They live near USF, in an apartment barely big enough for them. The red pleather on their couch is disintegrating, so they’ve thrown a decorative blanket over the seat so the red flecks don’t stick to your legs. The bathroom has nothing in it — no towels, no hand soap, no messes — but the white pressboard cabinets are starting to shed fake wood around their edges. In the living room, there’s a donated coffee table, a donated TV and a picture on the wall.
The picture — the lone item in the entire apartment not overtly functional — is of Abdu’l-Baha, leader of the Baha’i Movement from 1892 until 1921.
Meet the Smiths.
That’s not their real name, of course, just as Hazel and Sean are also pseudonyms. They’re scared of using their real names, their real photos, because they have friends back home who could suffer if the government reads this article. Is that possible? Does the Iranian government read Creative Loafing? The Smiths are not taking any chances. They escaped religious persecution three years ago — after Mr. Smith went to jail on suspicion of being an Israeli spy and plainclothes government workers broke into their apartment and beat Mrs. Smith and Hazel — and lived in a refugee town in Turkey until January, when they were among some of the last Iranians to make it into the country before our 45th president’s travel ban halted immigration from historically Muslim nations, touching down on U.S. soil the night before the ban went into effect.
This story isn’t about the travel ban. It’s about hope and dreams, which the Smith family has in spades. Even in the worst of circumstances — we’ll get to that in a bit — and even with nothing of their own except some clothes, Mr. Smith and his family are grateful for the chance to live as Americans.
That chance comes at a price, one we don’t think about. Everyone, one of two Farsi interpreters present for our interview tells me, likes to talk about refugees, but after spending the morning with this Iranian family, it’s clear that talk may be the end of what we do.
You see, this family of new Americans landed in America owing $4,000. That figure grows every day — the $4,000 is their plane ticket from Turkey, but added to that is the money for a lease they were asked to sign upon arriving at their apartment directly from the airport. That peeling red couch? That’s another $400 to the bill.
They’ve applied for Social Security numbers, but until they receive them, they cannot work, which means their dwindling bank account must sustain them. After three years in Turkey, unable to work, that nest egg is more sparrow than eagle-sized.
We want to make it clear: The Smith family didn’t complain about any of this. The interpreters told us this after we’d completed our interview. The Smith family, Baha’i refugees persecuted for believing in things like equality for men and women and unity of religion, denied higher education, unable to work at the better jobs in Iran, thanked the U.S. government and the agency that helped them get here — the Seventh Day Adventists.
Jewish and Catholic agencies also help refugees, but the little-known aspect of being a refugee is the debt you carry by coming here. Of course, people should pay for their plane tickets. But if the agency buying that ticket screws up and sends you to LA instead of Tampa (as they did in the case of the Smith family), should the Smith family incur that debt, too? Should they have to sign a year-long lease the day they land in Tampa?
Refugees are big business, it seems. Compassion factors into it, but so does profit. Of course, we’re not suggesting a church will profit from someone’s hardship, but for people starting over in a strange land that almost doesn’t want them (the Smiths landed here hours before the travel ban went into effect), is it fair to saddle them with such a debt?
Despite this, at the end of the interview, we asked the Smiths if they wanted to add anything. They asked that we ask our readers to pray for the Baha’i in Iran who are in jail, that we ask you to keep their families, waiting for their release, in their thoughts. And then Mr. Smith thanked President Trump for allowing his family to come to America.
This article appears in Mar 9-16, 2017.