Starting over in U.S. can be frustrating for Iraqis

Her mansion in Iraq was bombed, her medical career and future in her beloved country dashed the day she found a white envelope on her car windshield. Inside was a single bullet. Wassan Yassin was marked for death.

She knew she had to flee. She eventually landed in America, far from where her life was threatened, her sister was shot and her co-worker kidnapped. Her new Florida surroundings offered a haven from the horrors of war.

But there is no happy ending. Not yet, at least.

Yassin's first year here has been marked by frustrating — even humiliating — experiences: A small apartment in a crime-scarred area of Jacksonville. Food stamps. And no job, even though she's a gynecologist who also morphed into a construction company executive during the war.

Saif Alnasseri, a 31-year-old wartime translator and journalist, has fared better. A former pharmacist at a large Iraq hospital, he now is a pharmacist's assistant in a New Jersey drug store. Life in America has been a trade-off: His job supervising dozens of workers, his comfortable home and lush garden in Baghdad are gone, but he has something else — security.

"We are safe here and this is very important to us," Alnasseri says. "But there are a lot of things I spent years building in Baghdad. ... I was very well-known in my neighborhood. They called me doctor. I had a lot of people who respected me. Here I'm starting from the beginning. From zero."

"Every day I say, 'OK, I made the right decision,'" he adds. "After two hours, I say, 'Did I really?'"

For thousands of Iraqis, resettling in America has been an agonizing transition filled with questions, doubts — and, sometimes, despair.

Many Iraqis have discovered that gold-plated resumes have opened few doors in a nation reeling from its worst economic decline since the Depression. Stories abound of Iraqi professionals doing menial jobs — a doctor flipping burgers, a druggist washing dishes.

Iraqis also have struggled to navigate a confusing bureaucracy and an overburdened social service system that has sometimes run of out money to help provide their basic needs.

"Everything is kind of conspiring to make it a particularly difficult time for them," says Bob Carey, a vice president of the International Rescue Committee, a refugee assistance agency. "There's the declining economy, the conditions from which they come, the conditions in which they arrive, the fact they're often highly skilled professionals with sometimes high expectations."

"It is," he says, "the perfect storm."