After the Last Border

by Jessica Goudeau

  Family reunification, he explained, struggling a bit with the vocabulary in Arabic, just meant that if one of them was resettled—ideally with her husband and Rana, maybe her sons—then the rest of the family would be flagged in the system and notes made to keep them together. If they were doing a background search on her, they would also learn information about the rest of her family and could vet them at the same time. Most countries felt that refugees did better with their families; in fact, of the refugees he had interviewed who were offered resettlement, almost all of them said that family reunification was the main reason they chose to go to a new country across the world.

  She asked him why they had called her and he told her that women traveling alone were often more likely to be resettled than men because it was harder for them to make it in countries like Jordan. She told him her husband was alive and they were separated by the war, but he urged her to at least go through the process a bit further. She found she liked him, his open face and his endearing Arabic, which she corrected only a few times. She appreciated his effort and by the end, Hasna felt they were almost friends.

  Hasna left the building in time to walk to Rana’s school. The UNHCR official gave her the feeling that she might have been something of an anomaly; most people when asked if they wanted to go to North America, Europe, or Australia were immediately interested. But Hasna felt some concerns—she had no desire to leave Syria and, if they had not called her, would never have thought of resettlement. Still, she recognized the man’s wisdom—she would continue to go to the interviews, keep her options open. She stopped at the butcher’s before going to Rana’s school and exclaimed, as she did every time, about the price of meat in Jordan—things were half as expensive and twice as good in Syria.

  * * *

  —

  The calls came within minutes of each other, around 2:00 a.m. in late October 2013, a few months after they set up the big apartment in Irbed.

  The first call was from Khassem, who was staying with friends on a job in a nearby city: “Mama.” His voice broke and he began sobbing and she was instantly awake, sitting straight up in bed, not bothering to lower her voice.

  “Khassem? What is it?”

  “Mama, it’s the house. There was a missile.” He held the phone away from his mouth and she could hear him sobbing. “Father is injured. Someone called me and told me that our uncle had given them my number—they’re rushing Father to the field hospital now. It doesn’t look good. The house is gone.”

  “Laila and Hamad? Were they there? Are they okay?”

  “They were there.” He paused again. “I don’t know, Mama. I don’t know.”

  And then Amal was banging on Hasna’s bedroom door, her phone in her hand, her hair escaping in tendrils from her low ponytail. She held up the phone and kept speaking: “What does that mean? Will he be okay?” She gripped her mother’s hand and listened, cradling the phone to her cheek while she closed her eyes.

  The call ended. She told Hasna what she had learned: Jebreel was about to go into surgery. No one knew what had happened to Malek, Laila, and Hamad; just that they were in the house when the missile landed.

  Hasna and Amal began the longest wait of both of their lives. Rana woke up but the little granddaughters slept. Hasna made coffee that no one drank, set out spiced bread that no one ate. They waited. The sun lightened the skies, the birds began to chirp, the earliest shopkeepers opened their doors and rolled out their awnings before the next call came in.

  It was Malek. The line crackled and almost dropped, but she could hear him. “We’re safe, Auntie. We’re okay.”

  “Where are Laila and Hamad?”

  “They’re here.”

  “Please, let me hear them.”

  There was a pause, then Laila’s voice, “Mama! Mama, we’re okay! Hamad was scared, but he’s fine, aren’t you, you good brave boy?”

  Hasna told them she loved them through her sobs and sat down hard on the floor, and after a few minutes the call dropped.

  And then she could finally face the truth. It was gone. Her home, her life, all of it—nothing but rubble, nothing but dust.

  * * *

  —

  The missile had hit the bedroom where Jebreel was sleeping. It was a small missile, or he might not have lived. Still, he credited Hasna for saving his life, as well as his father, who built a home intended to last. When Hasna moved the cupboard in their bedroom to hide her gold, she placed it in such a way that, when it fell, it protected him from the worst of the shrapnel. The walls, with their huge basalt stones quarried from the mountains around Daraa, absorbed the impact of that missile. He should have died. Instead, he lost his left arm from the elbow down, a portion of his cheek, his ear, and part of his torso. The doctors told him later the major miracle was that he did not lose any of his organs.

  Malek, Laila, and Hamad—sleeping on the other side of the house—were bruised and dazed, but otherwise fine. They had gone to the field hospital with Jebreel, sitting with their relatives who were still in the neighborhood while doctors stabilized him that night. When a relative had secured an ambulance for Jebreel, they had not been allowed to go with him across the border—the Jordanian government only allowed those with life-threatening injuries to cross the border seeking medical help. Instead, they slipped out of town to call Hasna, journeying as close to the border as they could so that they could get some cell service. Jebreel was rushed to Irbed, where Samir’s friend, a surgeon, was waiting for him; by the time Jebreel’s ambulance arrived, Hasna, Amal, and Samir had been at the hospital for several hours.

  The doctors in Irbed performed a series of surgeries on Jebreel; he was one of many patients from Syria rushed over every time the government shelled its citizens. The Jordanian government provided health care for refugees despite the exorbitant cost to their small country. Surgeons amputated what remained of his arm, stitched his face and his side, grafted skin to partially fill in the portions of his flesh the missile had destroyed.

  Hasna nursed him faithfully, rarely leaving his side while he was in the hospital. When the doctors released him after his first surgery, she took him back to the apartment in Irbed. That first dinner, she helped him sit down at the seat at the head of their table; his body leaned to the left and she helped to stack pillows on that side to cushion his still-healing stitches.

  She placed the dishes down for most of her family to eat together for the first time in years; the ache for Laila and Malek and Hamad was almost physical, a cavernous emptiness she felt just beneath her rib cage.

  Chapter 19

  US REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT, 1965–1980

  One of the most important political victories for the American resettlement program occurred in 1965 with the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). Built on a bill initiated by John F. Kennedy just months before his assassination, the act was a hard-won victory for Lyndon B. Johnson, who spent a great deal of political capital negotiating for its passage. He did what few presidents have been willing or able to do since then in radically overhauling the complicated American immigration system. Following on the heels of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the INA was the next step in reshaping American immigration to align more closely with the values of the civil rights movement.

  President Johnson signed the bill into law on October 3, 1965, in New York beside the Statue of Liberty. In his speech, he noted that the law would “repair a very deep and painful flaw in the fabric of American justice.” In abolishing what he called the “harsh injustice of the national origins quota system,” in which 70 percent of the immigrants to the US arrived from England, Ireland, or Germany, the INA changed the values by which the United States accepted immigrants: “from this day forth those wishing to immigrate to America shall be admitted on the basis of their skills and their close relationship to those already here.” Refugees were intrinsic to the new
immigration policy. Johnson directly addressed Cuban refugees in the speech: “I declare this afternoon to the people of Cuba that those who seek refuge here in America will find it. The dedication of America to our traditions as an asylum for the oppressed is going to be upheld.”

  Johnson’s liberalizer position was a tempered one: “The days of unlimited immigration are past.” Still, by signing the bill into law on Liberty Island, Lyndon B. Johnson signaled a deliberate return to the America described in Emma Lazarus’s anthem; he pointed to nearby “Ellis Island, whose corridors echo today the joyous sound of long ago voices” and said the law marked a new beginning: “today we can all believe that the lamp of this grand old lady is brighter today—and the golden door that she guards gleams more brilliantly in the light of an increased liberty for the people from all the countries of the globe.” And he expressed the belief that, with the signing of this law, racist immigration policies would “never again shadow the gate to the American Nation with the twin barriers of prejudice and privilege.”

  * * *

  —

  The Immigration Act of 1965 established refugee resettlement as one of the new pillars of immigration, along with merit-based acceptance policies and family reunification. Refugee advocates hoped this would be a change from the 1950s’ tempestuous, reactive presidential paroles and congressional acts providing special allotments for a limited time to refugees in specific situations. However, the limited scope of the INA still offered opportunities only for some types of refugees; “refugee” continued to imply “anticommunist,” even if the INA moved away from white European as essential for American resettlement. The emphasis on anticommunism opened some opportunities for non-European immigrants, such as Cubans fleeing Fidel Castro’s reign or Chinese escaping the Cultural Revolution.

  But throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, refugee resettlement continued to be an uneven process based less on need than advocates would have liked. Refugee activists—including those who worked in the nonprofits, voluntary resettlement agencies, and other aid groups established in those years—labored tirelessly to get the wording of American policy adjusted so that communism was one, but not the only, type of persecution the US government recognized.

  Though the policies were draped in humanitarian language, visas in the 1960s and early 1970s were predominantly given out based on US foreign interests. It’s clearest in the case of Cubans and Haitians, both arriving on the shores off of Florida, where the MS St. Louis had docked thirty years before. Cubans—anticommunist dissenters, allies of the US cause—were welcomed. Airlifts began in 1965 to pluck Cuban bodies out of the water and went on for years; by 1973, more than three thousand flights had been logged, rescuing more than 250,000 Cubans and bringing them to their new lives in the US. Aid, federal support, legislation such as the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, all assisted Cubans fleeing communism.

  Those same waters were also filled with Haitians. Dozens of Haitian citizens piled into the same kinds of boats as the Cubans. And yet, they did not receive anything close to the same kind of help. Haitians were fleeing persecution at the hands of a corrupt dictator who was also an American ally, President Jean-Claude Duvalier. US politicians actively denied that his people needed to flee; their language and laws classed Haitians as grasping economic migrants rather than deserving asylum seekers. While untold thousands of Haitians arrived between 1961 and 1971, they were treated with none of the special dispensations often given to Cubans. What was a life-saving policy change in 1965 for Cubans did little for Haitians fleeing a violent dictator.

  In 1967, the UNHCR Refugee Protocol changed its language to acknowledge that refugees were not specific to a region or country—not just people affected by the Holocaust, for example—but could come from anywhere. It would be years before the American federal government updated its definitions to match those of UNHCR.

  * * *

  —

  Despite the flaws in the new system, the 1965 INA marked a significant and positive change for those refugees who were accepted for resettlement because of family reunification. It meant that refugees were able to have hope that their close relatives could join them in their new life. While family reunification had been a part of the Immigration Act of 1924, only about half of the visas given out before 1965 were for the purpose of reuniting families; after 1965, 74 percent of the visas brought over family members permanently. The wider scope of the INA also meant that family reunification was not exclusively available to Northern Europeans. And as resettlement demographics shifted over the next several decades, with the many partisan divides and debates, there was never serious opposition to family reunification. It was one of the few characteristics of immigration policy that restrictionists and liberalizers readily agreed on. Access to family seemed like such a basic human right that few disputed it.

  The US continued the resettlement of anticommunist refugees with the Soviet Jews who began arriving in the 1960s; the resettlement of this group grew steadily in the 1970s. Resettling Jewish refugees was also something politicians from both sides of the political aisle could agree on: Not only was it a human rights issue, it also fit the foreign policy agenda of continuing to prove to the Soviet Union that the US was culturally superior. Amnesty International ran a campaign to free Soviet Jews; Jewish advocacy groups were strong supporters and, as the emergence of human rights for its own sake became a more widely accepted position, their advocacy led to many Jewish refugees choosing resettlement in the United States over Israel. Refugee advocates from HIAS and the Council of Jewish Federations also successfully lobbied the US for federal financial assistance accompanying resettlement, something Hungarians, Cubans, and Vietnamese refugees had also received but that was not yet an established part of resettlement protocol. The anti-Semitism of the 1920s and 1930s was gone, or at least more skillfully hidden; it no longer actively controlled American policy.

  There were other groups that came in during those years: A few hundred Chileans fleeing the coup that brought Pinochet to power. The Cubans. Thousands of Russians. And there were groups that were overlooked, including the 2 million Nigerians displaced by the Biafran war in 1967.

  But the group that defined US resettlement by the 1970s was not one group of people at all. Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, and Hmong people, often referred to collectively as “Indochinese boat people,” were part of one of the largest mass migrations of political refugees and economic migrants in history. The public outcry on behalf of the Indochinese boat people—with its echoes of the public goodwill the American public had not experienced since World War II—would do more to move the United States toward another peak in refugee resettlement and the creation of a permanent, stable federal program than any other humanitarian crisis.

  * * *

  —

  Several events in Southeast Asia in 1975 displaced hundreds of thousands of people. The Laotian civil war in 1974 pushed 120,000 people, particularly the Hmong, into Thailand. The fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, and the removal of the last American troops immediately threatened the people of South Vietnam, including the translators, the children of US soldiers and their mothers, and others who had provided critical assistance to US troops. Despite the fact that the American public predominantly supported ending US involvement in the Vietnam War, the fate of those people who would be at the mercy of the North Vietnamese army weighed heavily on our national conscience. The Vietnam War had already displaced 2.7 million people; the fall of South Vietnam displaced 800,000 more.

  And then in December 1975, the first internationally recognized genocide since the Holocaust occurred. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia slaughtered more than 2 million Cambodians in an ethnic cleansing that sought to remake the country into an agricultural, Marxist state. The leader, Pol Pot, displaced thousands of urban dwellers to the north of the country. He created farm collectives and then demanded that the unskilled city dwellers miraculously figure out how to produce crops
; they died in the hundreds of thousands because they starved or were beaten to death by the Khmer Rouge guards. He also executed people by the thousands in a calculated, government-led campaign.

  If people could flee Vietnam or Laos or Cambodia, they did, on boats heading to Malaysia and Indonesia and Thailand. Many of them died. The US went to extraordinary lengths to save and resettle the Indochinese boat people, with the kind of airlifts they had used for the Hungarian and Cuban refugees, but advocates argued vehemently and compellingly that those efforts were not enough.

  The Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1975 began the process of resettling more than 360,000 refugees from the region from 1975 to 1979. Rather than being fed up with helping after the initial act, public will extended the program further. One study from 1985 states that, of the “1.5 million refugees who fled Vietnam, Laos, and Kampuchea [Cambodia’s name at the time under Pol Pot], approximately half have now settled in the US.” By 1992, that number had risen to more than a million.