There’s been a lot of discussion about refugees seeking asylum recently. So I have run into quite a few people who feel the need to explain to me that refugees are faking their need for asylum – that they’re just trying to get here for the economic opportunities, that they might be terrorists, and that they’re unskilled foreigners who will take jobs away from American workers. And so on.
I sit and watch them until they run down. Then I say, “You do know that my parents were refugees, right?”
My parents did not arrive destitute, like many other refugees. But they were fleeing the Chinese civil war, the beginning of Mao’s dictatorship, and they would almost certainly have been executed had they stayed. (My father’s older brother, in fact, was arrested and “committed suicide” while in police custody. My grandfather immediately sent his two remaining sons to the U.S., fearing they too might be murdered.)
The only reason my parents survived, and that I exist at all, is that sixty years ago, the US was willing to take in people fleeing violence, war, or repressive regimes in their home countries. I am alive because, when my parents came, the U.S was willing to grant asylum to those who needed it.
But this is about more than just me, or my family. It’s about my entire community.
I grew up in the Washington, DC area. Most of my classmates were white, but there was also a thriving Chinese-American community. So I grew up with a lot of Chinese-American friends. Virtually none of our parents spoke English as their first language. (Though they were pretty much all fluent in English: My mom sounded a lot more like Manhattan than Shanghai. And her score on the SAT-V practice test when I suggested she take one blew most American-born high school seniors’ scores away.)
My Chinese-American classmates’ parents weren’t native English speakers for the same reason mine weren’t: Every single one of their parents had fled China during the Communist revolution. We were all children of refugees.
So if the US hadn’t accepted refugees seeking asylum, not only would my entire family have died, but the families of every Chinese American kid that I knew would also have died. The weekend Chinese school that we all hated going to would have been completely empty. All the teachers would have been murdered, and the kids would never have been born.
So when I hear people talk about turning away refugees who ask for asylum, that’s what I think of: The entire Chinese American community I grew up with, wiped out. Every last one of us.
And I think it would have been a huge loss to the US, too. We kids were more or less indistinguishable from other middle class American kids (except maybe that our parents pushed us more). Like other middle-class American kids, most of us went to college and into various professional careers. My family was composed of scientists and academics – my dad is a well known astrophysicist (with his own Wikipedia page!), my mom was an X-ray crystallographer, one uncle was a well known international law professor and another a top-notch engineer. China is poorer for having lost my parents and the other Chinese parents in my community. America is richer for having them.
War doesn’t care who it uproots – in fact, it’s the brave and resourceful, and the people who had the skills and education to save enough money to flee, who are most likely to be able to escape. These are the people you want to have.
Current political discourse focuses on the refugees who are arriving today. Many people think of today’s refugees as desperate people from foreign countries, a land where many people (or even the government) are hostile to America. They see that today’s refugees come from radically different cultures, speak different languages, and may not speak even one word of English.
And yes. That’s true. All of it.
But it’s unfair to look at people only in the moment they cross the border. Or even to judge them by what they were in their home countries: Business owners, doctors, auto mechanics – whatever they were before war wiped out their past.
You have to look at them in the future, too. I can tell you that my parents, and my Chinese-American friends’ parents, passed through Ellis Island looking not too different from today’s asylum seekers – citizens of a hostile country, from a totally different culture, with few assets, speaking minimal English. And I can tell you what they became. They became scientists and law professors and engineers. They started businesses, worked as nurses, became real estate agents, became office managers. They became parents. And they became me and almost all the other Chinese-American kids of my generation.
If you are dealing with someone my age who is of Chinese ancestry, the odds are very good that they’re the children of Chinese refugees. They might be your doctor, your waiter, your coworker, your boss. They might be software engineers, nurses, or vintners (that’s my brother!). They speak English like they were born here (because they were!), and they’re fluent in American culture, because they were born here, grew up here, and know no other country.
To see the future of today’s refugees, look at my past. Because I am the daughter of two refugees, and I can tell you exactly what I am, and what we are. We’re Americans.
BRAVO!!
Wonderful…but what can we do about people who don’t see it?
Hi Judy!
I think the important thing to do is open a dialogue (if you can). I wrote most of this blog post as a pair of Facebook posts. Someone (who I assume originally disagreed, and may still disagree) commented and said, “I greatly appreciate the thought you put into this and your effort to explain it to people in a calm and detailed manner. I was able to take it in and start to see how it effects my viewpoint.”
That’s why I decided to expand the Facebook posts into a blog post – because I think that opening a dialogue, and talking about things in a non-hostile manner, is necessary to convince people who disagree with you. Of course, not everyone is interested in having a dialogue! But I think it’s important to talk to people who are interested, who are curious about what “the other side” thinks. I also think it’s important to “bear witness” – to tell your own personal story, and the stories of others around you. That’s why I talk about living with bipolar disorder – because people are far less frightened of the familiar. So knowing one person who is “out” about mental illness makes the next mentally ill person they encounter less scary. And also helps other mentally ill people feel less alone.
So I would say: Start a conversation. And point them at this blog post for a different viewpoint! (I’d love social media shares, especially on Facebook, to help get the word out. The buttons at the bottom of the post will do it automatically, or of course you can also paste the link.)
Tien
Tien, I suggest that you submit this to the op-Ed page of the L.A. Times or the New York Times. This is high quality writing and a wonderful perspective on a most timely issue — one that should not be controversial but is, unfortunately.
I, too, am from refugee heritage. My grandfather, with his siblings and parents, fled what is now known as the Czech Republic. It was then called the Austro-Hungarian Empire. My great grandfather left because he didn’t want his sons forced to fight in foreign wars. They were farmers and weren’t poor. They all became US citizens when they could. They sent the only child of this family to college and expected her to prosper. This child was my mother. People coming in from far off lands and different cultures are what make America great. Thank you for writing your story.
We need all kinds of good people. I’m not a scientist. I’m poor in math skills. I thank all those who are better at those skills I personally lack. We need all sorts and levels to make us a “Whole” country. 🙂
I’m sure you’re grateful to the country that accepted our immigrant forbears but there is a deafness in your assumptions. Not sure who you are referring to who wants to “turn away” asylum seekers. As of 2015 the US had the most in absolute numbers of immigrants of any country in the world at 47 million immigrants. Each year we accept 1 million immigrants.
Refugees admitted to the US number In the hundreds of thousands per year. There were 65 million refugees in the world a year ago.
The major causes of this crisis is “violence, war and persecution”. Meaning terrible governments.
Since the US cannot take all the refugees that want to come here there needs to be a system of established priorities and vetting. I’m sure you see how gang members and crooks of all sorts including child traffickers and coyotes want to game the system.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/06/there-are-now-more-refugees-than-the-entire-population-of-the-uk/
Who wants to turn away asylum seekers and refugees: The Trump administration, and many of their supporters. Pew Research in 2017 notes:
http://www.pewglobal.org/2017/10/12/u-s-resettles-fewer-refugees-even-as-global-number-of-displaced-people-grows/
After holding fairly steady between 2012 and 2015, the annual number of refugees resettled in the U.S. jumped to 97,000 in 2016, according to UNHCR data. In part, this was the Obama administration’s response to a dramatic increase in the global number of displaced people due to conflicts in Syria, Iraq and sub-Saharan Africa. Even with the 2016 increase, however, the number of refugees resettled in the U.S. during the latter years under President Barack Obama was lower than in previous times of high refugee resettlement in the U.S. and did not keep pace with the world’s refugee population. Annual admissions from 2014 onward would have had to exceed well over 100,000 refugees to emulate past American responses to refugee surges, such as in the early 1990s.
Thus far in 2017, about 28,000 refugees have been resettled in the U.S., far less than in 2016, according to U.S. State Department data. If the number of refugees worldwide remains the same as in 2016 and if few refugees enter the U.S. for the rest of 2017, the U.S. is on track to accept just 0.2% of the world’s refugee population ““ far less than the historic average of 0.6%, and lower even than the share admitted in 2001 and 2002, in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Each year, the president’s administration sets the ceiling for how many refugees are resettled in the United States. In fiscal 2017, the Trump administration used an executive order to reduce the number of refugee admissions previously set by the outgoing Obama White House to be less than half the initial ceiling.6 Looking ahead to fiscal 2018, the Trump administration has proposed a refugee resettlement ceiling of 45,000 to Congress. The White House has also asked Congress for lower annual admissions of refugees as part of their immigration principles for immigration legislation.
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More recently, USA Today reported that refugee resettlement had been slashed drastically by the Trump administration in 2017:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/01/03/refugee-admissions-u-s-plummet-2017/999903001/
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President Trump had to battle the courts and vocal opposition, but by the end of the year, he was able to slash refugee admissions into the United States to historic lows.
From Inauguration Day to Dec. 31, his administration accepted 29,022 refugees, the lowest number since at least 2002, according to State Department data. Comparable figures before then are not available.
The previous low during that time frame (29,468) came in 2002, when the U.S. slowed down all avenues of legal immigration following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
That decline will continue in 2018 because Trump instituted an annual cap of 45,000 refugees a year, the lowest cap since Congress created the Refugee Resettlement Program in 1980. Presidents have the authority to unilaterally set the annual refugee cap, which has been as high as 217,000 under President Reagan and hovered between 70,000 and 80,000 under the Bush and Obama administrations.
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In addition, the Trump administration (through John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff) stated pretty clearly that the purpose of separating families who crossed the border seeking asylum was to discourage families from seeking asylum. From this interview with NPR: https://www.npr.org/2018/05/11/610116389/transcript-white-house-chief-of-staff-john-kellys-interview-with-npr
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NPR: Are you in favor of this new move announced by the attorney general early this week that if you cross the border illegally even if you’re a mother with your children [we’re going] to arrest you? We’re going to prosecute you, we’re going to send your kids to a juvenile shelter?
Kelly: The name of the game to a large degree. Let me step back and tell you that the vast majority of the people that move illegally into United States are not bad people. They’re not criminals. They’re not MS-13. Some of them are not. But they’re also not people that would easily assimilate into the United States into our modern society. They’re overwhelmingly rural people in the countries they come from ““ fourth, fifth, sixth grade educations are kind of the norm. They don’t speak English, obviously that’s a big thing. They don’t speak English. They don’t integrate well, they don’t have skills. They’re not bad people. They’re coming here for a reason. And I sympathize with the reason. But the laws are the laws. But a big name of the game is deterrence.
Family separation stands as a pretty tough deterrent.
It could be a tough deterrent “” would be a tough deterrent. A much faster turnaround on asylum seekers.
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On the need to vet refugees:
There was and always has been a stringent system of vetting refugees. You can read more about it here: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/asked-refugees-vetted-today
I’m pretty skeptical that additional vetting is suddenly critically needed.
Vetting?
Read about the epidemic of fake passports, adults passing themselves off as children, sex and slave trades among migrant populations.
https://m.huffpost.cohttps://www.politico.eu/article/europes-fake-forged-stolen-passport-epidemic-visa-free-travel-rights/m/us/entry/6193648
I believe you are trained as a scientist. You do meticulous experiments with minute color variations on fiber. There are immense problems and the solutions are not easy. Just using your parents anecdotal story as a basis for immigration policy is very unscientific. Would you have liked it if others jumped the line repeatedly ahead of them? That is what is happening to legal applicants.
Hi Diane,
I notice you didn’t respond to my point about “who wants to turn away asylum seekers and refugees”. You implied strongly that nobody is trying to reduce the number of asylum seekers/refugees, which is demonstrably untrue, and also said we take in hundreds of thousands of refugees per year, which is also not true. After I responded with data, you’ve tried to divert the discussion to something else entirely.
I agree cheerfully with you that the plural of “anecdote” is not “data”. However, I also believe there is value to allowing all people to tell their stories, because stories are how people understand and connect with each other. My goal was not to cover all of immigration policy in one blog post, but to talk about my personal experience, and the experience of my refugee community. I think that story is important and very relevant to the discussion.
I also think that you are being disingenuous at best with your assertions, and changing the subject when confronted with data showing your statements were wrong. That is not honest debate.
So I don’t think there’s any point to further discussion on this topic.
Well said!
Thank you Tien! I am glad you spoke out. I tell people that I am an immigrant who arrived with $7 in my pocket. Not a refugee but a grad student. In any case, my parents could only afford to send me, not support me here. Both my husband and I graduated, became successful professionals and now support others through our taxes.
Even those who don’t want immigrants in this country.