Home economice for refugees: what it's like to be separated from your family by process paperword, and politics.

• Author: Whitehead, Margaret Redmond

EVERY MONTH IN Louisville, Kentucky, Abdi Mohamed does a little bit of family banking. The 32-year-old Somali man with dark, deep-set eyes and a cleanly trimmed goatee opens an app called Wave. Foremost in his mind are his wife, his 6-year-old stepdaughter, and his 3-year-old daughter. He tries to figure out how much money they need: Did they run out of toiletries? Any hospital visits? Have the girls grown out of their clothes? After running through his mental checklist, Mohamed determines a number, navigates the app, and taps his finger on the screen to send his family what they will need this month. The money withdraws from his bank account in Louisville. Eight thousand miles away in Nairobi, Kenya, Mohamed's wife Sophia gets a notification on her phone that the money has arrived from America.

"I send $500 to $600 per month to my family," says Mohamed, who earns $12.50 an hour working in an Amazon warehouse. "But sometimes there are medical bills; it fluctuates. So [I] may end up sending $500, $600, $700, and by the end of the month, [I] keep on sending other money. Sometimes it goes beyond $1,000." At these figures, he gives a helpless laugh.

Mohamed was 6 years old when he left Somalia, an arrow-shaped country capping the horn of Africa that has been hounded by civil war since a coup in 1991. His family fled across the border to Kenya and found tenuous safety in the refugee camp of Dadaab, and it was there that he grew up. After an unhappy first marriage, Mohamed applied for the United States Refugee Admissions Program, a yearslong process with the potential to result in resettlement to America. Then his plans went awry: He met Sophia, who had a daughter from her own previous unhappy marriage. She was beautiful, patient, and fastidious. The two fell in love and wed, and soon had a daughter of their own.

"Marriage and death are things that always come as a surprise," Mohamed says. "Sometimes things happen the way you don't plan it."

Since Sophia and the girls weren't a part of Mohamed's initial application, he was not able to add them to his case. In 2013, when he was approved for resettlement to the United States, he had to go alone. Now he's in the process of applying to bring them to join him in Kentucky. He works 60-hour weeks and sends them money to live on. Mohamed is keenly aware of the difference between himself and the other workers at his warehouse: They end long shifts and go home to their families, while his wife and daughters are an ocean away.

Mohamed is a legally "single" man who is simultaneously bound to support three dependents. His immigration attorney at Kentucky Refugee Ministries, Sarah Mills, calls his financial situation "maintaining two households," a phrase usually reserved for wealthy owners of multiple homes. Mills has been working with Mohamed since June 2014 to file a refugee family reunification petition, a legal channel through which refugees in their first two years in the United States can bring their immediate families to join them. But until his petition succeeds, Mohamed lives in a kind of limbo, his feet on Kentucky ground but his heart with his family in Kenya.

Thousands of such fragmented families exist. Just as most American families would not disunite intentionally, these refugee families never meant to get permanently separated. Under normal circumstances--their countries intact and safe, facing no persecution--they would function as single households living under the same roof.

Instead, many refugees' full energies are devoted to absent family members overseas. The cost of this separation, both to people like Mohamed and to the American communities they live in, demands closer investigation. So do the costly inefficiencies in the family reunification system.

'IF I MISS ONE DAY OF WORK, THEY WOULD SUFFER' MONEY IS ON the minds of most new refugees in the United States. The U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program aims for them to be financially self-sufficient within 90 days of arriving in the country. New arrivals learn that they must put aside any notions of full-time English classes in favor of finding a first job, and fast.

They are often blindsided by the cost of living in America. "There are so many bills: water, house, electricity," says Elhadi Adam, a Sudanese refugee who fled Sudan's ethnic cleansing campaign and resettled in Maryland in 2012. But even with these costs, Adam's life in America was still better than that of his family...