Iraqis at home in Midlands

Mohammed al-Kadhim and his wife and two sons, who are more accustomed to Baghdad's 120-degree summers, now find themselves staring into the face of their first full Omaha winter.

“That's scary,” he said, laughing. “But we've survived three wars.”

The Iraqi refugees, who were resettled here earlier this year, also have found warmth in their reception. Al-Kadhim, 43, said the family requested Omaha at the urging of one of his wife's relatives, an Iraqi-born Omahan who touted the city as peaceful and easy to adjust to. “And he was right.”

Similar decisions have helped bring a modest rise in the number of refugees from war-battered Iraq to Nebraska and Iowa recently, and still larger numbers may be ahead.

The United States has long been criticized for taking in only a fraction of the millions of people put to flight after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The Bush administration said tighter security after 9/11 slowed the flow until procedures could be streamlined. Critics, such as war protesters and refugee advocacy groups, saw a lack of will and a White House desire to downplay the war's trauma.

The refugee intake began increasing two years ago, from about 200 annually in the middle years of the decade to almost 19,000 in the fiscal year just ended, the government says.

Nebraska and Iowa are not exactly magnets for these refugees; most have gone to Michigan, California and Illinois. But the future is likely to bring more to the Midlands — especially Lincoln, now home to about 1,000 Iraqi natives.

“We do have a pretty established Iraqi community here,” said Seth Odegaard, who directs refugee work for Lincoln-based Catholic Social Services, one of three official resettlement agencies operating in Nebraska.

It's reasonable to expect more Iraqis here as the number grows nationally, he said, although the recession's lingering effects — the resettlement process puts a premium on getting the new arrivals into jobs — and the byzantine refugee process make exact predictions impossible.

“Sometimes I'm thoroughly confused about how it all works out in the end, but it does,” Odegaard said.

Al-Kadhim counts his family lucky.

He said he grew up in Baghdad, Iraq's sprawling capital, where his parents had settled after meeting and marrying in the United States in the 1950s.

He survived the Iran-Iraq War and the Persian Gulf War while in his teens and 20s, and said he was working in administration for the United Nations in 2003 when its headquarters was truck-bombed, one of the first big suicide attacks of the current war. Over the next two years, bombings and kidnappings became “a daily event,” he said.

“In Baghdad, we almost gave up. We thought we wouldn't survive.” In 2005, he said, the family fled to neighboring Jordan.

Al-Kadhim and his family spent four years there, uncertain of their status and increasingly crowded. Some 2 million Iraqi refugees — most living in Jordan and Syria, with no right to work — still await their fate as their private resources dwindle and their children go unschooled, said the Migration Policy Institute, a nonprofit research group based in Washington.

Although Iraq is calmer now than at the height of the war, bloodshed continues and many provinces are limiting where returnees may live, the institute said. Jordan and Syria, meanwhile, are tightening rules on refugees, worried that local resentment is rising and that the Iraqis' living arrangements will morph into permanent settlements, like those the Palestinians formed after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

“I didn't see any chance of getting back to Iraq, because of the situation there,” al-Kadhim said, and “Jordan is a small country with limited resources.”

To resettle somewhere permanently, most Iraqi refugees must apply with the U.N. refugee agency, be screened and hope for acceptance by a third country — a process badly backlogged. However, al-Kadhim was able to apply under a separate U.S. government program aimed at Iraqis considered to be at high risk because of their perceived connections to Americans.

After 10 months of interviews and paperwork, he said, his family flew into Chicago, then on to Omaha the next morning. It was the last week of January.

Still in Jordan, he said, are his mother, two sisters and their families, while another sister remains in Baghdad.

“Of course we miss our family and friends. But life's not perfect,” al-Kadhim said from a west Omaha apartment last week. “It's OK. We're getting to know new people.”

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. 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.

That echoes a familiar historical pattern: A few brave immigrants settle in a pocket of the Midlands, they encourage family and neighbors from the old country to follow, and soon there is a Nebraska town like Prague, full of transplanted Czechs, or a Gothenburg, full of Swedes, or a Little Italy neighborhood in Omaha.

Nebraska's Iraqi-born population numbered about 700 in the 2000 Census. Most of them live in Lincoln, thanks to a surge of refugees after the 1991 gulf war. Iowa had about 150.

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.

The resettlement experience, officials say, can be especially tough for Iraqis, many of whom were professionals with middle-class dreams in their home country, then had to start from scratch in America with the additional psychological burden of war-zone memories.

“For many, there is a matter of pride involved,” said Vandenberg, the refugee manager in Omaha. Some once held positions of power and now find themselves near the bottom, he said. Some, such as doctors now working in assembly plants, have had to radically adjust expectations.

Al-Kadhim has two part-time consultant jobs, one with the University of Nebraska Medical Center, working with its foreign patients, and one with an international labor rights group. His wife, Hadeel Haider, 40, has just started a part-time personnel job at Sears. One son is a freshman, the other a senior at Omaha Burke High School.

“They're getting straight A's,” their father said, and the elder son is pondering college: “maybe pre-med.”

“Life is much more organized and stable than it was. Now we can plan for our future. We have ambitions to have better jobs ... and be a positive part of the community.” He said they plan to seek U.S. citizenship once they are eligible, in about four years.

“We very much like this city,” he said. “It's a very easygoing city. People are nice.

“...We are very, very happy.”

Contact the writer:

444-1140, roger.buddenberg@owh.com

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