After the Last Border

by Jessica Goudeau

  Military officials in the United States were ready for what seemed to be inevitable strikes, quietly scheduled over Labor Day weekend. On Saturday, August 31, President Obama issued a statement:

  Our intelligence shows the Assad regime and its forces preparing to use chemical weapons, launching rockets in the highly populated suburbs of Damascus, and acknowledging that a chemical weapons attack took place. . . . All told, well over 1,000 people were murdered. Several hundred of them were children—young girls and boys gassed to death by their own government. This attack is an assault on human dignity.

  In addition to the danger to Syrian citizens, he called the attack “a serious danger to our national security,” “a mockery of the global prohibition on the use of chemical weapons,” and said it endangered US allies that bordered Syria, which “could lead to escalating use of chemical weapons, or their proliferation to terrorist groups who would do our people harm.” National security and humanitarian duty were the cornerstones of his address. Therefore, he concluded: “this menace must be confronted.”

  And then, the speech made a surprising turn. Rather than announcing the strikes or military action against Syria his “red line” comment had implied, Obama announced that, as “president of the world’s oldest constitutional democracy,” he decided to “seek authorization for the use of force from the American people’s representatives in Congress.”

  The day before, the British Parliament had rejected the resolution, backed by Prime Minister David Cameron, for military action against Syria. Without allies willing to cooperate, the case became more complicated before Congress. Still, there was reason to think that military force was still an option. On September 3, House Speaker John Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor both endorsed military action. But it became clear over the next few days that the vote would not pass the full Congress—many representatives did not want to go back to war-weary constituents having voted for yet another Middle Eastern conflict.

  At the G20 Summit in Russia Obama attended on September 5–6, world leaders were reluctant to back up the American military. Without congressional support at home or allied support abroad, the Obama administration faced two almost equally intolerable foreign policy possibilities. The first was not intervening when a country employed chemical weapons against its own civilians, thus signaling to Syria and any other foreign actors that there would be no punitive action in future uses of those same kinds of weapons. This would cause political and rhetorical predicaments with possibly disastrous consequences in the future, either on US soil or for American troops abroad, not to mention civilians in Syria and elsewhere. The second was to commit American troops and American funds to another long slog of a war with the nebulous goal of regime change.

  The Obama administration agreed readily when Russia presented a proposed solution on September 9 to broker a deal for Syria to hand over its chemical weapons supply. Obama called on Congress to postpone the scheduled vote on Syrian military action. He hailed the “diplomatic solution,” but warned that the talks with Russia couldn’t be a “stalling tactic.” He used language of international cooperation to ensure that “Assad gives up his chemical weapons so that they can be destroyed.”

  But as it would turn out, those talks were only mildly successful—a stalling tactic at best. Certainly, the Syrian government gave up some chemical weapons when it joined the Chemical Weapons Convention in September 2013 and allowed UN inspectors to destroy its chemical weapons or remove them in late 2013 and early 2014. But gas attacks against civilians continued. Some attacks were clearly the work of Syrian government forces, others were possibly by ISIS or other actors in the increasingly complicated political terrain.

  Civilians endured documented gas attacks in April 2014, September 2014, March 2015, April 2015, August 2016, December 2016, March 2017, April 2017, April 2018, and November 2018; with chlorine and sarin and sulfur mustard gas; in Talmenes and Sarmin and Marea and Aleppo and Hama and Damascus and Douma and Khan Sheikhoun.

  The weapons employed against civilians in Syria were not just chemical. There were FROG missiles. Scud missiles. Antitank guidance missiles. T-55, T-62, and T-72 tanks. Su-22 and MiG-23 warplanes. Sniper rifles, assault rifles, anti-material rifles, antitank rifles, carbine assault rifles, heavy machine guns, light machine guns, submachine guns, semiautomatic pistols. Rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Automatic grenade launchers. Shoulder-fired rocket launchers. Mortar weapon systems. Improvised explosive devices. Barrel bombs. The brutal torture chambers in Sednaya Prison and every prison throughout the country. The horrible, mind-gripping fear of a people so thoroughly traumatized, with such justified fear of their own government, that their collective PTSD seeped into the DNA of their children.

  Syrians fled. And fled. And fled. They ran on a massive scale—refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced, all looking for any place safe. Many escaped their government to die at the hands of ISIS, or in a boat trying to get to Europe, or of starvation along the road to any other place at all. By 2014, 4 million refugees had fled Syria to the neighboring countries—2 million to Turkey, 1 million to Lebanon, 1 million to Jordan. Those countries closed borders rapidly; routes that had been available even days or weeks before were suddenly gone.

  Hasna, like many Syrians, points to moments in those years when she thought the world would finally wake up and help. In 2011, when the government attacked the parents of the tortured children in Daraa. In 2013, when the US almost followed up when Assad barreled through Obama’s red-line policy. In spring 2015, when it became clear that chemical weapons were still being used against Syrian civilians even after the UN inspectors had come and gone. In fall 2015, when the world saw the body of drowned three-year-old Alan Kurdi wash onto the sand of a Turkish beach. In April 2017, when photos of Abdel Hameed al-Youssef clutching the blue-lipped bodies of his gassed, nine-month-old twins after the chemical weapons attacks in Khan Sheikhoun horrified social media and journalists alike.

  These are the moments summed up by that thin diplomatic phrase, “assault on human dignity.”

  * * *

  —

  The first Syrian refugees trickled into the United States through the resettlement program in October 2011, just a few in the beginning: 31 the first year, 36 the second, 105 the third. In 2015, 1,682 Syrians were admitted for resettlement; by the end of the year, the UN identified 6.75 million people of concern from Syria alone. And Syria was not the only country with epic, continuing crises: Conflicts in Afghanistan and Somalia, as well as many other places, led to the ever-increasing rise in refugee numbers. The fact that American resettlement represented the tiniest of drops in an ocean of need had never been clearer.

  But by the end of 2015, the American public was in no mood to calculate the humanitarian need—not after the Paris attacks on November 13–14, 2015. Over the course of two days, suicide bombers and mass shooters terrorized Paris. 130 people were killed, over 400 injured, in the deadliest attacks in the country since its occupation during World War II. Reports trickling out in the days and weeks after the attacks indicated that ISIS in Syria had at least some connection to the bombers, some of whom trained in the ISIS-held city of Raqqa. At least two Iraqi bombers arrived in the Schengen area claiming to be Syrian refugees (their passports were later found to be fabricated). The European Union’s unique border policy meant that once migrants passed through an external boundary checkpoint, they could move unimpeded through the region. Thousands of unvetted economic migrants and asylum seekers flooded the countries, many of them from Syria.

  Europe experienced a massive wave of anti-immigrant sentiment following the Paris attacks, and the bombings in Brussels a few months later. Like the Islamophobia in the United States after 9/11, it was a misplaced, harmful swing of public opinion that equated terrorists with victims in other countries who were fleeing terrorists. The broad-brush fearmongering spread quickly to the United States. Despite the fact that the u
ndocumented migrants and asylum seekers in Europe had a completely different path from the well-vetted Syrian refugees who were accepted for resettlement—after years’ worth of interviews, background checks, and identity verification by highly trained US and UNHCR officials, including an enhanced review for Syrian cases—the backlash in the United States was fierce.

  In November 2015, thirty-one US governors issued statements declaring that Syrian refugees would not be welcome in their states. Presidential candidates like Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, congressional representatives like Michael McCaul, and governors like Mike Pence of Indiana and Greg Abbott of Texas all began to speak out against refugees. For the first time since the establishment of the Federal Refugee Resettlement Program, the term “refugee” no longer immediately implied “victim of persecution” in the imagination of the American public. Decades’ worth of unobtrusive, widespread government and private-sector support left the American people with little working knowledge of what refugee resettlement actually entailed.

  In the last two years of his presidency, as President Obama framed the response of the United States to the Syrian crisis as one of the great moral predicaments of our time, for the first time in decades, the national debate about refugees turned back to whether we should resettle them at all.

  * * *

  —

  On September 20, 2016, in remarks by President Obama at the Leaders’ Summit on Refugees, he outlined the enormous necessity for countries to do more. He returned to shared international security as a major determiner in refugee assistance: “Not because refugees are a threat. . . . They are victims.” But because “when desperate refugees pay cold-hearted traffickers for passage, it funds the same criminals who are smuggling arms and drugs and children. When nations with their own internal difficulties find themselves hosting massive refugee populations for years on end, it can risk more instability.” National security underlined the argument echoed from President Bush before him: that there was great risk in “reinforcing terrorist propaganda” by reifying the stereotype that “nations like my own are somehow opposed to Islam” when Muslim refugees are disproportionately turned away for resettlement.

  But the greatest danger Obama identified was a “test of our common humanity—whether we give in to suspicion and fear and build walls, or whether we see ourselves in another.” In failing to act, the US could “betray our deepest values,” “deny our own heritage” as a country “built by immigrants and refugees,” ignore a “teaching at the heart of so many faiths that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us,” and cause a “stain on our collective conscience” like the one the country earned when it turned away Jewish refugees. How the United States and other countries responded to refugees and immigrants would be a bellwether of our own ability to live by our deepest values, and “history will judge us harshly if we do not rise to this moment.”

  In August 2016, the 10,000th refugee from Syria arrived in the United States. An editorial by the Washington Post editorial board noted the relatively small measure of this accomplishment: “the United States could do much more. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were resettled in this country after the war there. More than 120,000 Cubans came to the United States in the course of a few months during the Mariel boatlift in 1980.” It was a reminder of how embattled the topic of refugees had already become; the editorial called it a “craven resistance to any resettlement.” On September 28, in Obama’s last Presidential Determination on refugees, the Obama administration announced the resettlement ceiling would jump to 110,000.

  Less than two months later, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.

  Chapter 27

  HASNA

  AUSTIN, TEXAS, USA, OCTOBER–NOVEMBER 2016

  Six weeks after they arrived in the United States, Hasna started the first job of her life. She had never worked outside the home. Natheir asked her one day if there was a job she had always wanted. For a second, she thought of saying architect, but that long-ago dream felt childish and absurd. But she surprised Jebreel when she said, “Hairdresser.”

  “Really?” Jebreel’s face was mildly perplexed.

  “Yes, really! I always colored my own hair and our neighbors’ back in Daraa.”

  “Well, yes, but . . .”

  “Well, I want to be a hairdresser.” Her voice sounded firm and she felt pleased. This would be a good fit for her, something she could be proud of.

  A few weeks later, Natheir called and told her he had found a place for her, a high-end salon downtown managed by a woman named Nawal, who was Muslim but did not wear a hijab over her highlighted hair. The women in the apartment complex helped Hasna figure out the bus routes and Hasna left two hours earlier than she needed to, arriving with thirty minutes to spare. Nawal’s dark-paneled salon had low couches, gilded mirrors, dark-paneled walls. The aroma of sandalwood and lemongrass lingered in the air. Hasna felt out of place, and apologized for arriving early, but Nawal waved it away and told Hasna she’d be able to talk when she finished cutting her client’s hair. Hasna watched her fingers closely, the way she pulled the comb out at an angle to snip expertly, the way she stepped back and pursed her lips slightly while evaluating the length.

  When she was finished, Nawal pulled Hasna back into the office and talked to her about the job. Hasna was disappointed to learn that she would not be able to cut hair and was only going to be allowed to wash and mix colors. She told Nawal that she was very good at the right hair color—she even pulled off her hijab to show Nawal her honey-colored hair, explaining the formula she used, the proportions of bleach to olive oil, and how she was quick at pulling the hair with the thin hook through the rubber cap for highlights so that it hurt less. Nawal nodded but stated firmly: Hasna could neither cut nor color the clients’ hair. In the United States, you had to have a certificate before you were allowed to work as a cosmetologist; technically, Hasna was not supposed to be on the floor at all, but Natheir was an old friend of Nawal’s and she was doing him a favor in employing Hasna.

  Hasna was disappointed—“hairdresser’s assistant” did not have the ring to it that “hairdresser” did—but she was determined to prove herself. She had heard stories from the women about the jobs available here, how the Iraqi chemists and doctors, engineers and college professors, were all working now in hospital kitchens or as custodians. She wanted to stay in this salon, with its gilded sheen and perfumed air.

  The first few days, she was humble when Nawal explained to her the proper way to shampoo hair, the right temperature, the words to ask—“Mint? Or lavender?”—when letting clients choose that month’s shampoo scents. The women whose hair she watched Nawal wash were sleek, their eyebrows curved in perfect lines, their cheeks contoured by their makeup, their lips slightly pursed and always glistening with lipstick. They did not speak to Hasna, but some of them smiled. She watched Nawal fold foils of gel around her clients’ hair and thought this American method of highlighting was superior to what she had done; her head always burned for a few days after pulling at her hair and then dousing it with bleach.

  Hasna swept eagerly and tried to avoid tripping up Nawal or the other hairdressers while getting the hair out from under their feet. Nawal asked her once to wait until they were done, so Hasna stood eagerly to the side. When she scrubbed the desk thoroughly, she only lightly splashed the appointment book sometimes.

  * * *

  —

  Rana started school and struggled to catch up to her peers; she spent hours every night studying on the rickety table in their apartment. Hasna was confident it would not take Rana long to learn English, but Rana did not share her mother’s assurance. Their RST caseworker helped them apply for Medicaid and they went to doctors’ appointments with translators. The doctors admired the skill with which Jebreel’s torso and shoulder had been reconstructed.

  Jebreel seemed to be pulling into himself more and more. While she was gone at
work, he straightened up around the house, but that did not take long. He spent many hours with other Arabic-speaking men in the apartment complex, sitting on the couches smoking and talking about politics. Many days, Hasna came back from a backbreaking day to find the men in her living room and her home filled with smoke. She never liked smoke but in Daraa she understood that she had joined her husband in his home when they married and smoking had always been a part of that. Except now, she was the one working for their rent and the acrid stink of stale smoke clung to her clothes in the pristine salon. Their irritation with each other seeped into the fabric of their home. In Daraa, there had been space when they had fought, neighbors and daughters to vent to and laugh with, work that kept Jebreel occupied all day. Now, those buffers were gone.

  Jebreel’s disability checks did not come and did not come. She looked at him one day when she walked in the door, sitting alone on the couch checking the news on his phone, and realized that he was old. At some point in the last three years, he had aged significantly and, for the first time since she had been a teenage bride, she felt the gap between their ages was wide. Every day she felt an inexorable pull out of the apartment, a desire to learn English and to find out what was happening around them in Austin. She loved to watch the women in the salon, her mouth twisting itself into English whenever she could. She had already learned to shop, to ride the bus, to find her neighbors’ homes in the labyrinthine complex. His world by contrast was becoming the small, isolated world of an old man.