President Obama continued:
Refugees face daunting challenges in an unfamiliar society with new rules, new resources, and often a new language. Yet, in spite of all they have faced—harrowing acts of violence or devastation, flight across borders in search of aid and shelter, uncertain and often prolonged stays in camps, and travel to a strange country—refugees are survivors. Living in the United States presents an opportunity to move forward, one that countless refugees from all over the globe have embraced. Their remarkable determination to rebuild a brighter future after great adversity embodies our Nation’s promise and spirit of boundless possibility.
The 1980 bill came after almost two hundred years of American ambivalence toward immigrants and refugees. Embedded in American culture and politics is a strain of xenophobia, or nativism, which elevates the interests of native-born or established inhabitants over those of immigrants. For most of America’s history nativists have targeted a succession of newcomers, which included Irish, Germans, Chinese, Jews, Italians, East Europeans, Latinos, Southeast Asians, Middle Easterners, and Africans. Their modern-day ranks include white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and racists of all stripes.
The original U.S. Naturalization Law of 1790 limited citizenship to immigrants who were “free white” persons “of good character” and thus excluded Native Americans, slaves, free blacks, and Asians. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers. The Emergency Quota Acts of 1921 and 1924 cut immigration by more than half and created a quota system that gave preference to northern Europeans.
During the 1930s and early 1940s, as hundreds of thousands of European Jews sought safe havens outside Nazi-occupied territory, the United States had no official refugee policy beyond the immigration procedure in the 1921 bill. In 1938, on the eve of World War II, two-thirds of Americans opposed the admission of refugees, including children, from Germany and Austria. President Franklin Roosevelt appeased American xenophobes and anti-Semites on immigration quotas and infamously stayed quiet while a 1939 bill to admit twenty thousand Jewish children died in Congress. The Holocaust killed millions of Jews before Roosevelt created the War Refugee Board in January 1944.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, an outgrowth of the Red Scare politics of Republican senator Joseph McCarthy, upheld the quotas of the 1921 bill. Sponsored by one of McCarthy’s staunchest Republican allies, Senator Pat McCarron of Nevada, the 1952 bill was passed over the veto of President Harry Truman. It provided for deportation of immigrants and citizens suspected of subversion. In a speech before the Senate, McCarron stated the following:
I believe that this nation is the last hope of Western civilization and if this oasis of the world shall be overrun, perverted, contaminated or destroyed, then the last flickering light of humanity will be extinguished. I take no issue with those who would praise the contributions made to our society by people of many races, of varied creeds and colors. . . . However, we have in the United States today hard-core, indigestible blocs which have not become integrated into the American way of life, but which, on the contrary are its deadly enemies. Today, as never before, untold millions are storming our gates for admission and those gates are cracking under the strain. The solution of the problems of Europe and Asia will not come through a transplanting of those problems en masse to the United States.
It is no small irony that the facility that welcomes worldwide visitors to Las Vegas is McCarron International Airport.
America’s immigrant and refugee history is not without compassion and generosity. The Displaced Persons Act of 1948 and the Refugee Relief Act of 1953 admitted more than four hundred thousand refugees. The Hungarian Refugee Act of 1956, Refugee-Escapee Act of 1957, and Cuban Adjustment Program of the 1960s admitted many “escapees” displaced by the Cold War. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, promoted by Senator Kennedy, eliminated national origin, race, and ancestry as bases for immigration. Its long-term effect vastly increased the numbers of immigrants and the percentage of Hispanic immigrants. The fall of Saigon in 1975 and a totalitarian regime in Cambodia fed a new wave of refugees. In 1979 the Carter administration doubled the quota of refugees from Indochina to 14,000 a month, and over an eighteen-month period 232,000 arrived and resettled.
The so-called Sanctuary Movement of the early 1980s provided safe haven to Salvadorans and Guatemalans who fled murderous regimes but who were not classified as refugees by the Reagan administration. The movement started at Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson, Arizona, and spread to more than five hundred congregations of various denominations who provided shelter, clothing, and legal advice to refugees.
The Refugee Act of 1980 empowered the president to designate which refugees, and how many, were to be admitted each year. Predictably the decision became political and contentious. Proponents of resettlement contended that it was compassionate and humanitarian and that it advanced U.S. foreign policy and national security interests with states and allies that hosted the majority of the world’s refugees. Opponents couched their racial animus in economic rhetoric; they claimed that refugee resettlement burdened taxpayers, tilted the political scales to the left, and flooded the workplace with cheap labor—conspicuously in the meat-packing industry—that undercut native workers.
Obama authorized 80,000 refugees for fiscal year 2011, which was 20,000 fewer than proposed by the Refugee Council USA (RCUSA), the lobbying group for the resettlement agencies. But 80,000 were too many for Refugee Resettlement Watch, a nativist group, which contended that resettlement agencies lobbied for more refugees because their government subsidies increased. (Ultimately the United States admitted 56,424 refugees in fiscal 2011, down from just over 73,000 in fiscal 2010. Resettlement advocates cited stricter U.S. Homeland Security checks for the decline.)
Refugee resettlement found itself up against the sort of xenophobia provoked by the 2002 publication of Mary Pipher’s The Middle of Everywhere, which celebrated the diversity of refugees in Lincoln, Nebraska. Pipher, a PhD in psychology, wrote the following:
Lincoln has been described by disgruntled local and insensitive outsiders as the middle of nowhere, but now it can truthfully be called the middle of everywhere. We are a city of juxtapositions. Next to the old man in overalls selling sweet corn at the farmers’ market, a Vietnamese couple sells long beans, bitter melons and fresh lemongrass. A Yemeni girl wearing a veil stands next to a football fan in his Big Red jacket. Beside McDonald’s is a Vietnamese karaoke bar. Wagey Drug has a sign in the window that says “Tarjetas en Espanol se Venden Aqui.” On the Fourth of July Asian lion dancers perform beside Nigerian drummers. . . . At our jazz concerts Vietnamese families share benches with Kurdish and Somali families. When my neighbor plays a pickup basketball game in the park, he plays with Bosnian, Iranian, Nigerian and Latino players.
A critic of Pipher’s book, Tom Andres, wrote:
Pipher interviews three Muslim brothers who are in tears describing how terribly American men treat American women, a sort of “mirror image” of how American men view Muslim men’s treatment of Muslim women. Yes, it is undoubtedly painful for immigrants to live in a culture they see as sinful. What is completely lost on Pipher is that this is exactly why it has made sense historically for people of drastically different cultures to live in separate nations. . . .
Tragically, the very thing that Lincoln Nebraska was accused of being, it was not, but is now becoming. It was once the middle of a strong and cherished culture. It was at the very heart of somewhere. Now Pipher almost swoons when she describes the colorful “diversity” of a downtown park, with women in hijabs next to women in tank tops, and so on. But a nation is not a costume ball, nor is it a bizarre anthropological experiment. Only now is Lincoln becoming “the middle of nowhere.”
Refugees tended to be “othered,” along with undocumented immigrants—indeed, all immigrants—as newcomers who threatened the American way of life. Nativists clung to this view, even though demographics in America
never had been static. Nativists felt their cause vindicated by an upsurge in immigrant gang activity and violence. On Easter Sunday 2010 a seventeen-year-old South Sudanese youth driving in north Omaha pointed a gun at an African American walking with an assault rifle. The South Sudanese youth was shot in the stomach and barely made it to a hospital. Police found out he was a member of the South Sudan Soldiers, a gang of mostly Nuer youth. After the shooting, law enforcement and security experts estimated that there were as few as three and as many as fourteen South Sudanese gangs in Omaha. Though the number of South Sudanese gang members was estimated at no more than 350, the gangs would earn a brief mention in the FBI’s national gang threat assessment in 2011. Their emergence mirrored a historical pattern in which street gangs, driven by poverty and social dislocation, arose from virtually every immigrant and refugee population to arrive in the United States.
The upsurge in South Sudanese gangs had intrinsic causes, such as lax discipline by parents, school failure caused by placement above ability level, and an English fluency “gap” that enabled children to manipulate parents in encounters with teachers and police. Journalist Kathleen Massara wrote, “When young men’s self-affirmation is coming from their peers, when the adults in their lives fail them, and when they move from a war torn country to a rundown neighborhood, then the conditions are ripe for mayhem.”
Basketball ignored politics and walled off Akoy from gangs. That summer after his freshman year he played an AAU schedule with Hammer’s Team Nebraska Express and the Martin Brothers’ Iowa team at tournaments in Florida, Wisconsin, and Illinois. He was the youngest player ever to participate in the Metro Summer Basketball League for college players. “It’s good for him to play with older guys,” Behrens told a reporter. Akoy already held verbal offers from Nebraska, Creighton, Colorado State, Indiana State, New Mexico, and Marquette and had heard from Kansas, Texas, and Memphis, according to newspaper reports. Hammer took Akoy to a showcase camp in Chicago, where more college coaches saw him for the first time. A video of his highlights went up on YouTube.
Buoyed by his rising profile, on July 7, 2010, Akoy posted on Facebook, “What IS MY Destiny? Its Whatever I Want It TO Be!!!”
Comments followed:
KenDawg LeFlare: “akoy we all know your fukkin destiny, yo big ass goin to da nba”
Akoy Agau: “hahahahahhaaha. yall trippin man i really suck and got alot to work on!!!”
KenDawg LeFlare: “well yu better get to work and dnt let all dat height go to waist”
Sam Bongomin: “Aye akoy don’t go to the NBA . . . let’s go back to Africa and start are own dynasty!!!”
Akoy Agau: “kenny yeah you got a point! and samuel yeah we should just do that!”
Things were good until they weren’t. Adaw was fired from her job at First Data due to chronic tardiness. “It was upsetting,” she recalled. “I have my car and house and now nothing [with which] to pay them.” To pick up the slack Madut took a better-paid job in Denison, Iowa, with Smithfield Farmland. The seventy-four-mile commute twice a day was too much, so Madut rented a room in Denison. A marriage fragile from staggered work schedules and refugee stress, Adaw recalled, became more tenuous. “He need that job or we lose the house,” Adaw said. “I wanted to move there [to Denison], but Madut didn’t want us to go there. He wanted the children here, and he would come on weekends. And then sometimes he work on weekends and can’t come home.”
Madut’s absence was hard on his children as well as his wife. “The kids love their dad—they want their dad to be there for what they do,” Adaw recalled. “I try to explain to them if we was in a village in Africa, your dad would not be there. He would go to work in the city, and you guys would be with me. And then I tell them to call your Dad on the phone. Talk to him and tell him how you feel and what you need, what you did good, and what you did bad. I try to do that, but it was hard. Adaw said that Akoy understood: “He miss his dad, but he knows his dad try to do his best and his mom try to be here with her children. I tell him just focus on your future. Your dad’s dream is to work and feed his family. Your mom’s dream is to have a car and a home. What is your dream?”
Akoy could not foretell his future, but basketball would be part of it, he was sure. From Adaw’s vantage, basketball was a nice sport that had its time and place as long as it didn’t interfere with Akoy’s studies and sibling duties at home. And now that she was out of work, she urged him to find a job. “To help with the car,” she told him. He could work a part-time job and help at home, and if basketball could fit into his schedule, so be it. But Akoy was almost sixteen, the age at which, in South Sudanese culture, young men assert sovereignty over women in their households. So Akoy enlisted Hammer to explain to Adaw how basketball could lead to a reward—an athletic scholarship and college education—far beyond that of a part-time job. “She had no idea any of this existed or what the opportunity was,” Hammer recalled. Going forward, Adaw would be in and out of jobs, and when she had work, she would ease up on Akoy for a time. In pursuit of independence Akoy began to spend more time at Hammer’s home in west Omaha, where hospitality was warm, meals were ample, and his father’s absence not so keen a pain in his heart.
At the end of the summer Akoy was back at Central. A chance meeting with Denise Powers, who taught business education and sponsored the Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA) club, helped launch his sophomore year. Powers was assigned to monitor a hallway and exit at the end of each school day. Her exit happened to be where Akoy waited for his girlfriend, Jessica. Powers knew Akoy played basketball, but she wasn’t much of a fan. She nodded at him for a few days, he nodded back, and then she struck up a conversation.
“What sort of activities interest you?” she asked.
“Basketball. That’s it, pretty much.”
Powers encouraged Akoy to broaden his interests and extolled the range of clubs and activities available at Central. She hyped her own club, FBLA, and suggested that Akoy join. He said he would think about it. Then he told Powers what was on his mind. “I need a signature,” he said. “Something people will remember me by.”
Powers knew that famous people sometimes were noted for a signature gesture—a clenched fist, victory sign, nod of the head—and she wondered if Akoy considered himself famous. She told him what she told the members of her FBLA club: “A handshake is good,” she said. “People in business remember that.”
Akoy said he would give the handshake a try. A couple of weeks later Powers asked Akoy how the handshake had worked out. His shrug answered her question. She looked him up and down.
“You seem like a warm person,” she said.
“I can be.”
“Well then you just need to hug people.”
Akoy gave it a try and liked it. A gentle hug from someone so large put people at ease. He liked it if people opened their arms and returned a hug. And if they didn’t, he lightly enveloped them. A hug became his go-to greeting and signature, a tiller to navigate stardom.
8
To Absent Moms
Several of Akoy’s teammates played football and brought to hoops a blue-collar toughness he admired. Some harbored a notion that Akoy was “soft,” which stung his pride. To prove himself and perhaps to sample the autumn spotlight, Akoy went out for football. He did so, he told a reporter, against the advice of “basically the whole United States, actually, more like the whole world.”
Eric Behrens liked football enough to work the chains for home games. He and chain captain Scott Wilson, who taught history by day, entertained one another with trivia contests as they moved up and down the sideline. “Friday night lights, best seat in the house, I loved it,” Behrens said. He paid attention to how football coaches managed games for ideas he could coopt. He came to appreciate the toughness of football players. “Football players have a mentality, especially good ones,” Behrens said. “They can’t shy away from contact or be afraid of hitting. They fight through little injuries.”
Plenty of good footb
all players had played for Behrens. Shaun Prater (2007) made it to the NFL. Courtney Grixby (2004) and Mark LaFlore (2002) started at the University of Nebraska. Chris Griffin and Ronnell Grixby started for Central’s 2007 football state championship team. Nate Prater (2005) and Brandon Gunn (2004) played D-1 football. But as much as Behrens enjoyed and respected football, he did not encourage Akoy. “I was always for guys playing football, but Akoy may have been the one exception,” Behrens recalled. “[I] just really felt his future was in basketball, and he had a better chance of getting hurt than of helping Central win any football games. Plus, he wasn’t really all that good at football.”
Football had an obvious downside: broken bones and concussed brains. Akoy’s favorite pro baller, LeBron James, had been a standout wide receiver at St. Vincent–St. Mary High in Akron. James’s mother had taken out an insurance policy on him before his junior season of football and then persuaded him to drop it as a senior. With a potential billion-dollar basketball career at risk it made sense.
Nonetheless, Akoy was determined to play and made the junior varsity as a tight end and defensive end. “He was a big target to begin with and an even bigger target due to who he was,” recalled Jay Ball, varsity football coach. They tried to put Akoy’s height and long arms to use. His quarterback lobbed him high “fade” passes, and he lugged one in for a touchdown. He tried to disrupt opposing quarterbacks with his upraised arms. As Ball expected, he took some big hits and delivered a few. When the season ended, Ball said, “Akoy decided football was better to cheer for and that basketball was his deal. I appreciated him coming out and his basketball coaches not getting in his way.”
To Behrens’s relief Akoy was in one piece when basketball started in November. But for reasons buried and/or forgotten, they clashed, not for the first time or last, and Behrens kicked Akoy out of the gym. This clash was special in that Akoy made it public on Facebook, in a manner that suggested he had taken too many hits on the gridiron: “news for the world! Akoy agau has just been put on the reserve team this year!! You probably might not believe me! But i am!!!!!!!!!!!” The next post, a day later, stated: “everyone i was just playing about being on reserve!!!” It was followed by: “hahahahhahahaaha everybody at school fell for it. and they said they was going to kill my coach. lol”
Citizen Akoy Page 7
