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We get a glimpse into resettlement experiences of two Iraqi refugee
cases assigned to resettlement contractors in Salt Lake City, Utah, in articles in KSL Broadcasting and Deseret News. An Iraqi woman arrived to an empty apartment. She turned a broken TV that she had scavenged on its side as a makeshift table. An television journalist forced out of the country with his wife and children by Iraqi militia members reports that although the family spoke no English at all, no one met them at the Dallas airport during a flight connection, nor did anyone meet them at the airport once they arrived in Salt Lake City. Instead, a security guard referred them to the airport FBI office.

…Suhad Kudhair and many in her “large family” in Iraq had English language skills and worked with American companies, which labeled them as disloyal to Iraq and attracted threats to their lives, mostly from Iraqi militia. She and her two sons fled to Egypt in 2006, where the process of accomplishing refugee resettlement to the United States took three years. “I told them I have a sister in California. They said California was too expensive, and I was going to Utah.”…

…Once in Utah she worked long hours on a farm, at a day care, as a medical translator, and now works for Catholic Community Services doing what a lot of other Iraqi refugees do once they are established: She is a case manager for new refugees who are in the process of resettlement.

She knows as well as anyone what it is like to arrive in a strange country at the end of 36 hours on airplanes to a place where there are no friends, no family, no job and an apartment with no furniture.

Kudhair said she scavenged a TV set that did not work properly but made a makeshift table when laid on its side. Turned on, the picture tube made an interesting blue glow in the room that people found curious enough they would take pictures of it when they visited the apartment… Read more here

And this about the Iraqi television journalist and his family who were
also resettled to Salt Lake City:

My name is Mohammed Mushib. I live in Salt Lake City, but I was born in Baghdad and lived there until 2007. In Baghdad, I was a television journalist. In Salt Lake City, I am a refugee. Once I reported stories, now I am part of a story…

…I had a nice house, a nice car, and my wife Faeza and I started our family…

…In 2003, the war started. Iraq was in chaos. We did not have a government for one and a half years, so the people established security units for each neighborhood. I was a security guard in my neighborhood. In 2005, the civil war started. The militias killed many people. I lost friends, I lost relatives, there was death all around…

…In February of 2008, the United Nations told us that we could go to the U.S. as refugees…

…We, along with about 20 other families, flew to Turkey, on to New York, then to Dallas, then to Salt Lake City. The other families went different ways in New York, we flew alone to Dallas. We spoke no English. No one met our plane. I saw a salesclerk at the airport who was wearing a hijab. She was from Somalia, and she only spoke a little Arabic. I was very relieved and grateful for her help – she gave us cake and cola and a banana, which she paid for – that I cried. God sent her to us at that moment.

We arrived in Salt Lake City, no one met us. I found the exit, there was no one except a security guard. who pointed me toward the FBI, which I knew from movies. They told me that our contacts from the International Rescue Committee were outside! They took us to a motel for the night, and after 1 or 2 hours of sleep, there was a knock on the door. It was a woman who spoke Arabic and identified herself as the person whose name I had gotten from my brother. She brought us food and welcomed us to Utah. In the morning, our case worker, Travis, took us to our apartment and to WalMart to shop, and our new life began… Read more here

The good news is that Utah and the Salt Lake community has actually taken proactive and creative efforts to help refugees who have advanced skills and degrees – so different from what we saw in nearby California when Iraqi SIVs (Special Immigrant Visa holders) were arriving in Sacramento in late 2009. (In that case state refugee coordinator Thuan Nguyen gave us endless excuses and misreferrals in our attempt to aid two Iraqi engineers whom a resettlement contractor had referred to low-skill, low-pay jobs. In one case that involved a job at a distant food market beginning at 5am before buses operated, and in another case involved a set-up at a gas station where the resettlement contractor first took a relative in to be interviewed before coming out and canceling the SIV refugee’s interview.)

Efforts in Utah involve the New-American Academic Network, which seeks to place refugees with professional credentials in jobs and training that will help them to find proper employment for economic self-sufficiency.

…”As particularly the Iraqi population was coming into the valley, we were experiencing sort of a new phenomenon in the sense that many of the Iraqi population or individuals had training — undergraduate, graduate and professional positions,” said Rosmarie Hunter, special assistant to the president for campus community partnerships at the University of Utah.

“They were coming over as engineers, doctors, lawyers, journalists, but were coming here and being resettled in much the same way where they were going into entry-level positions,” she said, which left some unable to afford to live here, or unable to afford professional testing and retraining needed to work in their profession.

“People were going back, and perhaps in very unsafe circumstances,” Hunter said.

The New American Academic Network was created to help those professionals re-certify to work in their fields of expertise. NAAN is a partnership between the University of Utah, University Neighborhood Partners, the International Center, Workforce Services and resettlement organizations in Utah.

“The main problem is the financial problems for the refuges,” said Muthana Maktouf, also from Iraq. “The NAAN program tries to find other help, other resources, started to find internships for the students.”… Read more here