Shortly after arriving and receiving treatment, Al-Suhail told his mother he was cured. He lied. Now every time he calls his mother, she greets him with the same question: “Are you sure you’re cancer free?” she asks, “because I don’t believe you anymore.”

Eugene Peba made it to America. Now he’s waiting to hear if he can stay.

He traveled with a suitcase and handbag filled with clothes, pictures and his laptop to Chicago where he was received by his uncle. An officer welcomed him, saying, “you’ve done more for the United States than most people have.”

Sarfean’s tendency to gravitate towards the intellectually stimulating is what dominated his former life in Iraq. It is this very tendency that makes his new life in America so very frustrating.

A few people enter the small, one-room house, speaking several different languages. Darfurian refugee Abdulkarim Lazim tries to understand everything…

Crying, and clutching her stomach to keep herself from succumbing to overwhelming panic, Ahlam made up her mind. “From that second, I swore to God I would never leave any Iraqis to suffer what I suffered, to feel when I first came.”

Kira immigrated to Skokie from Moscow only a few months earlier, on Sept. 1, with her parents… The move was nearly 14 years in the making and just in time, for by Sept. 30, the U.S. would no longer process Russians claiming refugee status.