‘WE’RE NOT THE BAD GUYS’
Bay Area refugees tell of fleeing violence and war in their home countries
PALO ALTO >> The Aleppo that Toukhig Arabian remembers was a peaceful place. It’s where kids spent summer days in swimming pools, where she sang in choir, took art and piano classes and eventually got a university degree in English literature.
But when the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, the once bustling city came crashing down, forcing millions like Arabian to flee without looking back.
“If you would’ve told anyone from my generation or younger that Aleppo would become a place with bombs falling on our houses, helicopters hovering over our neighborhoods, car bombs exploding and snipers shooting from the rooftops — there’s no way,” Arabian said. “Aleppo was the safest place on earth.”
Like thousands before her, Arabian found refuge in America. But today, journeys like hers are becoming rare.
With the Trump administration clamping down on the number of refugees resettling in the U.S. and the Supreme Court weighing a decision on President Donald Trump’s third travel ban, once lengthy lists of refugees cleared to immigrate here have shrunk, and resettlement agencies are unsure of what’s in store for those still determined to come.
The number of refugees settling in the U.S. has dropped significantly — about 383 refugees were resettled in California between October 2017 and January,
“Even though I didn’t have any skills and my English was very poor, I came here and worked hard. We’re immigrants, we’re not the bad guys. We come here and contribute to the country.”
— Vietnam refugee Quy Lee
compared with 3,200 during the same period in the previous year, according to the most recent data from the state’s Department of Social Services.
State Department data shows the U.S. resettled an estimated 15,500 Syrian refugees in 2016 toward the end of Barack Obama’s presidency. As of April this year, the Trump administration had admitted only 11 Syrians, according to NPR.
Arabian and other refugees who settled in the Bay Area are sharing their experiences in a series of intimate storytelling events known as the “Made Into America” project. On Thursday night at Palo Alto’s Mitchell Park Community Center, she described her family’s decision to flee Aleppo, after waiting for weeks as the bombs grew closer and closer. They flew to Armenia, where her parents were from, and then to the U.S. Eventually, Arabian, her husband and their two children settled in Millbrae.
“I still wonder why I’m still alive and someone else isn’t. I still have some survivor’s guilt,” she said. “But I know God has a plan for all of us. And this is his plan for me.”
Personal gratitude was a common theme Thursday night as most of the speakers shared their refugee stories for the first time publicly. But today’s political climate — with its immigration raids, calls for border walls, tighter restrictions on migration — is writing a difficult chapter in their stories.
“The current situation in the U.S. is very bad for immigrants,” said Ghezae Kidane, a Dublin resident
who escaped his native Eritrea in 2006 as the government was forcing young people into mandatory national service that the United Nations described in some cases as a “crime of enslavement.”
Kidane, then a recent college graduate, and his wife each paid a smuggler $3,000 to flee to neighboring Sudan, where they lived in a refugee camp for Eritreans and were granted refugee status by the United Nations. Kidane then traveled to Belgium to complete a master’s program on a full scholarship, before the couple was granted asylum in the U.S. They settled in the Bay Area in 2008, where they’re now raising two young children.
His family dispersed; Kidane’s parents remain in Eritrea, and the 38-year-old has siblings in Sweden, Germany, Switzerland and Dallas. Two other siblings are still stuck in the Eritrean National Service, and he lost two cousins as they attempted to escape Eritrea by boat.
But Kidane, a clinical lab scientist for Kaiser and Sutter Health, is hopeful for his future in the U.S. “We’re free,” he said. Supreme Court justices are weighing whether
Trump’s third installment of the travel ban — which bans refugees from five Muslim-majority countries as well as North Korea and Venezuela — is unconstitutional.
The administration last year capped the annual number of refugees admitted to the U.S. at 45,000 — the lowest of any White House since the president began setting the ceiling on refugee admissions in 1980, according to news reports.
The numbers are unsettling for refugees such as Quy Lee, who started a new life in the U.S. after fleeing Vietnam.
With $10 in his pocket, Lee landed in 1979 in Houston, where he convinced a skeptical factory manager to hire him at an oil rubber fittings factory despite his poor English. He studied electrical engineering at the University of Washington, eventually getting a job at IBM.
“Even though I didn’t have any skills and my English was very poor, I came here and worked hard,” he said. “We’re immigrants, we’re not the bad guys. We come here and contribute to the country.”