DEARBORN, Michigan — Abdulsalam tried to leave Syria twice. The first time he did so legally, gathering his papers and taking his wife and three sons to the Jordanian border. Turned away, they were forced to seek shelter in a nearby mosque with shattered windows, using blankets left by other refugees to keep warm during the winter nights.
The second time they bypassed the authorities, driving near the Jordanian border in the middle of the night to join the hundreds of others making the five-hour passage on foot through rugged, steep terrain. Some in the group served as scouts, surging ahead to look for gunmen. At times, gunfire forced everyone to the ground.
“It’s not a game,” Abdulsalam says of the journey, in which some succumbed to injury or exhaustion. “You pass or you die.”
That was February 2012. Today Abdulsalam’s family lives in a small, cream-colored house in Dearborn. They’ve got a small garden where they grow vegetables, a grey Honda minivan donated by local volunteers, and a sparsely decorated living room with a flat-screen TV, which Abdulsalam watched until 11 on election night — with minimal interest.
“I would like to congratulate President-elect Trump,” says Abdulsalam, who like others interviewed prefers to use his first name only out of fears for those back home. “I hope America will thrive during his presidency. Trump is human; surely he has a heart, he has feelings. Surely he will feel for us Syrians who are here and those who aren’t.”
Abdulsalam is one of the nearly 1,900 Syrian refugees to arrive in Michigan since 2011, when civil war broke out in Syria. And like many of his peers, U.S. politics is not his chief concern. In the aftermath of the presidential election, when many Americans were engrossed in a national conversation about the country’s future, Abdulsalam and other Syrian refugees maintained a faith in the nation they say restored their hope and sense of security.
After Michigan went red during the presidential election, Syrian refugees in its southeast corner received an outpouring of support. A local Muslim community center catering mainly to Syrians was flooded with calls of solidarity after the results. The Syrian American Rescue Network, a nonprofit geared toward helping refugees, saw a 30 percent increase in volunteers in the days immediately following.
Weeks after the election, Abdulsalam is still genuinely awed by how he’s been received from Americans in his host country. His wife, Nadya, never gets a dirty look for wearing a hijab, he says. Their three sons — Mohammad, 14, Yousef, 12, and Khaled, 8 — aren’t bullied for speaking Arabic. The teachers at school, he jokes, might just care about his kids more than he does.
“When I got here, it was surprise after surprise,” says Abdulsalam, who used to sell auto parts in Syria but now works in landscaping and house painting. “When I get to the cashier, for example, he greets me. As I leave, he wishes me a good day or a good night! It really gives you a great feeling about living here.”
The positive perspectives of at least a handful of Syrian refugees in southeastern Michigan — the state home to the most Syrians refugees per capita — may seem counterintuitive given statements and actions made by local and national politicians.
In September, citing national security and public health concerns, local Republican leader L. Brooks Patterson announced intentions to sue to prevent more Syrian refugees from arriving in Oakland County, just north of Dearborn. In October, leaders from a township in the county approved a measure to stop participating in the Syrian refugee resettlement program. The state’s governor was the first to call for a pause in admitting Syrian refugees.
The local voices mirror national public opinion — an August poll found just 36 percent of Americans support accepting Syrian refugees. And they echo President-elect Donald Trump, who during his campaign pledged to end the acceptance of refugees from Syria and deport those who’ve already arrived. “I’m putting the people on notice that are coming here from Syria as part of a mass migration, that if I win, they are going back,” he said at a rally in New Hampshire last year. He’s also called for some form of national registry for Muslims, though he’s since backed away from his claims.
In some cases, anti-Muslim sentiment has led to threatening behavior. The Southern Poverty Law Center recorded 900 reports of harassment and intimidation in the 10 days after the election, many aimed at Muslims. Mosques throughout the country have received threatening letters. At the University of Michigan, a student was approached by a stranger who threatened to set her on fire with a lighter if she didn’t remove her hijab.
These actions fill Abdulsalam and other refugees with sadness, but not with fear for their safety or their future. Fear was the feeling Abdulsalam says he felt when he heard the roar of Syrian government planes over his home, or when he approached border guards, uncertain if he was on a blacklist. Fear was wondering whether his children would come home again from school in Jordan with blue bruises on their legs, marks left by the whip of a teacher’s cable.
If southeastern Michigan’s refugees have a message for the American people, it’s that they are here to flee terror, not inflict it. “We are the first victims,” says Nedal, whose Syrian family was among the first wave of recent refugees to arrive in Michigan in the summer of 2015. They were forced to leave their farm in Daraa, Syria after Nedal was imprisoned for a peaceful protest at a university. He was tortured for a week. “Everyday I died a thousand deaths,” he says.
What keeps fear at bay for Nedal and others is a faith in American institutions — a belief in the constitution, in the checks and balances of power. “It feels safe, as though justice is ever present here,” says Nedal, whose name means “struggle” in Arabic. “It’s not a dictatorial place.”
His thoughts are shared by Maaz, a Syrian refugee who arrived to southeastern Michigan in August with his wife, two sons and a daughter. A distributor of clothing in Damascus, he decided to leave the city after repeated bomb raids and government searches of his home. When his wife, Abir, arrived at the Detroit airport, she couldn’t stop crying about leaving her family.
Now she’s busy learning English — sprinkling her Arabic with quick “Ohmygods” — and entertaining a constant stream of visitors in their home in Madison Heights, Michigan. He’s working as an electrician at a local factory owned by Syrian-Americans and embracing American rites of passage like taking his kids to Chuck E. Cheese. Their biggest fear isn’t that Trump will deport them, it’s that he’ll cut Medicaid, which they need for eldest son, Mohamed, who has cerebral palsy.
“I don’t think anything will happen to us here,” Maaz says. “This is country built on laws,” which he intends to follow “100 percent.”
His faith in his own future is well-placed, according to Jennifer Quigley, advocacy strategist for refugee protection at Human Rights First, a Washington nonprofit group.
“One of the key components of international law as it relates to refugees is the principle of non-refoulement, which means you can’t return them to a country where they could be persecuted,” Quigley says. “The only time refugees have faced deportation is when they are convicted of a crime.” And even in that case, they could still make a legal case to stay, she says.
Quigley and other advocates are more worried about two other scenarios: the implementation of a database targeting Muslims, and the suspension of the refugee program from Syria and other Muslim majority countries.
Quigley fears Trump could resurrect a program implemented after 9/11 called the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, or NSEERS. The program screened people from 25 countries, all of which were majority Muslim nations except North Korea. It required males 16 and up from those countries to be photographed, fingerprinted and registered with local immigration officials once a year. The program only applied to those holding temporary visas, meaning it wouldn’t apply to refugees. But advocates say that could easily be changed. In November, a senior adviser to Trump was photographed with him carrying a document that called for reintroduction of the program.
Tweaking NSEERS so that it screens for all Muslims could be challenging, advocates argue, since it’s unclear how to develop an accurate religious test. It would also be unconstitutional, Quigley says. Terminating the Syrian refugee program, however, would be far more straightforward.
“It’s 100 percent the discretion of the president as to who he brings into the country as part of the refugee resettlement program,” Quigley says.
In the meantime, the local leaders in southeastern Michigan have little say about where Syrian refugees settle. The federal government works with refugee resettlement groups across the country to place refugees in communities. And while the State Department requires that those resettlement agencies consult quarterly with state and local government officials, it’s ultimately the federal government that decides where the refugees end up.
The Toll of War
The situation in Syria is the largest humanitarian crisis since World War II. More than 400,000 people have been killed and at least 12 million displaced in the conflict. In recent weeks, the internet has been flooded with pleas from children and others trapped in Aleppo, one of Syria’s largest cities.
Every few days, the refugees in southeast Michigan lose a loved one to the war, says Rasha Basha, founder of the Syrian American Rescue Network. Nedal says he’s been thinking a lot about the consequences of the U.S. stopping its Syrian refugee program. “It saddens me,” he says. His parents are still at his farm, watching over his pomegranate trees. Like other Syrian refugees, he fears that if his family members don’t get out, they could be imprisoned, killed in air raids or targeted by extremists. He’s already lost a 17-year-old cousin to ISIS; the group posted photos on Facebook that show the moment before and after he was shot.
The U.S. has taken in about 17,000 Syrian refugees since 2011, with the highest numbers settling in California, Michigan and Texas, respectively. Far more have settled in the Middle East and Europe. Turkey registered 2.5 million Syrian refugees in 2015 — the most of any country. Germany alone received nearly 116,000 in 2015, according the U.N. refugee agency.
[ The tragic numbers behind Syria’s refugees.]
Critics of the Syrian refugee program in the U.S. say the vetting process is not sufficient, complicated by a dearth of data on Syrians. The Obama administration counters that while not foolproof, the process is extensive and effective. Since 9/11, only three resettled refugees have been arrested for planning terrorist activities.
Before the U.S. even begins to screen refugees, they must be referred from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees or occasionally a U.S. embassy or NGO. Only 1 percent of refugees make it through that screening, a process which takes four to 10 months and multiple interviews.
The U.S. phase of the process involves additional interviews, a health screening and multiple security checks by the FBI, the Department of Defense and other agencies, according to the State Department. The vetting typically takes an additional 18 to 24 months. All the while, applicants must wait in camps or other kinds of living quarters in Jordan, Turkey or other countries where they first applied for refugee status.
“If there’s any doubt, they don’t get in,” says Sean de Four, who oversees refugee resettlement for Samaritas, the largest refugee resettlement organization in Michigan. His group is a local affiliate of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service and Episcopal Migration Ministries, two of the nine national organizations that work with the federal government to resettle refugees.
Samaritas helps refugees find their bearings, offering job placement assistance, connecting them with English lessons and benefits and distributing a modest sum of federal funds to cover rent, utilities and food. The funds typically last only for the first three months, and amount to about $925 per refugee.
“At the end of 180 days, 75 percent are self-sufficient,” he says.
Syrian refugees are able to build a new life in Michigan in part due to an established Syrian community in the area that immediately came to their aid. “I have never seen a cultural group mobilize as quickly and effectively as the Syrian American community,” de Four says.
It also doesn’t hurt that they tend to be highly skilled. “The first wave of refugees who arrive in any group tends to be more educated,” he says. Among Syrians in particular, “you are going to find a lot of doctors, engineers and scientists.”
Nedal, Moaz and Abdulsalam say they take pride in working and paying taxes. Maaz insists that other countries actually give refugees too much aid. They talk excitedly about their American dreams — starting companies and restaurants, mastering English, sending their kids to college.
In their optimism, de Four sees parallels to all Americans.
“The refugee experience reflects America in ways we don’t really recognize,” he says. “We reflect in our American values a resiliency, a need to push forward, a can-do attitude.”
Abdulsalam’s American dream is for his sons to pursue a profession that allows them to give back to their new country. That should be easy, he says, since they’ve got a school with luxuries like heat and air conditioning and teachers who care if students miss class. He was alarmed one day after hearing his children were taking swimming lessons in the dead of winter. After going to school to investigate, he was stunned to find an indoor pool.
“If this was my school, the least I would be is a great doctor,” he says, chuckling.
So far, his sons are on the right track. In the boys’ bedroom, Khaled’s “student of the month” award is tucked into a corner of a mirror. The boys giggle as they pull out their homework, pointing to several “100 percents.”
“America is a nation of greatness,” their father says. “I came here, and even if they were to kick all Arabs out of this country, I would still feel only positive things towards America. Believe me, because I’ve seen goodness here.”
Every so often he breaks out into a hesitant smile, asking reporters if they share his convictions.
Lydia Chebbine contributed reporting to this article.
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Syrian Refugees in the U.S. Maintain Hope After Trump?s Win originally appeared on usnews.com
