Iraqi Refugees Continued

Meet Murtaja Kamal Aldeen, a 26-year-old Iraqi refugee living in San Jose:

Living in a spare room in an elderly uncle’s house, Mr. Aldeen, like many refugees, rides an emotional roller coaster. Sometimes he lives the euphoria of escaping a nightmare, and sometimes he plunges into the sadness of having left his family, and all that is familiar, behind.
“I feel lonely,” he said over a chicken dinner recently. “I need friends; I need American friends. Maybe after 10 years or even 5, I will have the life I always dreamed about — living safe, living well, living with all my family in a healthy environment.”

Most immigrants spend their first six months happy — buoyed by having made it to the land of their new dreams, she said. After that, the expenses and other difficulties of daily life often bring despair.

Meanwhile Nick Kristof writes about Iraq:

The dirty little secret of the Iraq war isn’t in Baghdad or Basra. Rather, it’s found in the squalid brothels of Damascus and the poorest neighborhoods of East Amman.

Some two million Iraqis have fled their homeland and are now sheltering in run-down neighborhoods in surrounding countries. These are the new Palestinians, the 21st-century Arab diaspora that threatens the region’s stability.

Many youngsters are getting no education, and some girls are pushed into prostitution, particularly in Damascus. Impoverished, angry, disenfranchised, unwanted, these Iraqis are a combustible new Middle Eastern element that no one wants to address or even think about.

Iraqi refugees are hard to count but may now amount to 8 percent of Jordan’s population of six million. The average Jordanian family, which opposed the war in the first place, is now bearing a cost that may be as much as $1,000 per year for providing for the refugees.

In contrast, last year the United States took in only 1,608 Iraqis. European countries have done better, but they believe that America created the refugee crisis and should take the lead in resolving it.