In August of 2005, Vincent, a freelance journalist, was kidnapped, tortured, and shot to death in the southern Iraqi city of Basra by militants dressed in police uniform. His abduction and murder came two days after a story about the infiltration of the local security forces by Iranian-backed Shia militias ran with his byline in the New York Times. Al Khal was also kidnapped and shot during the attack, but survived and was transported to a hospital in Baghdad. Fearing for her life, al Khal fled to a neighboring country upon her release, where she remains to this day (the exact location of which is kept private, for reasons of security).
“Before she worked with Steven, Nour had worked with the Guardian, the Dallas Morning News. She has impeccable credentials,” Ramaci-Vincent tells me a few weeks after testifying before a Senate hearing convened by Ted Kennedy and Arlen Specter.
Lisa has lined up a job for al Khal in New York at the UN Bureau Office of the Al-Arabiya news channel, and if her plan succeeds, al Khal will stay in the same East Village apartment that she shared with Steven. Yet, despite all this planning, when Ramaci-Vincent first approached the State Department, she was told that al Khal does not qualify for refugee or asylum status because Iraq is now a democracy, hence there should be no reason she would need to flee.
“If she goes back to Basra, where she’s from, she’ll be killed. Thanks to the Patriot Act she’s viewed by our government as a potential terrorist, and the screening process takes at least six months—assuming she’s even granted an interview.”
Al Khal may in fact be one of the “lucky” ones, as many Iraqis who have worked as translators, interpreters, and contractors for the U.S. Army, nongovernmental organizations, or Western media (all of whom have become favored targets of insurgent groups inside Iraq) lack an American sponsor working actively on their behalf. Many fine journalists have by now covered the story of those Iraqis who trusted the United States, and whose simple requests for security within Iraq or sanctuary without have been answered with silence.
It is an important story, but one that needs to be viewed within a larger context—as one small part of what Refugee International calls the fastest growing refugee crisis in the world and the largest movement of people in the Middle East since the war of 1948 that led to the scattering of the Palestinian diaspora. Iraqi asylum seekers in countries that report those numbers to the UN last year outnumbered those from any other country of the world. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) more than two million Iraqis have fled their country since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. The vast majority of them now live in Jordan, Syria, Egypt, and Lebanon.
The outflow grew from a steady stream to a torrent after the Samarra mosque bombing in February 2006, which many observers point to as the act of terrorism that triggered in earnest the sectarian civil war between Shia and Sunni militias. Daily kidnappings, car bombings, suicide bombings, mortar attacks, house seizures, random and targeted assassinations, and pitched Sunni-Shia sectarian warfare have created such chaos that those Iraqis with the resources to do so are fleeing, and fleeing fast. UNHCR and relief workers in the region estimate that 50,000-100,000 leave each month, and as of this writing another 1.9 million are displaced within Iraq. The UN estimates that, given current levels of violence and insecurity, another million will be displaced internally by the end of 2007.
To better understand the ramifications of this tremendous regional crisis and the extent to which it will affect domestic policy here in the United States, a bit more historical analysis should be useful, especially because, until recently, most Americans paid little attention to the story. One reason they have not is that as of the four-year anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion in March, fewer than 500 Iraqis had received refugee status in the United States. Only 202 were admitted in 2006—out of more than 40,000 refugees from around the world who were resettled in America by the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration in the same year. In much the same way that media images of the flag-draped coffins of U.S. soldiers killed in combat have been kept from the public eye, Iraqis fleeing their war-torn homeland have also been effectively kept out of sight and out of mind by current U.S. refugee and immigration policy.
Lest there be any confusion about the logic behind U.S. policy, Arthur E. Dewey, former assistant secretary of state for refugee affairs, spelled it out for the Boston Globe last December: “For political reasons, the administration will discourage” the resettlement of Iraqi refugees in the United States “because of the psychological message it would send, that it is a losing cause.”
But in response to a doubling of the annual funding appeal by UNHCR in January and an explosion of critical media coverage that followed, the Bush administration was forced to make an about-face, or at least give the impression of doing so. The State Department announced the creation of a task force on Iraq refugees and displaced persons, and the administration pledged eighteen million dollars toward UNHCR’s 2007 budget, also promising to expedite resettlement of up to 7,000 Iraqi refugees by September. Soon afterward however, the State Department backtracked, saying that “very intense security screening” might cut the number in half. Keeping things in perspective, that’s eighteen million dollars allocated toward refugee assistance in 2007 in comparison to the more than ninety billion dollars the U.S. government is budgeting for the Iraq War and occupation in 2007.
BY WAY OF CONTRAST, Sweden, which has a community of Iraqi-born residents roughly the same size as that in the United States, accepted the vast majority of asylum claims made last year by more than 9,000 Iraqis. Australia, a nominal member of the “Coalition of the Willing,” admitted 2,150 Iraqi refugees between 2005–2006 as part of its Offshore Humanitarian Grants program. The United Kingdom, on the other hand, has appeared to follow Washington’s lead, denying more than 90 percent of the applications for asylum made by Iraqis in 2006. The United Kingdom is also the only European country to have deported Iraqi citizens living in the country illegally. The asylum status granted thirty-eight Iraqi nationals who had fled Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was rescinded, and they were deported to northern Iraq, regarded at that time as sufficiently stable by the UK government.
Where are the Iraqi refugees? Syria, which shares a long southern border with Iraq, has allowed as many as 1.2 million Iraqi refugees to cross the border, most of whom entered on three-to-six-month business or tourist visas. Neighboring Jordan has more than 750,000 displaced Iraqis, according to UN estimates. Neither Syria nor Jordan is a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, so the nearly two million Iraqis eking out a living or rapidly depleting their life savings in the two countries are not officially considered refugees as such, and thus are not eligible for many public services, such as schools and hospitals. Egypt is estimated to have up to 150,000 displaced Iraqis; Lebanon, 40,000-50,000. One reason the crisis was not front-page news until recently is that Iraq’s refugees weren’t huddled by the tens of thousands in desert camps, but are swelling the city slums of Amman, Damascus, and Cairo. UNHCR head Antonio Guterres has called it “the highest urban caseload UNHCR has ever had to deal with.”
Now, just as the world’s media have begun to focus on the story, neighboring governments are taking a harder line. Numerous reports corroborated by Human Rights Watch and Refugee International speak of an increase in deportations and of Iraqis summarily being returned at the border, often separating families in the process. Saudi Arabia, one of the U.S. government’s closest allies in the region, has had a no-entry policy from the beginning of the war and is constructing a 550-mile, high-tech fence to seal off its border from the sectarian inferno that is modern-day Iraq.
As to a flood of Iraqi refugees reaching American shores, we might first ask, if the United States were to expand resettlement options for some Iraqis, would they want to come here? Yes, many would. Laith Yousif, computer programmer and creator of the Web site “From Baghdad to New York,” an aggregator of news about Iraq and an archive for articles about Iraqi history and culture, arrived here in January of 2001 on a work visa. It is a feat that would have been next to impossible a year later, after the post–September 11 clampdown on immigration from the Middle East. Yousif’s family is now scattered between the United States, Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt, a “typical” Iraqi family, he tells me.
It has been over six years since Yousif has seen his family. Last summer his brother fled Iraq for Lebanon after his work with a British-based human rights organization was rewarded with a letter in the mail that read “Leave Now or Else.” His parents, who fled their home in Baghdad earlier this year and now live in Jordan, were recently denied a tourist visa to the United States. Yousif can’t leave the United States to visit the Middle East, though, as even his own immigration attorney warns him that trying to come back would be a nightmare. “I can’t get my family over here, but if I take the chance to go visit them over there, I feel like I’ll end up like that guy in the Tom Hanks movie, The Terminal, where the guy is stuck forever inside an airport.”
According to Joseph Kassab, president of the Chaldean Federation of America, a group that represents Iraqi Christians in the United States, stories like Yousif’s are all too common.
The organization has been contacted by thousands of Iraqi families living in the United States looking for help in sponsoring relatives and friends who have fled Iraq and have no desire to go back. “We are working with UNHCR and the State Department on creating a database of our people in exile, people who have seen too much horror, whose family members have been killed, who can no longer call Iraq home,” Kassab tells me. “We want the U.S. to take more, but Australia also must take more, Canada must take more.”
It used to be easier for them. According to the Migration Policy Institute, more than a third of Iraqis now living in the United States originally entered as refugees or were granted refugee status. Census figures from 2000 show that almost half arrived after 1992, fleeing Saddam Hussein’s government and the deprivations caused by sanctions. But that welcome mat has been yanked out from under Iraqis escaping today’s sectarian bloodletting.
WILL OUR GOVERNMENT ever agree to resettle large numbers of Iraqi refugees? Though historically the world’s largest resettlement destination, the United States has linked refugee policy to foreign policy, making a consistent distinction between “deserving” and “undeserving” refugees. The undeserving are typically those fleeing war and persecution in countries with governments supported by the United States. Deserving refugees flee states that have leftist governments, stormy diplomatic relations with the United States, or both. North Korea, China, Vietnam, Eritrea, Iran, and Sudan, for example, are designated by the State Department as “Countries of Particular Concern.” Unsurprisingly, their refugees receive a much heartier welcome than Iraq’s. To better gauge what to expect in the coming months and years, while potentially even more of Iraq’s population abandons the country, it is useful to revisit parallels from recent history.
During the 1980s, with the cold war in its final throes, Central Americans made up two-thirds of all asylum seekers in the United States. Brutal civil wars raged in Guatemala and El Salvador, with U.S.-backed military governments engaging in scorched-earth, anti-insurgency campaigns that killed tens if not hundreds of thousands. An estimated one million Salvadorans and Guatemalans fled the repression and strife between 1981 and 1990, entering the United States as undocumented migrants.
But many were sent back. Because Jimmy Carter had signed the Refugee Act in 1980, imposing a nonideological standard of “well-founded fear of prosecution,” and also because Congress had banned foreign assistance to governments committing gross human rights violations, the Reagan administration characterized nearly all Salvadoran and Guatemalan migrants as “economic migrants.” As a result, only 2 percent to 3 percent of their asylum claims won State Department approval, and as many as 40,000 were deported, some of whom were killed upon their return home.
This biased policy caught the attention of the mainstream media when hundreds of U.S. churches and congregations defied the Immigration and Naturalization Service and created the sanctuary movement to provide humanitarian assistance to Salvadorans and Guatemalans denied political asylum. Activists called it the New Underground Railroad. When the Department of Justice charged sixteen of the organizers with criminal conspiracy in 1985, the issue received even more publicity. Though all the defendants were convicted, none were sentenced to jail.
Asylum seekers from Nicaragua, then governed by the socialist Sandinista Front, against which the United States was arming and training the contra army out of neighboring Honduras, received a starkly different treatment. Nicaraguan asylum-seekers hewed much more closely to a cold war narrative about the repressive nature of the Sandinistas, and the Reagan administration appeared eager to declare incoming migrants as political refugees fleeing communist persecution. In that period, asylum claims made by Nicaraguans were approved at rates of 60 percent to 80 percent.
The disparity in treatment of refugees from the Caribbean, namely Cuba and Haiti, is fraught with the same contradictions. Cuban refugees have received privileged status since the adoption in 1966 of the Cuban Adjustment Act, which grants residence status to Cubans arriving in the United States, legally or illegally. Not so with Haitians fleeing political instability. From 1991 to 1992, the year in which a violent military coup toppled the democratically elected government of Haiti, a total of 41,342 Haitians were interdicted at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard. The vast majority were denied entry to the United States and sent back to Haiti. These Haitians, clearly fleeing political upheaval, were also classified as “economic migrants.”
ANOTHER COLD war example mirrors many aspects of the current crisis, that of Afghanistan, which in the 1980s was one of the largest producers of refugees on the planet. Almost a million Afghans lost their lives as the Red Army tried to impose control for its puppet Afghan government after the 1979 Soviet invasion and later, as religious extremists and warlords vied for control of the country. More than three million Afghans fled abroad, and although the vast majority went to neighboring Iran and Pakistan, where they were treated fairly hospitably, almost 40,000 were offered resettlement in the United States. Tens of thousands more were later allowed to join their families here.
The other wretched historical allegory is that of Vietnam. Although some of the first images beamed around the world after the fall of Saigon were of helicopters lifting Americans off the roof of the embassy as desperate Vietnamese were pushed away, within six months more than 130,000 “deserving” Vietnamese refugees had been resettled in the United States. Since the end of the Vietnam War the U.S. government has allowed more than 900,000 Vietnamese to resettle here. As citizens of a country unquestionably responsible for, at minimum, putting the events in motion that led to the current horrendous civil war in Iraq, we should be extremely concerned about that precedent. Only after the war in Indochina dragged on for almost ten years, destroyed the entire country, and killed 56,000 Americans and up to four million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians did the United States open its doors to political refugees from the region.
It is likely that the United States will pull out of Iraq much sooner and with far fewer U.S. casualties, but whether or not that withdrawal will precipitate even bloodier sectarian strife and a new flux of war-scarred Iraqis is unknown. With or without a U.S. withdrawal, the current exodus continues and demands an immediate solution.
IN APRIL OF this year, the UNHCR held a two-day meeting in Geneva dedicated solely to the humanitarian dimensions of the refugee crisis. Commissioner Guterres closed the meetings with a call for more commitment from the international community “that includes financial, economic support but also expanded resettlement opportunities for the most vulnerable. The generosity of host countries must be matched by that of the entire international community.” The meeting seems to have had some effect, as at its close the U.S. delegation pledged more than $100 million in humanitarian assistance for Iraqis, both inside and outside Iraq, and insinuated that the United States was willing to take in as many as 25,000 refugees in 2007, pending referrals from UNHCR.
“Pressure has to come from Congress,” says Muzaffar Chishti, director of the Migration Policy Institute at the NYU School of Law. The quota determining how many refugees are admitted is not set by the State Department, but is negotiated between the administration and Congress on a yearly basis. “Clearly the U.S. has the capacity. In the 1980s we were admitting over 200,000 refugees a year. In the nineties the U.S. admitted tens of thousands of refugees from the Balkan wars.” Chishti explains that up until 2002, when security considerations led to a drastic reduction, the United States had for decades admitted more refugees than the ninety other countries registered with the UNHCR combined.
This is one part of our history of which we can be proud. It is also a part of our history that we should seek to emulate when we demand from Congress that it hold the administration to its word on recent pledges of help and do more by way of assisting both those Iraqis trapped in legal limbo in the Middle East and those who have a compelling reason to think that the United States owes them sanctuary. In the interim, countries like Jordan and Syria, which are bearing the overwhelming burden of the crisis, must be provided with the resources to alleviate the strain on their infrastructure and economy that the crisis has exacerbated. In the absence of such support, both countries will likely adopt even more hard-line policies sure to send many more Iraqis back to certain death.
Laith Yousif, the Web master of “From Baghdad to New York,” has no intention or desire to return to Iraq at this point, a state of mind shared by many other Iraqis he knows. He tells me that a number of his friends are now in Jordan or Syria working without pay. Their employers know that they need proof of employment to stay in the country, and that they would rather work for nothing than return to Iraq. He also tells me about another Web site he is working on in collaboration with Iraqis from around the world—www.wikiraqi.com—an online encyclopedia, in English and Arabic, of Iraqi culture, history, slang, and jokes. An explosion of similar Iraqi blogs and Web sites run from all parts of the globe reflects a diaspora haunted by similar feelings of pride, longing, and despair.
“It’s a way for us to remember the things that we love about Iraq,” Laith tells me when I ask him about the new site. “We are documenting a country that we hope not to lose, but which, really, we already expect to lose.”
Exporting Democracy: Lessons Learned from Iraq
Mark Beissinger on Promoting Democracy: Is Exporting Revolution Constructive?
Ian Roxborough on WMDs: Threats and Strategies
Drums of War, Calls for Peace: 2003 Iraq Symposium
Iran and the West: A Symposium
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