After an 18-year-old Syrian named Ali and his father fled the city of Damascus following crippling sieges during that country’s ongoing civil war and reached the Turkish city of Istanbul, he had nearly lost all hope of going back to high school.
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Hoping to support his father, who was ailing from health issues, and the rest of his family, Ali found employment at a sweets factory, working long hours. He injured himself on the job and almost lost most of the fingers on his right hand.
But now, Ali is back in school and progressing toward graduation, because the nonprofit Karam Foundation is working to provide monetary aid to him and his family on the condition the children remain in school, according to Karam’s website, which tells Ali’s story.
Foundation officials report the organization has helped more than 200 Syrian refugee children like Ali, all of whom live in extreme poverty and some of whom face the prospects of child labor. The foundation also built a “Karam House” in Reyhanli, Turkey, near the Syrian border, a safe environment where refugee teenagers can learn math and science skills and simply “be teenagers,” according to the nonprofit’s website.
The Karam Foundation’s headquarters aren’t in Turkey, New York City, Washington or even Chicago. They are located in a small, one-room office in Lake Forest, at the Gorton Community Center. Co-founder and chief executive Lina Sergie Attar — a Syrian-American daughter of immigrants who spent her teenage and college years in Aleppo, a city now torn apart by war — lives in Lake Forest with her husband, also a Syrian-American.
Sergie Attar and the five Karam Foundation employees based in Lake Forest are just one example of the modest impact the international flow of refugees has had on Lake County. The issue has been in the spotlight in recent weeks after President Donald Trump issued an executive order last month indefinitely barring Syrian refugees from entering the country and suspending immigration from seven Muslim-majority nations — Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. The federal courts halted the order, but Trump has been reportedly preparing a second attempt to accomplish its ends.
New figures compiled by the Associated Press show that of the 10,864 legally permitted refugees from the seven countries identified in Trump’s order who have arrived in Illinois between 2007 and the end of January 2017, nearly half gave a destination of Chicago, and more than a quarter were resettled in Skokie, Rockford, Aurora or Wheaton. The data shows the cities that refugees gave as their destination; in many cases, those cities are where the refugees first lived, according to the AP, although many may have since moved.
Lake County cities, towns and villages account for a relatively small portion of the arrivals. But communities like Vernon Hills, Deerfield, Mundelein, Lake Forest, Libertyville, Buffalo Grove, Wauconda and Waukegan have, between them, been the destination for more than 100 refugees over the last 10 years who would have been included in Trump’s order. Of those, all but 10 came from Iraq, and the 10 others were Iranian refugees whose destination was Deerfield.
The AP analysis found that 2016 was the busiest year for America in the past decade for refugee arrivals from the seven countries. During the calendar year, 43,259 refugees from the targeted countries arrived, more than a third of whom were Syrian. As the Syrian Civil War has escalated, the number of Syrian refugees dramatically increased in recent years, from 26 in 2007 to 247 in 2014 and 15,479 in 2016.
Despite the relatively small impact on Lake County, leaders across the area welcomed the news that refugees had settled there when told of the AP figures.
“Lake County and the 10th [U.S. Congressional] District actually have a proud history of bringing refugees to our area,” said County Board Chairman Aaron Lawlor, who pointed to the resettlement of Soviet Jews in northern suburbs such as Buffalo Grove — which spans Lake and Cook counties — during the Cold War.
Still, Lawlor said, it remains “incredibly important” that federal officials “know who’s coming in” and that arrivals are “vetted in an intensive manner” for security reasons.
Sergie Attar is not a refugee herself —the daughter of doctors, she was born in New York — but she moved back to Aleppo at the age of 12 and attended college there. She came back to America and was married to her husband, a dentist who grew up in the Mundelein area and has a practice in Libertyville, she said. And she remains deeply engaged in the Syrian refugee crisis through her work at the Karam Foundation.
“We really love being here at Gorton, in a community of nonprofit organizations in Lake County,” Sergie Attar said.
She said Trump’s executive order is “extremely worrying.”
“I feel, as a child of immigrants, that it’s very hurtful and un-American,” Sergie Attar said. But she cautioned against solely blaming Trump for any indifference America has shown to the plight of Syrian refugees.
“Under the Obama administration, our doors were not open to Syrian refugees, either,” she said.
She pointed out that an intensive vetting process already exists, and that between 2012 and 2016, the U.S. has accepted only about 14,333 refugees from Syria compared to more than 2.8 million who were resettled in Turkey, more than 1 million in Lebanon, almost 655,500 in Jordan and 360,000 in Germany, according to a Quartz report published last month.
“Trump’s attitudes specifically toward Syrian refugees are pretty much in line with Obama’s attitude,” Sergie Attar said.
Vernon Hills has accepted more refugees from the seven majority-Muslim countries over the past decade than any other community in Lake County, according to the AP data. Twenty-three refugees arrived there from Iraq, with 14 of them arriving in a single year, 2008.
John Kalmar, Vernon Hills’ village manager, said the community has “always” welcomed diversity and said he was “not surprised” that the Iraqi refugees ended up there.
“We have a great cross-section of people in the community,” Kalmar said. “And the community’s always been open and welcoming to those folks. So from that perspective, everyone’s welcome.”
The statistics show that over the past 10 years, 21 refugees from the seven countries gave Mundelein as their destination; 11 were headed for Lake Forest; nine for Libertyville; seven each for Buffalo Grove and Wauconda; and six for Waukegan. Other communities such as Antioch, Highland Park and Lake Zurich were each the destinations for five or fewer refugees from the seven nations.
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Twenty-one refugees from Iraq and Iran gave Deerfield as their destination. Alan Farkas, a village trustee, said he was “pleasantly surprised” upon hearing that Deerfield was among the more popular destinations for refugees in Lake County. Barbara Struthers, Farkas’ colleague on the village board, said they “are certainly welcome to be here.”
“We have people of all different faiths here and all different appearances,” Struthers said. “And if they find a home here in Deerfield, more power to them.”
Twitter @lucashammill