The Newcomers

by Helen Thorpe

  By the time a refugee family walked into their new home, a case worker had to have secured appropriate housing, arranged for bedding and furniture, provided basic cooking utensils, cleaning supplies, and groceries, and prepared a warm meal of food that the family would find familiar. Much of Troy’s time over the previous two weeks had been spent finding and furnishing the house, which had three bedrooms, plus a full basement. Simply finding a suitable property large enough for this family had taken longer than usual. Even though the family might have preferred a property that was smaller and less expensive, the federal government stipulated how many bedrooms there had to be per number of individuals. In the end, Troy had been able to secure the tan clapboard house only after agreeing to an odd clause in the rental agreement. The case worker always had to cajole property managers into renting to individuals with no rental history, no job, and no Social Security numbers—it took a few weeks for refugees to obtain those. In this case, the manager had been especially reluctant, but he had agreed to rent the property to Troy after charging a higher price for the first half of the year: $2,250 per month. Then the rent would drop to $1,400 if the property was well maintained. “It was such a weird clause and it was so hard to go over it with them,” Troy would say later. “I had to convince them this was basically the only option we could provide.”

  The money Troy had used to secure the house is often called “welcome money,” although it is officially known as “reception and placement funds.” The cash can be used in almost any way that a resettlement agency deems wise. It is not given directly to refugees in case they fall prey to the barrage of advertising they encounter as they enter the developed world. They might use the money to buy material goods like cell phones and television sets, only to discover they had nothing left for housing. Almost every refugee I spoke with told me they feared their case worker had stolen some of their welcome money, although the case workers were able to provide a thorough description of exactly how the money had been spent down to the last penny. In the case of Solomon and Methusella’s family, the African Community Center received cash stipends of $1,025 per individual, meaning that the organization received $1,025 for Timoté and another $9,225 for Beya, Tchiza, and their seven youngest children. The ACC could legally hold on to the money for a period of three months, after which time they had to disburse the remaining funds to the family.

  There was virtually never anything left to disburse. Even before the family’s plane had touched down in Denver, Troy had spent $2,500 on a security deposit to secure the property on Wabash Street. He had also paid $1,400 in prorated rent for the month of September and $1,802 on furniture. Usually, he didn’t spend that much—Troy was good at furnishing a house with used items that cost next to nothing—but by law all the mattresses had to be new, and he was required to buy enough mattresses to sleep ten people. He also used another $362.77 for groceries, cooking utensils, and cleaning supplies. And he purchased a $100 gift card at King Soopers, the local supermarket chain, so that the family could buy more groceries. Troy had tried to create a home with which the family would be pleased, and to that end he had spent a total of $6,224.77. In other words, before the family had even left the airport, more than half their cash was gone—and Troy had been doing this for years and was good at managing money.

  It was close to 2 A.M. by the time Troy and Bizi got everybody to Wabash Street. “The reunion with Gideon was pretty emotional,” Troy recalled. “Beya was superexcited and teary-eyed.” Watching a family reunite always elated Troy and remained the single most rewarding aspect of his job. It was part of the reason why he worked so hard for these people, even though they were angry with him half the time, because he had to tell them things they did not want to hear. Troy wanted to let the family get reacquainted, but before he could leave, he needed to walk through the house with Tchiza and Beya and explain a few things. The housing orientation was perhaps the most critical thing Troy would do that day.

  Hot water exists in America, Troy told the family. They had to be careful with the faucet handle on the left side, especially when bathing small children. Troy asked Gideon to go over the hot-water heater with Tchiza later in more detail. Electricity was another thing Troy wanted to describe. As a general rule, refugees from the Middle East understood matters like electricity and hot water, but refugees from Southeast Asia or Africa did not. This family was familiar with solar power but had never received an electricity bill. Troy showed them how to turn the lights on and off, and mentioned that as long as the lights were burning, it was costing them money. Here is what a smoke alarm sounds like, Troy said—and then he set one off. He wanted every person in the family to know what that earsplitting noise meant, in case it woke them up while they were sleeping.

  He spent most of his time talking about the stove. Neither Beya nor Tchiza had ever owned one before. This was almost always the case for families coming straight from a refugee camp in Africa. In the Congo, and at the refugee settlement in Uganda, Beya had cooked the family’s meals over an open fire, using wood scavenged from the surrounding area. Troy went over how to operate the stove. It was imperative that the entire family understand the appliance was for cooking. You did not use a stove to heat your house, Troy admonished. “It’s never happened to me, but I’ve heard some terrible stories about people leaving the gas stove on all night long,” he told me later. “Especially with September arrivals, it’s important to go over that stuff, because it’s cold.”

  The following day, Troy returned for his twenty-four-hour visit and handed out $100 each to Beya, Tchiza, Elia, and Timoté. This was all the cash they would get. The remainder of the welcome money would be applied toward their rent. By November, they would have exhausted the one-time stipend, but Troy hoped that at that stage, all of the adults might be working. Troy didn’t get into the minutiae of the household budget he had drawn up yet, because it would be too overwhelming when the family had been in the United States for only one day. At this visit, the main thing he tried to convey was that he was available as needed; they could call him anytime. Usually, Troy would take a family grocery shopping, but in this case, Gideon brought his family to the supermarket. Their first trip could last for hours; faced with such an array of goods, refugee families frequently could not decide what to put in their carts.

  Troy saved “the talk” for a few days later, when the entire family came to visit him at the ACC offices. This was called, in official resettlement parlance, “arrival and orientation.” The meeting had to happen within seven days. Troy needed only the adults, but Beya and Tchiza brought everyone—ten people plus himself. Troy ushered them all into the staff room, where the family sat down at a large conference table ringed by fancy chairs, with the little children constantly swiveling in their seats. Bizi translated as Troy explained things. The theme of “the talk” was that life in America is hard. They had to become self-sufficient as quickly as possible. Troy urged them to take any job that was offered, no matter how menial. The faster the adults started working, the better off the whole family would be; even a job that paid minimum wage was better than welfare. And they had to work as a team. Elia and Timoté had to contribute to the family’s well-being—they had to help pay the bills that were about to start coming in the mail—or else Troy could not make the math work.

  Next, Troy went over the documents. They had all received I-94s, a special visa given to refugees. “Do not lose this,” Troy told them. The visa allowed them to work, and it also enabled the adults to acquire another document that would serve as their main form of identification, something called an employment authorization card. After one year, the visa would expire, and then they would need to apply for legal residency and obtain green cards.

  After that, Troy went over their rights and responsibilities. They had to pay taxes, and they had to obey the laws of the United States. Cars were expensive and required insurance; if they started driving, they would need to know traffic regulations. He recommended using the bus system. Als
o, in the United States, it was illegal for an adult to have sex with a minor. If the older boys wanted to date, they had to make certain the girls they developed a fondness for were at least seventeen. Most critically for a family of ten with no income at present, they qualified for all of the state and federal subsidies available to people living below the poverty line.

  Next, Troy went over those benefits, always the most confusing topic. Different programs had varying age cutoffs, which meant that various family members would be eligible for a unique set of subsidies. Basically, one or more members of the family would qualify for each of the following programs, available to every American living below a certain income: TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), food stamps, and Medicaid. Plus, a few family members would qualify for CARES, the refugee cash assistance program that provides a brief safety net to refugees who do not qualify for TANF. Typically, families qualify for either TANF or CARES, and it was unusual for one family to participate in both programs.

  The main income subsidy that most of the family would depend upon until the adults found work was TANF. Gideon, Elia, and Timoté had to be subtracted from the TANF equation, however, because they were over eighteen. The rest of the family—Tchiza, Beya, and the six younger children—qualified. A family with two parents and six dependents that had no income qualified for the maximum subsidy allowable, $895 per month. As soon as Tchiza started working, the allotment would go down, but he could continue to receive some assistance as long as his income remained below a certain level. Because he was going to expedite the benefit, Troy told them they could expect to start receiving TANF money within seven days.

  Meanwhile, Elia and Timoté qualified for CARES, a program that supports refugees who do not qualify for TANF (single adults over the age of eighteen, or couples without children). Both Elia and Timoté would receive $335 per month from CARES. At the moment, Solomon was seventeen, so he remained part of the family unit that qualified for TANF, but on January 1, 2016, when he turned eighteen, he would go off TANF and on CARES. CARES would be available to Elia, Timoté, and Solomon for only eight months, starting from the moment they arrived in the United States. Troy doubted that they would use it for that long. As soon as any of them started working and earned more than $335—which Troy expected would happen quickly—they would stop receiving the subsidy. Most of his clients did not use CARES or TANF for lengthy periods. The resettlement agency stressed the need to become self-sufficient, and the refugees themselves disliked handouts. They could earn more by working.

  Confusingly, the rules for food stamps were different. Dependents are eligible until the age of twenty-two. Therefore, Elia was included in the family’s food stamps benefit, although Timoté was not; for the purposes of this subsidy, the family would consist of two caretakers and seven children. The family’s food stamps allotment was $1,315 per month, as long as they had zero income. As soon as anybody started working, this subsidy would drop. Also, Elia and Timoté had to report the income they were getting from CARES, which affected the amount the family got in food stamps; TANF income did not affect their food stamps allotment.

  “It was very hard to explain all this to them,” Troy said.

  I had no doubt that was true. It was hard for him to explain all of this to me, and I had been speaking English my whole life. We were sitting in his office at the ACC as we spoke. Troy was a fervent young man in his early thirties with a full beard and tortoiseshell glasses that made him look like an academic, although he spent his days buried in the nitty-gritty of how to get by in America on very little money, rather than books. Behind him, on the wall, he had hung three black-and-white photographs of small children from Sudan. He had moved there directly after finishing college and had rebuilt schools, hospitals, and churches destroyed during one of that country’s civil wars. After war broke out again, Troy worked in a refugee camp distributing food rations.

  During our time together, Troy fielded a stream of interruptions. Refugees called his cell phone and his office phone; colleagues knocked on his door, or walked in without knocking. Every interruption involved some query related to a family who had recently arrived in the United States. The African Community Center employed only four case workers and handled close to 600 active cases. As we spoke, Troy was juggling more than 150 cases himself. Even though he had to concentrate on a given family for only three to six months, he still carried a crushing workload. I felt a little guilty for distracting him from his job.

  Troy said that after “the talk,” he imagined that Solomon and Methusella’s family would be fine until his next regularly scheduled visit, thirty days after their arrival. Instead he drove over to check on them the following week, because the ACC had been notified that they were running low on food. Most of the children were enrolled in school, so the only people Troy found at the house were Tchiza, Beya, and their daughter Zawadi. He took them to the building that housed the state’s food stamps program and secured approval for the benefit that same day. Then he brought them to a grocery store to show them how to use the plastic card they had just received. It functioned exactly like a credit card or a debit card, but Tchiza and Beya had never owned either of those before, so the whole idea of swiping a piece of plastic to buy things was unfamiliar. Troy explained that the food stamps benefit sounded like a lot of money, but was not really enough to feed them all, unless they were thrifty. They could not afford to buy steak, he emphasized—they had to buy the cheap cuts of meat. Also, the food stamps benefit could not be used to obtain prepared food from the deli, or home supplies such as paper towels or Ziploc bags. Once he was satisfied that they understood how to buy food, Troy said he would see them at the thirty-day home visit.

  Actually, the thirty-day home visit took place twenty-three days after their arrival, because of Tchiza’s confusion around finances. He thought that he understood everything Troy had told him, but many things proved mystifying. For example, Tchiza feared he was not receiving any money from TANF; actually, Troy explained, the TANF money had been attached to the same plastic card that he thought of as being for food stamps. Troy spent three hours with Tchiza and Beya, going over all of the household finances a second time. He drew up a rent calendar, labeling each month and writing down what the ACC would contribute and how much the family would have to pay. While the ACC had been able to cover the October rent, using up another $2,250 of the family’s cash, by November all that would be left of the one-time stipend was $678. After Troy applied that to the November bill, the family would have to make up the remainder. And then the cash would be gone. The family would have to pay the entire December rent bill themselves.

  Troy thought he had been completely clear and didn’t expect to see the family again until the ninety-day visit, scheduled for the middle of December. At the beginning of November, however, their landlord complained that Tchiza had neglected to pay his portion of the rent. Troy drove over and learned that Tchiza had not known how to get the TANF dollars off the little plastic card and into the hands of his landlord—nobody had shown him how to generate a money order. Troy felt terrible that he had neglected to cover this; he usually went over it during the twenty-four-hour visit, but Gideon had managed the first trip to the grocery store, and Troy had forgotten to tell Gideon to instruct his father in how to get a money order. “It was worrisome for me because they were a huge family and I did not want them to end up in a bad place,” Troy said later. “Like, close to homelessness. I’ve had a few clients end up homeless, but they were special cases—mental health issues, huge amounts of trauma.”

  Troy took Tchiza to King Soopers to show him how to obtain a money order. From that point forward, Tchiza made his rent payments on time. All of the adults in the household scrambled to find jobs, as Troy had advised. When they had visited the ACC for “the talk,” Troy had walked the grown-ups over to the area where the employment team worked, and had red-flagged Tchiza and Beya’s case. “We need to get as many people in this family working as possible as quickl
y as we can,” Troy had told his colleague Hussen Abdulahi, an employment specialist. “Anybody old enough needs to work.” Hussen and the rest of the ACC’s employment team scoured the community to find jobs that refugees could do and then played matchmaker between employers and employees. Hotels, local manufacturing sites, and meatpacking plants were the largest employers of refugees in the region. The first thing that Hussen always did with a refugee looking for work was perform an assessment, which he did right away with Tchiza, Beya, Elia, and Timoté. As Hussen spoke with Tchiza about his level of education and his job experience, he sized the man up. To understand a given refugee’s state of mind, Hussen asked himself: Is this person stressed? Does he have a happy home life? Is he shy or outgoing? Tchiza had many strengths. He was gregarious, had a supportive family, and possessed humility. He was also in superb physical condition, from a lifetime of farming, which meant that he could handle hard labor. Employers would like this man, Hussen imagined.

  Like Tchiza himself, Hussen was originally from Africa—Ethiopia, in his case—and he did not make the mistake of underestimating Tchiza. When Tchiza said he had no work experience that he could list on a résumé, Hussen asked him to describe how he had fed a family of eleven with his bare hands. Then he translated what Tchiza said into résumé-speak. They listed the following skills: sowing crops, preparing crops for market, assisting in the births of live animals, caring for newborn animals, cleaning and disinfecting buildings used to house crops and animals, and preventing the spread of disease among livestock. Hussen also took note of the fact that Tchiza had a tenth-grade education. “In the region that he’s from, that’s very rare,” Hussen said afterward.

  Hussen and Tchiza worked to create both a long-term plan and a short-term plan for the family’s integration into the United States. The long-term plan was easy. Tchiza wanted to learn how to speak English, become a citizen, and buy his own home. Hussen assured him that was doable, perhaps even within the span of five years, if he worked hard and embraced the concept of borrowing money. The idea of borrowing a huge sum from a bank to buy a house was foreign to Tchiza. “You are here in America now—think like an American,” Hussen told him. The short-term plan was more difficult. How to get from here to there? Hussen worked with Tchiza to identify intermediate steps he could take. They agreed Tchiza would attend English as a second language classes, go to job-training seminars, and get a job.