10/8/16, 1(43 PMRefugee Crisis in Syria Raises Fears in South Carolina - The New York Times

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U.S.

Refugee Crisis in Syria Raises Fears in South Carolina By RICHARD FAUSSET SEPT. 25, 2015

DUNCAN, S.C. — The worried citizens gathered in the high school cafeteria, about 200 strong. Patriotic songs played on the stereo, a man in a blue blazer from the John Birch Society hovered by a well-stocked literature table, and Lauren L. Martel, a lawyer from Hilton Head, told the crowd that 25 Syrian refugees were already living among them.

“The U.N. calls it ‘refugee resettlement’ — the Muslims call it hijra, migration,” said another speaker, Jim McMillan, a local businessman. “They don’t plan to assimilate, they don’t plan to take on our culture. They plan to change the way of American life.”

The United States government has pledged to increase the number of worldwide refugees allowed in the country each year from 70,000 to 100,000 by the year 2017; earlier this month, the Obama administration said it would take in at least 10,000 Syrian refugees over the next year. But the anger and anxiety here show just how hard this might be in some parts of the country.

None of Syria’s four million refugees have been resettled in this part of South Carolina in the last year, according to the State Department. Since May, a Christian nonprofit group, World Relief, has placed 32 refugees in the region, but most of them were Christians fleeing troubled countries like Myanmar and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

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Even so, in South Carolina’s Upstate region, as its conservative northwest corner is known, the crisis has divided those who want to welcome new waves of huddled masses from those who question the federal government’s ability to weed out Muslim extremists. Some critics, echoing concerns in towns across the country, fear the newcomers will burden local government agencies or alter the character of their communities.

The criticism here has encompassed both sober-minded questions about local school funding and warnings about global conspiracies. It began this spring when the Baltimore-based World Relief, one of nine nonprofit agencies that work with the federal government to resettle refugees, prepared to open its new office in Spartanburg, a city of 37,000 close to a major BMW auto plant.

Lynn Isler, a stay-at-home mother, was among those who pushed back. She created a short-lived Facebook page that warned of the “perfect storm that the Syrian refugees will bring.” She has also warned that Communists had infiltrated some elements of the Christian Evangelical movement that supports refugee resettlement.

Elected officials have weighed in as well. Representative Trey Gowdy, a Republican whose district is part of the Upstate region and who leads the House select committee investigating the attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, has complained that the federal government did not sufficiently coordinate with local officials before allowing the current crop of refugees to arrive.

State Senator Lee Bright, who represents Greenville and Spartanburg Counties, has called for “open hearings” on the resettlement effort, echoing the concerns of some fellow Republicans who say it is difficult to perform background checks on Syrian refugees, given the chaos that has engulfed their country. Many critics point to the congressional testimony of Michael Steinbach, assistant director of counterterrorism for the F.B.I., who told a House committee in February that Syria lacked systems that could provide information to evaluate refugees.

At the meeting in the cafeteria Sunday evening at James F. Byrnes High

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School in Duncan, a small city near Spartanburg, State Representative Mike Burns, a Republican from Greenville County, spoke more broadly of immigration policies that were threatening traditional American culture.

“This immigration fiasco that we’re in the middle of is going to take away the very things that we’re dear about,” Mr. Burns said.

Evan Mulch, the field coordinator for the John Birch Society, the right-wing group, told the crowd the resettlements were “part of the New World Order game plan.” Another speaker worried that the refugees would stress the state’s already stretched Social Services Department.

The United States, Ms. Martel said, is “a Judeo-Christian nation.”

“We are not a Muslim nation, and those two things cannot coexist,” she added.

During a question-and-answer session, a woman asked if the refugees could be sent home on “troop ships.” A man asked if they could be sent on a plane to Saudi Arabia. When he was told that they could not, his frustration mounted.

“Do we shoot them?” he asked, to laughter and applause. “Come on! I mean, this is crazy.”

Jason Lee, 41, a Southern Baptist preacher who is the director of World Relief’s Spartanburg office, said he had been surprised by the vehement resistance. In the mid-2000s, when he helped Somali refugees adjust to new lives in Kentucky, there were very few local complaints.

“The fear-mongering seems really different,” Mr. Lee said.

The situation here has been troubling enough that Anne C. Richard, the assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration, traveled to the Spartanburg area in late August to meet with skeptics and to try to correct what she called “misinformation” about the local program.

In a telephone interview on Tuesday, Ms. Richard said that the concern about

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bringing in “bad actors” from the Middle East had some merit. She alluded to the case of two Iraqi refugees who settled in Bowling Green, Ky., and were charged in 2011 with trying to send weapons and money to a Qaeda affiliate in Iraq.

But she said that screening procedures had improved since then. She also said that the vast majority of the three million refugees brought to the United States since 1975 — including 19,000 Iraqis who were resettled in the 2014 fiscal year — have integrated peacefully. (The United States has taken in about 1,500 refugees from Syria since the start of the conflict there more than four years ago.)

Ms. Richard said many Americans had long supported refugee resettlement programs. “It’s an American tradition, and a lot of Americans get that,” she said. In many parts of the country, including South Carolina, the Syrian crisis has elicited calls for compassion and offers of help: On Sept. 13, hundreds of people gathered in University City, a suburb of St. Louis, to ask the federal government to accept “as many Syrian refugees as possible” in the area, according to the St. Louis chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

This week, the mayors of 18 American cities, including Bill de Blasio of New York and Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles, sent a letter to President Obama urging him “to increase still further the number of Syrian refugees the United States will accept for resettlement.” The mayors asserted that the United States had a “robust screening and background check” system in place for refugees, who, they said, “have helped build our economies, enliven our arts and culture, and enrich our neighborhoods.”

But even before the Syrian crisis dominated headlines worldwide, resettlement agencies had noted a rise in anti-refugee sentiment in parts of the United States, said Melanie Nezer, vice president of policy and advocacy at HIAS, a Jewish nonprofit that works with refugees. In the last two decades, they have increasingly placed people in smaller communities to try to avoid the high cost of living in traditional immigrant magnets like New York and Los Angeles. At the same time, unemployment and tight budgets have prompted some local governments to fight the placement of refugees.

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In South Carolina, a number of influential Upstate religious leaders have embraced the refugee program. The Rev. D.J. Horton, senior pastor of Anderson Mill Road Baptist Church, said dozens from his flock of 2,300 had already completed refugee support training. “It’s very hard to read your Bible, especially your New Testament, and refuse refuge to people who are vulnerable,” he said.

Mr. Lee said World Relief has proposed to the State Department resettling as many as 116 refugees in the Upstate region in the next year. He did not rule out the possibility that Syrians might be resettled in the area in the future. For now, he said, his group had resettled just one Muslim family of four, from Iraq, and a former Iraqi translator for United States security companies who has renounced his religion.

The former translator met with a reporter on Monday and asked that his name not be used, for fear of attracting attention from anti-refugee activists. He said his reception in the United States had been warm, but he had been careful not to mention he is an Iraqi: Among Americans, he said, “Suicider, killer — this is the stereotype of Iraq.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 26, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Fear Arrives in South Carolina Long Before Any Actual Syrians.

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10/8/16, 1(42 PMSyrian Refugees in Jersey City Are Among Few to Start New Life in U.S. - The New York Times

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N.Y. / REGION

Syrian Refugees in Jersey City Are Among Few to Start New Life in U.S. By LIZ ROBBINS OCT. 13, 2015

JERSEY CITY — After four years of fleeing and 15 hours of flying, Hussam Al Roustom walked off the plane at Newark Liberty International Airport, only to feel as if he had stepped into an American movie.

“It was like an action film in the sense that this hero had lost everyone dear to him, and then he finds himself safe — but he has nothing else to lose,” Mr. Al Roustom said in Arabic, through an interpreter. “That’s how I felt.”

Mr. Al Roustom is a refugee from Syria. Since arriving in June, he, his wife, their 3-year-old daughter and their 7-year-old son have been living in an apartment atop the Kwick Discount Center grocery store in Jersey City. Their journey ended even as four million Syrians were still looking for a home, throwing Europe and the Middle East into a humanitarian crisis.

Mr. Al Roustom was one of only 1,682 Syrian refugees admitted to the United States since Oct. 1, 2014, and among 78 resettled in the New York metropolitan area.

Those numbers are about to multiply. President Obama has pledged to accept at least 10,000 displaced Syrians over the next year, increasing the annual cap to 85,000, from 70,000, for refugees from all countries.

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Mr. Obama’s decision will accelerate a vast and largely unknown refugee resettlement system run not by the government, but by private aid organizations that the government has been turning to for decades.

With roots dating to World War II, which incited the largest refugee exodus of the 20th century, a network of nine aid groups with affiliates in 180 communities across the country provide an array of essential services for new arrivals, including rented homes, jobs and English-language classes.

Aid groups like the International Rescue Committee have long been doing this work, but it was not until 1980 that Congress formalized the partnership, driven by the notion that humanitarian aid groups can mobilize resources better than government agencies because of their roots in the communities.

As they prepare for a new wave of Syrian refugees, the aid groups know they may have to quell concerns some communities have about security risks, but federal officials say refugees undergo a rigorous screening process — as long as three years — before being allowed into the United States.

Whatever the challenges ahead, the organizations say they are more than ready. They recently joined former government officials in urging that the White House accept 10 times the number pledged.

“We are ready for 100,000 Syrians,” said Sarah Ivory, the regional relief director for Church World Service, which resettled Mr. Al Roustom. “Ten thousand is barely more than we already anticipated. It’s not some big ratcheting up of our program.”

The government gives local offices of the nine aid organizations $1,975 per refugee to cover initial rent, clothing and food, in addition to covering administrative costs for the national offices that comes to an average of $270 per refugee, the State Department said.

The local offices also register children in schools, provide access to medical care and provide cultural orientation. The government contracts are standard,

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down to the number of forks, knives and spoons that must be provided for each refugee (two).

On April 15, as Mr. Al Roustom sat in a Jordanian refugee camp, he had no idea that a committee was deciding where he would start his life. Representatives from the nine organizations took part in a weekly Wednesday meeting in Arlington, Va., reviewing a spreadsheet of names and data that would become animate in a matter of months.

Somewhat like a draft conducted by professional sports teams to choose players, each organization selects a prescribed number of refugees in several rounds, with the order rotating every week. They select cases depending on whether an applicant has a relative or a friend near an aid group’s field office. If not, they consider an applicant based on languages spoken, whether others from that country live nearby (there is a large Syrian community in Paterson, N.J., for example), medical concerns and other specific issues, such as sexual orientation. Only two of the nine agencies have resettled Syrian refugees in the New York area, in part because of the high cost of living.

“You can’t think too hard about the fact that you are greatly influencing someone’s future,” said David Mills, the associate director for prearrival services for Church World Service. “You do your homework and place them where all the evidence would point to them flourishing as they start new lives.”

Mr. Al Roustom, 36, first uprooted his life in 2011, when the Syrian civil war erupted in the city of Homs. The supermarket he owned was ransacked, and one of his two homes was destroyed. His son, Wesam, who has autism and was frightened by the shelling, stopped speaking.

In March 2013, Mr. Al Roustom paid a smuggler to take him and his family through the desert, leaving them to hike over a mountain into Jordan. The police then took them to the Zaatari refugee camp, where he registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

The United Nations’ refugee agency determines if return is not possible

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because of past persecution or fear of persecution. If so, the agency refers the most vulnerable cases to the resettlement support center in that region.

In Jordan, the International Organization for Migration, a global nonprofit group, administers the resettlement program for the State Department, compiling a case file for United States Customs and Immigration Services.

A State Department spokeswoman said refugees were subject to “the highest level of security checks of any category of traveler to the United States.”

As Mr. Al Roustom’s application was being considered, he left the refugee camp after squalid conditions made his children constantly sick.

They moved in with relatives in Irbid, Jordan, while Mr. Al Roustom worked as a blacksmith. Since it is illegal for Syrians to work in Jordan, he was arrested, then sent with his family to another refugee camp for five months.

Once the United States government approved his application for refugee status, the Church World Service office in New Jersey — the newest of its 33 field offices — got to work. The office found him a three-bedroom apartment and furnished it with donations. On June 16, they picked up the family at the airport, spotting Mr. Al Roustom because he was wearing an International Organization for Migration refugee credential around his neck.

All that remains from the ruins of Mr. Al Roustom’s life he keeps in a white plastic bag from the migration agency — his Syrian military identification, his United Nations papers, his travel records, his I-94 form admitting him to the country. The award-winning poems he wrote were destroyed in Syria.

The first job Church World Service found for him was, appropriately enough, at a moving company. Alex Minz, who owns White Glove Moving in Bayonne, N.J., said he liked to hire refugees because he, too, was one. He left the former Soviet Union for Israel as a teenager and then settled in the United States. “We see it as a holy thing,” he said.

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Because the hours were too unpredictable, Mr. Al Roustom found another job through a neighbor, baking pita overnight at Toufayan, an Armenian family company in Ridgefield, N.J.

Hoping to ease the transition for other Syrians, he has volunteered to move furniture into a new refugee family’s apartment, and in August he and his wife, Suha, hosted a welcome feast for the newest Syrian families in Jersey City.

“It’s like taking someone from a very small, dark room to a very, very big world,” Mr. Al Roustom said. “This is why I want to help others go through what I have gone through.”

Mahmoud Mahmoud, the director for Church World Service in Jersey City, said that though Mr. Al Roustom’s refugee application was probably helped because of his son’s special needs, he did not exploit that. “Through all his personal circumstances, every adversity he had to face, he has not let any single obstacle deter him from moving forward,” Mr. Mahmoud said.

Not every refugee has adapted as quickly.

Mohamed Darbi, 42, came with his wife and three children at the end of July, and said he was dismayed at his apartment, which seemed rundown.

Mr. Darbi, a carpenter from Syria who fled in 2012, was grateful to be alive but anxious over not being able to find work to pay rent once the money from Church World Service ran out. He had, Mr. Mahmoud said, turned down a dishwashing job.

Mr. Darbi said he was heartened that his son, Shaker, 5, and daughters, Nabiha, 13, and Hajar, 12, were enjoying school.

“This is the end of our journey,” he said alongside his wife, Amira, a former high school physics teacher in Syria. “But they have their entire future ahead of them.”

Mr. Al Roustom said sometimes refugees might come across as frustrated

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because they were overwhelmed.

“The C.W.S. is not a magic lamp,” he said. “And Mahmoud is not the genie that would make your wishes his command. I tell people not to be scared and to have patience and to work hard. And perhaps rely on the support you’re given, but not to overuse it and abuse it.”

To dispel security concerns about the refugees, Mr. Mahmoud met with lawmakers in Washington recently — and took Mr. Al Roustom with him.

At a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee about the security and the cost of the refugee program, Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, introduced Mr. Al Roustom to the panel. “He is not a terrorist, and he’s not a fiscal drain on America,” Mr. Durbin said. “We should be proud that our country has welcomed Mr. Al Roustom and his family. That is what our country’s refugee settlement program is all about.”

On the train home, Mr. Al Roustom received a joyous call from his wife. Mr. Mahmoud heard the conversation in Arabic:

“She said to Hussam: ‘It’s ironic to imagine that just a few months ago you were in a refugee camp. And now, you’re inside the doors of the United States Congress.’ ”

Rasha Arabi contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on October 14, 2015, on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: For Some Syrian Refugees, Life in U.S. Has Already Begun .

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