We Are Not Refugees: True Stories of the Displaced

Before We BeginI met Khalid in an Istanbul apartment in spring 2013. He hadfled the violence in Iraq. He was suffering from hypertension,diabetes, asthma . . . he was taking pills of every color underthe sun and couldn’t stop complaining about his illnesses, eventhough he’d just received the news of a lifetime: he’d been grantedasylum by the United States. At my assurance that an ideal futureawaited him, Khalid finally allowed himself to be carried away byeuphoria—he lifted his hands as if turning a steering wheel, andthen he waved and bestowed a haughty glance on an imaginarycrowd. I’ll buy myself a great set of wheels in Detroit, he seemedto be thinking.This is an image that President Donald Trump would like tosuppress. With Trump’s rise to power in the United States, theconstruction of the refugee as an enemy—a criminal, a terrorist,0668_Refugees_i-xvi,1-272_r1jm.indd 9 6/26/18 7:29 AMWe Are Not Refugeesxa threat to U.S. safety—has reached its peak. The fact that mostpeople seeking asylum in the United States and Europe are likeKhalid—ordinary people trying to escape violence—is a realitythat Trump and his supporters deny. Refugees, then, becomeobjects of fear; the human dimensions of their stories are erasedand replaced by a caricature promoting the agenda of a presidentfor whom fear is politically expedient.The truth is that the story of Khalid’s asylum is an exception.He is part of a minority. Millions of people flee violence everyyear, but most will never attain official refugee status, whetherin the United States or anywhere else. Their requests are likelyto be denied because asylum systems, even where they exist, arenot prepared to deal with millions of applications. In the case ofthe United States, new restrictions banning citizens of predominantlyMuslim countries (which were challenged in court afterthey were issued) paint an even more dreadful picture. But mostimportant, many in need of asylum will never even reach thepoint of being able to apply. The vast majority of those fleeingviolence remain in their own countries or in neighboring ones,experiencing scenarios very different from that of Khalid, andmany do not identify with the label refugee—because they haven’tobtained asylum, because they don’t want to become refugees, orsimply because they don’t want to be labeled at all.Although there is no single, universal refugee experience,most of the people whose stories appear in this book share a struggleto escape conditions of brutality and privation that most of uscan only imagine. The paradox is that we tend to focus preciselyon these moments of crisis, and fail to understand what happensbefore or after they flee. We think of them not as human beings,but as either victims or objects of suspicion, depending on ourideology. We tend to define these people exclusively by theirwounds.0668_Refugees_i-xvi,1-272_r1jm.indd 10 6/26/18 7:29 AMxiBefore We BeginBut to come closer to understanding their situation, we mustlisten to them speak not only of hardship, but of hope; not only ofmoments of crisis and escape, but also the tedium of waiting, andof uncertainty. Only then can we engage in the cultural battle todefine who these people are. And maybe the answer is much simplerthan we thought.Over the past decade, I’ve spoken with hundreds of refugeesand nonrefugees. Some of them were unwilling to speak publiclydue to fear of reprisal, even death, at the hands of security forcesand militias. But many were eager to talk, to give voice to theexperience of millions of others like them whose stories willnever be heard. Why risk speaking to a journalist, a foreigner andstranger, after you’ve fled air strikes in Aleppo or gangs in Honduras?I wouldn’t have done it myself had I been in their shoes. Andyet many of them did. These are their stories.