If the numbers of people resettled in the United States were unprecedented by historical standards, so, too, was the support from the American public. By the end of the 1970s, American identity—shaped by the civil rights era and forged in the Vietnam War—was turned toward humanitarianism, with an avid interest in what was happening around the globe, not just in those places where the US had a foothold.
Human rights groups exploded. John F. Kennedy’s Peace Corps, established in 1961, grew exponentially: There were 370 programs in effect in 1966, and by 1971, there were 546. Membership in Amnesty International, which had been a small organization in the 1960s, grew by over 1,000 percent in the 1970s, with its Campaign Against Torture. Human Rights Watch began in 1978 with the desire to help Soviet bloc countries monitor their government’s adherence to the Helsinki Accords, which had been signed on August 1, 1975.
Throughout American history, economic crises like the Great Depression have often led to a rise in isolationism and nativism, with a subsequent resurgence of anti-immigrant economic arguments. The old argument that “these people are coming to take our jobs” is often an effective restrictionist argument when the American public feels that work is scarce. Interestingly, then, though there were still active, vocal anti-immigrant groups in the United States during and after the recession from 1973 to 1975, the country as a whole did not normalize the kind of isolationism that was ubiquitous during the Great Depression. Refugees were just a portion of the immigrants coming in droves.
In addition to the end of the Vietnam War and the rise of the Indochinese boat people crisis, the Watergate scandal and the corruption revealed in the Nixon presidency contributed to the American public’s humanitarian turn. In 1976, the country elected as president a peanut farmer from Georgia who campaigned with human rights as the backbone of his foreign policy. In his inaugural address in 1977, Jimmy Carter made clear his strategy for human rights around the world: “Because we are free, we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom elsewhere. Our moral sense dictates a clear-cut preference for those societies which share with us an abiding respect for individual human rights.” His warm language toward other countries echoed the Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, with its assertion that we are “all members of the same human family.” As the descendants of the people who once huddled on other teeming shores, Carter’s words implied, we could no longer ignore those who longed to breathe free. His administration’s emphasis on human rights led to refugee resettlement on a different scale than our country had ever seen before.
In the late 1970s, the refugee crises in the world taxed the American government’s short-term policies. Refugees continued to be paroled into the country by the executive branch in response to displacement with very few resources in place to extend the programs as needed. This made it difficult for federal and local authorities to be prepared for refugee admissions, and for the many NGOs and voluntary resettlement agencies around the country to budget and plan from year to year. Because it was impossible to predict how many refugees might be coming, organizations could not reliably hire the number of caseworkers they needed or ensure that they raised as much money as they should so that they could consistently cover their overhead costs. There was an outsized need for a federal program to permanently regulate the refugee visa allotments and create a more efficient system.
In 1979, the Carter administration proposed a bill to address refugee admissions permanently. The Refugee Act did two crucial things: First, it offered an allotment system that was ingeniously both predictable enough for federal budgets and voluntary resettlement agencies, and flexible enough to respond to humanitarian crises around the world. The act raised the admissions ceiling to fifty thousand, but also created a process through which the administration and Congress could work together to amend the yearly cap based on events and needs around the world. Refugee visa allocations could only be changed yearly during the formal Presidential Determination, in which presidential administrators meet with the House and Senate judiciary committees—a meeting which the act stipulated must occur before October 1. Other proposals had insisted on firm numbers for refugee admissions, but politicians’ concern that the United States would need to adjust those numbers—thus leading to reactive, ad hoc policies again—kept those bills from passing congressional debate. The innovative solution proposed in the Refugee Act established a stable process with reliable numbers that could be flexible enough to adjust to the needs of the world.
The second critical aspect of the Refugee Act was that it updated the national definition of what it meant to be a refugee. The US finally amended its language to match the 1967 UNHCR Refugee Protocol. A refugee in the United States, as the US Citizenship and Immigration Services still defines it, is someone “located outside of the United States,” of “special humanitarian concern to the United States,” who “demonstrates that they were persecuted or fear persecution due to race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group,” is not “firmly resettled in another country,” and is “admissible to the United States.” A refugee could not be someone who “ordered, incited, assisted or otherwise participated in the persecution of any person on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion”—part of the vetting process would focus on keeping out the perpetrators of violence against others.
Leading up to this bill, refugees had generally been defined by large-scale persecution—hundreds or thousands of people fleeing at once. While that still generally remained the norm, there were now more opportunities for individuals or families or smaller groups of people who were still persecuted. Before, individual refugees were often famous, isolated incidents of Russian, Chinese, Cuban, or other anticommunist dissidents defecting; after the 1980 bill, women targeted for their gender, LGBTQ people, individuals whose opposition to people in power led to their persecution—all could now rightfully file to become a refugee. And the bill retained the US commitment to non-refoulement and the protection of asylum seekers from the 1951 UN Refugee Convention.
The bill passed the Senate unanimously—a feat in and of itself. In early 1980, in one of his last acts as president, Jimmy Carter signed the Refugee Act of 1980 into law. The act established the Federal Refugee Resettlement Program (FRRP) and the Office of Refugee Resettlement, housed within the Department of Health and Human Services, and strengthened the relationship the federal government had with the voluntary resettlement agencies that were now an integral part of the process. Because it allowed the US to formalize the foreign-policy aspects of refugee resettlement, officials at government agencies ranging from the Department of Defense to the State Department supported a stable FRRP.
For the first time in American history, the US established a bipartisan, internationally cooperative, public-private refugee resettlement program. It included a screening process for refugee admissions based on the early efforts in the 1950s to ensure that all accepted visa holders met the criteria for being a refugee; these vetting procedures would continue to be honed over the next few decades in response to restrictionists’ rigorous standards. The admissions cap would never fully satisfy refugee advocates’ desire for more assistance to those caught in humanitarian crises around the world. Yet, at its best, the program balanced the restrictionists’ national security and economic concerns with liberalizers’ and human rights activists’ desires to admit people who were truly in need—people who had already endured the trauma of persecution and war.
* * *
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Trauma might be one of the few things that refugees shared in the years following the establishment of the Federal Refugee Resettlement Program. It was not just the trauma of witnessing one difficult incident, not the same as being in a car accident or seeing a single act of violence. The trauma that resettlement agencies came to expect from their clients is called “complex trauma.”
Scientists have studie
d the impact of trauma on the brain since soldiers following World War I came back changed—then, they called it being “shell-shocked.” Later other terms were used, such as post-traumatic stress. As scientists studied more about the impact of trauma on the brain, they gained knowledge about how multiple traumatic incidents affected brain development in children, how it changed thinking in adults on a neurological level.
Most refugees—if not all of them—who have lived through war and the stress of life in camps, or who spent years trying to find any safe place at all in an openly hostile world where they navigated danger, starvation, poverty, persecution, and other massive threats, have complex trauma. This causes structural change in the synapses that affect decision making, relational connections, and emotions.
Trauma can cause rage, sadness, and depression. Complex trauma magnifies those symptoms and includes others: distrust of other people, helplessness or hopelessness, a sense of isolation, intense guilt or shame, a change in your own view of yourself, memory loss, the sense that you’re detached from your body or your mind, a desire to hurt yourself or others, alcoholism, suicidal thoughts. Many refugees arrived in the United States only to realize that the peace they sought was just as elusive as it ever was, that they’d brought the war with them in their minds.
* * *
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The program that offered new life to traumatized people was in no way perfect. There were the often-impossible tasks set before caseworkers, the mountains of paperwork in front of volunteers, the difficulties of creating new life for thousands upon thousands of people with different cultures and languages and expectations and personalities and priorities. There were all the normal bureaucratic hurdles, the unnecessary difficulties, the gap between what refugees needed and what they were provided, the uneven support refugees received from group to group, year to year, even month to month.
And yet, pulling back the lens to look at the process itself decades after the FRRP was established, it feels stunning that there was a time when a program like this was built, when it easily earned support from people on both sides of the political aisle, when it moved between state and mosque or synagogue or church. When the word “refugee” invoked compassion and admiration and a strong desire to help. When politicians standardized the process, and the vagaries of public opinion made the numbers ebb and flow to a certain extent, but refugee admissions continued no matter what happened in our fierce national debates about American identity.
Chapter 20
MU NAW
AUSTIN, TEXAS, USA, OCTOBER 2011
On the night Mu Naw realized that her marriage was over, Saw Doh had fallen asleep on the sofa waiting for his dad to come home. Saw Ku had missed dinner, had missed the kids’ day entirely, which was nothing new by now. Even a few months ago, when the trouble seemed to be spiking between them, Mu Naw would have waited anxiously by the window, watching to see the car turn into the parking lot. That night, she waited beside Saw Doh. The lamp in the corner gave the room a soft glow. Her foot tapped vigorously against the wooden leg of the couch. She did not watch TV. She did not read a magazine.
Saw Ku was the only one who could drive; they had bought a used tan Honda Civic a few months before. At first, it had seemed like a marker of their achievement—the time saved no longer waiting on the bus was an incredible boon. But the car gave Saw Ku freedom that shifted something in their relationship. The waiting had become more common than she told anyone; she sat in the dimly lit room beside her sleeping son, thinking how much had changed in the last six months.
* * *
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The first night he had been late, six months earlier, she had panicked. She had spent the day with Kachin friends in the apartment complex, walking together to pick the children up from their new school. The children’s homework was finished—Mu Naw read over their shoulder while they worked to pick up English tips—and then they played outside while she made dinner. She set food on the table a few minutes before Saw Ku usually came home; she called his phone several times, but he did not answer. She stood at the window watching through the blinds; she tried to hide her fear from the children when they trooped in. Her mind was racing—if there had been an accident, would someone call her and tell her? Would he go to the hospital? How would she find him?
She could call one of the older men from the Karen Baptist church to see if he would drive her around to find Saw Ku, she decided. Maybe one of her new neighbors would help her watch her kids. She was trying to think where to go when she heard his key in the door.
The set of his jaw as he walked in let her know he was on the defensive. He held his guitar, the one he normally pulled out only on Sundays. After the church service, the Karen people who lived all over town always ate together; the women prepared the potluck, the older men sat and listened, and the young men played music. Mu Naw loved those evenings. She could see who Saw Ku might have been if they had not gotten married so young, if he’d had a chance to go to school, if he could laugh and hang out and just be the young man he was.
So, that first panicked evening, when he held the guitar up, she was only relieved, already forgiving him for the late arrival. She opened her mouth to ask him if he had gone to their friends’ house, but he spoke first, eyes slightly shuttered, chin up: “Don’t say anything. I was playing guitar with my friends and didn’t hear you call. When I did hear, I decided to come home.”
He made to brush past her to put his guitar away. She stepped in front of him. She pulled back the words.
“I cooked dinner while you were playing the guitar? I thought you were dead or in an accident or something!”
“What?” His expression of annoyance only further deepened their entrenched sides. “Why would you think I died?” He spat out the words. Mu Naw watched herself, heard her mother’s voice come out of her mouth as she moved to the tips of her toes: “Because you were gone! For hours!”
“Yeah, working! One of us has to work!”
“And what do you think I do all day? You think I don’t work?”
“You make, what, $20 a day? Maybe $40? That’s not the same. I work for eight to ten hours every day to give you this,” he gestured around at the apartment they both loved, with two bedrooms and clean vinyl blinds and a view of the tree outside, the apartment that was more expensive than the ones they’d had before and a step up from the first one where they had sat in the darkness and brooded. So many things had happened in the last four years and they had worked so hard to find each other again in this space, and yet some part of Mu Naw had always known that the end of their marriage would come and that it would look exactly like this.
“I work for $20 an hour as a translator. That’s more money than you make an hour and, because I take your son with me wherever I go and because I have to be here with your children every day after school, I can’t work more than a few hours at a time.” Mu Naw could feel the words flowing out of her, too powerful and painful to stop, words that would obliterate his argument, that were maximized to wound him. “Honestly, I think you’re jealous. I think you’d love translating. I think you’d love to speak English. That’s the real problem—that I can speak English and you can’t.”
Mu Naw knew that was the moment when she pushed him too far. He was very sensitive about his lack of education, about his lack of English. He could not keep up with the pace of her knowledge and he had been—for a long time—proud of his brilliant wife. But there, in that pride, was also the source of insecurity for him and a power differential she had never used against him before.
That night, their fight was savage. Mu Naw found, to her surprise, that her mind no longer felt divided. She liked this strong side of herself—her anger made her feel powerful. That power was heady.
After that, Saw Ku stayed out more and more, playing video games and jamming on his guitar with the unmarried men their age.
* * *
—
> Six months after that first fight, the power she had felt growing in that time burned away any concerns she felt about the conversation she knew would end their marriage. She felt calm as she watched her son sleep and tapped her foot against the wooden leg of the couch. Something had happened that day, something she vaguely felt was connected with her anger now; it was a connection she did not want to examine, wanting to focus instead on her rage against her husband.
While the girls were in school, Mu Naw and Saw Doh walked to the grocery store. Watching her son trudge through the weeds along the side of the busy road, Mu Naw remembered being not much older than him. She had run through long grass herself. She had been quiet so the junta would not find them. It was a visceral memory, more body sense than formed thought. The grass around her legs had been green and lush; the grass around her son’s legs was reedy and dry. She had lifted her legs just as her son did.
She felt goose bumps on her arm despite the humid warmth of the day. Her heart raced. She grabbed her son’s hand. She ran, the flap-flap of her sandals on the pavement when they left the grass for the parking lot underscoring her fear. She arrived at the grocery store. She was breathless and bewildered. The army was half a world away. The panic left her drained. It took longer than normal to walk home with her hands full of groceries. The handles of the plastic sacks left red welts on her palms.
She filled her mind with anger so she did not have to think about that memory. That night, she had decided to move Saw Ku into the children’s room. She put Saw Ku’s pillow on the bottom bunk bed, where Naw Wah usually slept, and moved Pah Poe’s twin bed into their room, shoved beside the queen bed. The long sleeping space reminded her of the rice mat they used to sleep on as a family in Thailand, but she did not let herself remember their tiny hut infused with the idyllic memories of their first years as a family. She wanted to stay upset.
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