SETTLING IN
As an Iraqi refugee landing at the Dallas airport in 2008, Tememe wasn’t sure what he’d find.
He pictured a Hollywood version of Texas with cows and cowboys; instead he peered out the car window on that first drive from the airport at twisting highway overpasses and strip malls.
He remembers the cockroaches in his first apartment, the crime in the neighborhood, and the helplessness — not knowing how to get a driver’s license or open a bank account, or where to buy groceries. He struggled to understand the English around him, totally unlike the formal British grammar from his school days.
“When people arrive in Dallas, I tell them: ‘If you can get through the first six months, you can make it here,' ” Tememe said. “The hardest time is the first six months, when we learn how to settle in and understand the community.”
In Dallas, Tememe’s family joined a growing community of Iraqis displaced by the American invasion. Twenty years ago, before the start of America’s war on terror, there were approximately 90,000 Iraqi-born people in the United States, according to the U.S. census. By 2019, that population had nearly tripled.
Many of those new refugees clustered in hubs like the Dallas metro area, where resettlement agencies were active, and where jobs and low rents were in good supply.
“In 2007 and 2008, we were receiving, like, five Iraqi families each week,” said Aisha Waheed, a Texas native and the daughter of a Pakistani immigrant, who opened a Dallas nonprofit in 2007 to help new refugees.
“Their trauma was so fresh,” she said, recalling families who told her of fleeing Iraq on foot and weathering months or years in refugee camps. “When they landed here, you could tell how exhausted they were.”
New arrivals here tend to be placed first in clusters, in affordable apartment complexes spread across the city’s northeast neighborhoods.
“I used to introduce one family to another in the same complex, and they became friends,” Waheed said. Older families would drive newer families to the grocery store and other errands. “And it was so nice to see, if there was a wedding, the whole Iraqi community got together,” she said.
Many, like Tememe, came from high-status jobs and lost everything in the war. “If I told an Iraqi person, the next best thing is you go work at Walmart, he felt insulted: ‘But I’m a dentist.’ We had to explain, it’s a different type of process here,” Waheed said.
Success came with time.