After the Last Border

by Jessica Goudeau

  In this dark closet in a country thousands of miles away, that story took on a new cast.

  * * *

  —

  Years ago, in her home village, Mu Naw’s mother danced in front of everyone for the Karen New Year celebration.

  She had grown up poor and she had landed a job as an indentured servant in the home of some of the richest people in their village. The rich people paid her family for her services and she worked night and day for them. She had very little time off, but she managed to sneak away to spend time with her new boyfriend. Their love was bone-deep and easy. It made the years of hard labor seem survivable; when her family had saved up enough of a bride price, she would marry this good man.

  That night, she danced with abandon, aware that his eyes were on her.

  Mu Naw’s father thought she was more beautiful than any woman he had ever seen. His need to possess her became a consuming passion. He knew that he was a good-looking man and he had never really been denied anything that he wanted. He had no doubt that she would be lucky to marry a man like him. And watching her slim body move beneath her finest skirt, he knew it would be tonight.

  Mu Naw’s mother returned in the dark of night to the home of the rich family, smiling as she remembered the things her boyfriend told her.

  She never saw the men waiting for her around the bend in the path. They put a sack over her head and covered her mouth so she would not call out. They carried her to a hut across the village.

  There, they ripped the sack off her head. Laughing men surrounded her. None of the men were her gentle boyfriend. They all left except for one, closing the door behind them. The men stayed outside all night to prevent her from leaving.

  Mu Naw’s father had always said that was their wedding night. Now, with a deep intake of breath, Mu Naw realized her father had raped her mother into marriage.

  That night changed everything, because it ruined her mother’s reputation. Mu Naw’s mother could no longer work in the job that supported her family. She could never marry the man whom she loved, the one she’d kissed just hours before.

  The news spread instantaneously around their small village, spurred on by Mu Naw’s father’s friends, who were proud of their capture. For Mu Naw’s grandparents, the news was a mixed blessing: Mu Naw’s daughter could no longer work, but they no longer had to pay the expensive bride price because she was damaged goods. Mu Naw’s father’s method was not even that unheard of; other women had been forced into marriage in the same way.

  “He’s so handsome! Look at his light skin!” Mu Naw’s mother’s friends told her. “You should be pleased. He will make a very handsome husband. Your children will be so beautiful.”

  Either that first night or in the nightmarish ones that followed, Mu Naw was conceived.

  Her mother served her husband faithfully. She worked hard to create a home for him. She cooked him dinner, cleaned him up when he staggered home drunk, endured his swinging bouts of anger, made no comments when he gambled away their money. She brought his two daughters and one son into the world. But she never, not once, loved him.

  When her father told the story of how he made her mother marry him, guffawing over his own cleverness, Mu Naw noticed that her mother never laughed. As she grew older, she noticed her mother’s jaw clenched with each telling.

  And now she knew: her mother had left her father at Nu Po camp all those years ago because she wanted to be free. It was not inevitable for marriages to end in conflict. Her parents’ marriage had never been anything like the one she shared with Saw Ku.

  * * *

  —

  Mu Naw stopped sobbing. She could still hear muffled noises from inside and outside her apartment—the TV in their living room, neighbors yelling at each other in Spanish, cars coming in and going out of the apartment complex, feet on the stairs and in the neighbors’ apartment above.

  She realized that her face was pressed against her Karen dresses hanging in the back of the closet, dresses that she had once worn every day and now wore only for special events, that had become more costume than clothes. She could feel the knotted designs with her fingers even if she couldn’t see them in the dark. She jerked a skirt off of the hanger, bunched it in her fist, buried her face in its supple folds.

  All these years, Mu Naw had blamed her mother for the things she had not had—a loving home, a stable life, a connection to her past, access to school, some idea about how to navigate the world. She had, without realizing it, carried this rage and resentment for years, heavy and dense, since the fire in the camp when she could not find her mother and she had no choice but to flee with her grandmothers.

  And then, in a way she could not explain, her mother was here with her, closer than she had been in years, closer than she had perhaps ever been. The closet was infused with her scent, the fruity shampoo she used, the clean smell of her skin. Mu Naw felt her mother’s warm breathing, felt the pressure of her arms around her, felt the release as her mother unclasped the burden of grief and guilt and anger and fear Mu Naw had carried for so long.

  In that moment, Mu Naw understood several things at once. Mu Naw might have been born of rape and violence, but her mother had adored her, had stayed in the home of her rapist for the sake of her tiny, tenacious daughter and the children who came after. Her mother had so few choices in her life: children she had not wanted with a man she never loved, the desecration of their home, the loss of everything they had ever known, a half-life in a camp, the constant search for money to care for them all, the years when she had not known whether her children were dead or alive, the resentment of a teenage daughter who came back after years only to hate her within weeks, the disappointment of a second marriage that had brought equal parts happiness and pain, the daily disgrace of living in a tiny space with small-minded people who taught her daughter she was a source of shame instead of a source of boundless, indomitable strength.

  As Mu Naw felt regret well up in her, her mother offered forgiveness, bright and warm, flowing through her body. Her mother knew everything, knew the remorse Mu Naw felt for those lost years.

  Her mother’s forgiveness washed her shame away like a burst of afternoon rain in Myanmar—sharp and quick and cool.

  When Saw Ku finally opened the closet door, Mu Naw had fallen asleep with her face cradled in the folds of her Karen skirt. The light hit her eyes and she opened them; they were swollen from crying and her legs and the arm she had slept on tingled painfully. She struggled to sit up and Saw Ku reached out his hand to pull her up.

  He did not embrace her. He kept his hand on her arm and they looked at each other for a long time. Mu Naw knew then, with some regret, what she had to do.

  Chapter 26

  US REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT, 2008–2015

  By the time President Obama entered office in 2008, the Refugee Admissions Process (RAP) had become a well-honed system. Agencies built on the security practices started in the 1950s and 1960s added such new technology as biometrics and international security databases as they became widely available in the 2000s, making it the most secure entry process for anyone coming to the United States. The RAP numbers remained consistent with President Bush’s. For his first several years as president, Obama did not significantly raise the admissions ceiling during his Presidential Determination—his administration capped refugee admissions at 80,000 from 2009 to 2011, lowered them in 2012 to 76,000, then again in 2013 to 2015 to 70,000. He only raised it his last year in office, 2016, to 85,000; it was still significantly lower than the highest ceilings set by Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush (142,000 in 1982 and 1993) or Bill Clinton (121,000 in 1994).

  Under the Obama administration, the admission process was at its pinnacle. Refugees around the world identified themselves to UNHCR officials to receive aid and benefits; no matter the country they were in or whether resettlement was an option for them, declaring that they were a refugee with UNH
CR was always the first step. UNHCR officials conducted initial interviews, gathered documents, began a file with data including names, former addresses, birth dates, family relationships, date of border crossings, and other details. In the initial vetting interviews, officials asked the same questions over and over, pushing against stories and comparing data collected from one interview with those provided by neighbors or family members to form a holistic picture of backgrounds of the refugees they were interviewing. At the end of that time, a handful of refugees who UNHCR determined had a verified need for resettlement were recommended to overseas Refugee Support Centers, US government offices that prescreen refugees, administer their case files, and prepare them for interviews.

  American RSCs were federally funded, and officials from various agencies combed through the initial interviews from UNHCR and repeated the process again until refugees had been interrogated thoroughly by multiple officials over several months. Before 2003, those RSC interviews were handled by the State Department or agencies with a State Department contract; after that year, with the institution of the Department of Homeland Security, they fell under the jurisdiction of the new US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Depending on the region and the conflict, the FBI or the National Counterterrorism Center, as well as other agencies within the intelligence community, might be involved. The level of information these agencies discovered about refugees—their relationships, their known associations, their habits, their livelihoods, their interests—was often staggering to the interviewees themselves. It was only when they had passed the biographical security checks—which once more weeded out a number of applicants—that RAPcandidates’ files were passed on to highly trained USCIS officers.

  These officers collected biometric data such as fingerprints in addition to reconducting the already reconducted interviews, digging further for any red flags or changed answers or signs that refugees had attempted to deceive officials with their stories. The biometric information was screened against a number of databases—FBI, Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security. This was the point at which Syrian refugees received an enhanced Fraud Detection and National Security (FDNS) review, which looked at social media and other sources; individual cases might be recommended for the enhanced review as well.

  If they passed these tests, refugees underwent medical examinations; anyone with tuberculosis or other communicable diseases was denied resettlement. After the medical examinations, refugees attended a cultural orientation that attempted to prepare them for life in the United States. Based on a wide range of factors—including refugees’ relationships within the US and regional availabilities at the time—various agencies chose their resettlement location. Finally, when every part of the process was finished, the International Organization for Migration booked their travel; refugees were screened again by Customs and Border Patrol, and then by Transportation Security Administration officials. After enduring scrutiny at every step in a process that took at the very least eighteen months, though often much longer, refugees arrived in the United States.

  Because it was a long-term, complicated process, if the executive branch of the United States raised the refugee cap with the yearly Presidential Determination, there were not always enough refugees ready for resettlement, which was why some years actual resettlement numbers were below the visa allotment ceiling. On the other side, if the cap was lowered, the process bottlenecked. People in camps, or making do in hostile urban areas, waited longer and longer, with the threat of violence or chaos, growing resentment, or suffocating hopelessness.

  After refugees finally arrived in the United States, their first few months fell under the jurisdiction of the nine different voluntary resettlement agencies—the volags—with State Department contracts: Church World Service; Ethiopian Community Development Council; Episcopal Migration Ministries; Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society; International Rescue Committee; Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service; US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants; United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Migration and Refugee Services/Catholic Charities USA; and World Relief. Those agencies either resettled refugees within cities themselves or partnered with smaller agencies—such as Refugee Services of Texas in Austin—that were established in almost every city in the country. Some smaller affiliates contracted with more than one national agency to receive resettlement allotments. At the end of the Obama administration, the nine volags managed or partnered with 350 affiliate sites throughout the country; the agencies had varying amounts of money to help refugees in those first few months, depending on the federal budget of the Office of Refugee Resettlement and the amount of donations each agency received or the funding of their agencies. Their caseworkers, employment specialists, therapists, and translators were the frontline support—along with faith communities and volunteers and schoolteachers and hospitals and employers and other aid workers—in helping refugees start their new lives. The refugees who arrived were truly in need of resettlement and the joy of watching entire families or small diasporas of people find new life made even the hardest, most difficult times worth it to those involved at every stage. It was the unlikeliest thing—a bureaucratic program laced with goodwill and hope.

  * * *

  —

  During President Obama’s years in office, while American admissions numbers remained relatively static, the global refugee crises spiked again. In 2007, UNHCR began including people in what the agency termed “people in a refugee-like situation” in their calculations of global risk, causing an even greater jump in refugee numbers around the world. The previous calculations (including the numbers cited in earlier chapters) covered only refugees recognized under the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. For UNHCR, actual registered refugees became a subcategory of the larger “persons of concern” designation. In adding other groups to this larger umbrella—including asylum seekers, internally displaced persons (IDPs), returned refugees and returned IDPs, stateless persons, and others in vulnerable or precarious situations—the agency acknowledged that the often-narrow definition of refugee from 1951 did not necessarily match the needs of the world in the twenty-first century. Even without their expanded definitions—just using the traditional definition for refugee—the numbers rose alarmingly while Obama was president. At the end of 2008, there were 10,489,812 global refugees and 34.46 million persons of concern. By the end of 2016, there were 17,187,488 global refugees and 67.75 million persons of concern.

  In those eight years, no conflict escalated at the rate and scale of the Syrian crisis. The Obama administration, along with most of the international community, did not respond to the Assad regime’s attacks on its own civilians in a way that might have prevented—or at least mitigated—the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II. The reasons for America’s inaction were much the same as the reasons for doing nothing in the 1930s: The economic recession of the 2000s fueled the same kind of strong public lack of interest in spending money on any foreign policy situation as had the Great Depression. After long-lasting, complicated conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US public exhibited the type of war fatigue that had swept through the nation in the decades following World War I. And the widespread, racialized antiterrorist rhetoric and sentiments after 9/11 made it much easier to dehumanize the victims of the Assad regime. Despite the brilliant diversity of the Syrian people, the fact that Christians and Muslims and Druze and others had lived together in harmony for centuries and were now facing equal threats under Assad, because the country was in the Middle East, from the very beginning, there was low American public support for assisting the Syrian people.

  Karen Christian refugees from Myanmar remained an easy sell in those years; the program begun under Bush flourished under Obama. Muslim refugees from Syria—victims of the same kinds of targeted attacks by their own government—would never enjoy that widespread support.

  * * *

  —

  Obama campai
gned on a platform of withdrawing from Iraq. In 2011, the year the war in Syria began, Obama began the process of pulling the US military out of Iraq. Whether that withdrawal was too early—and fomented the creation of the Islamic State—remains a matter of debate among historians and political scientists, journalists and pundits. But having staked political capital on that decision, the Obama administration was not in a position to push for strong intervention on behalf of civilians when the war in Syria began—in the first heady days when the US or European allies flexing their muscles at the Assad regime might have actually stopped what was to come.

  The war in Syria got very bad very fast. Obama issued a White House statement on August 20, 2012, saying, “We cannot have a situation where chemical or biological weapons are falling into the hands of the wrong people.” In what many at the time took to be an escalation of US policy toward Syria, Obama warned Assad and “other players on the ground” that “a red line for us is we start seeing a bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.” If that happened, it “would change my calculus; that would change my equation.”

  But when the red line was crossed on August 21, 2013—when the Assad regime attacked rebel-held enclaves in Damascus with chemical weapons and when amateur footage from cell phone cameras showed mouths foaming from sarin gas, parents clutching dead babies, bodies lining hospital floors—the US did not intervene. In what would become a hallmark of the Syrian war, viral photos and videos clearly provided footage of what was happening almost in real time. With no free press to monitor the government, and revolutionaries who had learned from the Arab Spring the value of social media and cell phone coverage, what happened in Syria was instantly available around the world. There was now no need for the violin-laden newsreels of the 1940s, the solemn newscasts of the 1960s to the 2000s, or even the breathless coverage of the cable news era. Syrians on the ground sent videos via text or WhatsApp to people who uploaded them to YouTube or Twitter, Facebook or Reddit, within minutes of any attack.