On a pleasant afternoon in Amman, the genteel Jordanian capital, a petite Iraqi woman with carefully coiffed hair, heavy makeup and lots of gold jewelry sat in a classroom full of refugees heading to America, her face frozen in wide-eyed horror.
Her husband had disappeared in the war. Her request to settle in Jordan had been denied. Now an advisor from the International Organization for Migration was telling her no U.S. firm would recognize her law degree or her nearly two decades of experience.
In a month, the 51-year-old woman was due to leave for Portland, Ore. In the hushed room, she protested helplessly, "I am a lawyer. What else can I do?"
A few desks away, Anwer and Avan Shalchi, bound for Folsom, Calif., nervously took notes on how many bags they would be allowed to take on the plane (two apiece), how much cash they could bring into the United States ($10,000 duty free) and how much financial aid they could expect (only the first month's rent would be guaranteed).
Avan, 32, wondered how they could reduce their lives to so little. Her husband, Anwer, 37, worried about how they would afford medical costs for their youngest daughter, born prematurely, and for his diabetes and high cholesterol.
They too had hoped to last out the war in Jordan. But Iraq's neighbor was handing out few residence permits, and they hadn't wanted to keep working illegally.
In the year of waiting for their applications to resettle in America to be processed, both families had run through most of their savings. They had assumed that the U.S. would take care of them. The two-day class, just weeks before their departure last fall, was the first they had heard of how hard it might be to pursue the American dream.
There would be more rude surprises after they arrived.
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Under Saddam Hussein, the Shalchis had belonged to a privileged Baghdad elite. So too did the lawyer, who asked to be identified only as Shifa to protect relatives still in Iraq. Weekends were spent at clubs, where intellectual leaders and regime favorites would gossip around the pool and sip expensive whiskeys at the bar. Holidays were for touring the Middle East and Europe.
But privilege was no protection once the war started -- quite the opposite. As lawlessness took over the capital, prominent families were hunted down by kidnappers and religious extremists.
