Naqibullah Obayd, 35, moved to the United States in July of 2024. A policy-maker by profession, the Taliban threatened Obayd after he refused to work for them following the 2021 takeover of Kabul. He fled to Qatar with his wife and two daughters, and after a year and a half, received asylum in the US.

After four months living in Philadelphia, employment quickly became Obayd’s biggest concern. As part of the newest wave of refugees, he belongs to a group of largely educated Afghans who are struggling to find work in their professional fields. 

Obayd has a master’s degree in policy-making from Gazi University in Turkey, with six years of professional experience. In 2021, he “was working as a plans and policies director in the attorney general’s office of the Republican government,” he explained. On November 2nd of 2024, he interviewed to be a grocery bagger at Walmart. 

 

76,000 Afghan evacuees came into the United States in August of 2021, the largest American evacuation since the end of the Vietnam War.

That month, the Biden administration created the Operation Allies Welcome program; it served as an immigration pathway for vulnerable Afghans, particularly those who had worked for the US government. After extensive background checks, the admitted Afghans entered the United States either as Humanitarian Parolees (a temporary protection which needs to be renewed every two years) or, if they had worked for the US government, through Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs).

Louise Sandberg of the Princeton Interfaith Refugee Resettlement Committee (PIRRC) has worked to resettle 127 people since 2015, 86 of them Afghans. Her organization works with the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, and she said that the work has been harder than expected. 

“With Afghans – with the overlay of these traditional values and the extended families they’re coming from…” she trailed off. “It’s really difficult.”

PIRRC helps refugees find housing, schooling, and employment. “It was an eye opener,” said Sandburg, about the Afghan evacuees. “They’re moving towards independence. Most of them are able to support themselves for the most part. But it hasn’t been easy.”

 

According to a study by the Immigration Policy Institute, only 61% of Afghan immigrants were employed in 2022. Other figures were equally grim: the median household income for Afghan families was $48,000, compared to $75,000 for the average immigrant household.

Obayd said that many of the difficulties in finding work are due to improper job training. He said that without the proper direction, he had many unanswered questions: how to write a resume, how to job-hunt, how to act in interviews – he felt that he hadn’t been properly prepared by the refugee agencies.

More generally, Obayd said English-language difficulties have complicated the job-searching process. “I want to do a job in my own field, in the future,” Obayd said. “But right now, I need to improve my English.”

Obayd said another problem was that resettlement agencies were only finding jobs to meet their quotas. “Their policies for job seeking is that they are filling their targets,” he said. “They just want to put people in different jobs which is not going to help them in the future.”

Despite his master’s education and extensive experience in plan and policy making, he said that he hasn’t been connected with any related work opportunities. 

 

Shayan Davoudi, an immigration lawyer at the HIAS refugee organization, said he’s seen Obayd experience reflected in the cases of many Afghans. 

“The majority of my clients, they were educated people. They had their own dreams, they had their own profession, they had their whole life,” Davoudi said. “Regardless of what age they came to this country, they have to start from zero.”

“And 0 means, more likely than not, forgetting about what you had in your country,” he continued. Davoudi has worked with over a hundred Afghan refugees since 2021, and said that regardless of master’s- or doctorate-level education, he sees many Afghans “just end up being an Uber driver, Lyft driver or working in a factory.” Without proper systems of support or training, many of them stop trying to find jobs in their professional field. 

“You know, after 2-3 years of being in this country,” Davoudi said, “you lose hope.”

 

As of the publishing of this article, Obayd hasn’t heard back from Walmart about the potential job, but he’s hopeful. He insists that he’s grateful to the United States for welcoming him, and he calls out human rights abuses in Afghanistan. 

But he continues to hope that in the future, the resettlement agencies will match him with work in his professional field. “I’m a policy-maker, they want me to be a carpenter,” he said. “It doesn’t work like that.”