When you hear people being called elites, you think of athletes or the rich–or that class of people who’ve reached the top of whatever they’ve become known for. I’m writing today about Juan, Ruben, San, Samira, Thang, Nahid, Eric, Irhad, Fadiga, Enis, Zelda, Yaroslavna, Shahed, Issa, Farhad, Baby, Monita, Agnes, Abdi, Lammi and many many many more–a tiny fraction of the students I had the great fortune to teach. Young men and women who ended up in my classes and helped me form my understanding of people and morality as I was just starting my career. I can’t say I was always a great teacher for them… nor that they all ended up doing great things with their lives… but what they taught me has helped me do some good work for others. Here, I get 700 words to encapsulate a big idea, so I’ll bullet point just a little of what they helped me to understand better:
● Laws, procedures, rationale and local support structures surrounding refugee resettlement…
○ and that the world’s conflicts and climate change are producing more and more displaced people..
■ that little Idaho had enough infrastructure and willing citizens to become a resettlement destination
● Informal networks and structures that develop between newcomers as secondary supports
● The precariousness of life for those who come without documentation… or who come here alone
● That culture and experience shape who we are as communities and individuals in truly different ways, …
○ but human nature, and personality type, can still explain us, too.
● Push-pull factors in migration that, for the most part, eliminate any choice
● That trauma accumulates in people like steam in a pressure cooker and the release valve is often the safety and security of a home in the US…
○ the behaviors of resettled people often don’t reflect native culture as much as the experience of loss and the fight to survive in violent, depraved circumstances that they’ve just come through…
■ that life in refugee camps is it’s own animal, too
● That love and faith give people strength
● That children often end up caring for parents
● That math and science the way we teach here, aren’t “universal languages”
● That no teacher, social worker, boss, counselor… will do good by speaking for newcomers…
○ support actually means compassion without expectations, learning how to balance recognition of their differences and their pasts with opening doors to a future here, knowing how to teach skills for success here and making the space for people to be able to find their own voices
■ … and that those voices, when they emerge, aren’t predictable….
● or even acceptable, sometimes…
○ and that diversity really is complex, formidable, problematic, and yet loaded with amazing potential
● That through them I gained another lens for seeing what our American flag meant
If I died today, the faces of family and friends I love would be with me, but so would the faces of so many of my students who made me feel so proud and so humble at the same time. For me, they are some of humanity’s elites. It’s been seen and noted throughout history that people who survive what refugees survive, sometimes by accident and sometimes by sheer force of will, are remarkable people who somehow, sometimes, succeed for themselves and their families and bring out the best in their new communities.
The fact that huge numbers of individuals and families around the world are forced from their homes is tragic.
That it is a strain on the people and places where refugees resettle is true and completely understandable. That the US is now choosing to minimize the real complexity of issues at the root of push-pull factors, and how to deal with newcomers by wrapping it all up in “us vs. them”, with a white Christian nationalist ribbon, is just dumb and gross. (For a grim laugh on the subject, Google Trump Shares Own Experiences As Victim Of White Genocide – from The Onion)
The people shaping new immigration policy now, as well as those who are eager to see it enforced, lack the faith, work ethic, and character within themselves to know what this article is about. I hope they will read it anyway and think about it.
