While a student, and at the encouragement of my mother, I recruited my grandmother to help me collect ghost stories from her oldest sister, Julia, the most renowned storyteller and tamale maker in my family. In addition to learning a little bit about linguistics and a lot about transcribing interviews I also heard for the first time the tale of how her family came to Texas from Torreón, Coahuila. In honor of Diez y Seis and with all due respect to the still precarious status of immigrants and refugees in the United States I am retelling it to you today.

Special thanks are due to my mom Janis, Grandma Pauline, and Aunt Julia who guided me to that kitchen in south central Austin, January 1997, where I first heard this tale.  I had to exercise a little poetic license to weave that conversation into a single narrative but its really Julia’s story. Believe me, when its family holding you to account you’re going to do your best to tell the tale right!

SPOILER ALERT I hesitated to put this next paragraph ahead of the narrative, but disliked placing it at the end of the post. Go read the story first and then come back, I’ll wait… Okay… At the climax of the story the captain of the Villistas spontaneously decides to spare Julia’s father’s life announcing that Frank is his guardian angel. There’s some interesting symbolism here that might have been clearer had Julia’s ordering of the events been more linear, but then she was already quite elderly when I recorded the story. First, the soldiers had already rounded up all the men and locked then in a warehouse, although Frank was just a boy he should have been with them but somehow they missed him and he slept through it. Second, he is wrapped in a sheet because he rolled off the bed when the raiders stole the mattress. Thus, not only does he appear out of nowhere but he is literally clothed all in white, hence why he is like an angel.

NB. At the end of the story, after the family has risen from destitution to some degree of stability, Julia describes herself as being in a house where “we felt like we were okay.” Being that she and her friend have easy access to the river that is only a short horse ride away this is probably the Deep Eddy house, which is where the ghost stories begin.

The Castruita Family Flees to Texas to Escape War in Mexico

by Aunt Julia, with a little help from my Grandma and me

When I was little, you see my daddy would live in a big hacienda. I don’t know how they call it (laughs). Hacienda. And do you know it’s all big and round and all the people sleep all the way round, it’s adobe. Las casas. The houses were made of adobe. Adobe, yes. And it was a big, high wall all the way round the hacienda. Like a village. There was just one gate.

And we live there, my daddy was the el gerente. Manager. There was a water tank beside the house. There was a big windmill that pulled out the water. And a vegetable garden. On one side was the produce for the people, the vegetables and stuff. But over here on this other side, the other side of this huge water tower. It’s as high as the house on the other side, is where they had the fodder for the animals. And they plant oats and alfalfa.

See the man that brought my grandfather over here to Texas is the one that owned that big hacienda. He had a restaurant and one of the biggest hotels in Torreón. They had a warehouse where they had all the stuff that they produced from farming.

In the middle of the night. They were all asleep. And remember now they’re little houses, the hacienda is all these little adobe houses. The rooms all connect. That’s where all the help lived. The people who worked the fields. You see it go around like that and all just rooms together. My father is one that managed it all, he oversaw all the help that worked there.

They were asleep. About two in the morning. There was one guy who was the watchman. And he made the rounds. The Villistas came. They forced their way in.

It was the summer. They were sleeping outdoors.

They pointed their rifles. They put a noose around my father’s head. Everybody got up. They wanted my father to go and open all the warehouses, they were going to loot them. They looted the horses and the mules. They had the wine, the beans. Everything. Cheese.

They took all the men and put ‘em all in one room and locked it. It was an empty warehouse. They locked ‘em in there, just the men. They only left my mother and me, and then everybody else, all the families and everything, they were locked. I cry and cry. But daddy gave ‘em a lock that really didn’t lock. He knew that, but he gave it to ‘em. So they locked it.

My mother, they insisted that my mother give ‘em money and they went into the house where my mother lived. And here I am, a little girl grabbing onto my mother’s skirt. And they tear me away from her, from mama. And I’d come back and then they had a gun, a rifle pointed at my mother all the time. They came in. They took all their clothes. All the bed linens, everything. She had an old sewing machine. And her purse with the money. My mother’s purse with money was inside the sewing machine.

“Give us money!”

They never did find the money cause she had it locked, her purse was locked inside. They don’t find the money. And I was crying and screaming! And my mother would hold me. The soldier were trying to take me. He tried to kill me. With the, you know, turn of the gun. Tried to hit me. And my mother’s arm is all bruised where they hit ‘em.

So then he went and take out my daddy. And you know, Frank. He wrapped in one the sheets. They took the mattress, everything. They went out, take out my daddy. They tied him up.

Down the road from the hacienda was where the Chinese lived and they had orchards, okay. They wanted to know where the China-men lived.

So my daddy walk behind there. Tied up with the rope. He was walking behind the horses. They were going to hang my father. Frank, they went behind him. He was nine years old. He follow him. They were going to put the noose around his neck. They were going to hang my daddy.

Frank he ran and grabbed my daddy by his leg, and then the captain said, “That’s this man’s guardian angel.” And so cut down the rope. And they let him come back.

Frank slipped out. He roll in one of the sheets. And they took him (laughs). Yes, because they take the mattress and everything. But he roll to one corner they don’t see him. Cause it was dark.

And do you know, my mother make coffee right away. And they put some alcohol in their cafe. They were drunk when they left there. The soldiers. They insisted that my mother make coffee, and then they just poured this liquor in. It was 100 proof! (laughs)

They had big cans full of well, it looks like curds and whey. Ready to make cheese. The soldiers just reached in there, would eat the cheese. The cheese, what they need to do was to strain it you know. But they would just eat it. It was a big mess, where they had, you know, all stuck their hand and it was dirty.

All right, when they released my daddy and Frank they came back and because he put just a false lock on the door he opened it and released them. All the people from the hacienda, including me and mama (laughs), just night clothes. We don’t have nothing. Next day my daddy had to come to town and buy some clothes for us to use and everything. The soldiers stole them all. Yes, they took everything. They tore down the place.

They did leave after they decided not to kill my daddy. Yes, yes. They went to the Chinese and kill all the Chinese. And took whatever they want. This was very common. And they, cause that men just live on the mountains. They were guerrillas, more or less. But they’d come, it was very common for them to raid whatever little hacienda was close.

Oh yes. And then, and they told my daddy when they come back they find him there they gonna kill ‘em! So we stay about two weeks there and then my grandfather Anacleto, my daddy’s father say, “No you don’t stay here nomore. Go to Estadio Unido.” Go to U.S. Cause they gonna kill him and his whole family gonna be awful. So my daddy left, he had to go to Austin. He know somebody in Austin.

Yeah, the brother of the man, Mr. Lewis’s brother. This one named Carlos? Charley? Carlos. We stay there for six months, then my daddy went back and bring us to here. To Texas. He came here first, alone. And then he established himself, and then he went back in six months. And brought us back. My daddy went on a train. We went on a train, yeah.

Whenever these guerrillas, they took everything. Nobody go out. And no food, nothing. There wasn’t anything left so what we did was to grind corn, dry corn, and from that she made like a porridge. And that’s what we ate. Just little-bitty cups. One each.

On top of the roof of the house they put the machine guns. So nobody go out. They don’t sell nothing. The stores was close and everything. After the guerrillas would go through the government would send train loads of food. But then all the people, you know, didn’t have anything so they all mobbed the train. And they pass out wheat, flour. Each family would get just a little box which was equal to about a quart of flour, beans, rice.

Okay, see, my daddy after this raid, you know, when they cleaned out the hacienda the owner of the hacienda said, “You better go because they’re going to come back.” And in fact they told my daddy that the next time they came, if he was still there they will kill him. So he, that’s when he came to Texas.

My father’s cousin wrote him and said, “You’d better come back for the family cause, see the rations, your family is starving. You better come back.” So that’s when my daddy went back, six months later. And he brought us.

So we come. We stay in Piedras Negras. One week, because my daddy you know he didn’t have no passport. Well they detained ‘em. While the whole family had a passport, my daddy didn’t. He had only a tourist pass and it had run out. We were a week there, in Piedras Negras at the border. Doing the paperwork.

When we came over, it was Augustine. Mother. Maggie. Frank. Me (Julia). Four children and my mother. And we traveled alone, because see my daddy came the other way around. They traveled alone. I remember that picture of my mother, she was so skinny. But we had had hardship for six months. Down there.

When we first got here we lived in this big ol’, this empty store. And it was just one big, you know, hall. And behind there was this big water tower with a metal tank because it was a windmill pump. And it was so cold that year that in the morning there’d be a huge icicle on the side of the tank. We had no bedding.

In the evening, when we went to bed my mother would wash our clothes and hang the clothes to dry inside the building. There was one stove where she did the cooking. Wood stove. And we all slept around it. But because she had to wash the clothes, cause that was all the clothes we brought what was on our back.

And there was a little black woman that lived near there and she gave my mother some old rattly-tattly blankets and we wrapped ourselves in it to sleep. And the kids wake up in the middle of the night, they’d be so cold, they’d be crying. My father would wake up in the middle of the night, add wood to the stove so it would stay warm. He’d kill birds and coons and possums and squirrels. And that’s what we used to eat when we first come to Austin. And next to the house it was a big field of cabbage (laughs), steal the cabbage from the guy next door. It was so sweet to steal cabbage like that (laughs)!

For 25 cents a day the boys were hired to spinach. Turnips, big turnips. Now my father was working in the dairy already, but this man that hired him would give him breakfast which my mother cooked. She would fix for each one of the hired hands, bacon and biscuits. And my daddy would eat one egg and one slice of bacon, and give my mother the other egg and the other bacon and the biscuit and she then took that divided it among the four kids.

See for a whole year we were there with that man. Then after the end of the year this other man hired him and he gave us a house to live. And then we were no longer hungry because we have everything there. There was a lady she would give us eggs and bacon. And my mother had a vegetable garden. Peach orchard. Grapes. You know every weekend they go fishing, perch. The lady had two sons and one daughter, and they’d climb up and cut the grapes. So see we felt like we were okay because they had all this to eat. They put netting around the trees in the orchard. Plums and grapes.

The little girl was my same age and we would get on the horse and go play on the beach near the river. We go on the river and play there.

Okay. We’ll cut it there.

As a volunteer legal advocate working with refugees who were seeking resettlement, I learned to ask detailed questions about persecution. These were the kind of questions you would never ask in polite conversation: Who kidnapped your best friend? Were they wearing uniforms? What did those uniforms look like? Where did they hit you? Did you pay a ransom for her release? How did you identify her body? Questions like these, which refugees are asked over and over as part of the already extreme vetting that they undergo to be granted asylum and resettlement, are personal, intimate, painful. They demand a precise and consistent command of autobiographical detail and the strength to revisit events that one might otherwise want to forget. They try to get to the heart of what happened to a person, what forced them to leave everything behind.

On a more cynical level, these questions try to catch a person in a lie, to identify those who are not “deserving” of refuge. The answers are checked and cross-checked, asked again and again across multiple agencies and organizations. In separate interviews, family members are asked the same questions. Do the answers match up? Do the dates and places make sense? Were you a victim of persecution? Are you who you say you are? While these questions and their answers shape the narrative of an individual resettlement case, there is a way in which they don’t get to the heart of what happened to a person, why someone was forced to flee, cross at least one border to enter another state, and is now seeking resettlement in a third country.

Vetting, extreme or otherwise, is about inclusion and exclusion. But before someone even gets to the arduous, opaque process of being considered for resettlement in the United States, decisions are made at the executive level about who to include in a broader sense. While the Refugee Convention provides protection for any person with a “well-founded fear of persecution” on specific grounds, this has never been the full story of the US refugee program, where a presidential determination each year decides how many refugees will be resettled, and from where. Some die-hard advocates and detractors aside, refugee resettlement has historically had bipartisan support and mostly stays under the radar of public attention, except, it seems, in moments where it becomes a reflection of broader anxieties and struggles over belonging and exclusion.

The argument for extreme vetting is all about uncovering the truth about individual refugees—the presumed danger that can be discovered by interagency database searches, probing questions, and medical tests. The counterarguments that illustrate just how rigorous the vetting is already are both true and necessary, but they keep our rejoinders in the narrow realm set out for us by those who would argue that refugees pose a security threat. These lines of argument keep us from looking at broader relationships of obligation and mutuality that might demand a different response.

As an anthropologist who studies refugee resettlement, I’m drawn to these larger questions. What logics guide resettlement policies and programs, and how do these processes reinforce or maybe subvert the violence of migration regimes more generally? These larger critical questions get obscured in the focused myopia of the refugee adjudication process, and they are completely obliterated in rhetoric about “America First” or “taking care of our own”. But asking these questions is essential to understanding the stakes of the executive order and the violence and uncertainty it unleashed. It also helps us to understand the implications of such an order for displacement in a global sense.

Only about 1% of refugees are ever resettled—a process where people who have already sought asylum are offered residence, and often pathways to citizenship, in a third country. In 2015, of the 21.3 million refugees worldwide, only 107,000 were resettled. 66,500 of those were resettled in the United States. So if the United States halts resettlement, even temporarily, the global landscape of refugee protection is drastically altered.

Unlike asylum, which is a right under international law, resettlement has been portrayed as a humanitarian gift, a benevolent act of charity. And it is true that typically only the most vulnerable of refugees are referred for resettlement: victims of torture, people with serious medical needs, unaccompanied children. Resettlement is, as it is advertised, an extra protection measure for refugees who cannot go home and cannot live safely in the country where they sought asylum. But, for the United States, resettlement is frequently also the policy equivalent of extending a hand to help someone up right after you stuck your foot out and tripped them. The Iraqi who worked with the US Armed Forces as an interpreter and was kidnapped and forced to flee as a result. The Hungarian dissident in 1956 who listened to Radio Free Europe’s promise that “America will not fail you”. The Degar in the jungle of Vietnam still fighting for the US cause, not yet realizing that the Americans had packed up and gone home a long time ago.

For these refugees, resettlement seems less like a humanitarian gift than a duty, a moral obligation and small recompense for having been so treacherously untrustworthy. Critics of the ban have been quick to point out these cases of duty unmet and I am sympathetic to their efforts to garner support for refugees. But, and this is a banal understatement, you did not have to work for the Americans to have your life destroyed in Iraq after 2003, and surely some moral obligation emerges from that too. A third resettlement logic, frequently employed during the Cold War, was one of naked ideological one-upmanship—welcoming exiles from communist countries bolstered the story of the US as a haven for freedom, creativity, science. These logics of obligation—to suffering others, to allies, to the nationstate—have co-existed in the US resettlement program for years, at various points in tension with one another, and always in conversation with questions of security. Trump’s insistent portrayal of refugees as a security threat, despite all evidence to the contrary, represents a particularly virulent populist answer to a longstanding debate about the obligations states have to their citizens and to non-citizens.

These questions of who should be admitted must be asked with at least one eye to the geopolitics that allow some countries to be “resettlement states” with the ability to choose from abroad which refugees they will admit. How do these politics relate to European states financing camps to keep migrants from leaving Libya? To Australia’s outsourcing of refugees to island detention camps for years in the name of “deterrence”? I would argue that understanding the geopolitics of obligation and exclusion demands an attention to how these processes of inclusion and exclusion are experienced by those who are subject to them and the ways in which these politics are confirmed or resisted social interactions. It also demands that we pay attention to the continuities here, as well as the disjunctures.

In some ways, this travel ban is remarkable and new and remarkably outrageous. In other ways, it is part of familiar patterns of abjection—the ways that some states, nations, people are cast out or pushed down in global spatial and temporal hierarchies. Muslim bodies traveling have already been subject to humiliation and rejection. Airports have already been spaces of violent detention and deportation. Refugee policy and practice has already been part of a larger politics of migrant containment.

As part of my ethnographic fieldwork with Iraqi refugees in Cairo, Egypt, I spent time with families as they navigated the arduous, bureaucratic process of seeking resettlement to the United States long before the ban. I saw firsthand the toll it can take to live in uncertainty for months or years, not knowing if you will be allowed to travel and start your life in a new place. Do you buy something you need, knowing you might have to try to sell it if you travel? Do you spend precious savings to enroll your children in school, knowing you might travel before the semester is up? Do you travel back to Iraq to attend your mother’s funeral, knowing that to do so might jeopardize your resettlement case?

Each time resettlement or asylum is applied for, each time it is granted or denied, geopolitical claims are being made and remade. These small moments add up to a larger picture of who we are in the world. And refugee resettlement is so much more than a simple humanitarian endeavor. It is one way that states tell the story of who they are, and their geopolitical place in the world. These stories seek to set the terms of the debate, to naturalize historical, political and economic relationships between so-called resettlement states and the refugees who seek admission, but we don’t have to accept them. Attention to their fuzzy edges, their inconsistencies, and the ways they change over time create openings for action and the possibility of telling different stories.

Nadia El-Shaarawi is assistant professor of global studies at Colby College. She is a cultural and medical anthropologist whose research is on transnational forced migration, humanitarian intervention, and mental health. She is currently writing a book about Iraqi refugees in Egypt.

The Racist Gift of Immigration and Citizenship Bans, Again

Catherine Besteman

How can we understand Donald Trump’s executive order banning the entry of immigrants from Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Iran and Iraq, as well as all refugees? As an act of national security, the ban makes no sense. Rather, I read them as a racist gift to the white Christian alt-right that formed President Trump’s initial core base. The United States has a history of bans and color bars to entry and citizenship, about which we are rightfully embarrassed in hindsight. The Naturalization Act of 1790 restricted citizenship to only white immigrants, a law that remained on the books until 1952. Entry to the US remained open to anyone, however, until the implementation of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and then the Johnson Reed Act of 1924, which imposed the first comprehensive control over immigration. The Act placed a cap on the number of people to be admitted, set national origins quotas based on the 1890 census for entry, and barred anyone ineligible for citizenship from entry. By using the 1890 census, the national origins quotas intentionally favored immigrants from northern Europe and restricted Jewish immigrants because of anti-Semitism and fears of Communist influence.

Furthermore, the Supreme Court declared ineligible for citizenship everyone from Japan to Afghanistan, with the exception of the Philippines, then a US territory, thus creating a new racial category of “Asian” to be universally banned. When comprehensive immigration reform in 1965 removed national origins quotas and bans, it was heralded as a rejection of racist barriers to entry and a victory for American values of justice, human rights, and fairness. A dog whistle to those lusting for white Christian hegemony, the bans are an initial step to return America to a time when Muslims were barred from entry and immigration to the US was controlled by and for whites only.

The Politics of Naked Cruelty

Elizabeth Cullen Dunn

Since the end of the Cold War, global politics has been animated by “humanitarian reason”—a curious mix of violence and care used by nation-states to pursue their own geopolitical interests while ostensibly acting altruistically to provide aid.

No more.

Donald Trump’s refugee ban signals a dramatically new basis for global politics: a politics of naked cruelty.

Humanitarian reason carefully cloaked even its most violent acts in the treacle of human rights and emergency aid. The occupation of Afghanistan, the “liberation” of Iraq and the targeted bombing of Libya were all presented as military action taken to care for the impoverished, oppressed, or forcibly displaced.

Trump’s refugee ban makes no such pretense. Instead, it pretends it is indifferent to what happens to the millions of people who will be oppressed by their own governments, killed in conflict zones, or left to linger in the eternal limbo of displacement. “We have to take care of our own first,” is the constant refrain.

The politics of naked cruelty turns the humanitarian stereotype of refugees-as-innocent-victims on its head in order to justify state-sponsored mass violence against them. Already, Republicans in Congress have proposed that the US withdraw from the UN—which would mean cutting funding funds for housing and feeding displaced people. The right to turn away from starving refugees is baked right into that policy.

The only upside to the politics of naked cruelty is that it is naked. We no longer have to work to unmask the complex workings of neoliberal biopolitics. Power is now unmasking itself, which makes it fundamentally easier to oppose. That is why whether or not we care about refugees—and there are plenty of liberals willing to accept the sacrifice of refugees as unavoidable collateral damage as they focus on populations they deem more important—it’s worth continuing to fight the ban. It’s an obvious place to contest the underlying principle of the politics of cruelty: the right not to care.

Refuge, Refugees, and the Fears We Share

Tricia Redeker Hepner

What is daily life like under a regime that abuses its own people, disregards the rule of law, targets vulnerable and minority groups, and fails to hold perpetrators of human rights abuses unaccountable? How do reasonable people exist – and resist – in a society where those in power have created a nightmarish alt-reality and convinced others to go along with it? At what point does fear become action, pushing one to wager life itself against intolerable repression? These are precisely the dynamics I have explained – literally hundreds of times – to US immigration officials adjudicating asylum claims filed by people from Eritrea. While some of the fears that drive people to flee are indeed subjective and contextually specific enough to require translation, many are not. Being detained for one’s religious beliefs, beaten to death in prison, or subjected to torture require no culturally specific explanations to establish their moral repugnance or illegality. Rather, in explaining to US immigration officials the subjective fears of an Eritrean, or an Iraqi, a Kurd, a Syrian, or Afghan, what we are really doing is helping to narrate a story not about them but about us.

For “refuge” is really an elaborate ritual in which we affirm the predictability, integrity, tolerance, fairness, and inherent respect for justice and basic human rights we imagine characterizes America. Asylum in theory, if not practice, reiterates how America differs from the authoritarian, human rights-abusing states from whence refugees come. That is, until the day we wake up to realize that the refugee narratives we have helped tell for others, the subjective fears we translated as though alien, are really our own. Battered by xenophobia for decades, the US refugee system endures all-out assault by the very political dynamics it was once designed to subvert. In “Make America Great Again” we hear an echo of the lamentations of untold millions throughout time and space who have fought, died, and fled from dictatorships and wars that too often America helped create. But who will testify for us?

Sacred Grounds and Stolen Land, or, White Supremacists are Immigrants Too

Carole McGranahan

We Are All Immigrants. Make America Immigrate Again. Immigrants Built This Country. Signs such as these are prevalent in ongoing protests against Trump’s executive order banning individuals from seven countries from the US, including legally-approved refugees as well as legal permanent residents of this country. His action took place in the midst of other nefarious actions seemingly built on a platform of hate, lies, and destruction. Many have called his Muslim immigrant ban un-American, claiming this is not who we as Americans are. Others might disagree. The internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 are early precursors to this moment. However, we need to go back further, to the founding of the United States of America and to a different protest sign: #NoBanonStolenLand

Immigrants did build the USA, but they did so through the dispossession and subordination of other people: the millions of sovereign Native American peoples already living here. These were someone else’s lands, someone else’s sacred grounds. Immigrants also “built” the USA through slave labor. We are not all immigrants. Some of us are immigrants. Some of us are refugees, fleeing war and political violence. Some of us are descendants of slaves, sold and forced to “migrate” to this country. And some of us are native. Who are immigrants then? Those of us, including me, whose ancestors chose to come to this country. And: white supremacists. White supremacists are immigrants.

In his first days in office, advised by white supremacist Stephen Bannon, Trump has left Jews out of a statement remembering the Holocaust, has instituted a ban on Muslims coming into this country, ordered the Army Corps to expedite approval of the Dakota Access pipeline near the Standing Rock Reservation, and embarrassed just about everyone but himself by not knowing who Frederick Douglass was in his “speech” marking Black History Month. He followed this with the suggestion that the governmental Countering Violent Extremism program would no longer have a focus on white supremacist groups who have carried out violence in the USA, but will instead focus solely on Islamic communities.

I regularly testify as an expert witness for asylum applicants from Nepal and Tibet. Some of these are individuals who have escaped unimaginable political violence. They are looking for a safe haven, a place where they will not live in fear, a home for their children. This country is not perfect. Our history—past and present—is one that includes trauma and unjust war. Acknowledging injustice is a key step in working for justice now. One refugee here in the US told me that as his plane was descending into JFK, as he entered the fabled America for the first time, he looked out the window expecting the streets to be made of gold. He laughed as he told me this, at how as a young boy then man, he had taken this to be literal truth. Our streets are not paved with gold. Our myths obscure the often-painful realities of hierarchy and difference and violence in this country. We cannot let white supremacists and those who live in gold towers dishonor these sacred grounds or all of us for whom they are sacred.

Signs, Accusations, Fates

Nomi Stone

The morning after the Trump’s Immigration Ban went into effect, an Iraqi friend of mine, who now lives in America, sent me a picture of two trees that had just fallen in his yard: a prone cactus, spines pointing upward, and a larger trunk, a cracked triangle of earth around it. “It is a sign,” he said: “It is not safe here.” He, like many of the Iraqis I interviewed for recent fieldwork, had worked with American military personnel as a contractor and translator during the 2003 Iraq War, dreaming of a more just post-Saddam Iraq. Yet as Iraqi resistance to U.S. occupation grew, many Iraqis I interviewed described how they increasingly faced accusations of being informants to the U.S. military. Returning to Iraq terrified many of my interlocutors. As the news of the Ban sank in, people wondered what might be next. One friend with a Green Card said: “As long as they don’t kick us out. We finally got here.” And another told me anxiously: “I think he [Trump] will eventually send all Iraqis back, even if they have Green Cards. Iraqis can’t feel safe anywhere.” In a moment of despair, a friend who had nearly been killed by a militia for working for the U.S. military told me that Iraqis who blamed him for his wartime choices said: “we deserve this, to be treated this way now that we’re here.” As I formulated my thoughts today, I began rereading Hassan Blasim’s The Corpse Exhibition, thinking of the image in one story of a miraculous compass, light as a butterfly in the hand of its bearer, that turns blood-red to signal a turn in the story and the fate of the characters.

More Than a #MuslimBan

Marnie Thomson

Trump has issued a 120-day ban on ALL refugees entering the United States. Supporters of this measure stress that it is 1) only a temporary ban, and 2) it will only last until the vetting system has been improved. But does the ban’s impermanence and stated purpose justify this order? No. Here’s why:
The vetting of refugees is already, to use Trump’s word, extreme. It usually takes two or more years to screen refugees. The screening takes place in their country of refuge, before they ever set foot on U.S. soil. The process includes many rounds of interviews with UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) personnel, an interview with the State Department, multiple background checks and finger print screenings, a review of the case by U.S. Immigration Headquarters, an in-person interview with the Department of Homeland Security, medical examinations, U.S. cultural orientation, and finally a multi-agency security check prior to departure. For more details, please see this White House infographic and this U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) testimony.

Refugee vetting works. Zero fatal terror attacks on U.S. soil have been perpetrated by refugees. A risk analysis of immigration terrorism conducted by the Cato Institute found that the chance of a refugee murdering an American in a terrorist attack is 1 in 3.64 billion per year.

Temporary bans have permanent consequences. While Iraqi refugee resettlement slowed in 2011, halting all refugee resettlement is unprecedented. While impossible to know all of the ripple effects, it is certain that the ban will cause further harm to innocent people who have fled violence and languish in the harsh conditions of refugee camps. It will not improve national security. It will increase the burden of refugee hosting on other countries and institutions, and it will cost the U.S. its recognition as a global humanitarian leader.

Republican Senators Rob Portman, John McCain, and Lindsey Graham have already pointed to the irony that while refugees already undergo extreme vetting, this executive order clearly did not. Following its own language and logic then, this order should be banned until sufficient changes have been made to ensure that it is consistent with national interest.

AUTHORS

Catherine Besteman is the Francis F. Bartlett and Ruth K. Bartlett Professor of Anthropology at Colby College. She is the author and editor of many books, including Unraveling Somalia: Race, Violence, and the Legacy of Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), and most recently, Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine (Duke University Press, 2016).

Elizabeth Cullen Dunn is an anthropologist and Associate Professor of Geography at Indiana University. She wrote about refugee protection and resettlement problems in the May 13, 2016 issue of Science. Her book Unsettled: Humanitarianism and Displacement in the Republic of Georgia is forthcoming from Cornell University Press.

Tricia Redeker Hepner is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee. She is the author of Soldiers, Martyrs, Traitors, and Exiles: Political Coflict in Eritrea and the Diaspora (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) and co-editor of African Asylum at a Crossroads: Activism, Expert Testimony, and Refugee Rights (Ohio University Press, 2015).

Carole McGranahan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado. Her current research is on political refusal and refugee citizenship in the Tibetan diaspora. In May, American Ethnologist will publish her article “The Anthropology of Lying: Trump and the Political Sociality of Moral Outrage.”

Nomi Stone is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Anthropology at Princeton University. Her second collection of poems, Kill Class (based on her fieldwork within war trainings in mock Middle Eastern villages erected by the US military across America) is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2018. Her article “Living the Laughscream: Human Technology and Affective Maneuvers in the Iraq War” is coming out in Cultural Anthropology this February.

Marnie Thomson recently defended her PhD thesis “Stories of Darkness: Congolese Refugees, Humanitarian Governance, and a Neglected Conflict” at the University of Colorado. In 2012, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review published her article “Black Boxes of Bureaucracy: Transparency and Opacity in the Resettlement Process of Congolese Refugees.”

What if I told you to write what you don’t know?

I ask this because I find the oft-offered advice to “write what you know” both alarming and silencing. Isn’t ethnography at least partially about unknowability? If we acknowledge that textual recording is a form of fixing knowledge, how does one write what one doesn’t know? How can our writing play on the edge between knowing and not knowing, refusing to fix the unknown by writing it into existence? Exploring this playful and vexing tension in ethnographic writing is my current preoccupation.

A story might help illuminate my query.

A few years ago, some friends in the Somali refugee community in Maine with whom I do ethnographic work rekindled an old dispute. Tensions over leadership and representation plagued their relationship, and in the latest eruption people with knives broke through the apartment wall of my good friend Khalar. Khalar and his family fled the apartment and filed charges with the police. He and another man took out protection orders against each other. A defamation lawsuit filed by one against the other began making its way through the court system. A few days later, another friend, Ahmed, told me that this newest fighting was generated by Khalar’s first wife’s rage against his new second wife. The problems between the two women were radiating out through their respective kin groups, provoking small but violent eruptions between family members.

“Wait,” I said to Ahmed. “Khalar has a second wife?”

I was spending countless hours every week with Khalar on community projects. I understood the tensions over leadership and representation between Khalar and the other men as emanating from things that happened back in their country of origin, things that happened in the refugee camp, personality clashes, and the particular contextual politics of diasporic community building. My understanding did not extend to include marital disputes. How did I not know that Khalar had married again? A few months previously, Romana had begun attending social events with Khalar. Reading their interaction as marital, I had then asked if they were recently married but Khalar insisted they were siblings. I recalled him telling me a few weeks prior that Zeynab, a local community leader, was negotiating a payment from him to his wife, which is what usually happens when a man marries a second wife. Stunned by my conversation with Ahmed, I phoned Khalar and asked, testily, “You’re married to Romana?” I was hurt he had felt the need for obscurity with me. How had I managed to miss this?

“No!” he retorted. “She’s my cousin [cousin” and “sibling” are often used interchangeably]. She was married but never had any children. My mother [who still lived in Khalar’s natal village in Africa] arranged the marriage. She insisted on it. How could I say no? So Romana and I will have children and I will register myself with DHHS as their father.”

Despite Khalar’s attempts to define the relationship as a sort of extra-wedlock favor and filial duty, and although there was no community ceremony, and although Khalar cannot have a legal polygynous marriage to Romana in the US, it is clear that to others in the refugee community Romana is his second wife and not just a duty to Khalar’s mother. The rancor between her and Khalar’s first wife continued to animate community divides, reaching a climax when each woman took out a restraining order against the other.

I know that because polygyny is illegal in the US it is usually not announced outside the community. I know that Khalar wants to be viewed as an American-style community leader and (rightly) suspects non-Somalis are judgmental against polygyny. I know that Khalar is trying to find ways to assuage the anger of his first wife by minimizing the emotional significance of his second marriage. Is his translation of his marriage as filial duty an attempt to maintain an unknowability about his marital life not only to me, but to others in the community as well?

This incident reminded me to question what I have a right to know and what ‘knowing’ actually means. When I write about internal tensions within the refugee community, which knowledges do I include and which do I leave unrecorded? How do I claim to ‘know’ the relevance of Khalar’s marriage to intercommunity tensions if he insists otherwise? At moments like these I feel the enormity of what I don’t know, of what my interlocutors (quite reasonably) don’t want me to know, and, sometimes, of the things I don’t actually want to know. Decades ago James Clifford wrote about ethnography’s partial truths, reminding anthropologists that ethnographies, as crafted texts, are inherently incomplete efforts to impose tidy boundaries on untidy subjects. But recognizing the partiality of our accounts is something different than recognizing unknowability—those things that are never fully understood, feelings that remain untranslatable, the incommensurabilities encountered in fieldwork. How should our writing reflect respect for the things we do not know and do not have the right to know? How do we do this without domesticating the unknown?