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Angeles; they were part of the 13,822 Iraqi refugees admitted to the US that year, enabled by the passage of the Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act. Yousef and Suha and their families came five years later. Yousef and his family had endured eight years in exile. Between 2008 and 2015, a total of 124,159 Iraqi refugees were resettled in the US.61 Iraq was the number-one refugee-sending country to the US for four of those seven years.
The lives of Yousef, Ibrahim, and Suha are windows onto a world of both the loss and the creation of belonging. Having lost it in the violence of postinvasion Iraq, they re-created contingent forms of it within communities in exile. Once they made the decision to apply for resettlement, they became engaged in a process in which they were vetted and prepared for the path to citizenship in the US. Toward that end, they arrived with immediate permission to work, a green card soon followed, and legal citizenship was expected in five years. Once they arrived, however, they discovered that the meaning of national belonging and good citizenship was intertwined with cultural notions of work and self-reliance. Refugee programs were implicitly justified to US taxpayers by the presence of model refugees—successful entrepreneurs and professionals who realized the American dream and were not a drain on the US welfare system. And yet there was a problem, because in the year 2008, when Ibrahim arrived with the first major wave of Iraqi refugees, the United States was facing a financial meltdown.
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