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They Can’t Go Home Again -- In These Times

They Can’t Go Home Again -- In These TimesToday, more than 150,00 Chaldean Americans and 300,000 Arab Americans call Metro Detroit home. For many, they considered this the Arab capital of the United States, home to Arab-owned businesses, mosques and the Arab American National Museum.

While in Jordan, the Rabbans had dreams of resettling in Detroit, both to join the vibrant Chaldean community and to reunite with their daughter, who had previously married and moved to the Detroit suburb of Farmington Hills. Gaining such a coveted resettlement allocation was a grueling process. Over a span of 18 months, the Rabbans were interviewed seven different times, first by representatives from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), then by FBI agents.

“The interviews were very detailed and very hard,” Fadi says. “They were so serious, they were taking every single bit of information from us.” Field agents spared no details, verifying the consistency of their accounts, administering physical exams and running background checks. “You want to make sure all of the information is correct,” he says, “but because the situation is so hard in Jordan, you feel that you want to make [the process] shorter.”

The Karanas had a similar experience in Syria. Two years passed between the day they submitted their UNHCR application and their resettlement date in the Detroit suburb of Oak Park. They acknowledge they were lucky — only 10 percent of applicants who register for relocation qualify, according to the Christian Science Monitor — but that didn’t make their time in bureaucratic purgatory move any faster.

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