Iraqi Refugees in the United States. Ken R. Crane
the years immediately after the terror attacks of 9/11 had been reduced to 26,839 and 28,306 in 2002 and 2003, respectively.49 The US Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) was essentially shut to Iraqis from 2003 to 2007. Deborah Amos, whose seminal work Eclipse of the Sunnis provides one of the best accounts of Iraqis exiled in the wake of the 2003 invasion, detailed the many barriers facing Iraqis applying for asylum to the US during this time. The Patriot Act disqualified anyone suspected of “material support for terrorism,” and the Department of Homeland Security, responsible for security checks on asylum applicants, extended this liberally to families who had paid ransom to release a family member, to Shi’a who had risen up against Hussein after the Gulf War, and to former members of the Baath Party, to which the vast majority of Iraqis belonged for practical rather than partisan reasons during the Hussein era.50
Instead of the US government ramping up its resettlement operation to accept refugees from Iraq, it channeled humanitarian assistance to those countries shouldering the burden of hosting the displaced, either through direct support to the Jordanian government or to the UN and NGOs in Syria, Lebanon, or Turkey. This strategy allowed scenes of suffering to be effectively decoupled from the violent morass arising from the invasion. Jordan, a country of ten million hosting half a million Iraqi refugees, challenged the US to step up its resettlement operation: “The U.S. has demonstrated time and again its ability to be a leader in durable solutions for refugees,” observed HRH Prince Ibrahim bin Talal of Jordan in reference to the successful resettlement of refugees from Vietnam, Cuba, Russia, and Bosnia.51 Jordan had opposed the US invasion in 2003, and Prince Ibrahim’s message to the US signaled that doing something more to address the Iraqi refugee problem was in the US strategic interests; it would help alleviate the burden on one of its few friends in the Arab world. Thus, the concern for maintaining a strong relationship with a US ally, known as the “politics of neighbors,” became a political factor in moving the needle of US refugee policy toward Iraq.52
Refugee policy in the US has always lived in a tension between humanitarian concern and fear that refugees could be an existential threat to the US cultural and political order. In the massive resettlement operation in the wake of the US withdrawal from Vietnam, a nation’s gratitude toward non-Communist allies was enough to override fear of the “Yellow Peril.” A similar sentiment emerged within the US among those who had formed ties with Iraqis during the invasion and occupation. During this time of widespread asylum denial, Iraqis who had collaborated with the coalition forces and occupation were being systematically targeted for assassination by insurgents. The List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies, an organization founded by Kirk W. Johnson, a former USAID administrator in Fallujah, began calling attention to the plight of Iraqi allies—engineers, translators, and advisers—who worked alongside US troops and contractors: “As our military rolled into villages, this linguistic and cultural gap between occupier and occupied was bridged by a unique group of Iraqis who stepped forward to help as interpreters. They became, in effect, our eyes, our ears, and our voice as we tried to make the best of an increasingly harrowing situation. Without question, their work has saved American lives.”53 Being the eyes, ears, and voice of the “occupier” subsequently made Iraqi staff vulnerable. Johnson argued that the US was on track to repeat previous abandonments of its allies to death or imprisonment (e.g., the Hmong of Laos): “The terrorist group that has already abducted, tortured, and assassinated hundreds of our employees just announced plans to redouble their efforts as America leaves Iraq.”54 The List Project’s website listed the names of Iraqi collaborators who had been murdered, injured, or forced to flee Iraq. As a matter of saving these individuals’ lives, the organization advocated for asylum and the permanent resettlement of Iraqi allies and their families to the US.
The lobbying by the List Project and other refugee advocates led to an amendment to the Department of Defense authorization bill of December 2007, the Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act, sponsored by the late Senator Edward Kennedy.55 The act prioritized admissions for Iraqis and their families who had collaborated with the coalition. This included those who had worked on the reconstruction of Iraqi infrastructure by the US government and its contractors. The act opened the door to other vulnerable Iraqis, not just those who worked with the US government and its agents, and mandated that humanitarian concerns be taken into account for religious and ethnic minorities and “other persecuted groups,” as identified by the secretary of state. Asylum advocates in Washington, DC, were especially worried about war widows and young women and girls working the nightclubs of Damascus.56
The Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act provided criteria by which Ibrahim, Yousef, Suha, and their families deserved to be considered for resettlement in the US. Suha was doubly at risk, as part of a religious minority and a widow. Yousef and Ibrahim had loose ties with the Americans or the reconstruction efforts under the occupation, enough to put them on hit lists, as well as exposure to violence in ethnic cleansing at the neighborhood level. This transmutation of an asylum seeker, a temporary and merely tolerated migrant, into a “refugee,” as set forth in 101(a)(42) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, is dependent on these calculations, which tilted the worthiness scale in favor of these Iraqis and others like them who passed the various types of scrutiny.57
Thus, becoming a refugee in the US bears the imprint of governmental determinations of citizenship worthiness. For Yousef, Ibrahim, and Suha, the worthiness process began with the asylum interview at the UNHCR office. That interview began their evolution from migrant, exile, guest, or asylum seeker into “refugee.” Because they had been judged to have a “well-founded fear of persecution” and because they had relatives in the US, their case files were recommended to one of the processing centers managed by the US Department of State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM).58 The Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act authorized the establishment of PRM processing centers where significant numbers of Iraqi refugees had already fled: Amman, Damascus, and Istanbul.
From the point when a refugee status determination is made by the UNHCR to the moment when a refugee arrives in the US, a minimum of two years will have elapsed (as in Ibrahim’s case) or as many as eight (as in Yousef’s). During this time, their lives will have been touched by several UN agencies, several NGOs that have provided some humanitarian support, and at least five agencies of the US federal government, as well as the International Organization for Migration, which coordinates travel arrangements. The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) will have coordinated a series of security-clearance interviews by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Medical exams will have followed, then coordination with Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) and its NGO partners at the federal, state, and municipal levels. Each government player had a role in the construction of that person’s status as a refugee and in setting his or her final destination. This Foucauldian knowledge-power of the state exerted on asylum seekers, observes Ong, is intended to mold future citizen-subjects who will contribute to “the security and strength of the state.”59
The Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act named and justified to the American people a specific nationality group of people to be authorized for resettlement in the US. To be so named in an act of Congress requires that support to Iraqi refugees had to be justified. The act implicitly considered them good future citizens on the basis of their support of the US war effort and the reconstruction of Iraq. Like the Vietnamese decades earlier, the US had a “moral debt” to Iraqis who had supported the US military. Resettlement of “up to 25,000” (for fiscal year 2008) was in alignment with the US foreign-policy objectives in the Middle East, by helping to mitigate the destabilizing effect of three million refugees spread through the region and by removing a “fertile recruiting ground for terrorists.”60 The reference to countries like Afghanistan and Iraq as breeding grounds of potential terrorists has been the constant background noise of the War on Terror since 9/11. Iraqis, like the Arab Americans they would soon join in the US, exist for Americans primarily within this narrow frame of reference. As such, Iraqi refugees came to the US as both potential good citizens and potential terrorists.
The refugee narrative as a whole tilts toward vulnerability. Humanitarian crisis is what opens the wallets of the American people, while the “moral debt” argument, along with foreign-policy interests, especially those claiming to mitigate the terrorist threat, justifies congressional appropriations. The Iraqi experience follows a well-worn pattern, that refugees