Arguably, the miracle is that, after the first attack on American soil in over fifty years, the resettlement program continued in the 2000s at all.
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The attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, occurred days before President George W. Bush was to announce the year’s allotment of refugee visas before the beginning of the fiscal year on October 1. On September 14, Bush issued a “Declaration of National Emergency by Reason of Certain Terrorist Attacks,” which gave the executive branch sweeping powers to respond to any potential terrorist threats in the country or outside it. In the days following 9/11, the country slotted the national identity mold developed over decades of the Cold War—the same one invoked by presidents Reagan, Bush, and Clinton—onto this new conflict. The United States defined itself almost instantaneously as antiterrorist in the same way it had been anticommunist.
While officially the language from the president and other politicians was measured, a shapeless panic directed at anyone who was Muslim, or even anyone who looked as if they could be Muslim, swept through the country. Hate crimes increased exponentially.
President Bush addressed the rising Islamophobia in a speech on September 17, 2001, given at the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., often referred to as his “Islam Is Peace” speech: “The face of terror is not as eloquent as the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.” He reminded the country that “America counts millions of Muslims amongst our citizens,” and that despite the “anger and emotion, our fellow Americans must treat each other with respect.” There should be no intimidation of American Muslims, and the people “who feel like they can intimidate our fellow citizens to take out their anger don’t represent the best of America, they represent the worst of humankind, and they should be ashamed of that kind of behavior.” But fear gripped the nation in a way it hadn’t since Pearl Harbor. It was as if the anti-Japanese sentiment in the 1940s combined with the McCarthyism of the 1950s for a fierce new form of better-safe-than-sorryism. There was almost immediate public support for closing down any entry point for immigration to the United States, no matter how improbable it was that terrorists could arrive in the United States through the refugee resettlement program.
In the weeks immediately following the attack, a number of things happened swiftly to communicate to the American public that the government was taking the threat of more terrorist attacks seriously: The Bush administration suspended the refugee admissions program on October 1, including refugee processing centers under USCIS around the world; this halt affected the more than 20,000 refugees who had already passed their security clearances. For seven weeks, refugees were effectively barred from entering the United States through the resettlement program.
The military launched Operation Enduring Freedom, the war in Afghanistan aimed against Osama Bin-Laden and al-Qaeda, on October 7. The US attacks on Afghan soil contributed to a humanitarian crisis already affecting 4 million civilians in the country; Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced 37,500 rations to aid the Afghan people, a tiny amount compared with the scale of the need of feeding millions. While advocates applauded that the US was sending aid to affected civilians, they remained concerned about the scale of the crisis, especially as the resettlement program remained closed.
The Patriot Act passed Congress on October 24. The unprecedented legislation expanded law enforcement’s ability to prevent, investigate, and prosecute for terror-related crimes. It also aimed to prevent people accused of being involved in terrorist activities from entering the United States. The language was sweeping and broad, creating a complicated quagmire that would affect immigration entries, including refugee admissions, for decades.
On November 21, President Bush presented his Presidential Determination reopening the US Refugee Admissions Process with a cap of only 70,000, among the lowest numbers since the FRRP began in 1980. As part of the vast reorganization taking place at the federal level, the Office of Refugee Resettlement shared vetting with the newly created Department of Homeland Security. It took time to catch up on the backlog following the suspension of the program, especially with new vetting criteria being implemented under the DHS. Most of the allotted slots were not filled in 2002—only 27,000 refugees arrived that year. The number of refugees continued to remain well below the resettlement quota for the next few years—only 41 percent of the slots in 2003, and 75 percent in 2005.
As had happened in decades past, the mood of the American public—with the overt and underlying Islamophobia—deeply affected refugee admissions. Despite Bush and other politicians in the early 2000s promoting a differentiation between terrorist organizations and Islam as a whole, politicians on all levels learned quickly to match their rhetoric to what polls told them the public valued. The hatred and baseless fear against Muslims that took root in those years would blossom over the next decade into a national better-safe-than-sorryism on a scale not seen in the United States since the 1920s and 1930s.
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As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan progressed, the Bush administration prioritized immigration for translators, informants, and others who helped US troops. In 2009, the Bush administration formalized the entry policies in the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program designed to give a new avenue for resettlement for those Iraqis and Afghans, many of whom were Muslim, to the US. The number of refugees from other Muslim-majority countries, or for Iraqi and Afghan refugees who did not qualify for SIV status, however, continued to remain relatively low.
In addition to the resettlement admissions process for immigrants from other countries, the US enacted several changes that affected asylum seekers on its own territory. Along with the Patriot Act of 2001 and the Homeland Security Act of 2002, the Real ID Act of 2005 and other policies and programs disproportionately targeted economic migrants and asylum seekers who arrived on American soil, mostly from Cuba through Mexico, but also those fleeing violence in Central and South America. There were even several cases of people flying from such countries as Eritrea into countries south of the United States border, such as Brazil, and then walking into the country.
As long as these asylum seekers immediately informed border guards or officials in the country, it was not illegal for them to cross the American border. It was illegal, however, to prevent people from seeking asylum or return them to danger because of the non-refoulement clauses of the 1951 Refugee Convention. But the fervor for national security overshadowed the once-effective humanitarian arguments for asylum seekers having a chance to prove their cases in a US court. The national disaster in New York had ushered in a profound new age in American politics.
With the benefit of hindsight, there are a number of things to criticize about policy decisions in the years following 9/11. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan contributed to and caused massive humanitarian crises and essentially corroded what international goodwill the US had garnered after the World Trade Center attack. Legislation in the name of national security violated the privacy of millions of Americans. Overarching anti-immigration pushes hurt the lives of thousands of innocent people.
However, when it came to the resettlement program, the response from the federal level all the way down to local officials and community members across the country maintained the basic assumption of the previous decades: The resettlement program was an effective and worthwhile endeavor. The suspension in 2001 certainly created a backlog that it took a few years to make up; the caps were lower than they’d been since 1980. But the admission cap immediately following 9/11—67,000—still exceeded the 50,000 that the Carter administration had expected to be the norm for resettlement. There were the constant, well-founded criticisms that resettlement did not do nearly enough to mitigate the scale of humanitarian disasters around the world, but looking back, the steadiness with which the program contin
ued despite the national emergency is awe-inspiring.
Following 9/11, even as the country slowed admissions for Muslim refugees in concerning ways, the US turned its attention to protracted refugee situations and began to finally address one of the more shameful legacies of mid-twentieth-century refugee policies.
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The refugee camps that emerged as the model after World War II became one of the foundations of refugee aid around the world in the last half of the twentieth century. Camps played a critical role in resettlement not just to the United States, but to the other, predominantly Western countries partnering with the United Nations in offering new homes to vetted refugees. There were a number of reasons camps worked well for countries offering aid—as in postwar Europe, the countries sharing boundaries with a conflict zone took on a disproportionate number of asylum seekers and needed to set up temporary locations so as not to overwhelm their own citizens. Camps made it easier to pass out clothing, food, medicine, and other supplies to those in need. They also provided central hubs for UNHCR and other agencies to interview the refugees who might be considered for resettlement.
As the refugee crises ballooned worldwide in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, so did the protracted refugee situations. For example, to help Kenya with its swelling crisis, UNHCR set up Dabaab refugee camp in 1993 for the Somalis pouring in, later joined by Ethiopian and Sudanese refugees. The camp was designed to contain 120,000 people. By 2011, 500,000 were packed in, leading to squalid, inhumane conditions. That was just one of many examples—over the next few decades, twenty-three of the camps founded in the 1980s and 1990s remained open and nine more were added in some of the most unstable regions in the world. In the first part of the twenty-first century, more than half of the world’s refugee population lived in thirty-two camps.
A word in the Somali language, “bufis,” means an intense desire to leave—a feeling refugees around the world understood too intimately. The average length of stay of a refugee in any camp was twenty-six years.
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In the first decade of the twenty-first century, international refugee resettlement negotiations between the United States and other countries finally made some progress in the long-term deliberation about refugees in protracted refugee situations. A UNHCR report from April 20, 2006, advocated that countries do more than provide aid in response to “refugee emergencies” and instead, do something about refugees “trapped in situations far from the international spotlight.” The month that report was issued, the United States was three years into the Iraq War; Nouri al-Maliki had just been named prime minister of Iraq. While the US attempted to frame the new government as a triumphant outcome of the war, Iraqi civilians were dying at a rate of one thousand to thirty-five hundred per month. Other countries were increasingly concerned about the scope of a war with an undetermined endgame that had such dire consequences for the civilian population.
That spring, the US agreed to accept more refugees from camps, perhaps as a way to alleviate UN pressure about the war in Iraq. Opening up resettlement to people in protracted refugee situations was also a way for the Bush administration to enact “compassionate conservativism,” allowing some refugees to be resettled while still maintaining the firm restrictionist stance his base desired. Bush’s compassionate conservativism relied on a private partnership with churches, many of which had been deeply involved in refugee work for years. The leaders of those churches had been advocating for years for the Bush administration to open up admissions to the people trapped in camps.
In May 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice granted an immigration waiver that allowed many of the 9,300 Burmese refugees who had been at Mae La camp in Thailand to be resettled in the United States. First Lady Laura Bush hosted a roundtable at the United Nations Security Council to raise awareness of the humanitarian crisis in September of that year. Over the next decade or so, more than 163,000 refugees originally from Myanmar would arrive in the United States. The US public, which had been supportive of refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia, naturally expanded that support to other refugees from Southeast Asia.
And it did not hurt that Christian communities in the United States often advocated for Burmese refugees because they were moved by stories of ethnic minorities in Myanmar, many of whose ancestors had converted to Christianity in the 1800s. The Rohingya Muslim refugees, equally targeted in Myanmar, got less US news coverage in those days than Karen Baptists and Karenni Catholics coming to the US to find religious freedom at last.
The resettlement of refugees from Myanmar would be one of the largest and most successful programs in US history. Refugees from Somalia and Burundi, from Bhutan and the Congo, also benefited from the Bush administration’s focus on placing people from protracted situations. While there was still a stark, unmet need in the Middle East and other places, the response of the Bush administration to the better-safe-than-sorry restrictionism following 9/11 was not to end resettlement, but to open it up to groups in dire need around the world.
Chapter 24
HASNA
AUSTIN, TEXAS, USA, JULY 2016
Hasna turned the key in the door, shoving it slightly to open it. The apartment smelled dank and mildewy. When she flipped the light on, the single yellowish bulb did nothing to dispel her sinking feeling. She took her shoes off at the door. Rana and the volunteer who picked them up at the airport in Austin were chatting and laughing as well as they could with Rana’s few English words. Hasna left them to care for their five suitcases. She walked through the apartment. It did not take long.
The furniture did not match. There was a couch with holes near the cushion seams; it looked like suede, but when she rubbed her hand over it, the fabric felt too stiff, the indeterminate color neither gray nor brown. The coffee table was low and square, made out of plywood covered with a vinyl sticker that had woodgrain printed on it, the edges of the sticker peeling around the corners and the brasslike trim turning brown. When she touched it, the legs wobbled precariously. There was a table with three chairs—the table, at least, was really wood—crammed on the wall next to the couch. She took two more steps toward the bathroom and realized that from this vantage point she could see the entire home. The one bedroom had a queen-sized bed covered in a teal floral print. The dining nook, an extension of the living room, held a twin mattress on a frame; this was the second bedroom for seventeen-year-old Rana. The kitchen was a tiny corner—just room for a sink, an oven and stove, a refrigerator, and a few cabinets. She could cook and hand the dishes to Rana in bed through the peek-a-boo counter.
Opening the cabinets, Hasna realized there were no pots and pans, no way to even heat water on the stove. How could she cook with nothing to cook in? Did they also not cook in this country? There was a stove and a refrigerator that were not unlike the ones she had had back in Jordan and Syria, though this one seemed to be electric and not gas. She would not have to buy gas canisters, at least. She had wondered how she would know the vendors were coming anyway, or how she would negotiate with them if she could not speak the language. And the dishes—she couldn’t stop picturing the beautiful china and cutlery she had lovingly placed in boxes before leaving Daraa, the full sets she had invested in over time. Even the simple plates and cutlery in Jordan had at least matched.
This kitchen held only three of everything, none of it coordinating: two blue plates stacked on top of a thick pottery plate with a cream center and a dark green circle. One of the bowls was blue with red apples, one was pink, one was baby blue. The three bowls weren’t even the same sizes; neither were the three mugs. She couldn’t stack them, which didn’t matter because what was the point of stacking three of anything?
The volunteer made sympathetic noises as Hasna stumbled to sit down on the sludge-colored couch. She could tell from the way the woman was gesturing that the volunteer assumed they were physically tired. It was regret, not fatigue, that made Has
na’s knees feel as if they were about to buckle. She thought with almost physical pain of the gleaming wooden furniture she had sold off or given away in Jordan in the week that passed between getting the news they were coming to the US and leaving on the plane. All of the gold that she had used to garner things for a life back in Syria—their entire savings spent on appliances and furniture that, in the end, she had begged her neighbors to take. It had been less than forty-eight hours since she had held her grandbabies’ cheeks to her face. And she had left them for this—a bleak existence in a country whose language she could not speak.
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