After the Last Border

by Jessica Goudeau

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  The easy confidence that propelled her through her interview did not return on Mu Naw’s first day of work. She had tried on everything in her closet several times, hoping to achieve the effortlessly fashionable, casual but neat vibe she had glimpsed on the workers she would be sharing an office space with—leather earrings swinging, hair pulled up in topknots, tennis shoes combined with skirts, long paper beads layered with metallic chains. She knew as soon as she walked in that her outfit—a fitted green jersey top and jeans with the same black ballet flats she had worn before—was wrong. Standing beside Madelyn, whose white-blond hair was hanging almost to her waist, Mu Naw felt more like a child than she had in years. She strode through the large airy room with wooden tables in the center, metal shelves all the way to the ceilings, workstations set up and conversations taking place in a low hum around her. Everyone held coffee in their hands. Mu Naw did not like coffee.

  “You’ll work here. Jennifer, this is Mu Naw. This is Jennifer. She’ll be showing you around.” Mu Naw accepted Jennifer’s handshake, trying to match her warm smile. Madelyn led Mu Naw to an empty workstation at a light wood table, explaining the inventory. “Uganda is over there, India’s on that side, and this is where we’re keeping Vietnam for now.” Mu Naw could make no sense of these instructions. She concentrated on looking like she was listening, turning her head toward wherever Madelyn was pointing. She pulled her jersey shirt down, tugging on it a bit.

  They walked through the entire second floor—the large open offices with four to five desks each. Madelyn pointed at one of the wall-size bulletin boards and said, “This is the inspiration board for the spring and summer 2016 collection. We’re calling it ‘Wanderlust.’” The board held curated photos: a cliff face with layers of sediment in corals and tans, tassels in various colors, the edges of a camel saddle, a collection of curlicued baskets, one gray minaret against a setting sun, and—to Mu Naw’s surprise—a Karen woman walking with a gray-and-fuchsia bag slung over her shoulder up a path that looked as if it could have been on any of the hills that Mu Naw had lived on at any point in her life. She could have been that woman. But she was not.

  Mu Naw wondered whether she should say something to Madelyn, point out that her people were on their inspiration board. She decided not to. They walked on. By the time Mu Naw returned to the workstation, she was thoroughly confused about the honeycombed office. She had seen a bathroom on their tour but had no idea where to find it now. Madelyn left after a few minutes. Mu Naw smiled and nodded, but she was retreating into herself. She did not belong in this office full of competent women.

  Jennifer’s eyes crinkled slightly when she asked, “How are you feeling?” She put her hand for a moment at the top of Mu Naw’s arm and then withdrew it. “It can feel a little overwhelming. I felt like they’d made a mistake when they hired me because I didn’t have any shipping experience.”

  Mu Naw’s eyes widened. “You felt like they’d made a mistake?”

  Jennifer laughed. “Yes, but that feeling goes away fast. This job isn’t difficult, you just need to be ready to move quickly. In August, things are sort of slow, but by November and December, we’re moving all day. It’s fun, though. We have a great group in here. I’m the shift manager, so if you have any questions, you can just ask me. I thought you could shadow me this week and I’ll show you everything that you need, and then next week you can start working on your own. Does that sound good to you?”

  Mu Naw understood every word. Jennifer was looking at her kindly, without the condescension Mu Naw had expected, and Mu Naw smiled back without hesitation. Jennifer grabbed Mu Naw’s stool and brought it over to her own table.

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  Five months later, Mu Naw rode with Jennifer and some other women who worked in shipping to the annual all-hands meeting at a hotel conference room in downtown Austin. They met in the parking lot of the office early in the morning, went through a local coffee drive-thru. Mu Naw walked into the conference with her friends, chai latte in hand, and looked around with interest.

  Women from all over the country filled the spacious room. They wore the fair-trade jewelry their company made, or the scarves and hats they sold, made out of knitted alpaca yarn. Mu Naw smiled in response to a joke one of the women made, pulled gently on her layered artillery bead necklace, sipped her latte, and settled in to listen to the day full of conference speakers.

  The all-hands conference was an opportunity for this company’s representatives who sold the fair-trade jewelry in home shows and at special events to meet one another, get training in the latest business practices, learn more about the artisan groups that made their products, and see the spring collection. Mu Naw noticed the way that some of the women watched each other, tugging at their own clothes, eyeing their neighbors’ dresses and jewelry combinations rather than listening as the first speaker began, and felt a surge of gratefulness. She loved Jennifer and her colleagues and the camaraderie they had developed in her office. That feeling that someone had made a mistake in hiring her had driven her to prove they had not; by the end of the Christmas shipping season, Mu Naw not only kept up with her coworkers, she was faster than a few of them. She was good at her job. She belonged here.

  During the afternoon session, the founder of the company stood up to introduce their speakers for the day, the leaders of the artisan groups whose products they would sell. The three women—one from Vietnam, one from Guatemala, and one from Uganda—sat on the stage on a soft couch with tasseled cushions. Beside them, the white company founder curled up in a small wingback chair. She said they would show the videos of the artisan groups before beginning their discussions. As the first video began to play and the Guatemalan woman spoke, the English translation in white letters at the bottom of the screen, Mu Naw moved to the edge of her chair. She breathed more quickly; her shoulders tensed.

  Their videos told Mu Naw’s story.

  When the camera followed the Guatemalan woman up the path through the jungle to the village, Mu Naw breathed in the dank jungle air, felt the slick stalks of grass she had to push out of the way to walk, felt the slight give of the ground beneath her sandaled feet as each step rose up the mountain. Mu Naw had once been one of those sun-drenched babies, tied to her mother’s back as her mother wove, loom looped to pillars on the outside of a wooden hut. Mu Naw knew instinctively that these huts were built so that the breeze through the trees would cool their homes, so that the fields nearby would get the best of the daylit hours.

  When the camera stayed behind the Vietnamese woman moving through rice fields, cool water swooshed around Mu Naw’s legs, thick rubber boots kept her feet oddly dry. Her hand felt the ribbed, rough edges of the bone on the lowing water buffalo the woman greeted as she might an old friend. When the camera entered the artisan studio, Mu Naw could feel how the stone walls chilled the room, how the sculpted bone fit snugly into the curve of her hand, how the knife in her other hand pushed into and carved the bone into intricate shapes that she had learned from her mother and her grandmother and all of the mothers before them.

  When the camera captured the smile of the Ugandan woman—an unmitigated grin—pure joy lifted inside Mu Naw. Here in this Ugandan village, Mu Naw was the mother of these children who danced for the camera, running from every house with long arms and legs to join the song, to perform a series of moves they had been practicing for weeks. And she stood in the door of her new home, shyly pleased, as the women around her praised her and explained that women do not buy homes in this village, but this one had. This woman—the owner of this home, this model of stability and goodness and grace—stood like a queen among them. She had worked and saved her family with the strength of her hands.

  When the lights came up, Mu Naw felt herself return to her body and knew—finally, utterly—who she was. She was neither the well-heeled American women around her nor the artisans on the screen, not
the girl dressed in citrus-scented mall clothes or the girl in the handmade skirt—she was all of those things.

  She had felt power before when she was angry at Saw Ku, but now she realized it was power of a cheap sort. The power of women who knew themselves, no matter where they were from, was rich, deep, sacred. It was available to women in villages all over the world, but she had come to the United States to find it. Mu Naw, through luck and providence, had been given the chance to receive the gifts of her sisters from all over the world, and to send those handmade products out to people who wore their artistry with pride. She could never have asked for a more perfect job, one that gave her both a good living and a sense of purpose. She could not believe she was here, doing this, in this life.

  It was only when Jennifer put her hand on her shoulder and asked her if she was all right that Mu Naw realized she had been crying.

  Chapter 23

  US REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT, 1980–2006

  The Federal Refugee Resettlement Program in 1980 finally stabilized the high-stakes, political back-and-forth that had defined American resettlement policies up to that point. The next five presidents—Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama—held drastically different views on almost every issue: they were certainly not aligned on immigration policies, or the scope and responsibility of the US to victims of humanitarian crises. And yet, under all of their administrations, refugee resettlement was viewed as a vital program that ensured national security, provided economic stability, and fulfilled America’s humanitarian duties to the world. Those decades were not without turning points or shifts, but even the trickiest foreign policy situations—including the first attack on US soil since Pearl Harbor—did little more than cause the presidential administrations and Congress to pause the program for a handful of weeks, adjust the cap of refugees being accepted for resettlement, or turn American attention away from some regions to others.

  In fact, it might be the very steadiness of the program itself in the first decades of its existence that eventually led to its greatest threat. When resettlement was culturally acceptable, broadly supported, and reasonably well funded, there was no need for educational campaigns or PR blitzes. When every new president could rely on a relatively smooth transition of this federal program and a secure partnership with nongovernment partners, it would draw less attention than other, more controversial agencies or policies. Immigration debates raged on, but people on both sides of the political aisle brought up refugees, with their now-separate admissions process, only occasionally.

  If and how the nation would respond to refugee crises—once core questions of an American identity in flux—were no longer subjects of intense national debate. For thirty-five years, the questions were less about if or how than how many.

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  The Genocide Convention, ratified by the United Nations in 1948, was signed by the United States only in 1988. War-weary politicians following World War II and then the Vietnam War felt reluctant to commit US troops to any foreign conflicts even for the clearest humanitarian violations. Another reason for the delay was that many lawmakers felt that the language of the Genocide Convention indicted the United States in its historical policies against American Indians and African slaves. By signing the Genocide Convention, the United States joined other nations in pledging to do its part through intervention, aid, and resettlement when another government’s actions against its people met the international legal definition of genocide. The resulting decades would be full of international debates about whether the persecution and slaughter of innocent civilians was actually genocide—and therefore required international involvement—or regrettable acts of war, tragic but not necessarily the responsibility of outside countries.

  Worldwide, the number of acts of genocide increased at an alarming global rate after the 1975 Cambodian massacres, leading many historians to refer to the twentieth century as the “Age of Genocide.” The Iraq genocide against Kurds in 1987, the Bosnian genocide in 1992, the Rwandan genocide in 1994, the Sudanese genocide in 2003, as well as conflicts in El Salvador, Peru, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Yemen, Liberia, Senegal, Georgia, Yugoslavia, Algeria, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Burundi, the Congo, Cambodia, Nepal, Albania, Guinea-Bissau, and the continuing civil war in Myanmar, all created displaced populations in need of aid.

  As had always been the case, US foreign policy interests significantly affected the measure of its response. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the first Gulf War in 1991 moved American interest away from Cold War systems of power. The expansion of the definition of “refugee” beyond “anticommunist” to displaced people fleeing targeted persecution—epitomized by the Vietnamese refugees—was an important rhetorical and cultural move. But the country intervened or not, offered resettlement or not, based more on how a conflict affected US oil supplies, or the depths of the American public’s compassion fatigue, than on the actual need itself.

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  And yet, one of the aspects of American identity that politicians banked on in those years was a shared sense of being the kind of nation that did its part to help refugees. Lawmakers’ lofty language—often drawn from the postwar playbook—showed that, Republican or Democrat, politicians during the first decades of the program assumed a baseline of public support for refugee resettlement across the country. The United States continued to view itself as a country that defended the defenseless and welcomed the displaced.

  In his last address to the nation on January 11, 1989, the image President Reagan picked to describe what it was like to lead the country through the 1980s came from efforts to resettle the Indochinese boat people. He called it “a small story about a big ship, and a refugee, and a sailor.” A sailor on the carrier Midway, patrolling the South China Sea, “spied on the horizon a leaky little boat. And crammed inside were refugees from Indochina hoping to get to America.” A crew went out from the Midway to rescue them. As Reagan told it, “As the refugees made their way through the choppy seas, one spied the sailor on deck, and stood up, and called out to him. He yelled, ‘Hello, American sailor. Hello, freedom man.’” That image stayed with the president when he read it in a letter written by the sailor to the White House, because “that’s what it was to be an American in the 1980s. We stood, again, for freedom. I know we always have, but in the past few years the world again—and in a way, we ourselves—rediscovered it.”

  President George H. W. Bush echoed the postwar assertions that the country could do hard things if they were right, what Truman called “our plain duty” to “join with other nations in solving this tragic problem.” In a September 11, 1990, address to a joint session of Congress, President Bush’s tragic problem was a growing crisis in the Persian Gulf that he argued would require a steady hand and strong leadership in moving toward what he famously referred to as “a new world order.” In the speech, he recognized that “the material cost of our leadership can be steep,” but that there were some things a country couldn’t run away from: “We are prepared to do our share and more to help carry that load.” At the same time, the US would not enter the crisis alone, and instead “insist that others do their share as well. The response of most of our friends and allies has been good.” The plain duty of the United States, joined by several allied countries, “extends to the neediest victims of this conflict—those refugees.” Bush invoked the shared memories of a reluctant country later glad it assisted victims of the Holocaust as he pushed to move forward in “this purely humanitarian effort.”

  In 1999, President Bill Clinton relied on the international Declaration of Human Rights when he addressed US and NATO troops bound for Kosovo. It had only been a handful of years since the disastrous crises in Bosnia and Rwanda, when the United States and other NATO countries debated whether what was occurring was genocide—committing troops to fulfill the 1948 Genocide Convention—or vague
“crimes against humanity,” while civilians died in horrific ways. When ethnic cleansing exploded in Kosovo, Clinton and other world leaders responded with more fervor than they had in those earlier crises. In Clinton’s remarks, he went back to the definition of what it meant to be a refugee: “I hope to the day you die you will be proud of being part of a nation and a democratic alliance that believes people should not be killed, uprooted or destroyed because of their race, their ethnic background or the way they worship God. . . . As long as there are innocent civilians doing nothing wrong, they’re entitled to protection.” Fifty years after the Declaration of Human Rights was passed—when the United Nations had hoped that the programs and agencies put in place would provide the framework to prevent genocide from ever occurring again—that same rhetoric was just as timely, the risks to people’s lives just as high as when the document was written.

  Even so, refugee resettlement in the 1980s and 1990s in the United States remained part of other debates that raged in those years: about the country’s immigration policies on national soil; the risks and consequences of intervening in conflict zones around the world; the country’s responsibility to provide aid to victims of persecution and war. But uniformly, presidents supported refugee resettlement and assumed some measure of support from the American public as well. Every year in the refugee Presidential Determination, presidents from Reagan to Obama set caps well above the 50,000-person ceiling mandated in the Refugee Act of 1980; none of those presidents came close to a ceiling that low.

  Refugee resettlement was still only available to a tiny percentage of people in need around the world. In 1980, when Reagan was elected president, the number of refugees in the world expanded considerably. While it did not approach the almost 60 million estimated to have been displaced during and after World War II, the jump was alarming nonetheless. In 1951, the first year for which UNHCR has data, there were 2,116,011 refugees in the world. By 1960, that number fell to 1,656,664. But by 1980, the global number of refugees had more than quadrupled, to 8,454,937. In 1980, the US refugee/admissions ceiling was set at 231,700—a tiny percentage of worldwide refugees, but still incredibly high by American historical standards. Over the next twenty years, the American resettlement ceiling would never approach 230,000 again; as a result, the percentage of refugees resettled in relation to the global refugee crises would decrease sharply. By 1982, it was set at 142,000 and Reagan halved it four years later, with a refugee ceiling of 67,000 in 1984. The admissions ceiling rose and fell over the next two decades, with a return in 1992 to 142,000, .8 percent of the 17,838,074 refugees in the world as the Balkan and Rwandan crises in the early 1990s spiked the global number of refugees. The global refugee numbers seemed to be diminishing in the 2000s, fluctuating from 10,594,055 in 2002, to 8,661,988 in 2005, and then rising again to 11,388,967. The American ceiling decreased as well, with a low annual cap of 70,000, which would remain in effect from 2002 to 2007.