{"id":378,"date":"2017-03-03T01:42:27","date_gmt":"2017-03-02T22:42:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/yemeniamerican.com\/en\/?p=378"},"modified":"2017-08-08T01:45:28","modified_gmt":"2017-08-07T22:45:28","slug":"yemeni-americans-brace-for-future-immigration-woes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yemeniamerican.com\/en\/yemeni-americans-brace-for-future-immigration-woes\/","title":{"rendered":"Yemeni Americans Brace for Future Immigration Woes"},"content":{"rendered":"

By: Eli Newman – The Yemeni American News<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Metro Detroit\u2019s 15,000 Yemeni Americans wait to hear what will happen\u00a0next.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter\u00a012 years, they revoked the case. I cannot believe\u00a0this.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Muad Noman,\u00a0Hamtramck<\/p>\n

Muad Noman came to a recent community forum on immigration with one big question on his mind: how can he get his sister to the United\u00a0States?<\/p>\n

Noman, who lives in Hamtramck, left his native Yemen in 1999 as a youth to join his father who had been in the U.S. since\u00a01971.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow everybody\u2019s here except one of my sisters who\u2019s married with her family back home in Yemen, and we\u2019re trying our best to get her here,\u201d Noman says. \u201cBut it looks like it gets harder and harder every\u00a0year.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the weeks after President Trump issued his\u00a0executive order limiting immigration from seven countries including Yemen, Noman and others in Detroit\u2019s Yemeni-American community continue to question what the new president\u2019s policies will mean for local families. Dozens of people filled an auditorium in Dearborn earlier this month to hear from local and federal officials and ask what they can expect in the coming\u00a0months.<\/p>\n

A woman asks about the legality of having her mother\u2019s passport confiscated by border agents. Officials with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services tell her that passports can be taken as they are U.S. property, but the confiscation does not revoke her mother\u2019s\u00a0citizenship.<\/p>\n

One man asks if his young child can sponsor his citizenship. The federal agents tell him that his son must be at least 21-years-old to do\u00a0that.<\/p>\n

Another man asked about the delay of his application. He is told to apply\u00a0again.<\/p>\n

These questions are familiar to\u00a0Abdulhakem\u00a0Alsadah, president of the National Association of Yemeni Americans, which is based in Dearborn.\u00a0\u201cWhat the executive order has done is made a bad situation worse,\u201d he\u00a0says.<\/p>\n

The association provides a variety of social services for metro Detroit\u2019s Yemeni community, and Alsadah says\u00a0since the executive order was signed,\u00a0he has been working\u00a0overtime.<\/p>\n

A Century in the\u00a0City<\/p>\n

Metro Detroit\u2019s Yemeni community has been established for a century, says Sally Howell, director of the Center for Arab American Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.<\/p>\n

Yemeni Merchant Marines came to Detroit in the 1920s to join the growing auto, followed by various waves of immigrants who chased job prospects throughout the 20th\u00a0century.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the 60s, 70s, maybe early 80s it was mostly a male population,\u201d who would send part of their paychecks to families back home, Howell\u00a0says.<\/p>\n

A real shift happened in metro Detroit\u2019s Yemeni community during the late 1980s, according to Howell, when families began to immigrate.\u00a0They established themselves in Detroit and\u00a0the south ends of Dearborn\u00a0and\u00a0Hamtramck.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Yemenis who were new to having families here, living in this space that had suddenly been abandoned and was dangerous, they started doing all sorts of creative things like working with the police to patrol the\u00a0neighborhood,\u201d Howell\u00a0says.<\/p>\n

Many credit the Yemeni community\u2019s effort to build their new communities with helping to revitalize the neighborhoods,\u00a0further establishing Yemenis within metro\u00a0Detroit.<\/p>\n

Howell, who authored the book \u201cOld Islam in Detroit: Rediscovering the Muslim American Past,\u201d says Yemeni Americans centered their lives around the mosques they established. One of those is Mu\u2019ath Bin Jabil,\u00a0which helped make Hamtramck the country\u2019s first majority-Muslim\u00a0city.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the land of opportunity, because people come here to finish their education, to improve their economic life, or to live good\u00a0life\u00a0here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Saad Almasmari, Hamtramck City\u00a0Council<\/p>\n

Hamtramck City Council Member\u00a0Saad\u00a0Almasmari<\/p>\n

Yemeni Americans also are represented in local government. Hamtramck City Council Member Saad Almasmari\u00a0came to\u00a0the\u00a0U.S.\u00a0in\u00a02009.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the land of opportunity, because people come here to finish their education, to improve their economic life, or to live good life\u00a0here,\u201d he\u00a0says.<\/p>\n

Still,\u00a0for someone like Noman,\u00a0the U.S does not necessarily feel like a land of opportunity at the moment. His father in 2005 applied to sponsor his sister, and since then she has had several children. Then his father died while waiting for the paperwork to progress. Noman re-applied to sponsor her, but he says the federal government revoked the\u00a0case.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs Yemeni-Americans in the United States, we are being treated differently,\u201d Noman says.\u00a0\u201dWe feel that we are second-class citizens, that we don\u2019t get our civil rights as any other American living under the skies of\u00a0the U.S.A.\u201d<\/p>\n

Family\u00a0Affairs<\/p>\n

Noman is like nearly all Yemeni Americans who have direct relatives \u2014 parents,\u00a0spouses,\u00a0or siblings \u2014 currently living there, according to Alsadah. While it\u2019s been difficult for all people affected by the executive order,\u00a0Alsadah says\u00a0it\u2019s especially rough for those emigrating from\u00a0Yemen.<\/p>\n

Just 12 people from Yemen have arrived in Michigan with refugee status during the last few years compared with thousand from Iraq and Syria, according to The Refugee Processing Center, which is operated by the\u00a0U.S.\u00a0Department of\u00a0State.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s different because there is no American embassy in Yemen,\u201d Alsadah says. \u201cAmerican citizens who want to bring their families, they have to get out of Yemen to go to other countries so they can\u00a0apply.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yemeni immigrants who end up in Detroit have sometimes traveled to Malaysia,\u00a0Djibouti, Algeria\u00a0and a host of other countries with lax visa laws, Alsadah says. There,\u00a0they wait months,\u00a0sometimes years,\u00a0for the\u00a0U.S.\u00a0to approve the immigration paperwork,\u00a0DNA\u00a0tests\u00a0and blood samples they\u00a0submit.<\/p>\n

Alsadah says the vetting process was rigorous even before the executive order was signed and\u00a0expensive.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re in Malaysia for example, imagine, you need a birth certificate you need to go back to Yemen to get a birth certificate, he says. \u201cThat\u2019s how hard it\u2019s been\u00a0for\u00a0Yemenis.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By: Eli Newman – The Yemeni American News   Metro Detroit\u2019s 15,000 Yemeni Americans wait to hear what will happen\u00a0next. \u201cAfter\u00a012 years, they revoked the case. I cannot believe\u00a0this.\u201d   Muad Noman,\u00a0Hamtramck Muad Noman came to a recent community forum on immigration with one big question on his mind: how can he get his sister […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":379,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-community-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yemeniamerican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yemeniamerican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yemeniamerican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yemeniamerican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yemeniamerican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/yemeniamerican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":380,"href":"https:\/\/yemeniamerican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378\/revisions\/380"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yemeniamerican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yemeniamerican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yemeniamerican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yemeniamerican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}