On July 19, 2016, Mohammad Al Jarboai, his wife, and three children pushed a loaded luggage cart into the crowded waiting area of Terminal 5 at O’Hare International Airport. They had just landed after a 13-hour flight from Amman, Jordan. On the right, people were chatting at a cluster of tables next to a McDonald’s. Al Jarboai wondered what the people were saying, but the crowd pushed him onward. A man near the door caught sight of the family, walked over in no hurry, and extended a hand. “Welcome,” he said, before pointing the family to a taxi and giving the driver an address.
The couches are now empty, the ruins destroyed. When the war started in 2013, Al Jarboai fled Syria for a small Jordanian city called Madaba. He found work building homes on the outskirts of town, got paid poorly, and risked being discovered, detained, and sent back to Syria. While Al Jarboai worked, his oldest son started going to school. First, he would clean the room until the Jordanian students finished class. Then he would study for two hours. Then he would be sent home.
Al Jarboai is one of five million people who have fled Syria since 2013 and one of 84,994 refugees who came to the United States during the last year of the Obama administration. Six months after he arrived at O’Hare, a crowd of people holding signs and flags marched by the airport McDonald’s to protest the president’s travel ban, and dozens of lawyers sat at the cluster of tables with the families of passengers who had been detained. But while the protesters marched and judges handed down rulings, what had happened to Al Jarboai?
Rents in neighborhoods like Rogers Park, West Ridge, Edgewater, Uptown, and Albany Park that have businesses, doctors, and community centers serving refugee communities have gone up as much as $100 per month in the last two years, according to a number of landlords. At least four refugee families in Uptown had to leave their building when rents went up following a gut rehab. Tom Junkovic, a landlord who rents about a quarter of his 200 units to refugees, said that Edgewater is the new Lincoln Park. Self-sufficiency is elusive.
In Hyde Park, a religious group provided student-rate housing for two of the families, which Visser said is how they were able to afford the neighborhood. An organization called the Syrian Community Network provides six months of rental assistance to every Syrian refugee in the city. In years past, the Network also provided cars. Sirat, a Hyde Park-based Muslim organization, offers forgiveness on the loans refugees take out to pay for travel to the United States. Even with this assistance, however, Visser tells of a father who must work three jobs—one full-time, one on the weekend, and a cleaning gig—to make ends meet. Like many newly arrived refugee families, when he started making enough money to barely get by, he lost his cash benefits from the government. Visser said that she and her volunteers “had no idea how minimal the support is.”
Despite the finely-tuned resettlement apparatus that accounts for everything from medical tests to flights to housing to food stamps, where that extra support comes from—and where people end up because of it—is often a surprise. Amr Othman Agha, 39, who fled Syria in 2013, was among the refugees who arrived in the U.S. during the summer of 2016. He lived in Sacramento, California, for several days before moving by himself to Oakland. For Agha, America was the iron doors and alarm systems that he saw on every home in his new neighborhood. America was the feeling of being told that it wasn’t safe to go out after 6 PM. America was paying $500 to share a single bedroom with three other people. After six months, he decided he would go back to either Syria or Egypt. But as Agha prepared to leave, a friend of a friend in Chicago named David Graubard told him to come visit before making up his mind.
