After the Last Border

by Jessica Goudeau

  One day, several weeks into her new routine of having a family devotional, Saw Ku came out of the bedroom and joined them. The kids, following their mother’s lead, acted as if it were normal for him to be there. When she asked Pah Poe to read aloud from the Karen Bible, Saw Ku took it and read the verse himself. When he was finished, Naw Wah read it confidently in English. He told his little daughter she had done well. Saw Ku caught her eye and they smiled at each other. A year later, they moved into the new home they could afford because of Mu Naw’s good job.

  Chapter 29

  US REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT, 2015–2018

  In 2015, while President Obama was making the case for resettling more Syrian refugees, the massive unraveling of public support for refugee resettlement in the United States began relatively quickly. The spark might have been the Paris attacks at the end of 2015, as well as the attacks in Brussels in early 2016, but this particular restrictionism had been simmering in the country since 9/11.

  Social media spread fear of refugees in a new way, but the underlying messages and racialized tropes were virtually unchanged since the United States immigration debates in the 1880s. One meme that went viral in the United States and Europe showed four images of heavily built men crossing gangplanks. The caption, “Refugees?” in white letters in the middle of the picture was followed by red-rimmed, disintegrating letters at the bottom: “Is it sinking in yet?”

  Another meme lifted an image from The Atlantic of a Free Syria Army officer posing with his assault weapon outside Aleppo in January 2015 and then seeking asylum in Greece in fall of 2015. The image—shared by an anti-immigrant advocate in the UK, Peter Lee Goodchild, with the caption, “Remember this guy? Posing in ISIS photos last year—now he’s a ‘refugee.’ Are we suckers or what?”—was shared more than seventy thousand times before Goodchild removed the post.

  “Sucker” was the same word used by the announcer in the postwar Army-Navy newsreel when he posed the question about why the United States and other Allies were helping refugees. The argument put forth at that time—that aid was effective not just for humanitarian reasons but because, if the US didn’t “help these people now, then the chaos will continue indefinitely, and the seeds of a third World War will take root”—was not as effective in 2015 as it had been in the late 1940s. Instead, to paraphrase the Chinese Exclusion Act cartoon, the memes represented “The Great Fear of the period—that the United States would be consumed by terrorists.” As had happened in the 1930s, this rhetoric conflated the victims of terrorism with its perpetrators, but, unlike the 1930s, the intensive—one might even say extreme—vetting processes put people accepted in the United States for refugee resettlement in a completely different category. The Refugee Admissions Process was an all but impossible avenue for terrorists to enter the country. The American public did not turn against people holding tourist or student visas, which were the way most of the actual non-American terrorists in the twenty-first century had gained admittance to the country. Stoked by fear-based social media, however, that logical argument did little to stem the tide of public sentiment.

  This view—that any humanitarian impulse toward Muslim refugees was a product of suckers who were welcoming poorly disguised terrorists—was not limited to biased posts on social media. Antirefugee rhetoric became more and more mainstream. Politicians once again presented better-safe-than-sorryism as commonsense policy. They used phrases almost identical to those in the starkly racist debates that culminated in the Immigration Act of 1924 and the closed-door refugee policies of the 1930s and early 1940s.

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  Trump gave a speech on refugees on January 12, 2016, while campaigning in Cedar Falls, Iowa, almost eighty years after Lindbergh’s 1941 Iowa “war agitator” speech, that played up that great fear. He had just begun using the slogan “America First,” which journalists and historians at the time connected with Lindbergh and the original America First Committee. Trump framed Syrian refugees, and Muslims in general, as an enemy to the American people:

  They don’t have paper work, they have no documentation whatsoever—they have no documentation! And then we’re bringing them into this country? We don’t know who they are? And you look at what happens in California? And you look at some of the things that happen, including, by the way, flying airplanes into the World Trade Center? Why are we doing this?

  He conflated all Syrian refugees (and, in other speeches, all Muslims) with San Bernardino shooters Syed Rizwan Farook (who was from Riverside, California) and Tashfeen Malik (who was originally from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan), as well as the al-Qaeda-associated September 11 hijackers who came to the US on tourist and student visas from Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Lebanon. Syrian refugees, who had years’ worth of paper trails backing up their stories from the intensive vetting process across multiple agencies and international databases, were the people he said had “no paperwork.”

  But the speech was just weeks after the Paris attacks, and news outlets in the United States were still tracing some of the terrorists back to ISIS in Syria—whether or not any of Trump’s referents were factual at all, his audience’s shared context made those appeals effective in a way they might not have been in another time.

  At the same rally, to describe his immigration policy, Trump put on his reading glasses and read Oscar Brown Jr.’s lyrics to “The Snake.” The story line is simple: a woman finds a cold snake, takes it into her home to warm it up, and then it bites and kills her. For emphasis, Trump added the word “vicious” before the word “snake” every time he read it. When he arrived at the end of the lyrics, he emphasized each word: “You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.” At this point Trump paused, took off his glasses while the audience applauded, and asked, “Does that make sense to anybody? Does that make any sense? Does that make sense? And hopefully that’s not going to be the case. I read it and I just put it together.” The simplistic, sing-song rhythm felt like a children’s nursery rhyme, a concept so easy to grasp even a child could understand: a country naïve enough to bring in “snakes” deserves what it gets.

  Lindbergh’s anti-Semitic “America First” speech in 1941 destroyed his reputation. Trump’s Islamophobic “America First” speeches in 2015–2016 led to his becoming president.

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  —

  On Friday, January 27, 2017—Holocaust Remembrance Day—President Trump instituted one of the first acts of his administration. Effective immediately, the sweeping “Executive Order Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States” restricted entry by citizens of seven different countries—Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, and Syria—for ninety days. The travel ban issued a call for new immigration screening processes in addition to the ones implemented under Bush and Obama, what Trump called in other speeches “extreme vetting.”

  The order suspended the refugee program for four months, longer than the Bush administration’s suspension after 9/11. In a striking deviation from every other president before him, Trump’s order overturned Obama’s Presidential Determination to resettle 110,000 refugees and capped the admissions ceiling at 50,000.

  In the order, Trump also banned all Syrian refugees. As he said in his announcement speech, “I hereby proclaim that the entry of nationals of Syria as refugees is detrimental to the interests of the United States and thus suspend any such entry.” Once the resettlement program reopened, priority would be given to refugees for whom “the religion of the individual is a minority religion,” meaning that Christian refugees from Muslim-majority nations would be much likelier to receive resettlement than their fellow citizens.

  There were no exceptions made—not even for family members of those who had already been resettled, the first time since 1965 that the United States would challenge family reunification as a pillar of immigration. Soon the Trump administration would rebrand family reunification as “chain mi
gration”; Vice President Mike Pence would promise to abolish it. Presidential senior policy adviser Stephen Miller—whose uncle wrote a scathing op-ed in Politico revealing that his family was the product of “chain migration”—and other officials in the Trump administration would work tirelessly against allowing families to reunite in a series of policies affecting all immigrants, but particularly targeting refugees.

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  On the day the administration issued its travel ban, there was an immediate explosion of demonstrations in airports across the country. News outlets shared stories of those affected—people with legal visas sent back without being able to disembark, refugees who had sold everything unable to board their planes after years of vetting. Lawyers and reporters jostled with sign-holding protesters for days at almost every international airport in the United States. There was an overwhelming public outcry against the president’s language asserting that all immigrants from the seven Muslim-majority countries were “foreign terrorist entries.”

  Lawsuits filed by the ACLU and other groups on Saturday, January 28, led to a temporary injunction from a federal judge in New York by the next morning. Four other federal courts agreed with the judge in New York. While the courts sorted out what was legal and what was not with the order—unprecedented both in scope and in the rapidity of its implementation—officials allowed refugees and other immigrants with legal visas and imminent arrival times who had been banned to enter the United States.

  The real impact came for those who were not on airplanes, for refugees at various points in the resettlement process, for voluntary resettlement agencies that had prepared for arrivals that were stopped, for immigrants whose paperwork was still under consideration.

  On March 6, 2017, Trump signed a narrowed version of the ban, which took off Sudan and Iraq but added Chad to the countries whose citizens would not be admitted (the Trump administration would later remove Chad from the list in April 2018). A federal judge in Hawaii halted implementation of the ban on March 15. In May 2017, a judge in Maryland upheld a lower court ruling in an International Refugee Assistance Project lawsuit against the government.

  In July 2017, the Supreme Court agreed with a ruling by a lower court that exempted not just immediate family members from the travel restriction but also grandparents, grandchildren, brothers- and sisters-in-law, uncles and aunts, cousins, nieces, and nephews—anyone with what it termed a “bona fide relationship.”

  In September 2017, the Trump administration countered with a third version of the executive order, which this time added North Korean citizens to the list of those restricted from coming into the country, as well as some Venezuelan officials. The justices allowed the travel ban to remain in effect while the courts considered challenges.

  On June 26, 2018, in a 5–4 decision in Trump v. Hawaii, the US Supreme Court upheld the third version of the Trump administration’s executive order. Chief Justice John Roberts noted at the time of the ruling that many of the statements made by the president of the United States, including his promise to instill a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” could not be considered by the court; their job was not to decide “whether to denounce the statements” made by the president—in fact, he stated he would “express no view on the soundness of the policy.” Instead, the order on which they deliberated fell within the “scope of Presidential authority” and therefore outside the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court: “The admission and exclusion of foreign nationals is a fundamental sovereign attribute exercised by the government’s political departments largely immune from judicial control.” The third version of the executive order stood.

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  The travel ban in the United States might have been an extreme policy, but resettlement numbers were down across the globe as restrictionism rose worldwide. There was every reason to think that there should be more resettlement opportunities—the number of countries partnering with UNHCR had risen from fourteen in 2005 to thirty-seven in 2016. And yet the number of people accepted anywhere for resettlement declined sharply as well, from 189,000 people worldwide in 2016 to 103,000 in 2017.

  At the same time, the number of refugees reached a record high in 2017: 25.4 million by the end of the year. The number rose more than 2 million from 22.5 million at the end of 2016, and there were now 71.44 million persons of concern in the world.

  If it were possible to gather the persons of concern into one country, by population it would fit between Thailand (69.3 million) and Germany (82.4 million). By population, if the 103,000 people resettled collectively anywhere in the world were a city in the United States, it would be about the size of Wichita Falls, Texas; Rialto, California; Davenport, Iowa; South Bend, Indiana; or Las Cruces, New Mexico.

  * * *

  —

  In 2017, in his first Presidential Determination, Trump announced a refugee admissions cap of 45,000, the lowest ceiling since 1980. Only 22,491 refugees actually arrived in the United States in fiscal year 2018. For the first time since the establishment of the Federal Refugee Resettlement Program, the US no longer led the world in resettlement. Canada surpassed the United States, with admissions just under 30,000.

  The vast majority of refugees, 7,883, came from the Democratic Republic of Congo; 3,555 arrived from Myanmar. True to his administration’s promises, the arrivals were 68 percent Christian, though the stark decrease in the overall number of refugees meant that the number of Christian refugees was down significantly from 22,637 Christians the year before. There were still a handful of people—369 total—resettled under the “bona fide relationship” exemptions to countries listed in the travel ban.

  In 2018, the Assad regime systematically regained control of the country, unimpeded by the international community and backed by Russia and Iran, and UNHCR estimated 13.1 million people were in need in Syria. There were now 3.3 million Syrian refugees in Turkey, 1.5 million in Lebanon, over a million in Jordan.

  In 2018, the US resettled 62 Syrian refugees.

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  —

  Because the Refugee Act of 1980 put refugee admissions under the jurisdiction of the president, it is one of the few aspects of immigration over which any president has almost unimpeded control. The Trump administration set out to curb immigration in the United States through a number of restrictionist actions in 2017 and 2018: ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program; ending the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for people from Haiti, Nicaragua, Sudan, Honduras, and Nepal; targeting undocumented immigrant populations, even those who had been ignored by previous administrations, for arrest and deportation; separating families at the border as a matter of policy; turning asylum seekers away in a violation of American non-refoulement agreements. Some of those attempts were more successful than others; federal courts stopped the administration’s attempts to cancel DACA; public outcry against the family separation policy mitigated it to some degree.

  When it came to this item on their agenda, however, the Trump administration was enormously effective. Miller’s remarks at a White House meeting with officials from the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and the National Security Council on June 5, 2017, in a story recounted to Jonathan Blitzer at The New Yorker, showed the administration’s focus. Miller notes that, unlike past administrations, “the President views this as a homeland-security issue.” As an unnamed official understood it, resettlement would no longer “be looked at from the typical lens of foreign policy,” but instead it became “a domestic-policy issue, an immigration issue.” Previous administrations took pains to separate refugees, with their unique admissions process, vetting procedures, humanitarian needs, and foreign-policy considerations, from larger national immigration discussions. The Trump administration erased those divisions and special considerations, lumping refugees with almost all immigrants—this administration’s new “undes
irables.”

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  —

  The changes effectively constrained the resettlement network that had grown up since the passage of the FRRP in 1980. By adding extra procedures to the vetting process, the Trump administration impeded the ability of the FBI and other government agencies to conduct routine security reviews—one of the main reasons why less than half of the allowed 45,000 people actually arrived in 2018. The same way that McCarthyism stringently over-vetted refugee admissions in the early 1950s, so restrictionist officials were able to slow the process under the Trump administration. But in the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration worked to ensure that those officials did not wield a disproportionate amount of power. In 2018, the restrictionist officials were within the administration itself.

  The drastic cut in admissions came with steep financial implications for organizations that often already worked on a shoestring budget. The federal government provided each refugee a grant that partially funded agencies’ work and with lower arrivals, their budgets fell immediately. In early 2018, based on the lower number of arrivals, the State Department adjusted the number of contracts it offered to the nine national private voluntary resettlement agencies—effectively, it no longer approved some places to work with refugees and, without that approval, the organizations could no longer do the work they had done for years. By early 2018, there were 324 resettlement offices operating in the country under the nine volags with a State Department contract or their affiliates. The State Department announced in February 2018 that 40 sites would be forced to reduce their operations and 20 others would close completely. By April 2018, in Florida alone, 12 of the 25 resettlement agencies closed or moved away from resettlement. Those site closures represented the loss of experienced caseworkers and translators, community partners and volunteer coordinators—the kinds of workers that would be incredibly difficult to replace should resettlement numbers go up again in the future.