The four Libyan men show up at the Center for Immigrants and Immigration Services just before closing Friday. They finish their cigarettes outside and make their way to the unassuming office in the basement of an aging building. They wait, anxious and uncomfortable.
They will talk to me if I do not use their names. The situation is precarious. You never know who is watching. The men are here to ask about a grocery card. Food donations, they say in voices that suggest they cannot believe it themselves.
Just four months ago, they left Libya to earn advanced degrees in mathematics and engineering at universities here. Their government paid their tuition and provided large stipends to pay rent, bills, food for them and their wives and children. Back home, three of the four were university professors.
But what was home, no longer is. What is home is civil war and mothers and fathers who call and say, “Don’t come back here.” Which leads these men to the inevitable question: What will happen to us if we stay here?
It is that question that brings Libyans daily to meet with CIIS executive director Frederick Jayweh and his small staff. They are all volunteers, Jayweh included. He is Liberian by birth and worked at the Rocky Mountain Survivors’ Center for seven years before it closed in September 2009. The day after it closed, Jayweh opened CIIS. The nonprofit focuses on those seeking asylum and provides mental-health care, English and computer classes, bus tokens, donated grocery cards and referrals to its partners for legal and medical services.
It’s not clear the 250 or so Libyan students in Colorado will qualify for asylum. It’s not clear, in fact, that many will want asylum. But Jayweh sees only one thing right now:
“They are traumatized. They are anxious,” he says. “They come in like this every day, two, three, five at a time, and they have a lot of questions. So far, we have screened 35 heads of households, and many have wives and children.”
The most pressing worry outside concern for their families in Libya is financial. The war and United Nations sanctions have cast in doubt the future of the Libyan scholarship fund and access to it. On Friday, these four Libyan students received their May salary. They were told not to expect further payment. Without the stipend, they cannot pay living expenses. They cannot pay tuition in the fall. All are here on student visas. If they are not enrolled in a university, they lose their legal right to be in this country.
“By the end of May, they’ll be out of every resource,” Jayweh says. “No money for food. No money for rent. We’re asking churches for help. We’re asking for free legal assistance.”
The Colorado chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association has begun working with universities that have Libyan students. It’s offering presentations on legal options and free individual consultations to students.
Nationally, the organization representing university foreign-student advisers is asking the U.S. government to allow Libyan students to find jobs off-campus, work permission typically forbidden to student-visa holders. Similar exemptions have been granted in the past to Japanese and Haitian students.
The four Libyan men at the CIIS office find little comfort in this. They find little comfort in the idea of asylum, either, a process that sounds time-consuming at a moment when they have no time.
“How can we stay here without money?” one of the men asks. “It’s one thing to say you can work, but what kind of work will we find?” another says. “In my country, we are all university professors. What can I do here? Work in a restaurant?”
They shake their heads. What options are you considering, I ask. They say they believe the war will end soon, Libyan president Moammar Khadafy will be deposed and they will be allowed to continue their paid studies here.
“But right now, chances are 80 percent that I will go back by the end of May,” says one. The other three, all from rebel-held eastern Libya, say they are 90 percent certain they will return at the end of the month.
They’ll take the risk that Libyan-government spies here photographed them at an anti-government rally in Capitol Hill and that their names are on a list somewhere. They would rather risk death in war, they tell me, than live on the street here.
Tina Griego writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
