Left Behind

By Robert Davis

Some Afghan evacuees feel left behind as Colorado resettlement agencies face housing shortages and swelling caseloads

Ahmad Siddiqui, 35, struggles to do nothing. But after his family relocated to Broomfield, Colo from Afghanistan following the government’s collapse in August, it seems that nothing is all he can do these days.

After spending nearly two decades as an interpreter connecting U.S. military officials with members of the former Afghan government, Siddiqi says coming to America solved a lot of problems for his family. But, like many of the Afghan evacuees that have already resettled in Colorado, Siddiqi says the warm welcome is quickly fading as Colorado’s initial stability service pipeline struggles to deliver the benefits his family needs to grow roots in their new community.

“It gave me a lot of hope to come here to the United States,” Siddiqi said. “But now when I look to the future, it’s kind of opaque.”

Siddiqi received a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) from the State Department for his service in Afghanistan. The SIV makes him eligible to receive $500 in monthly federal cash payments as well as health, housing, and food benefits. But accessing these benefits has proven to be harder than Siddiqi initially thought as Colorado’s three resettlement agencies—The International Rescue Committee of Denver (IRC), Lutheran Family Services of the Rocky Mountains (LFS), and the African Community Center of Denver (ACC) — are all face swelling caseloads amid a statewide housing shortage.

Resettlement agencies act as liaisons between federal agencies and refugees who qualify for their assistance upon their arrival. They also help people like Siddiqi navigate bureaucratic processes to obtain identification, licenses, and employment.

One critical part of their work is to help Afghan evacuees like Siddiqi obtain a Social Security Number (SSN) so they can access additional federal benefits and apply for a federal work permit. However, Siddiqi says he has struggled for more than two months to obtain his SSN from his case manager. Ironically, he adds that his two-year-old daughter was able to get hers through the mail.

Siddiqi said he tried going to his case manager’s office to retrieve the documents, but the strategy turned out to be both unsuccessful and expensive. Each trip came with small purchases like a two-way bus fare that Siddiqi said just resulted in more waiting. The same is true of other tasks like shopping and running errands, Siddiqi adds. Every trip eats a little more out of the family’s bottom line.

“Now, I call and call and it just seems like no one is ever there,” Siddiqi said. “We’re not the kind of people who ask for or take charity, but they’re all so busy with all of the other people that are coming here that it’s really causing a problem.”

One of the logjams was created after President Joe Biden swiftly raised the refugee ceiling to 125,000 per year after former President Donald Trump had lowered it to 15,000 during his last year in office. This increase lifts the ceiling to levels not seen since 1994, according to data from the Migration Policy Institute.

However, the funds needed to bolster the stability service pipeline arrived much later than the Afghan evacuees. President Biden signed a bill on December 3 that allocated $7 billion for resettlement programs. States like New York started investing their own funds to help settle the evacuees shortly thereafter despite former Afghan citizens starting to flow into the country in mid-August after the country’s government collapsed.

Siddiqi is one of the more than 1,000 evacuees that made it to Colorado so far, according to data from the Colorado Refugee Services Program. Since the state typically accepts 3% of the national resettlement figures, Colorado could welcome another 1,000 evacuees by the end of the year. Maria Farrier, development manager at ACC, said many resettlement agencies received short notice of the Afghan evacuees’ arrival, which has made it difficult to secure temporary housing for incoming folks. She says ACC is experimenting with a co-hosting model where the agency connects volunteer hosts with Afghan evacuees and their families to help drive down wait times. Private donors have also helped to secure some housing arrangements, she adds.

But the high volume of resettlement cases is already thinning out the agency’s scarce resources, Farrier adds.

For example, according to the agency’s annual report, ACC welcomed more than 1,200 community members last year, including 70 refugee families and another 55 SIVs, all with a budget of approximately $2.7 million, the lowest it’s been over the last four years.

Farrier adds that the agency was already on pace to increase its number of families served in 2021 because COVID-19 caused many former clients to return for additional housing or employment services.

“So far, it’s been really challenging,” Farrier said. Floyd Preston, a program manager at Lutheran Family Services in Colorado Springs, echoed Farrier’s sentiments to The Colorado Springs Gazette. He said his organization is struggling to keep up with housing demand because rentals are becoming hard to find in the “hot” housing market.

LFS is even asking its private landlord partners for some flexibility on rental payments from refugees. The IRC did not return multiple requests for comment on this story.

Despite the current challenges, state economists found that more than 76 percent of the refugees and immigrants who come to Colorado experience “high integration” within the first four years of their arrival, meaning they were able to find employment, place their children in school, and attain health care, among other social measures.

But the logjam for services is impacting the everyday lives of Afghan refugees like Siddiqi. Since his wife, Hoira, doesn’t speak English yet, Siddiqi says the family is surviving on federal cash benefits and another “few hundred dollars” of food stamps until he can find employment.

And little decisions seem to add up quickly. Siddiqi said that after his daughter spent $40 on books at a recent school fair, he and his wife skipped a meal at the end of the month to balance out the expense. These dilemmas seem to be cropping up more frequently, too, Siddiqi said.

Even though the family received a “generous” amount of donation from Broomfield community members upon their arrival, Siddiqi knows it won’t last long once they move out of the home they are currently sharing with a local police officer and his wife.

Siddiqi said his family hopes to move out of the house soon but finding a reasonable rental home has been “next to impossible.”

Broomfield’s average rent for a two-bedroom apartment is close to $1,800 per month, according to data from real estate website Point2Homes. This means people like Siddiqi need to find a job that pays at least $72,000 annually to not be considered housing burdened or spend more than 30% of their monthly income on housing expenses.

However, Colorado’s most recent Refugee Integration Survey and Evaluation (RISE) report, found that immigrant and refugee households in the state average between $700 and $999 in weekly earnings during their first four years. If Siddiqi found a job at the high end of the average income range, he would still be paying approximately 45 percent of his monthly income on housing.

The mismatch between local wages and housing costs is one of the “structural barriers” identified by researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2019 that can cause immigrant and refugee families to experience chronic poverty.

Siddiqi said he’d like to work in communications, or anywhere where he can make enough money to cover the rent and a few upcoming expenses. He says he wants to become a citizen, but first, he must get over the hurdle of getting a green card, which includes a $1,200 application fee.

“It’s one thing to get people out of Afghanistan, but then when you get here, you basically get nothing,” Siddiqi said. “I’m really getting tired of it. I just think to myself, maybe this is all they can do for me?

Denver VOICEJanuary 21, 2022