Refuge

How the State Shapes Human Potential

Heba Gowayed

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780691235127
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

How states deny the full potential of refugees as people and perpetuate social inequality As the world confronts the largest refugee crisis since World War II, wealthy countries are being called upon to open their doors to the displaced, with the assumption that this will restore their prospects for a bright future. Refuge follows Syrians who fled a brutal war in their homeland as they attempt to rebuild in countries of resettlement and asylum. Their experiences reveal that these destination countries are not saviors; they can deny newcomers' potential by failing to recognize their abilities and invest in the tools they need to prosper.Heba Gowayed spent three years documenting the strikingly divergent journeys of Syrian families from similar economic and social backgrounds during their crucial first years of resettlement in the United States and Canada and asylum in Germany. All three countries offer a legal solution to displacement, while simultaneously minoritizing newcomers through policies that fail to recognize their histories, aspirations, and personhood. The United States stands out for its emphasis on "self-sufficiency" that integrates refugees into American poverty, which, by design, is populated by people of color and marked by stagnation. Gowayed argues that refugee human capital is less an attribute of newcomers than a product of the same racist welfare systems that have long shaped the contours of national belonging.Centering the human experience of displacement, Refuge shines needed light on how countries structure the potential of people, new arrivals or otherwise, within their borders.

1

Finding Refuge

The vacuum kept shocking Amjad¹ as he pushed it across the factory floor. He tried to explain to his supervisor what was happening, using hand gestures to relay that static buildup was raising the hair on his arms and making his janitorial work unnecessarily uncomfortable. But she couldn’t understand what he was saying. Amjad had only been in the United States for five months and only had a grasp of the most rudimentary English phrases. The translation app on his phone was not much help because, semi-literate in his native Arabic, he wasn’t sure what to type into the program. Amjad smiled and walked away from his supervisor. Despite their failure to communicate with each other, Amjad did not want his supervisor to think that he was someone who complained. He couldn’t afford to lose this job. “I felt sorry for myself,” Amjad told me.

Six years earlier, in his native Homs, Syria, Amjad was a tile contractor. He had his own workshop and owned a company van. He employed workers. On a visit to the Yale University Art Gallery, Amjad waved me over. On the wall before us was a fragment of a mosaic floor from 540 CE, a part of an exhibit of ancient art excavated from Gerasa, Jordan. “I used to make things like this,” he told me, as we admired the small square tiles, some the color of natural stone and others dyed olive green and pink that formed an abstract flower pattern. Most of Amjad’s work, he clarified, was tiling businesses, but every now and then he worked on more complicated projects. He was doing so well that in 2011, after seven years of saving, he had enough money to buy land on which he planned to build a bigger workshop and a home for his wife Rima and their two children.

As Amjad spent his life savings investing in the foundations for their new home, three thousand miles away a street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi was slapped across the face by a police officer who confiscated his wares. He set himself on fire in protest, an act which was the catalyst for civil disobedience across Tunisia. Inspired by these protests, dissidents in Egypt and then Qatar and Bahrain took to the streets, protesting their own despotic rulers.²

As Syrians too demanded isqat el nizam, the “downfall of the regime,” those with knowledge of the country’s history and politics held their collective breath. Hafez al-Assad, former president of Syria, had massacred his people in response to their calls for change decades prior.³ Bashar al-Assad, who took over after his father’s death, is a British-educated optometrist whose wife, Asma, was once profiled in a spread in Vogue. Early in his presidency there was hope that he would be a political and economic reformer. The world watched, however, as Bashar followed in his father’s footsteps, responding to civilian uprisings with live ammunition and plunging his country into one of the bloodiest civil wars the modern world has ever seen.⁴

Homs, deemed the “Capital of the Revolution,” was an early and exceptionally deadly site of regime violence. Rima, Amjad, and their two toddler sons, escaped to Damascus after the fatal shootings of Amjad’s father and his eleven-year-old sister two weeks apart. They thought that their departure was temporary and that they would soon return to enjoy the home that they had just begun to build. Instead, following a car bomb explosion during a funeral procession that propelled Amjad’s infant son from his arms and claimed the lives of sixty people walking alongside him, the family knew they had to move further away. They left Syria for Jordan. There, in July 2012, uncertain if they’d ever see home again, they registered as refugees.

Their story is not unique. The United Nations reports that in 2021, there were over twenty-six million refugees⁵ registered globally, the most since World War II.⁶ Syria is the country that has contributed the most, with over six million who have fled. The vast majority remain in nearby countries of immediate refuge including Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon—which despite having a population of six million people hosted one million Syrians. Life in these countries can be precarious—refugees lack documentation and a right to work, their children attend overcrowded schools, and millions are relegated to indefinite stays in camps where their mobility is restricted.⁷

For those in these situations of protracted displacement, there are two legal options that promise a reprieve from a life of precarity, and a chance at a new beginning as legal residents of a new country—resettlement and asylum.⁸ Resettlement refers to a third country selecting registered refugees with humanitarian needs from United Nations rosters and offering them an opportunity to travel as recognized refugees. Asylum is when someone travels to a new country, often making difficult journeys over land or sea, and applies for legal recognition as a refugee.

After two years in Jordan, Rima and Amjad received a call from the United Nations Higher Council for Refugees—they had been selected for resettlement to the United States provided they passed the vetting requirements. They were overjoyed, and they dreamed of a future in “America” that was even brighter than their Syrian past. But as they underwent the extensive security process over the following two years—five interviews, fingerprinting, health screenings, and behind-the-scenes review by thirteen security agencies—their anxiety built. They were wracked with worry about what this move would mean for them. Amjad and Rima, who carried the traumas of war and displacement, had little to their name and knew that their language, religion, and ethnicity marked them as stigmatized minorities in the “West.” What lives would they be able to build?

This book follows the journeys of Rima and Amjad and other Syrians who sought refuge in the United States and Canada, world leaders in resettlement, and Germany, which, in response to the men, women, and children who boarded rafts across the Mediterranean, offered asylum to more than half a million Syrians. Arriving in all three countries are people who come from similar backgrounds as Amjad and Rima, members of a broadly construed middle class who had stable lives in Syria, but who lacked formal education, credentials, and proficiency in English and German. Through resettlement and asylum, they come face-to-face with national systems shaped by inequalities foreign to them that determine their access to resources as they rebuild their lives and imagine their futures. Their experiences reveal that these destination countries, while offering legal solutions to displacement, do not guarantee bright futures—they can deny newcomers’ potential by failing to recognize their abilities and invest in the tools they need to prosper.

Rima and Amjad were selected for resettlement in the United States because of their humanitarian need as displaced parents of young children. As they crossed the Atlantic, however, they transitioned in the eyes of the United States government from humanitarian cases to workers—people who were expected to quickly become self-reliant. As refugees, they were held responsible for the cost of their flight, and so they arrived USD 4,000 in debt. They received limited federal resettlement assistance—only ninety days of funding that barely covered rent and basic expenses. The only other assistance available to them was Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), or welfare, which for a family of four provided USD 701 a month, while their rent was USD 1,000.

Rima and Amjad were ensnared, like other low-income Americans, in the United States’ threadbare social safety net. At the core of the 1980 Refugee Act is the goal of self-sufficiency or non-reliance on government assistance,⁹ which is also the goal of TANF.¹⁰ This is not a coincidence, as both the resettlement program and TANF are products of the limited social welfare system in the United States, a feature of the country’s neoliberal economy. This system treats poverty as an individual failure, an approach inextricably linked to the disenfranchisement of Black Americans who are disproportionately impoverished by it.¹¹

The new arrivals, facing this dearth of support, needed to earn an income now. “How?” Amjad asked the caseworker when she told him that he and Rima needed to find work immediately. He did not know anyone, and though he had been attending English classes, three months was too short a time to learn a new language. Amjad asked a question that I would hear repeated by almost everyone resettled in the United States: “Why did they bring us here if they were not going to help us?”

Amjad saw himself as the breadwinner of his family, so it was his responsibility to seek out employment. Without time to learn English or support for translating his skills, the only jobs available to him were those on the bottom rungs of the United States’ stratified post-industrial labor market, characterized by long hours and isolation from other workers. These conditions, which describe his janitorial job, thwarted any possibility for building economic capital or learning English—two of the primary tools for a US immigrant’s upward mobility.¹² Using his skills as a tile contractor to derive a middle-class income was a distant memory.

As the family’s caretaker, Rima stayed home to look after their sons. When they went to school, she was able to attend English classes with other Syrian women, reaching an intermediate level. Some of the other Syrian women, responding to the dire need for additional income, also reimagined their existing skills for economic profit by selling their cooking and handcrafts to combat family poverty. However, women’s language learning and economic enterprise was thwarted by the absence of progressive family policy: along with Rima, many eventually dropped out of English classes due to a lack of childcare options. And, five years after their arrival, while the women knew more English than the men, neither had strong enough language proficiency to sit for the United States citizenship exam.

The United States’ incorporation policy not only shaped Rima and Amjad’s immediate circumstances, but also the ways they could use and develop the skills through which they earn economic returns—or their human capital. We typically understand human capital as a testament to individual merit and hard work.¹³ Immigrant human capital is often measured as credentials earned, years of education, or employment in a given field.¹⁴ But what did Amjad’s decades of work as a contractor, his skill in putting together mosaic tiles, really mean in the United States? And was Rima “unskilled” simply because she had an elementary school education and hadn’t been formally employed before?

Human capital, as Amjad and Rima demonstrate, is not a static account of merit, but a dynamic product of the immigration process.¹⁵ In this book, I advance a theory of state-structured human capital, arguing that human capital is augmented, transformed, or destroyed by national incorporation policies through two mechanisms. The first is investment in newcomers, or whether the state allocates or denies resources and opportunities that enable them to use their existing skills or gain new ones. The second is recognition, or whether the state sees or ignores immigrants’ histories as economically viable skills. Because, as we saw in the case of Amjad and Rima, this process is shaped by gender stratification within state institutions and households, as well as by racism, human capital formation is gendered and racialized.

To understand this process, we need to compare the lives of Syrians in the United States to those who sought refuge elsewhere—what of their human capital? Omar, Yasmine, and their three children live five hundred miles northwest of Amjad and Rima, in Toronto. Like Amjad, Omar was an artisan; he was a blacksmith in Syria. Like Rima, Yasmine was a stay-at-home mom. But because of Canada’s policy of integration, which focuses on language learning as a vehicle to “multicultural” inclusion, the government invests in refugee arrivals.¹⁶ This draws on the broader, more generous Canadian approach to social welfare, albeit one that exists in the context of the country’s restrictive and selective immigration policy.¹⁷

Omar and Yasmine received a substantial start-up sum, as well as a stipend that covered their expenses in full for their first year. After twelve months, they had access to a generous welfare system. From the time of their arrival, they could attend free English classes and classes for skill development—including forklift operating and food safety or learning to run a kitchen up to health codes. There was publicly funded childcare support for English language learners. Both Omar and Yasmine were able to attend English classes. After a year, Omar found work as a blacksmith and, after his bad back gave o...