept him there, blindfolded. “There were other people there because I could smell them. No one had a chance to relieve themselves outside, so it smelled like a toilet.” He pulled a tissue from his pocket and held it to his eyes, silent for a minute. “People were moaning. We were not given food or water.” After three days, which he counted by the sound of the evening call to prayer, a man he believes was the emir of the Al Qaeda cell paid a visit to the basement. “He ripped off my blindfold and shone a light in my eyes. The light was attached to his weapon. He said, ‘This is not the publisher of the newspaper.’ ”

He was blindfolded again, led out of the building, and shoved back into a car trunk. After about an hour, he was thrown to the ground. “I knew this was when they would shoot me, and I thought I was at the field where they dump the bodies.” But, while he waited for the bullet in his skull, he heard the men get in their car and drive away. He lay on the frozen ground for a long while, too frightened to move, then worked his way out of the handcuffs and pulled off his blindfold. “It was black. All I saw were stars.” He tried to clean himself in a stream before he hitchhiked home. His wife and neighbors, certain that he was dead, had been searching the body-dumping grounds of the city. When he returned, alive, his wife insisted that they leave Fallujah.

Ahmed flipped through the pages of a notepad. “I started these notes in 2007, when I first came to Amman,” he told me. “I was so poor I couldn’t even spare money to buy a pen. That’s why it’s all in pencil. I took a course at a charity for refugees, and they gave me this pad and a pencil.” The pages are full of writing in Arabic, of phone numbers and boxes drawn around important times and meetings.

“Here is the number of the contact for Sweden; they didn’t accept me,” he said. “In 2009, they transferred me from the Swedish representative to the German representative. I had one interview, but they didn’t take me for another.” In 2010, he spoke with an American representative, who asked him to find a sponsor. By 2014, he had found one, an old neighbor from Fallujah living in upstate New York. He had two interviews, and after each he received a photocopied form in a manila envelope from the Refugee Affairs Division of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, with a tick next to the box that says, “Further review of your eligibility for refugee resettlement in the United States is necessary.”

He found the interview process at the International Organization for Migration offices terrifying. “You go into small room,” he said. “The interviewer and the translator sit together. There is a glass wall between you and them. You don’t know what the translator is telling the guy. Is he being honest? They film everything and ask you so many questions. ‘Which party were you in? Did you carry a weapon? Did you go to Kuwait? Did you fight the Americans? Why did you leave Iraq?’ For ten years, I have been repeating the same story.”

Like the other men, he tries to find ways to stay busy, to feel useful. “I used to take a lot of courses when I first got here, because they would often give you money for transportation and a meal,” he told me. “I would go to the course and then take some food home to my wife.” He keeps a stack of certificates in one of his plastic folders: there’s one for leadership, another for trauma relief, also one in human rights, and one for “Communication: The Way for Success.” But he finds it hard to find ways to put his new knowledge to use. As the big powers debate the number of refugees to accept, and as Trump tries to fully close the door to people like him, from Iraq, he waits. He found a volunteer job with a stipend at the Red Crescent, but that ended last year, and he is desperate to find another job. As we finished our conversation, he asked me to please put in a word.

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