Introductory note from Anne:
Dear friends,
Our fellow parishioner Bob Killebrew, who with his wife Pixie came to us from St. Paul’s, Newport News, asked me several months ago if St. Andrew’s has any kind of outreach ministry with immigrants. At the moment, we do not. I asked Bob about his interest in such a ministry, and he told me he’d be glad to write the story of his family’s involvement with reaching out to immigrants. I’m so glad he did. Here it is:
When our daughter served a tour in Afghanistan in 2014, her interpreter, a medical doctor named Abed (not his real name for this article), asked for her help immigrating to the United States under a special program for translators under threat for helping Americans. My wife Pixie and I volunteered to be Abed’s sponsors. Pixie, though, did most of the real work.
Two years later, on a hot summer midnight, Pixie and I met Abed, his wife Hunoon and their four children at the Newport News airport. Only Abed spoke English, but they were all exhilarated to be in their “new” country. Here’s the story of how that worked out.
Just getting here was tough. Despite the official program, it took Abed two years to complete the paperwork, interviews and security checks required to immigrate, which exposed his family to risk by revealing he had been an interpreter. It might not have happened at all, but Pixie badgered US Senator Mark Warner until he asked the State Department for a status report. A week later Abed got permission to immigrate. Without Senator Warner’s intervention, I doubt that Abed would have gotten permission in this “special” program and he and his family would be at great risk today.
To help immigrants negotiate the early stages of their migration, the State Department provides assistance funds through established charities, in Newport News Commonwealth Catholic Charities (CCC). A CCC representative (an immigrant from Iraq) was at the airport with us and took Abed and his family to an apartment in the Denbigh neighborhood with beds made, food in the pantry and a hot ethnic meal waiting for the exhausted family. CCC furnished the food; Pixie had scrounged the furniture. CCC paid the first two months’ rent on the apartment. For the next few months, we took on some of the tasks that CCC would have done, so they could put their (scarce) resources elsewhere. Here are some lessons we learned.
First, the US Immigration System is in complete chaos. Getting someone to the US in 2016 was tough; it would be near impossible today, leaving many of our interpreters and supporters, especially in the Middle East, at grave risk. CCC has taken big cuts in programs, and recent policy changes leave even legal immigrants like Abed at risk of deportation for using SNAP, state insurance for the kids and so on.
We have a much more sizable immigrant community in Newport News than we natives realize, mostly centered on the Denbigh neighborhood where there are a lot of inexpensive apartments; in some areas, women in headscarves appear frequently. Abed and Hunoon found an Afghan community and friends from other countries, and that community is trying hard to fit into the United States. But assimilation is difficult – much harder than we “natives” understand. Some of it is just unfamiliarity: Hunoon, who had never been to school, wouldn’t drink water from the tap until Pixie demonstrated it was safe. Abed never had a bank account – banks are distrusted in Afghanistan. The social security system and all its complexities were bewildering. Even the daily mail was a challenge, with all its giveaways that Abed initially took at face value – it was “official” mail, right?
But some of it is just bewildering bureaucracy, the kind we’ve long adjusted to. Americans are friendly folks, but our society is brusque and loaded with red tape – getting the water bill corrected, for example, or getting an appointment to see a medical professional is a tough process for someone with a limited grasp of the language. With new anti-immigrant regulations, it’s quite possible that some legal migrants have been cut off from SNAP and other programs they need without someone to help them deal with the various social agencies. Sponsors who can take time to help, like Pixie, are essential. Pixie committed hours and hours helping Hunoon and Abed negotiate the red tape of becoming an American; sometimes it bewildered us.
A bright spot was enrolling the four kids in school – Newport News has an excellent English as a Second Language (ESL) program, and they were soon started. (Hunoon commented that the teachers were “so kind” in the US). We can’t say enough good about the Newport News school system. After a year Hunoon observed that her kids were speaking English and Spanish. As with kids everywhere, soccer became the universal language.
Abed, and his other immigrant contemporaries, are enterprising and incredibly hard-working. CCC gets immigrants a job within two weeks of their arrival; Abed found a job after only two days – and then was cheated out of two weeks’ pay. The CCC job turned out to be stacking pork halves at Smithfield at midnight, which he did for a year, damaging his hands and getting by on two or three hours’ sleep a day. Eventually he found a better job, and has recently moved his family to Fredericksburg, Virginia for another, better job and he’s bought a condo. Gradually, Abed and Hunoon and their kids – including a fifth child, a brand-new natural-born citizen – are making it. He has given up his dream of being a doctor in America, as he was in Afghanistan, and is working now for his children’s’ future.
They aren’t out of the woods yet; COVID slowdowns have hit them hard financially, and cuts to social services have hurt, too. Their oldest child – a very bright young lady – is a rising high school senior with college potential, but the family is pretty strapped. But they’re safe from bombs and bullets. He has a job, a mortgage, and car payments, just like all of us. He and others are fighting their way into the American dream, like our ancestors did. It just shouldn’t have to be so hard.
