They fled war in Syria, now many refugees are leaving Paterson

Hannan Adely | NorthJersey

Show Caption Hide Caption English classes for Syrian refugees in Wayne English classes at the Wayne YMCA are a lifeline for refugees from Syria. The program offers a path to employment and opportunities to socialize and connect with people in their new country.

Some of the Syrian families who fled their war-torn hometowns and lived as refugees in Jordan and Turkey before making their way to the United States are now on the move again. This time, they are leaving Paterson.

At least seven families, citing the high cost of living, the low quality of housing and concerns about their safety, have left or plan to leave this summer, many of them headed to Michigan.

They include families who sued a Paterson landlord in April over alleged housing violations and a family of four who started looking for a new place after the father in the household was robbed and badly beaten on a city street in June.

“Work here is not enough,” said Tahani Al Ktuf, who will leave New Jersey for Michigan this month with her husband and five children. “You cannot live. Here a husband and wife can both work and it’s barely enough to get food and pay rent.”

For low-wage workers of any background, life in New Jersey — one of the most expensive states to live in the country — can be a struggle. But as newcomers to the United States, refugees tend to lack the family connections, work ties and property that keep other poor families from moving.

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They are hoping for better luck in Michigan, a Midwestern state with thriving Arab and Muslim communities. The minimum wage is higher and rents are lower compared to New Jersey, but it also has its share of urban problems like poverty and crime that they are seeking to escape.

When people come to the United States through the refugee program, agencies consider personal connections, community support and the availability of services and housing when deciding where to place them. Paterson, with a longstanding Arab-American community and plenty of Syrian-owned businesses, has welcomed dozens of families who have fled Syria's civil war.

Once in the country, families are free to move wherever they want and it’s not uncommon for them to leave, said Avigail Ziv, executive director of the International Rescue Committee for New York and New Jersey.

“People do move out of New Jersey for economic reasons and for personal reasons,” she said. “It does happen with any of our populations we work with.”

Hend El-Buri, programs and operations manager at the SMILE Organization, a Passaic-based charity that runs programs to help refugees, recounted saying goodbyes to several families in recent weeks from Paterson and Elizabeth who were going to Michigan.

“Initially, we were so hesitant. People are just leaving and we don’t know what they'll find there,” she said.

But she understands why they want to leave, she said.

“Supposedly one of the reasons they place people here [in New Jersey] is more cultural understanding and better wages and opportunity," she said. "But they are working minimum wage here. They could work minimum wage there and the houses are cheaper."

‘You can dream of buying a house’

Among those heading to Michigan are five of the eight families who filed a lawsuit in April against Paterson's Department of Health and Human Services and two companies headed by the developer Charles Florio over alleged housing violations.

The families said they dealt with mice, roaches and leaks in their apartments and believed the management companies had ignored their complaints. Florio responded that their buildings had been regularly serviced by pest control, and that the apartments were inspected by the city and a staff member from the International Rescue Committee, the agency that placed the refugees, before they moved in.

Since the lawsuit was filed, refugees and their Ridgefield Park-based attorney, Tareef Chamaa, said repairs have been made in some apartments, including the installation of new floors, bathroom tiles and ceiling tiles, while the city has conducted new inspections.

Chamaa said he was not surprised that tenants are leaving the area.

“Given the price of renting an apartment in Paterson — and, in exchange, not only are you not receiving a, quote-unquote, nice place, you are receiving substandard housing — why would you stay here?” he said.

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The families were charged about $1,400 or $1,500 in monthly rent for their two-bedroom apartments. As refugees, they got up to two years of rental assistance, and most had either reached their limit or were approaching it.

Al Ktuf will mark two years in the United States in August. Her brother-in-law and his family moved from Paterson to Michigan earlier this month. He has found her a one-family home with four bedrooms and a backyard for $1,200 a month in Dearborn, she said.

“Over there, you can dream of a buying a house in the future. But here you can’t. Costs are so high. Taxes are so high,” Al Ktuf said.

Lina Alhomsi, who is leaving at the end of the month, said her husband works in Paterson at a plastics factory, but at $10 an hour they still could not afford rent. He has a friend in Dearborn who’ll help him find work, she said.

And Mohammad Hlal, who left Paterson last week for Michigan, said he had been earning $1,000 a month working in a food truck. With the new income, he lost welfare benefits and struggled to pay his bills, he said.

“This state is very hard and very expensive,” he said, using the English he has learned since his arrival two years ago.

Hlal said the people he has met in New Jersey have been kind, but that he dreamed about the single-family home with a garage that he plans to rent in Dearborn for $1,000 a month.

Lure of Michigan

Michigan is alluring to families for signs of affordability. The minimum wage is $9.24, the median home value is $147,000 and the purchasing power of a dollar is estimated at around $1.07, according to a recent USA Today report.

In New Jersey, the minimum wage is $8.60, the median home value is $323,200 and the value of the dollar is estimated at 88 cents.

But Michigan also grapples with a poverty rate of 15 percent — higher than the national poverty rate of 12.7 percent, based on the number of people with incomes below the poverty line of $24,250 for a family of four.

There’s another lure for families besides the cost of living. The Detroit area is home to one of the largest and oldest Arab-American communities in the United States, including people from diverse Arabic-speaking countries of Muslim and Christian faiths.

In Dearborn, the city near Detroit where many of the families are moving, an estimated 40 percent of the population claim Arab ancestry — more than any other municipality in the nation.

Families who move there will find an extensive network of service organizations that help refugees, said Maha Freij, deputy executive director and chief financial officer of the Arab Community Center for Economic & Social Services, or ACCESS, in Dearborn.

ACCESS does not track the number of refugees who relocated to Michigan from another state, but she said she has also seen clients who have come from Texas and Florida. With a sharp drop in refugee admissions under the Trump administration, it’s assumed that a greater share of families are coming to Dearborn via secondary migration, she said.

“If you’re a newcomer, your ability to find your way and succeed may be smoother in a place like Michigan,” she said.

Yet, Freij said the newcomers may face some of the same challenges that they did in New Jersey. They could end up in neighborhoods with run-down housing and problems with crime. Poor public transit is also an issue. But once they start making money and want to move, “there is a lot of available housing,” she said.

Families may also find differing quality in schools. New Jersey spends more money per student, has higher scores on national tests and has better graduation rates. The state is routinely ranked among the top two states for education, while Michigan ranked 33rd in recent rankings. But as in New Jersey, quality of education can vary widely among school districts.

Safety a concern, especially for crime victim

Sikander Khan, who runs a nongovernmental organization called Global Emergency Response and Assistance, said families are also leaving Paterson because they don’t consider the areas where they live to be safe. Some refugees said they have seen people using drugs and alcohol on their streets and spotted homeless people in their buildings.

Although overall crime is falling, Paterson remains among New Jersey’s most violent cities with 1,126 violent crimes reported in 2016 including 19 murders, according to records from state police.

Dearborn, a city of 95,000, or about two-thirds the size of Paterson, had around 300 reported violent crimes that year, including one murder, according to Michigan State Police records.

Crime is the reason Nour, 48, is looking for a new apartment with his wife and two daughters. On June 13, Nour, who asked to be identified only by his first name because he fears for his safety, was walking home from a local mosque when he was struck in the head from behind with a metal pipe on Main Street near Bloomfield Avenue.

He fell to the ground and two suspects kicked and punched him, ripping his pants and grabbing $2,800 he had just received in financial assistance to pay two months’ rent. He spent two days at St. Joseph’s University Medical Center with bruises, a dislocated shoulder and a gash across his head that required stitches.

“Now, I cannot sleep every night because I have pain. It’s a big problem. I have two kids and they are afraid,” Nour said, using the English he has learned by studying two to three hours a day since he arrived in the United States two years ago.

The police report notes that the area where he was attacked was dark because the street lights weren’t working. No one has been arrested in connection with the incident.

In an interview at his home, Nour and his family still seemed shaken by the incident. He noted several times that he worries about his daughters, ages 14 and 16, who no longer want to leave the apartment, which is just a block from where he was attacked.

Privately, he has told caseworkers that he was considering returning to Turkey, where he fled after war broke out in Syria. He was a math teacher in Syria, and in Turkey was a principal at a UNICEF school for 2,500 refugees before the United States took him in.

He told The Record, though, that he wants to stay in the United States and has looked at apartments in Clifton that cost $1,600 and $1,800. “How can I pay?” he said.

Despite the attack, he talked about the kindness of people he has met in New Jersey, including the workers at the welfare office and the doctors and nurses who took care of him at the hospital and were smiling at his bedside.

He has high hopes for his daughters, who he noted get good grades. His older daughter wants to be a doctor, he said, and the younger one aspires to be an engineer.

“I like it here," he said. "It’s very good. I like the system in the United States. It’s good for the future of my daughters."

Email: adely@northjersey.com