This sob story from the Associated Press is meant to make naïve readers feel so very sorry for educated refugees, some in medical fields, who can’t get work here because they must get US licenses to practice (so that they can compete against your kids coming out of medical schools with degrees that cost you a fortune to provide).
But that isn’t the angle that interested me most in this report.
First and foremost, when someone is admitted as a refugee to the US under the US Refugee Admissions Program they are affirming that they can never return to their home country due to a legitimate fear of being persecutedfor one of several factors—religious, racial, political among them.
Here we see that since the parents in this story can’t immediately jump into professional lives here, one has opted to return to Kurdistan—TO WHERE THEY CLAIMED THEY WERE NOT SAFE! in order to keep money flowing to the family back here being supported partially by US taxpayers.
Workforce barriers keep refugees out of health care field
RICHMOND, Va. — Ferwerdin Al Barzanji has nightmares about what could have been — the promises she could have kept — if her almost 30 years as a university professor and medical researcher in Kurdistan were enough.
When she fled her home homeland bordering Iraq, Syria and Turkey to find refuge in Harrisonburg in 2016, families were depending on the monthly stipends she provided for food and housing. Students awaited her go-ahead to apply for grants at the college where she would teach.
She planned to bring more Kurds in!
Harrisonburg is a prime resettlement site. Protesting Trump’s refugee policies in 2017.
But within two years, she sent apologies instead. There was no money to send. There was no university job, no lab that would let her continue her work.
Like so many refugees, Al Barzanji’s options were limited, even with decades of experience and her fluent command of English, Arabic and Kurdish. Credentials, including her doctorate, were worthless in Virginia. To continue her career, she’d have to start over and go through school again. She couldn’t afford it, and it would be years before money flowed in again.
Eight months of tax payer financial assistance did flow in!
Refugees in the U.S. receive roughly eight months of financial assistance upon arrival, and after extensive interviews from federal officers abroad who determine their eligibility for resettlement, they’re immediately able to work. But neither Al Barzanji or her husband, Heja Al Sindi, could find employment that paid them a living wage.
Confirmed! Refugees are needed for cheap labor—“food factories” and “distribution centers!”
“They told me from the beginning, ‘You (can’t) think about your degrees. Ph.D.? Master’s? Teaching? No. You have to go to either the food factories or these distribution centers. Places like that in order to work,'” she recalled. “‘You can’t start like a university professor or a lab scientist.’“
So if they told her that in the beginning why is she whining now?
If both of them stayed in the U.S., they wouldn’t be able to give their five children [presumably being educated now in Virginia’s public school system—ed] a better education — the reason they left their hometown after 50 years and the one promise Al Barzanji refused to let go.
The ‘refugee’ Dad went back to the place of their supposed persecution, Kurdistan, so he can make more money!
So they made a decision that would separate their family: Al Sindi would go back and work as the vice president of the University of Kurdistan and send his salary to his family in Harrisonburg while Al Barzanji continued her work as an interpreter and full-time mother.
“I put all my feelings and everything into their success. I have to forget about myself,” she said. “So I have to think about it like this. This is it. I have to live like this.”
Oh poor baby!
There is much more we could discuss in this AP story. Virginia readers should definitely read on.
