The ungrateful refugee
April 4, 2017 12:05 AM   Subscribe

The ungrateful refugee. As refugees, we owed them our previous identity. We had to lay it at their door like an offering, and gleefully deny it to earn our place in this new country. There would be no straddling. No third culture here. A long personal essay in the Guardian.
posted by tavegyl (27 comments total) 37 users marked this as a favorite
 
This is good.
"The refugee has to be less capable than the native, needier; he must stay in his place. That’s the only way gratitude will be accepted. Once he escapes control, he confirms his identity as the devil. All day I wondered, has this been true in my own experience? If so, then why all the reverence for the refugees who succeed against the odds, the heartwarming success stories? And that’s precisely it – one can go around in this circle forever, because it contains no internal logic. You’re not enough until you’re too much. You’re lazy until you’re a greedy interloper. [...]

"Still, I want to show those kids whose very limbs apologise for the space they occupy, and my own daughter, who has yet to feel any shame or remorse, that a grateful face isn’t the one they should assume at times like these. Instead they should tune their voices and polish their stories, because the world is duller without them – even more so if they arrived as refugees. Because a person’s life is never a bad investment, and so there are no creditors at the door, no debt to repay. Now there’s just the rest of life, the stories left to create, all the messy, greedy, ordinary days that are theirs to squander."
Today, again, I was asked impatiently why I think I deserve to vote in two different countries – the USA and France, my two nationalities. All I can ever manage to do is stare at the educated professionals with families who ask me this question. Is it because the presence of others makes them wonder what they did to deserve a single nationality? Is it because the immediate and obvious answer to the question is "nothing, it's something someone else did"? Their mother, birthing them. Whereas facing them is someone who made a series of decisions and commitments that led to changing their lives and part of their identity.
posted by fraula at 1:48 AM on April 4, 2017 [18 favorites]


Yeah - it made me think of a recurring conversation i have about dual citizenship too fraula. I think her point is valid beyond refugees, and is particularly salient in countries that perceive themselves as monocultural.

Thanks tavegyl, that was a good read
posted by motdiem2 at 2:15 AM on April 4, 2017 [1 favorite]


This was beautiful, thank you.
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:39 AM on April 4, 2017


Reading that was... hm. Embarrassing and painful, I guess? I hadn't really thought about the gratitude narrative, but it's so horrible and obvious with when pointed out here. I'll be mindful of that, going forward. That's a fantastic essay, and I'm grateful for the FPP.

I think her point is valid beyond refugees

I can attest to parts of it meshing with my personal experience. I'm not an immigrant, but I'm the first person born on US soil on my biological father's side of the family. I'm biracial, visibly Middle Eastern. There was a messy divorce, and we ran, moving around quite a bit. Nobody really gave me a hard time about my skin color, at least not that I noticed as a kid.

Assimilation, on the other hand, wasn't negotiable. Everybody expected us to be culturally white. Still do. A lot of people I've met aren't just willfully ignorant, they're downright aggressive about keeping stuff that way. I still remember parents in one of my schools protesting their children learning foreign languages - the dangers of *gasp* multiculturalism. Keeping their children from being more competitive in future job markets just because anything from anywhere else was bad by definition. And it extended to more than just foreign countries: the US is big enough that in a lot of places, they don't feel like other parts of the US are good enough either.

I learned pretty young how to blend in to avoid trouble - how not to talk about stuff that'll set white people off and whatnot. I didn't even really think about it as a horrible thing for a lot of years. It was just... what you do, you know? Reading this is a sad reminder that I'm lucky: I didn't have a whole culture that I needed to hide or shed, just a lot of scattered observations.

It's increasingly apparent just how toxic American exceptionalism is though, especially since last year.
posted by mordax at 2:55 AM on April 4, 2017 [16 favorites]


Whereas facing them is someone who made a series of decisions and commitments that led to changing their lives and part of their identity.

I was born a dual citizen. Trust me, people don't like that either.

It's worth keeping in mind though, that this article is about way more than that. I have the luxury of not being expected to be "grateful" because my background is frequently invisible. That's frustrating in its own way, but it is the less hassle option.
posted by hoyland at 4:12 AM on April 4, 2017 [3 favorites]


During our discussion of Flannery O’Connor’s A Displaced Person, the class began unpacking Mrs Shortley’s hatred of Mr Guizac, the Polish refugee whose obvious talents on the farm would soon lead to her mediocre husband’s dismissal as a farmhand. “She’s seen the images from the Holocaust, the piles of bodies in Europe,” said one student. “So if one of those bodies in the pile can escape death and come to America and upend her life, then how much is she worth?”

Wow, this part jumped out at me. It explains a few things about recent developments in western populist movements, for one thing.
posted by rpfields at 4:16 AM on April 4, 2017 [12 favorites]


But what America did was a basic human obligation. It is the obligation of every person born in a safer room to open the door when someone in danger knocks. It is your duty to answer us, even if we don’t give you sugary success stories. Even if we remain a bunch of ordinary Iranians, sometimes bitter or confused. Even if the country gets overcrowded and you have to give up your luxuries, and we set up ugly little lives around the corner, marring your view. If we need a lot of help and local services, if your taxes rise and your street begins to look and feel strange...

This, exactly. If I were a minister this is what I'd preach. If someone is in trouble, it's your obligation to help them, even if it's inconvenient. You don't get to say that someone should be - as happened to a friend's girlfriend's cousin - sent back and murdered by gangs because otherwise they might need a social service or whatever.
posted by Frowner at 5:14 AM on April 4, 2017 [18 favorites]


Her comments are also broadly applicable to the poor -- services are grudgingly provided and constantly threatened with "take backs" if the recipient isn't grateful enough or deserving enough or using the resources in the wrong way. It's like the person who needs assistance, however briefly, must givenup their identity forever and become a doll.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:32 AM on April 4, 2017 [13 favorites]


The refugee has to be less capable than the native, needier; he must stay in his place. That’s the only way gratitude will be accepted. Once he escapes control, he confirms his identity as the devil. All day I wondered, has this been true in my own experience? If so, then why all the reverence for the refugees who succeed against the odds, the heartwarming success stories? And that’s precisely it – one can go around in this circle forever, because it contains no internal logic.
In high school I spent a lot of time volunteering as a tutor/peer mentor type person for a group of refugee students in middle school. One of the kids I connected with had grown up in Sierra Leone. He was here by himself. He lived in a group home. He had some scars. He had a diamond earring. He was in 7th grade in 2006, so prime time for giant t-shirts and baggy pants that were too low, and the teachers just gave him such a hard time. Sit down, stop talking, focus, focus, focus, pull up your pants, why aren't you working harder? You need to respect adults, pull up your pants, spit out your gum, just stop talking.

And then a few years ago, he was arrested for breaking into someone's house and duct taping them to a chair and then cutting them with a kitchen knife, and all I could think about was how the rigidity of expectations, the lack of empathy from a group of overworked and underpaid teachers, and the help we failed to get him just ... let him implode. And now, this amazing smart kid is in jail for a long time. And he becomes part of the narrative in NH about scary black people, about ungrateful refugees who come back to bite the hand that feeds them, and we've taken away his opportunity to live his ordinary life in so many ways.
posted by ChuraChura at 6:02 AM on April 4, 2017 [7 favorites]


Excellent read, thanks for posting (was thinking of doing the same, but got bogged down with contextual links - with hindsight, none are really necessary).

Even Merkel's "Wir schaffen das!" in 2015 almost seemed to qualify this obligation with Germany's ability to afford/manage the many newcomers. But these really are the basics of humankind...
posted by progosk at 6:09 AM on April 4, 2017


What has the refugee status to do with the fact that a lot of people are just racist assholes ? Is not different for me and Im an expat living in Switzerland of all things.

One example - once we went in a Restaurant in Switzerland and me and a friend where talking to each other in Italian. At the door the waitress tells us "sorry is completely booked". So I say to my wife (in swiss-german, she is swiss) well let's go somewhere else and suddendly the waitress "Oh sorry ! Of course there is a table free !"

So I dont get the point - the fact that your new country expects you to assimilate and be grateful is true for all immigrants. From the point of view of the racist asshole "the boat is full" you are a pos does not matter where you come from. As a poor refugee of course you dont even have the benefit of money shielding you from all this so its even worse but this has to do with wealth.
posted by elcapitano at 6:49 AM on April 4, 2017 [1 favorite]


This was a stunning read, thank you.

(Also, I was once asked by a US border guard why I married a Canadian instead of an American. It was...weird.)
posted by Kitteh at 6:59 AM on April 4, 2017 [2 favorites]


(Which, elcapitano, is in part what I think motdiem2, mordax, hoyland and GenjiandProust were getting at, above.)
posted by progosk at 6:59 AM on April 4, 2017


What has the refugee status to do with the fact that a lot of people are just racist assholes ? Is not different for me and Im an expat living in Switzerland of all things.

Among the differences, I imagine, is that if you are a refugee you are assumed to be fleeing a hellhole. Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, all these places may have been hellholes at various times, and there have been good reasons to flee them, but this is still a reductive redefinition of a childhood, family, ancestry, culture, religion, history, identity that demands you acknowledge that all you hold dear is inferior and that you should be glad to leave it behind. I expect most refugees have complicated feelings about their homelands as it is, and this redefinition does not help.
posted by tavegyl at 6:59 AM on April 4, 2017 [10 favorites]


The point is that most people don't want to think of themselves as assholes. So they need to come up with a justification for their xenophobia.
posted by Zalzidrax at 7:00 AM on April 4, 2017


Banishment and exile are capital punishments because belonging is a basic human need. Hospitality and generosity are fundamentally humane because they recognize and address that need. Providing shelter and comfort is important not only to help the needy, but to help us become more humane. So from that perspective I fully emphatize with the main thrust of the essay.

Where I don't follow the essay at all is in the idea that belonging can exist (and must be extended) without reciprocation. Reciprocal ties are what belonging is made out of. Those ties are built on a sense of solidarity that derives from some sort of identification. To be identified with, for others to recognize you as their equal and to prove yourself as such is an essential part of the struggle to belong.

When the author solipsistically writes: "My accomplishments should belong only to me" I think that completely ignores the extent to which those accomplishments have been contingent on her own struggle to identify with and assimilate into a Western mode of belonging. To then argue that that struggle is demeaning and teach that you have no-one to account to but your own conscience, that's just bad advice.
posted by dmh at 7:32 AM on April 4, 2017 [4 favorites]


Thank you for posting this article. It was a good, thought provoking read, although it makes me...conflicted.

Using the same quote as Frowner "But what America did was a basic human obligation. It is the obligation of every person born in a safer room to open the door when someone in danger knocks. It is your duty to answer us, even if we don’t give you sugary success stories. Even if we remain a bunch of ordinary Iranians, sometimes bitter or confused. Even if the country gets overcrowded and you have to give up your luxuries, and we set up ugly little lives around the corner, marring your view. If we need a lot of help and local services, if your taxes rise and your street begins to look and feel strange..."

Why does she believe that person from these "safer rooms" (USA, Finland, Germany, etc), has an obligation to welcome refugees, while the refugees owe nothing in return? That's not how life works, how societies work. There are an uncountable number of other discussions on the blue where people will comment on how some ungrateful those arsehole, bootstrap capitalists are that are unwilling to acknowledge that they wouldn't be where they are if not for public schools, roads, laws, etc. Why are refugees somehow exempt from that? No one living in any society should be exempt, barring disability or illness, from participating in that society. On the refugee side, that means a certain baseline level of assimilation. They made it out of an unstable and dangerous part of the world into a safer part. Now it's their turn to do what they have to, to help keep it safe. In America, I believe that means learning at least a little English, make ties to your local community, pay taxes, and participate in the democratic process to keep it strong.

On the accepting people's side, that means acceptance of trivial, and a certain amount of non-trivial differences from the refugee, and making accommodations for those non-trivial differences. And I lay much of the blame for the current and ongoing troubles with refugees squarely at the feet of people who should be doing the accepting. Because they aren't. They're being racist, xenophobic assholes. In some blatant and a million subtle ways. They're teaching their children to be just like them, that hate is OK. This makes it hard or impossible for the refugees and their children to assimilate, even a little bit.

Because of this, when the overcrowding starts, when people who have only a few luxuries to begin with lose them, when bitterness meets bitterness, that's when the explosions, both real and social start. Then it rapidly devolves into a vicious circle of mistrust and blame on both sides.
posted by sharp pointy objects at 7:39 AM on April 4, 2017 [2 favorites]


Among the differences, I imagine, is that if you are a refugee you are assumed to be fleeing a hellhole

Here in the country Nr 1 for wealth pro capita / wages / living standard, the common view is that asylum seeker are liars that just seek better economic conditions and their country is perfectly fine. So unless you are fleeing from Nord Korea you are a scumbag that came here to get free money.

So in practice if you are a refugee you are assumed to be a liar lazy bastard.
posted by elcapitano at 8:05 AM on April 4, 2017


It seems like a lot of people don't really understand the process of refugee resettlement into Europe and the US and Canada, and what is actually entailed in being a refugee? For one thing, refugees are expected to repay the prices of their plane tickets to the United States within a certain period of time. For another, most of the resources that help support refugees upon arrival end a year after their resettlement. Having your life upended by geopolitical forces beyond your control, being internally and externally displaced, perhaps spending generations living in refugee camps in truly marginal environments ... this isn't just a thing people do for the benefits. It's incredibly callous to call out refugees as people who exempt themselves from society.

I learned recently that there is a person who works for one of the few organizations left in Columbus helping resettle refugees whose job description is primarily managing casework for people who were tortured. They had to lay off about a third of their employees after the refugee resettlement numbers were cut, but one of the jobs they felt they had to maintain was providing support for all the refugees living in the Columbus, OH area who had been tortured. But sure, these folks just don't contribute enough to society and should be more grateful.

When I worked with Burundian refugees in St. Louis - they were part of a population that had been displaced since 1973. Imagine what it means to have spent fully 45 years living in refugee camps in Tanzania and Uganda after fleeing genocide? Neither parent in the family I worked with was literate - they spoke Kirundi, Kinyarwanda, French, Swahili - and I mean, they were trying to learn English but it's hard to learn English as a fully literate, healthy, happy person living in an intact society with social support and family and community, never mind in the situation they found themselves in. There were six children in the family, ages 23-2. The oldest kids worked as maids at one of the local hotels, the father was a dishwasher in the casino, and they were paying back the US government for eight plane tickets from Arusha to St. Louis. But they don't contribute enough to society.
posted by ChuraChura at 8:35 AM on April 4, 2017 [21 favorites]


This is the sort of think piece that always makes me wonder a bit - I definitely have an ingrained feeling that there should be some gratitude, some thankfulness toward the country that takes you in, especially if they take you in as a refugee or immigrant with nothing. And I wonder how much of that comes from - or was built entirely out of - the Jewish immigrant experience here. So much of what we think of as the generic American immigrant narrative was written by (mostly Eastern) European Jews who came through Ellis Island, went to New York or Chicago and then farther afield, worked hard and suffered and most of all assimilated and are now proud to feel a part of the majority culture while praising the "melting pot" that let them disappear within it as much as they chose. It may have been true for those writers and comedians and filmmakers, and it feels true. But European Jews were frequently able to blend in if they chose to assimilate, which non-white immigrants can't automatically do. And while many if not most refugees flee their country fearing for their lives, for Jews there was not only literally no place else to go at that time, but also no country where they wouldn't arrive as a persecuted minority who might still be endangered. So they were grateful to America - the goldene medina (Golden country) where you could be whoever you wanted to be, do whatever you wanted, succeed and be a full citizen with full rights just by living here. For a lot of Jewish immigrants, America was magical. And I don't think that mindset - which makes perfect sense when you're considered a global pariah, as vermin - is one that it's fair to expect of people who come from places where people like them are also the leaders, the majority, the cultural backbone, etc. Why should someone who belonged where they were, when their circumstances make it impossible for them to stay, have to feel grateful to a country for doing the barest minimum? Why on earth should they automatically feel like they need to assimilate?

But I think we want them to have the same A Tree Grows In Brooklyn mindset (not a Jewish narrative, but I think it's the best-known example of the genre) - that if you work hard and put the old ways behind you, you'll succeed here, and praise this country for making you a part of it. And it's ridiculous to expect non-Europeans to fit that mold. It's ridiculous to expect non 19th-century immigrants to fit it. The country now is a lot less friendly to recent immigrants, it's a lot harder to be poor and there's less sense of class camaraderie. But more than that, I think our culture has more or less erased the cultural reverence we once had for the flip side of that immigration and assimilation - that those same immigrants may have been grateful to be here, but they also joined the Communist party or the Bund and fought to change the country. That they built the unions and fought child labor and wrote novels like Call It Sleep showing that the goldene medina had an ugly underbelly of poverty and cruelty and despair. Emma Lazarus - whose words are on the Statue of Liberty - was not a meek, grateful, accepting rah-rah American. But her words are on the symbol of America because the type of fighter against America that she was, used to not be considered anti-American.

That's changed. In my own lifetime I've watched it go from Socialism being considered anti-American, to just wanting social justice at all going into the crosshairs. Tying racism to the capitalism just makes it more poisonous, and adding Islamophobia into the mix? I don't know how we - as a country - can backtrack. "Playing the game" of being grateful may rankle - and I don't question the author's indignation about it - but it worked. I don't know what else will, especially as our culture gets more diffuse. Junot Díaz and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Mira Nair and others are getting cultural attention, but instead of being widely embraced, it seems to just cause white people to circle the wagons that much more.

How do we get back our sense of America as a place where everyone belongs, and that difference makes us stronger? I don't know the answer, and it scares me. But maybe essays like these can help. Or at least remind people that America is bigger than that.
posted by Mchelly at 8:57 AM on April 4, 2017 [11 favorites]


In America, I believe that means learning at least a little English, make ties to your local community, pay taxes, and participate in the democratic process to keep it strong.

Are you under the impression that refugees get some kind of special long-term tax exemption? That when they walk into the drugstore the sales tax comes off the total? That, when they work, their employers don't do withholding?
posted by praemunire at 9:14 AM on April 4, 2017 [14 favorites]


Ummm...no? I was just attempting to think of examples of things that people do on a normal long-term basis that make society run smoothly in the U.S., while attempting to make it look like I'm not goofing off at work. Hell, I'm perfectly aware that refugees and other immigrants, both authorized or not, probably are better sticklers for tax paying than many people born here.

I did say in the next paragraph that, as far as I'm concerned, many of the difficulties that refugees face once they get here are caused by the entitled, hateful d-bags who already live here. Pretty much all the immigrants I know or have knowledge of locally are doing just fine when it comes to being decent citizen sand human beings. It's people who were born here (some of whom I'm related to) who say crappy, ignorant things about refugees and immigrants to the point I want to shake them until the stupid falls out.
posted by sharp pointy objects at 9:28 AM on April 4, 2017


Yes. Yes, yes, dammit, yes.

I had to stop and restart reading several times, because it was tearing at parts inside of me.

I'm not a refugee, but I am an immigrant—an overachieving one by definition—and have felt aspects of this, though never to recognize them this clearly. (With cases like mine, it's mostly The Good Example that comes into play.) I couldn't help nothing that it's the same dynamic at play when affluent people used to employ impoverished relatives or whatnot—shouldn't you be grateful? But writ large, at the society-wide level. The Good Example aspect also rings familiar to the position of women in, say, tech fields—I'm a Good Example there too—but it's far far more fundamental; it's the whole of someone's identity and activities, not just their work-self.

Arrrrgh, I'm not making sense. This is just too much. Must process some more.
posted by seyirci at 10:59 AM on April 4, 2017 [1 favorite]


I'm in exile and I'm grateful. I'm grateful of my heritage and the fortuity to live. I'm grateful that people cared. I'm grateful to be here on Metafilter. I'm grateful to have learned English and to be able to write to you, because you are wonderful people and it is an unadulterated privilege to be among you.
posted by dmh at 4:22 PM on April 4, 2017


And I wonder how much of that comes from - or was built entirely out of - the Jewish immigrant experience here.

I... think i need to object to this. I feel like you're overlooking the fact that first- and second-gen Jewish immigrants struggled enormously in the late 19th/early 20thc, and we weren't *really* allowed to assimilate more fully until the second half of the 20th. There's a reason there were so many Jewish musicians in the 20s and 30s, so many Jewish filmmakers in the silent era, so many Jewish comic book creators in the Golden Age. It's the same reason there were lots of Jewish gangsters and baseball players back then: the mainstream, respectable paths to success were not open to us. When Jewish artists of that era told stories about successful assimilation, it's not usually because they were actually experiencing successful assimilation, but because they weren't and wished they could.

When we talk about modern immigrant and refugee experiences, I think it's important to remember how long it took, historically, for groups that today are considered wholly assimilated. And, for that matter, what they gave up: I speak no Yiddish, I know virtually nothing about what my ancestors did before they came here. They chose to assimilate as fast and hard as they could, and it still took generations before they were considered assimilated 'enough.' And frankly, these days it's looking more and more like it wasn't enough after all.

If modern-day refugees are more skeptical of the virtues of assimilation, and more cognizant of the unreasonable expectations of their new countries, good for them.
posted by nonasuch at 7:35 PM on April 4, 2017 [6 favorites]


I agree nonasuch - I was talking about the narratives that were popularized later (which almost by definition were success stories), and in doing so I can see how I made it sound like there was no struggle, and that's not what I meant at all. Thanks for pointing that out.
posted by Mchelly at 3:38 AM on April 5, 2017


So Germany's casting about for narratives of Merkel's decisive move. A good sign, for a country not hugely versed in self-examination.
posted by progosk at 12:58 AM on April 6, 2017


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