PBA DESK : When Mahbud, 26, arrived in Vienna from Iran two years ago, he hadn’t planned to stay here very long: he dreamt of moving to the United States and becoming an engineer.
But along with more than 100 other Iranian refugees, he says his hopes have been dashed and he has been left stranded in Austria by US restrictions on refugees and immigrants.
Mahbud belongs to a persecuted religious minority and left the Islamic Republic under a programme run by a US refugee charity, HIAS.
Originally founded to help Jewish refugees who fled to the US, HIAS expanded its resettlement work to non-Jewish asylum-seekers in the early 2000s and says it has helped 25,000 Iranians from religious minorities flee the country since then.
Because Tehran and Washington have no diplomatic relations, the refugees have traditionally been channelled through Austria, where they are temporarily housed while final checks are made by US authorities.
Mahbud arrived in Austria at around the time of US President Donald Trump’s first travel ban in January 2017 — and it was then that his dreams of a new life in the US began to evaporate.
His final interview for security clearance never took place.
After more than a year of waiting and uncertainty, HIAS finally got in touch to say that his application had been closed.
“You plan your life, you have all these dreams that you are going to… live freely and in just a moment they say: ‘We can not do anything for you’,” Mahbud says.
“I thought: ‘OK, my life’s probably over, there is nothing that I can do about it’.”
His position in Austria was equally uncertain: HIAS warned he could be expelled within a matter of weeks.
PBA/zizi
