By Jodi Kantor & Catrin Einhorn | New York Times News Service
TORONTO—One year after Canada embraced Syrian refugees like no other country, a reckoning was under way.
Ordinary Canadians had essentially adopted thousands of Syrian families, donating a year of their time and money to guide them into new lives just as many other countries shunned them. Some citizens considered the project a humanitarian triumph; others believed the Syrians would end up isolated and adrift, stuck on welfare or worse. As 2016 turned to 2017 and the yearlong commitments began to expire, the question of how the newcomers would fare acquired a national nickname: Month 13, when the Syrians would try to stand on their own.
On a frozen January afternoon, Liz Stark, a no-nonsense retired teacher, bustled into a modest apartment on the east side of this city, unusually anxious. She and her friends had poured themselves into resettling Mouhamad and Wissam al-Hajj, a former farmer and his wife, and their four children.
But the improvised family had a deadline. In two weeks, the sponsorship agreement would end. The Canadians would stop paying for rent and other basics. Stark was adding Mouhamad al-Hajj’s name to the apartment lease, the first step in removing her own.
“The honeymoon is over,” she said later.
That afternoon, her mind was on forms, checks and her to-do list. But she knew that her little group of grandmothers, retirees and book club friends was swimming against a global surge of skepticism, even hatred, toward immigrants and refugees. The president of the superpower to the south was moving to block Syrians and cut back its refugee program.
Stark and her group were betting that with enough support, poor Muslims from rural Syria could adapt, belong and eventually prosper and contribute in Canada.
Stark’s most crucial task that day was ushering the Syrian couple to a budget tutorial. Because the sponsors paid their rent and often accompanied them to make withdrawals, the couple had little sense of how to manage money in a bank account.
Some of Canada’s new Syrian refugees had university degrees, professional skills, businesses up and running. But the al-Hajjes could not read or write, even in Arabic. After a year of grinding English study, Mouhamad al-Hajj, 36, struggled to get the new words out.
As he stared down Month 13, he felt overwhelmed and alarmed.
On top of his other concerns, his father back in Syria was entreating al-Hajj to send money for doctor’s visits and for farming supplies to help feed their family. When the son said no, unsure if he would have anything to spare and unwilling to ask the Canadians for more help, his father stopped answering his calls.
His wife, 37, told him to be patient. He had recently gotten a job, in the kitchen of a Middle Eastern restaurant. Their children were attending school for the first time in their lives, learning English and French, becoming ice skaters and soccer champions. She felt sure that the sponsors would remain by their sides and that, apart from financial matters, Month 13 would not change their relationship.
But she knew her husband was despairing.
Now, as Stark sat at the table, unable to understand the conversation in Arabic, Mouhamad al-Hajj told the counselor he was considering something extreme. “I was thinking about going back to Syria,” he said.
Stepping back
As Month 13 approached, the al-Hajj sponsors had decided that their payments to the family would stop. The family’s income would dip, but between Mouhamad al-Hajj’s earnings and a continued $1,800-a-month government subsidy for low-income families they would be able to remain in their $1,400-a-month, three-bedroom apartment.
Still, with the deadline nearing, the al-Hajj sponsors faced uncomfortable questions: Were they doing too much for the Syrian family? Even if they wanted to stop helping, would they be able to?
Many days at the family’s apartment passed as a series of sponsors knocking at the door, from the mornings when they arrived to tutor Wissam al-Hajj in English to the evenings when they took turns assisting with the children’s homework. As they dropped by, they brought extra produce or halal meat, answered questions about mail and drove the Syrians to appointments.
Even Mouhamad al-Hajj said he needed to make mistakes.
But the sponsors knew how much the family needed. The al-Hajjes had fled Syria at the start of the war and spent several miserable years in Lebanon, living in squalid conditions, the children working for a dollar a day. Could they really be expected to be independent in a year?
The sponsors resolved to continue tutoring Wissam al-Hajj and the children but to retreat in other ways. They asked the al-Hajj parents to take the children to swimming lessons instead of doing it themselves.
But they rarely followed through. When the al-Hajj children missed a swimming lesson, the sponsors started taking them again.
The welfare dilemma
The lowest point in the al-Hajj sponsors’ year had started with an unsettling discovery.
Like other Syrians, Mouhamad al-Hajj had arrived in Canada eager to work, but had been counseled by the sponsors to instead take intensive English classes.
A couple of months before the Month 13 deadline, he got lucky. A Palestinian-Canadian friend who was advising the group called in a favor: He phoned an Egyptian immigrant he had helped years ago who managed a shawarma restaurant in a mall food court and asked if he could give al-Hajj a job. Soon, al-Hajj was working a couple of evenings a week in addition to continuing English classes.
But when Stark accompanied al-Hajj to the bank to deposit a paycheck, she scanned his transactions and noticed something alarming: a couple of thousands of dollars were missing, withdrawn from ATMs. “I thought he was getting scammed, defrauded,” she said later.
Al-Hajj said he had taken out the money to stock up on food.
Stark, believing that al-Hajj didn’t understand his accounts well enough to realize what had happened, went to the bank to try to figure out what had gone wrong. When that turned up no evidence of theft, she and the other sponsors wondered if there were other explanations.
A few weeks later, al-Hajj asked the sponsors about going on welfare. He had heard about it from his classmates in English lessons.
The sponsors began to worry: Had al-Hajj been withdrawing the money to game the system, to lower his bank balance so he would qualify for social assistance?
Even legal use of the welfare system by Syrian refugees was a charged question, the sponsors knew.
Across Canada, resentment was rising about the amount of help the Syrian newcomers had been given.
In reply to his question about welfare, Peggy Karas, a sponsor, did not mince words. “We didn’t bring you here and give you all this help so that you could become a drain on our government system,” she told him.
Al-Hajj agreed not to apply.
“Working is much better than staying at home and doing nothing,” he said. “And work can make you earn more money.”
The Canadians decided to move on.
In fact, al-Hajj had even more of a safety net than he knew. The sponsors had not told him that because of government support, they had money left over from the family’s first year. When he and his family encountered extra expenses, they would have several thousand dollars waiting.
Measuring success
Six days into Month 13, the al-Hajjes were showing small new signs of independence. While the sponsors were still setting up their doctor’s appointments, the Syrians were now navigating there alone. Classmates of the couple’s sixth-grade twins had started visiting for playdates.
The restaurant was giving Mouhamad al-Hajj more hours, and he got his first raise, to $13 per hour from $11.50.
As his English inched forward, his talk of going back to Syria subsided.
Across the country, as Month 13 turned into Months 14 and 15, the early results of private sponsorship of Syrians looked a lot like al-Hajj’s progress—tentative, but showing forward motion. According to early government figures, about half of privately sponsored adults were working full or part time.
As a group, they were outpacing the thousands more refugees who did not have sponsors and were being resettled by the government—only about 10 percent of them had jobs. Previous refugees to Canada over the past decade—Iraqis, Afghans, Colombians, Eritreans and others—had followed the same pattern, with privately sponsored refugees more likely to be employed after a year at similar rates.
Around the world, more countries were exploring Canada’s system of letting everyday citizens resettle refugees.
But there was no common definition of success: Was it enough that these refugees were not dying in the Mediterranean or languishing in camps?
The al-Hajjes wished they could repay the sponsors, but it felt impossible. “They give us so much and we don’t have anything to give,” Wissam al-Hajj said. “So Mouhamad and I and the kids are always praying for them.”
Image credits: Damon Winter/The New York Times