April 13, 2005
by Alexa Smith

AMMAN, Jordan – "We've already lost our future," Maria Yosef says with passion. "We're thinking now about our sons, about the children."

Yosef is addressing a group of women in the parlor of St. Ephraim's Syrian Orthodox Church, a Jordanian parish that is helping about 800 families of Iraqi Christians who would like to emigrate but have been refused visas or put on a waiting list that stretches all the way back to the first U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Yosef has 10 children, and has watched them grow up almost homeless.

Her sons, aged 18, 25, 26 and 27 years, can't get jobs because they are not Jordanian. As theoretically temporary residents, they are ineligible for work permits.

Yosef herself moonlights (illegally) as a housekeeper, sometimes working 10-hour days. When she gets home, exhausted, she says, her sons weep with shame because they cannot help her financially.

"How can they build a future? How can they get a house? There's nothing here. The people here are, honestly, lost," Yosef says.

She looks at the faces of her listeners. None quarrels with her.

Countless Iraqi Christians are in the same boat: Living in a sort of "limbo." Unable to emigrate. Unwilling to return to Iraq. Penniless and fearful in a foreign land. They cannot put down roots in Jordan because the government has made clear that the several hundred thousand Iraqis living inside its borders will have to go home when Iraq is stable.

Every one of the dozen or so women gathered here has applied and reapplied for immigrant visas. To Sweden, the United States, Australia or Canada. And they are told: No. Or Wait.

They are waiting to join family members overseas. Elderly parents are waiting to join grown children in the United States. Middle-aged unmarried sisters hope to join brothers in Australia, where they may finally be able to get a job and earn money. Little kids sit and listen as their mothers sob and their grandmothers wring their hands.

Everyone is waiting to go home, not to an old home, but to a place they've never been before. God knows, they say, there is no kind of life here. But the phone could ring tomorrow. They all know others who have left and started over because they waved goodbye to them at the airport.

Yosef has been refused a visa by the Australian Embassy eight times. She couldn't visit even when her father lay dying in a hospital bed. Her mother is still there, waiting for her daughter to join her. But Yosef is so weary of rejection that she applied to Canada as well – and was turned down there as well, twice so far.

Christina Daud, an 80-something woman, sits quietly, a kerchief tightly pulled across her forehead. She has been refused four times: Twice by the United States, once each by England and Sweden.

She says she really wanted to go to Sweden. She has a 10-month-old grandson, Odescu Ivan, who was born there to a son who got a visa two years ago. She'd like to hold the baby once before she dies.

Twenty-nine-year-old Jinan Slio says: "Here we are all born in war. We've spent our lives in war." She goes through the litany: Iraq invaded Iran, then Kuwait. Then the embargo War again in 1991. And again in 2003. "People are desperate," she says.

Two years ago, Slio had the required medical exams in hope of getting a visa to Australia, where five of her brothers have emigrated. But she hasn't heard a word since then.

A tear slips down her cheek.

Unable to earn money, she cares for her aging parents and keeps the house spotless. She says her days are long: "I'm just sitting. Waiting. Waiting. And waiting. I watch television. I think. Sometimes I come to church. Or visit relatives."

She says she worries about her mother, who was hospitalized last month.

Yosef interjects, "Most people die here."

At the U.S. Embassy, Press Officer Justin Siberell says the visa system is sometimes slow – and some priorities rank higher than others.

If an applicant does not have a sponsor, a relative who is a U.S. citizen, the application will be rejected, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS). Others may apply through the government's visa lottery, which awards 50,000 visas per year. Last year, seven million people applied.

In the sponsor-system, reuniting spouses and small children is the first priority. Uniting adult siblings or adult children is well down the list, and may take four to seven years.

The United Nations High Commission on Human Rights (UNHCR) divides asylum seekers among accepting countries, one of which is the United States.

Jacqueline Parlevliet, UNHCR's senior protection officer, says it's hard to tell whether Iraqi Christians are asylum-seekers or ÈmigrÈs who just want to start over elsewhere. Some are a little of both. UNHCR has designated only 800 Iraqis as refugees, all before the war began.

"After four years in the region, it seems to me that many Iraqis are actually refugees who've never filed a refugee appeal," Parlevliet said in an interview in her Amman office. "But if you talk to them, what they'd experienced just didn't formulate in their minds as persecution."

There are a number of well-documented cases of persecution based on religion.

"It is too early to say that Christians are being persecuted in Iraq (for being Christian)," Parlevliet says. "Anyone can kill you on the street. The judiciary isn't functional. The police are not functional. ... Any sort of minority group may find it hard to feel safe."

Most people came here thinking it would be relatively easy to join relatives abroad. They were wrong.

Hanna Tanous and her husband, Polis Shaheen, have spent eight years waiting for a visa that would permit them to join his parents and other family members living in a household in Chicago.

Theirs is an international family. Polis has two unmarried sisters stuck in Jordan. Hanna has one sister in Paris and another in Sweden.

Iraq is a bad memory. Neighbors there harangued them about their family ties to the United States. Hanna worked as a hotel kitchen supervisor. Polis was a soldier who did clerical work and earned next to nothing.

A family rumored to have militia ties now lives in their house – and may not be willing to give it up should the couple return to Baghdad.

Shaheen's father died after his land was confiscated by Saddam Hussein, who built a palace there. Two of his brothers died in the Iraq-Iran war.

Nobody though reuniting the family would take so long. Shaheen's 80-year-old mother, Katrina Oron, filed a petition to bring her three children to Jordan in February 2002, but so far nothing has happened.

"She's not seen the children," says Tanous. "She says, ‘I just want to see you and then, I die.' All of her sickness, bitterness and despair is because she does not see them."

Bill Strassberger, USCIS's public information officer, says it may be a while longer.

The two daughters – adult unmarried children – will probably come first. The agency is now working on applications filed before March 15, 2001. So it will be about another year before their numbers come up.

For a married son or daughter, the agency is working on applications filed before Jan. 2, 1998 – which may mean a four-year wait for Tanous and her husband.

"There are four million people in the queue," he says sympathetically, referring to the number of pending applications worldwide for visas to the United States. "They're in the queue somewhere."

Even the children are obsessed with the thought of leaving.

Mark, 14, says he wonders: "How long will we be here?"

Mark's 6-year-old sister, Oxana, has no memory of Iraq, so he tries to fill her in, telling her about the house, the garden, the chickens in the yard.

Another sister, Mariana, 10, is preparing for the family's long-awaited move by learning English with her father. "Banana," she says proudly. "Hamburger!"

Presbyterian News Service