Here is another of those basic template stories, this time from Nebraska.  (The second Nebraska Iraqi refugee story in two days!)   A nice family is featured.   They can’t go home to Iraq for this reason or that reason.  They couldn’t survive in Jordan and so despite the fact that jobs are scarce and the US government isn’t generous enough,  they’ve come to America and have seen their first snow and know that everything will be great.  Well, truthfully this story has no snow in it, but they often do.

And, as is the usual pattern for these stories, one reads through many column inches before getting to some of the problems.  But, before I get to the bumps, check this out!  We’ve written about this before but it’s been a long while since I’ve seen it in print anywhere.

Divvying up refugees!

Ten non-profit government contractors are making the decision every week in Washington about what city these refugees will be sent to! 

Think about it, these agencies which have no elected officials overseeing them in any way (State Department officials involved are career bureaucrats) are determining the character and economic future for your neighborhood, your town, your city and your state.  Additionally, since they are paid to resettle refugees, each must surely be first and foremost defending its own turf and offices throughout the US.

Once a week in Washington, 10 resettlement agencies under contract with the government, most of them church-affiliated nonprofit groups, meet to divvy up the refugees deemed eligible for entry because of a “well-founded fear of persecution” at home.

It’s a process that Jeff Vandenberg, of Omaha-based Lutheran Family Services of Nebraska, likens to the NFL draft [clever, huh?]. Priority is given to reunifying families — the reason behind many of the arrivals in Nebraska and Iowa — and to placing the newcomers where they’ll find relatives or countrymen nearby, as was the case for al-Kadhim and his family.

The “bumps” for Iraqi refugees are that they expected to enter a life where they would work in the field in which they were trained and have nice housing.  For most, it’s not happening.  And, as we have reported previously, some have returned to the Middle East and the culture they are comfortable with.  Despite the problems and lack of jobs, the Obama Administration is promising that we will resettle another 17,000 plus Iraqis this fiscal year.

Since the 2000 Census, Iraqi natives have pushed their numbers to perhaps 1,100 in Nebraska and 165 in Iowa, estimated David Drozd, a demographer at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Problems with the newly arrived Iraqis here have been few, although “there are always bumps,” said Vandenberg. The federal goal — even in the midst of the “Great Recession” — is for resettled refugees to be economically self-sufficient within six months, the point at which their eligibility for government cash assistance generally expires, he said.

After two recent studies criticizing how Iraqi refugees have fared nationwide, the Obama administration vowed to review the resettlement process, a system essentially devised in 1980 to welcome Vietnamese and Cambodians displaced by war. The studies, by Georgetown University Law School and the International Rescue Committee, found that government resettlement funds were too quickly exhausted and job prospects too often scant, among other problems.

“I’m ashamed. I feel like I’m selling a lie,” Greg Wangerin of Interfaith Refugee and Immigration Ministries told the Chicago Tribune recently in an article that chronicled poverty and homelessness among the refugees in Chicago,* home to the second-largest Iraqi community in the United States, after Detroit.

Yes, Mr. Wangerin, you are.

* For  more on the Chicago mess go here.

Here is a revealing story about how a former Iraqi interpreter now using his skills in the National Guard in Nebraska struggles to dispel the negative image of Muslims in the military in the wake of the massacre at Ft. Hood.  He seems like a decent and sincere man who is happy to be in America, but one section of this story in the Omaha World Herald was revealing.   In his effort to recruit diversity into the Guard, he comes upon immigrants who obviously hate the country that now harbors them, and the National Guard that keeps them safe.

Many of the people he recruited welcomed him, thrilled to converse with someone who looked like them and wore an American military uniform.

But no map is good enough to keep him from taking wrong turns and slamming into walls.

He left a mosque once when the worshippers made him feel uncomfortable about the way he folded his hands to pray.

He learned that certain people from certain communities in Nebraska — he doesn’t want to say who — consider him an enemy of religion. They’ve hissed at him and called him everything short of an infidel.  [Three guesses who the ‘hissers’ are in Nebraska!]

“There are strict people,” he said. “You know, people who just know good or bad and that’s all. When you live like that, it is easy to kill. It is easy to say ‘In the name of God’ — bang! — ‘That’s it.’

“But of course it doesn’t work that way.”

Basim refused to stop, kept right on talking that day to the Muslim man convinced that the Nebraska National Guard was the enemy.

Basim told him he wasn’t going to fight his people, he was going to fight people who were hurting his people.

The argument turned into a debate, and the debate morphed into a chat. They parted as friends.

The man did not join the Guard. But maybe, Basim thinks, they changed each other’s minds just a little.   [I sure hope he didn’t change Basim’s mind a little!]

Just one of many posts at RRW on Somalis in Nebraska for your reading pleasure.

Update November 20th:  Schwartz confirms in Syria that we are taking at least 17,000 Iraqis this fiscal year.  Mr. Schwartz, where will they work?

But, he also says we are planning on taking another 17,000 this fiscal year as well!

From AP:

BAGHDAD — The Iraqi government has taken strides to help refugees displaced by the violence in the country over recent years return home, but still “needs to do a heck of a lot more,” a U.S. official said Saturday.

Eric Schwartz, the assistant secretary of state for refugees, said Baghdad has proposed a 250 percent increase to the budget to assist refugees and plans to appoint a coordinator to help people move back home.

That we are helping to encourage Iraqis go home is good news.   Schwartz is likely very well aware of the many Iraqis who have come to the US over the last year only to find they must live in substandard housing and go without meaningful work—in many cases no work at all.  The Iraqi refugees have a different personality than say the Burmese we have been learning about in Bowling Green, because the Iraqis are willing to complain loudly to the press that they feel neglected.  Some have even returned to the Middle East. See our Iraqi refugee category with 437 posts on the subject!

Nevertheless, Schwartz confirms that we are taking another whopping 17,000 Iraqis in FY2010 which began October 1st.

According to the United Nations, as of January 2009 there were an estimated 2 million Iraqi refugees in neighboring Jordan and Syria, and some 2.6 million people displaced within Iraq.

The U.S. was heavily criticized by those who felt it was taking in too few Iraqi refugees uprooted by the sectarian bloodletting that followed the U.S.-led 2003 invasion and ouster of Saddam Hussein.

But more than 30,000 Iraqis have moved to the U.S. since in the last two years as part of a United Nations resettlement program that started in 2007

Schwartz, who was in Baghdad for meetings with his Iraqi counterparts Saturday, said the U.S. plans to allow some 17,000 Iraqis refugees to settle in the U.S. next year. That number is roughly on par with the number resettled in 2009.

Iraqi boy, wise beyond his years!

We can’t save all the refugees in the world, so let me remind readers of what a wise Iraqi boy told a Tucson paper last year:

It is better to have 10 Iraqi refugees who are satisfied with their lives than having 100 angry ones with no life at all.

Got a refugee problem?  Write to Eric Schwartz, here.