More than half the nation’s governors this week said they wouldn’t accept Syrian refugees for resettlement after last week’s terrorist attacks in Paris. They’re powerless to stop the resettlement of refugees within their states, but they’re effectively saying no to people such as Fares, a Syrian who escaped war and now lives in Maine.
‘A family of refugees’
Fares and his family are no strangers to seeking safety from war.
His grandparents ended up in Syria more than 100 years ago as they sought refuge from the Balkan Wars that were roiling the then-Ottoman Empire.
In 2006, Fares was living in Beirut, Lebanon, after finishing college when war broke out there involving Israel, Lebanon and the terrorist group Hezbollah. He left and returned to his family’s home in Damascus, Syria’s capital.
In 2013, Fares and his then-pregnant wife left Damascus as the Syrian civil war escalated and life became more dangerous. Today, Fares, his wife and their 2½-year-old son live in the Portland area. His mother and sister have left Syria, too.
“We are a family of refugees,” Fares said this week. (Fares still has family members in Syria, so his name has been changed out of concern for their safety.)
Nearly 4.3 million people from Syria have left their country and registered as refugees with the United Nations, and the U.N. estimates nearly 11 million people inside Syria need humanitarian assistance. Of the 85,000 refugees the United States plans to admit from throughout the world over the next year, President Barack Obama’s administration says it will take in at least 10,000 from Syria.
Fares, 35, is part of another group — the more than 50,000 Syrians who have sought asylum in 90 countries since the start of the Syrian civil war. But he’s familiar with what refugees go through as they seek help through the U.N., apply for resettlement, then establish a new life away from home.
“It’s not easy to be uprooted,” he said.
A miserable situation
Fares has gone from helping refugees start the resettlement process to resettling himself.
From 2009-2013, he worked for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees’ Damascus operation, where more than 300,000 Iraqis registered as refugees and started the resettlement process.
As civil war took root in 2011 in Syria, well before ISIS as we know it infiltrated much of the country, work and everyday life became more difficult and more risky.
“A lot of my friends got either arrested, tortured or killed by the Syrian regime,” Fares said. “It started to become less safe than before.”
The Syrian government set up checkpoints throughout the city, impeding traffic. The soldiers manning checkpoints were suspicious of U.N. workers.
“Before I left, the situation was quite miserable,” he said. “To reach your office would take a very long time.”
At work, “they would ask us to close the shutters because there were explosions around. It became quite dangerous,” he said.
Increasingly, Fares would work from home.
He had friends encounter the horrors of repression.
One friend, Omar Arnous, a dentist, was arrested along with his wife and son, then age 2. Arnous’ wife and son were released, but Arnous remains in prison to this day and no one knows where.
Another friend, Bassel Shehadeh, had returned to Syria after receiving a Fulbright scholarship to study film in the U.S. He was teaching people how to document their experiences — demonstrations against the regime, the dangers of war — when he was attacked by government forces in Homs and killed.
As the Assad government continued its checkpoint crackdown in Damascus, one of Fares’ cousins was pregnant.
“She couldn’t make it to the hospital because of all the checkpoints along the way,” he said.
She arrived just in time to deliver her baby, but she didn’t make it to the delivery room. She had her baby with the help of a hospital janitor, Fares said.
Fares’ wife was pregnant at the time with their son.
“I reached a point where I felt this is too risky for me and my family to stay there,” he said.
They traveled to Jordan to secure tourist visas from the U.S. embassy in Amman. When they were finally able to leave Damascus, the city’s international airport was closed, so they had to travel to Beirut by cab in order to fly to the U.S. With all the checkpoints, a 2½-hour drive became a six- or eight-hour cab ride.
“You would have two suitcases, and you would try to put your life in it, in those two suitcases,” Fares said.
There were things Fares had to leave behind — the paintings his father, an artist, had made, for example — and people.
“You wouldn’t know when you would be able to go back,” he said. “It’s not easy because you know there are some people whom you wouldn’t be able to see anymore in your life.”
Temporarily protected
In February 2013, Fares and his wife arrived in Boston, where he studied one year during college. They made their way to Maine, where they had friends.
“I fell in love with New England. The people here are super nice. They’re down to earth,” Fares said. “When it was time for us to leave Syria, I told my wife that if we were to go back to the United States, let’s go to New England.”
Fares applied for Temporary Protected Status, a designation available to Syrians, and work authorization in July 2013. It took him about a year to receive both. The Temporary Protected Status allowed him to seek work authorization sooner than he would have been able to under the traditional asylum process.
Fares applied for asylum in December 2013. He said he was lucky to receive the help of a lawyer through the Cumberland Legal Aid Clinic.
“Because I worked for the United Nations, I knew how much people struggled when you ask them for identification or papers or certification or whatever,” he said. “So I had prepared myself and brought every single document that I would have a need for prior to my arrival in the United States.”
Fares and his wife received asylum a month ago, nearly two years after applying.
Asylum seekers and refugees
Asylum seekers and refugees are seeking protected status in a new country. While refugees start the process from abroad, asylum seekers have already landed in their destination country.
Asylum seekers must apply within a year of arriving in the U.S., and it can often take months to assemble the application and all needed documentation.
Asylum seekers then have to wait even longer before they can work. (Refugees are authorized to work once they arrive in the U.S.) They must wait 150 days from the date they submit their asylum application before applying for work authorization. In 2014, more than 2,300 Syrians had asylum applications pending in the U.S., according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.
A year with no work
In the 16 months he spent in the U.S. without being able to work, Fares volunteered as an interpreter, taught English at the Parkside Neighborhood Center in Portland, volunteered at Catholic Charities and helped to coordinate a Portland-area program that connects new arrivals with services and other needed help, including basics such as furniture.
Fares and his wife had some savings when they arrived, so they didn’t have to rely on city-provided General Assistance. But they came close to needing it.
“It’s just that the whole process should get expedited,” Fares said, “and this is how the state could avoid having the pressure to assist asylum seekers.”
For example, Fares and his wife had to go through screening when they secured their tourist visas; they had to go through much of the same screening again as part of the asylum process.
They had to rely on their Maine friends for some key assistance.
“As a newcomer, if we hadn’t known those people here in Maine, we wouldn’t be able to rent an apartment or rent anywhere because you would have to have someone back you up and say, ‘We know this person,’” he said.
Most immigrants he knows also could use some help to navigate the tax filing system.
Today, Fares works on call as an interpreter as he pursues a master’s degree in marketing online from Boston University and looks for full-time work. (His undergraduate degree is in computer science.)
His wife, who has a MBA, works for a business in Portland.
When he hears U.S. politicians question the refugee screening process, he knows what it takes to clear it.
“If someone thought that they might cause harm to someone here, whoever says that is blaming USCIS and the FBI and whoever else for not doing their job well,” Fares said.
Those leaving Syria have a simple motive in mind, Fares said.
“Ninety-nine percent of them are Syrian refugees who are seeking places to raise their kids,” he said.