The Ungrateful Refugee by Dina Nayeri

Source of book: Borrowed from the library.

 

I previously read Nayeri’s novel, Refuge, which is somewhat autobiographical - a lot of the book, for example, seems to be a reimagining of her fraught relationship with her father, and an analysis of the breakdown of her own marriage to a Frenchman.  

 

The Ungrateful Refugee is non-fiction, and tells the story of her own family straight up. It also includes the stories of other refugees she interviewed. Unlike the novel, which feels very personal and introspective along with Nayeri’s frustration at the injustices in how Western countries treat refugees, this book simmers throughout with a fury that is - I thoroughly believe - is justified in light of our current political moment. 

 

There is a lot in this book that was emotionally difficult for me, for a number of reasons. I had to step away and process it. I was raised to be a moral and ethical person - and an empathetic person. For reasons I do not fully understand, those who raised me that way have, over the last 40 years, chosen to reject that way of being. As Nayeri points out, it is a society-wide problem. Her experience of acceptance as a child has given way to screams to build walls and exclude people like her. 

 

So first: Nayeri’s story. 

 

She grew up in Iran, soon after the Islamic Revolution. Her parents were both educated professionals: he a dentist, and she a doctor. Her mother unexpectedly converted to Christianity during a visit to her mother’s mother in London. This led to a series of events which made it clear that her life was now in danger. She left her husband, taking the kids Dina and Daniel with her. The family spent time in a refugee camp in Italy, before being granted asylum by the United States, and moving to Oklahoma. 

 

Dina leveraged her OCD to her advantage, graduating from Princeton and later Harvard. The rest of the family did fine, after a fashion. Daniel became a pastry chef, then went into publishing. He eventually wrote an autobiographical novel, which I hope to read - his perspective might be interesting. 

 

The big frustration for Dina’s mom, though, was that she never was able to regain her former social and professional position. Her English was never quite good enough to pass the medical boards here in the US, so she ended up working far below her skill set. And, of course, had to put up with the usual prejudiced crap that first generation immigrants tend to get. 

 

I took a lot of notes when reading, and hope to give a bit of a picture. However, it really is best experienced. Grab the book from your local library or independent book store and give it a read. 

 

I think the central theme - as the title indicates - is the problem of expectations. We white people in the West have this tendency to expect gratitude from immigrants. After all, we are so fucking great, right? And we “let” desperate people come here once in a while. Surely they should genuflect?

 

Nayeri has a different perspective: refugees are worthy because they are human, not because they are beneficial to their new country. They do not owe gratitude for basic human decency. They should not be expected to be angels. And we who have immense wealth (often gained on the backs of the third world) do not get to feel self-righteous because we let a few people in. 

 

And the thing is, once you understand how our “asylum” system actually works - the way it dehumanizes people, refuses to grant them the right to live an actual life with a job and family until they convince us their case is “good enough” - it is impossible to feel good about our policies. They are evil, and we should feel sick at how we as a society - as a country - treat others. 

 

Again, impossible to explain this as well as Nayeri does - and she does it from first-hand experience. 

 

I would also like to address a particular issue. 

 

For our “asylum” laws, we demand proof of political or religious persecution. Not eligible, and generally denigrated: “economic” immigrants. As if dying of starvation is better than being murdered. As if wanting a better life is a BAD thing. I mean, if your kids wanted to better themselves, you would approve, right? What is wrong with an immigrant wanting to do the same? 

 

Also on point for many of us: why was it okay for our ancestors to come here for a better life, but not other immigrants? 

 

(And can you explain the difference without revealing racist beliefs? I’m still waiting to hear an argument that doesn’t end up racist when you dig deeply enough.)

 

Likewise, the system isn’t geared toward rescue at all, but toward finding reasons to reject people. 

 

Nayeri sets the stage for this in the introduction, recalling how often she would worry “Am I a real refugee?” So many times, she and her family had to tell and retell their story, trying to convince an asylum processor that they qualified, and weren’t “economic” migrants. 

 

What is hell enough for the West to feel responsible, not just as perpetrators of much of the madness, but as primary beneficiaries of the planet’s bounty, who sit behind screens watching, suspicious and limp-fisted, as strangers suffer?

Meanwhile, we assign our least talented, most cynical bureaucrats to be the arbiters of complicated truth, not instructing them to save lives, or search out the weary and the hopeless, but to root out lies, to protect our fat entitlements, our space, at any moral cost - it is a failure of duty. More infuriating is the word “opportunism,” - a lie created by the privileged to shame suffering strangers who crave a small taste of a decent life. The same hopes in their own children would be labeled “motivation” and “drive.” 

 

She also expresses her dismay at the shift in public attitudes since she was a child. (As do I: see my personal history in the footnote to this review - particularly the change in my parents.) 

 

Now, thirty years have passed; I have so much to say. The world no longer speaks of refugees as it did in my time. The talk has grown hostile, even unhinged, and I have a hard time spotting, amid the angry hordes, the kind souls we knew, the Americans and the English and the Italians who helped us, who held our hands. I know they’re still out there. 

 

I want to reach across time and space and assure her that yes, we still exist! 

 

Next, I want to look at a fascinating insight that Nayeri has into the way things work. Her experience as a child was that Christians were the good people, and Muslims the bad. Why? Well, she was surrounded by bloody murals of Khomeini, random executions and violence, threats, abuse by teachers, and so on. The few Christians in her life were those persecuted and in underground churches. They had to have community, to take care of each other. And nobody was a Christian for shits and giggles - you had to BELIEVE in order to endure being an outcast. 

 

Then….she came to the West. And found that the opposite was often true. Muslims had to stick together, while Christianity was, like Islam in Iran, more of a group identification than a heartfelt belief. 

 

Later in life, far from Isfahan, I would meet kindhearted Muslims and learn that I had been shown half a picture: that all villainy starts on native soil, where rotten people can safely be rotten, where government exists for their protection. It is only among the outsiders - the rebels, foreigners, and dissidents - that welcome is easily found. 

 

I might add other groups to the list from my own experience: African Americans here in the United States, LGBTQ people nearly everywhere in the world. Anywhere the government is set up to preserve oppression, the oppressor classes are free to let their worst people be rotten with impunity. Nayeri is onto something here. 

 

Nayeri also has a fascinating insight into religion - something I was not expecting in this book. Although raised Christian, Nayeri is no longer religious. I am on the more religious side of the spectrum, but definitely deconstructed from the doctrinal particulars of my youth. 

 

As I noted, Dina’s parents are complicated. Her mother’s mother abandoned all except for the youngest child to move to London. Her mother then ended up married young to her father - the opium addict and oftentimes abuser. While he had his good parts, and was often kind to Dina and Daniel, he had very “traditional” - that is, patriarchal - beliefs about women. Even though Dina’s mother was seventeenth in the entire country in her high school scores, he never fully respected her. 

 

Because of this, Dina believes her mother ended up converting to Christianity. 

 

Trapped in the Islamic Republic, she craved rebellion, freedom. Too conservative for feminism, she reached for the next best thing: Jesus. 

 

Later in the book, musing about what exactly a “true” story in the context of asylum would be, she doubts the supposed purity of her mother’s faith. (Yeah, coming from my own tradition, wow.) 

 

And yet, if one were to swim deep into the dark waters of the psyche, would one find in my mother a pure and guileless love of Jesus or a desperation to please her own mother, to escape a bad marriage, and to find some agency after a lifetime of obedience? After twisting into knots to reject every radical desire of her heart - to be seen, to be held equal to men - she couldn’t become a feminist, but she could rebel against most extreme injustice while making her mother happy; she could claim liberation while remaining a good girl who serves male ambition. Can such desires make the love of Jesus true? Well, who knows. Devotion is always murky. Anyone claiming pure love is lying. 

 

This is also the complexity of my experience of my mother’s faith. Definitely, she has transferred her trauma at having unloving parents (they worshiped her older brother and acted like she never mattered) to winning the approval of Jesus at any cost. I find it difficult to see it as genuine, let alone pure and guileless, because my experience of her devotion has mostly been as the target of rules and of the moral disdain directed toward my wife for not following the same cultural preferences. I don’t see Christ there at all. It is impossible to separate the religious devotion from the very unhealthy self-medication for untreated trauma and mental health issues. Devotion is always murky. This is beyond true. 

 

Nayeri follows two divergent stories - one of Kambiz, who is repeatedly denied asylum and eventually immolates himself - and Kaweh, who eventually does gain asylum and safety for his family. The differences in their stories illustrates her point - that two men who face death in Iran could be treated differently based on rules designed to exclude and harm rather than save. 

 

I am drawn to the place where their stories diverge, the vital hinge where one man is believed and the other is not, this weighing station of human worth operated for profit by winners of a great lottery of birth. 

 

This is the core of the issue, isn’t it? Those of us who won that lottery and were born into relative wealth and privilege seem to think we - WE - have the right to weigh the human worth of others. This is the problem I ultimately run into trying to discuss this with my right-wing friends and family. They will not give up their perceived right to make that decision. 

 

Turning for a bit to a lighter note, Nayeri’s memories of her refugee days are, like those of any child with a loving family, full of humor. I found particularly interesting her description of their stay in Dubai waiting for asylum, and her discovery that yogurt soda went with Kentucky Fried Chicken. I haven’t tried that, but I do like being able to get yogurt soda at a local Mediterranean grocery. 

 

Also amusing is the fact that Daniel’s name was originally Khorsrou - and when their mother changed it to Daniel to be more “western,” Dina’s first thought was “who the hell is Daniel?” 

 

Another incident brought to mind my observation that patriarchy is the same everywhere - there is more resemblance between “christian” Modesty and Purity Culture and the Islamic version than difference. Dina is reprimanded for licking ice cream in public…now that she is nine years old. Wait, what?

 

I was confused for a long time, until a decade later when, after years of screaming fights about the length of my skirts and the right to shave my legs, I realized that something dark would forever separate me and my mother. She had been brought to adulthood believing that every disgusting male thing was her fault, and the fault of her daughter.

 

Yep, that encapsulates it - and another difference my parents and I have fought over. 

 

Here is another amusing cultural touchstone: after their time in Italy, they finally are approved for asylum in the United States. There is a final gathering at the Christian refugee church, and they sing…wait for it all you Evangelical kids of the 1980s and 1990s…. “Friends are Friends Forever.” 

 

C’mon, you KNOW you listened to this album. (And I’ll admit I still think Go West Young Man was peak MWS.) For most of us too, we suffered through so many young women who couldn’t carry a tune but thought they could singing this for Talent Night. Ah, memories…

 

Nayeri returns to this place years later, with her husband just before they break up. (“The unhappy wife of a good man” as she puts it. All those memories of the tragedy and drama involving those she knew but never saw again come back. 

 

Returning again to the change in attitudes, there are a few passages that were shocking. First, Nayeri remembers when the American government seemed like an “incorruptible Christian nation unlike” Iran. And when a dignified Ronald Reagan made her feel safe. (And the thing is, THAT WAS TRUE TOO.)  

 

Likewise, Jim and Jean, the couple who take Nayeri’s family literally into their home for months until they can afford to move out, were, as Nayeri describes them, “right-wing evangelical Christians.” Like my parents. Because back then, you could be a right-wing evangelical Christian and still embrace immigrants. Now, say stuff like that (I did) and you get labeled a communist, and eventually expelled from church. 

 

Nayeri again nails it: 

 

[T]he world is turning its back on refugees, because America is no longer America and Europe is going the same way: these once-Christian nations have abandoned duty in favor of entitlement and tribal instinct. 

 

This is where the reality of being a refugee comes in. 

 

Did you know that if you are waiting with a pending asylum application, you are not allowed to work? 

 

SAY WHAT????

 

That’s right. So, if you are waiting for - as people do - years or decades to break through, you really have only two choices. Wait around and do nothing, or break the law and get an under-the-table job. 

 

Humans are not meant to be idle like that. And for younger people, putting off marriage and children for 10 years is cruel. What the fuck is wrong with us? Why do we refuse to fix this? 

 

[Don’t answer that rhetorical question. The answer is all too obvious.]

 

There are people who are trying to make things better within the system. Nayeri spent time working with volunteers at a camp, and described the difference between giving out food boxes and letting refugees choose their own. The difference is dignity. The first treats people like toddlers, unable to manage their own lives. The second treats them with dignity. 

 

Which is exactly why the American Right Wing wants to change the Food Stamp program to giving out boxes rather than vouchers for food. Because it’s all about grinding the faces of the poor, reminding them that they are subhuman. 

 

And guess what? Treating people with dignity works. 

 

Preparing for their arrival, Refugee Support store workers didn’t worry about chaos. They knew that when you treat people with dignity, they are dignified. Refugees - former doctors, teachers, craftsmen - browse the store. They choose olive oil or sunflower oil, the one they prefer. They don’t have to hurry off with a basket and barter half the items away. 

 

This is where there is a huge disagreement about how poverty programs should work, even among those who support them. Research has shown that the one thing that helps people the most isn’t some targeted benefit, but enough money to live on. I’ll link here to the program in Stockton where even a modest guaranteed income ($500 a month) showed massive benefits. Proof that the cause of much of our poverty-linked ills stem from substandard wages and a lack of income security. Just saying. 

 

And, as far as that goes, why are refugees not allowed to work while their applications are pending? Nayeri lays it on the line. 

 

The men tell jokes and prepare a bowl of fruit for me as the water boils. Their eyes sparkle with intelligence. These are no layabouts. I wonder what they might have done, if they had the privileges of the average American, even the poor ones…As I wait for my tea, I imagine what they might have become if they had, say, the same opportunities as the Trump children…There is no logical or just reason for a mediocre few, shielded from competition, propped up by inherited riches and passports, to feast on the world’s resources under the guise of meritocracy. Meanwhile, these clever young men are offered no country, no home, no right to work or study, no basic right to health care, no future. They are shunned from every society, their talents wasted - why? If they are offered charity, they are told exactly what they will eat, that it cannot be the luxuries of the more deserving. 

 

Let’s be honest: if Trump and his worthless grifting children had been born poor, they would likely be in prison, dead, or working at a fifth-rate used car dealership. But they were born rich, and get to think that they have what they have because of “merit.” 

 

The book spends a good bit of time explaining the problem of telling a good enough story to win asylum. 

 

To satisfy an asylum officer takes the same narrative sophistication it takes to please book critics. At once logical and judgmental of demeanor, both are on guard for manipulation and emotional trickery. Stick to the concrete, the five senses, they say. Sound natural, human, but also dazzle with your prose. Make me cry, but a whiff of sentimentality and you’re done. Stay in scene, but also give compelling evidence of internal change. Go ahead. Try it. It’s not so hard, you penniless, traumatized fugitive from a ravaged village, just write a story worthy of The New Yorker. 

 

Already, one can see the problem: those most likely to be fleeing for their lives are rarely the sorts that can pull this off. 

 

This class problem is, according to Marq Wijngaarden, a true flaw of the asylum process. Like the tax system and property and everything else, it’s biased against the poor and the uneducated, the very people most likely to be running out of fear. A villager who has never seen the borders of the next town doesn’t pick up and leave home lightly. That villager smells danger. And yet, he is the least likely to know the coded words that open the door to safety. Is his faith any less true? He lives his faith in other ways. 

 

Also on the subject of stories, Nayeri talks about her difficult relationship with her mother, in part stemming from the fact that Nayeri wrote about their refugee experience. 

 

Everyone wants ownership of their one, formative, true story - they want to choose how it will be told. My mother despises that I write about our escape, because that is her story, her tilting planet. She gets to decide what it looks like, and she has settled on a hagiographic story of faith and the power of Jesus Christ. There are no muddying details revealed. Everyone is protected from embarrassment. Jesus is exalted, and that’s that.

 

My narrative, she believes, is salvation by a parent who toiled to offer opportunities that I squandered. My stories disregard this thread, though it should consume me, and so they lack an essential element: respect from the child. Respect and thanks from the world. 

 

This has been a source of difficulty with my own parents as well. They do not like that I blog. They particularly dislike that I talk about our family in public. And more than anything, they are furious that they have lost control of our family narrative, that they are not the spotless heroes in my story. 

 

I get it - all of us imagine ourselves as the heroes of our own lives, I would guess. Our children will do the same, and that may not reflect as well on us as we would like. (Although I will also add that if you don’t want to look bad in your kids’ stories, maybe you should have behaved a bit better. Live your life as if your kids may grow up to be writers…) 

 

Nayeri describes being asked by her ex-husband (who I feel sorry for, honestly) why she wrote about their relationship; “Is nothing sacred.” She responds that stories are sacred. I agree. One of the problems in our world - why injustice is allowed to flourish - is that stories have been silenced. We have too many bad stories - explanations that support hierarchy and oppression - and too few of the true stories. And this is ultimately why I write. The dominant narrative of patriarchal religion as a force for good in our world is mostly a lie. We need the true stories of those damaged by it to be told. 

 

Nayeri also talks a lot about the cultural difficulties refugees have in telling their stories. And the problem of how to fit a non-western narrative into western boxes. Just as the most obvious example, western asylum officers tend to act as though governments like that in Iran are as fair and predictable as their own. Which is obviously and completely false. 

 

How can this be true? It seems that anyone using such logic is either so foolish that they don’t realize the Islamic Republic is corrupt and fallible, or they are disingenuous and reckless with refugee lives. 

 

This is like the conversation I have had about Trump supporters. Are they really that incredibly stupid? Or - and this is closer to the truth - do they really just not give a fuck about other people’s lives? 

 

How is one to present the truth to such a listener? When he accepts only one danger, and there are hundreds? When he has no empathy for the daily threat of unchecked violence; when the soldiers, who may not have been targeting you specifically, shattered your psyche, nonetheless. How do you make your true story the “right” kind of true? If your listener already has far greater lies embedded into their worldview, then the only way to sneak the truth into their mind is covertly, like sneaking medicine into a child’s food. Perhaps this is why Christ spoke in parables.

 

Indeed, having lies deeply embedded in their worldview is exactly the problem with white Evangelicals generally. They believe in a fantasy world, where wealth is justly apportioned and they deserve everything they have - unlike those people. 

 

On a related note, and very much in connection with our current homelessness crisis in California, Nayeri has a profound observation:

 

Displacement isn’t mental illness, but it makes visible the daily, hourly, work of staying sane - work that is unconscious in the rooted life. Suddenly, it takes effort to hold on to reason. And, like breathing, the work doesn’t store up. If you stop, its rewards are gone, like vapor. 

 

There is also an excellent exploration of the question of “assimilation.” I wrote a potential post about this years ago, but never finished it. (Maybe I should?) Assimilation cannot - and has never been - a one way street. Every group of immigrants changes the native born just as we change them. Which is why you can find decent Indian and Thai food in a surprising number of small towns across America, and why German-style beers dominate sales, or why all of the distinctive American musical genres have roots in African American traditions. 

 

A lasting, progressive kind of assimilation requires reciprocation. It is mutual and humble and intertwined with multiculturalism, never at odds with it. It is about allowing newcomers to affect you on your native soil, to change you. 

 

Nayeri bemoans the fact that all too often, immigrants downplay their own cultures, thinking their own is unimportant or uninteresting. This has not been good for anyone.

 

Our shame has helped create a cynical, sedated world wherein being a fully realized human is the privilege of whites, Christians, and the native-born. Insiders never question their most basic impulses; they just are, an inevitable ingredient in the air others breathe. The rest of us tiptoe and dance for their good opinion, filtering every smell and sound through a second skin. It is hardened instinct, but those with power can help break it. 

 

And how about this line? 

 

If you love a person, a family, you don’t want them to change into you. You want them to be them. 

 

This is ultimately a deep root of my estrangement from my parents. They wanted me (and my wife and children) to change into them - culturally, religiously, and politically. They at some point decided that we as we are weren’t valuable to them. Either we changed, or we would be discarded. 

 

(Also, I have determined to raise our children to be them, not me.)

 

The end of the book is a call to a deeper responsibility to our fellow humans, one not based on “what do I get out of this” but out of a sense of our shared humanity. 

 

Achebe recoiled at the notion that achievement should be any kind of gauge of our human obligations to one another. In conversations about the refugee crisis, educated people continue to make the barbaric argument that open doors will benefit the host nation. The time for this outdated colonialist argument has run out; migrants don’t derive their value from their benefit to the Western-born, and civilized people don’t ask for resumes from the edge of the grave. Achebe said, in 1988, “I do not see that it is necessary for any people to prove to another that they built cathedrals or pyramids before they can be entitled to peace and safety. Flowing from that, it is not necessary for black people to invent a great fictitious past in order to justify their human existence and dignity today. What they must do is recover what belongs to them - their story - and tell it themselves.” 

 

I agree one hundred percent. Our fellow humans deserve our respect - and access to peace and safety - without having to proof to us [white, Christian, cis-het] that they are “worthy.” We are to love our neighbors…period. Not ask “who is my neighbor?” 

 

There are a few random quotes that didn’t fit elsewhere, but that are worth mentioning. 

 

One of the most colorful characters in the book is Ahmed Poori, who isn’t quite a lawyer, but more of a “helper” of asylum seekers. 

 

He says he’s been vilified by the Dutch who refuse to believe that he doesn’t take money from vulnerable refugees. He works one day a week for a lawyer and earns enough. Why shouldn’t he spend his free days on work he believes in? Is the world so cynical? No one who works eighteen hours a day does it for money - those are obsession hours. 

 

I very much see this in my profession. No lawyer works absurd hours for the money. Either they are stuck in the big firm grind and have no choice - or, they are obsessed with their jobs. I chose my particular niche in part based on my desire to have a life outside of work. That way, I can work stuff I like to do - teaching at the local law school and for adult enrichment courses, making music, and exploring the outdoors. 

 

Nayeri also talks about her feminism - which started when she was a young girl. She took up Tae Kwon Do, and worked at it obsessively until she won at a high level. She did it to get into Harvard (she ended up at Princeton instead, which was fine), not because of any particular love for the sport. 

 

But also, she loved winning at a “male” sport in deeply sexist Oklahoma. 

 

Feminism was a significant reason she left religion in her teens. 

 

I was still angry about so many things - hijab, the Islamic Republic, the fat old church men who made high school football players feel like gods while they shamed women who dared to want too much. Try as I did, I couldn’t reconcile Christianity with what every instinct told me I deserved; I couldn’t believe that God wanted humility and submission from me, and greatness from some boy who could hardly add. 

 

This was the way my wife felt too, trapped in her teens in Jonathan Lindvall’s cult group. You can read about that experience here, if you like. 

 

This whole idea that mediocre or pathetic men should rule over brilliant and competent women is beyond absurd. But it sure is deeply embedded in American Christian culture. 

 

Fortunately, there is an ongoing discussion about this, particularly among us ex-evangelicals. I recommend Jesus and John Wayne in particular for its analysis of how “christianity” ended up in such an anti-Christ place. 

 

I’ll end with a bittersweet truth.

 

Home is never the same, for anyone, not just refugees. You go back and find that you’ve grown, and so has your country. Home is gone; it lives in the mind. Time exiles us all from our childhood.

 

As I grow older, I understand this truth more and more. The only constant is change, and although I try to adapt and grow, I can already see that my children experience a different world than the one I grew up in, for both better and worse. And my own childhood feels so much like a foreign country to me now. 

 

In that sense, we are all refugees. And the best we can do is help each other along the journey. 

 

I truly believe this book should be required reading. I know it will never happen, but I want every single one of my anti-immigrant family and acquaintances - particularly my parents - to read and understand it. But I know the soil right now hardened and infertile for any learning, unfortunately. But maybe open minds will find it helpful in understanding and find themselves drawn to a more compassionate and humane approach to our fellow humans. 

 

***

 

My personal history:

 

I have been thinking a lot about this over the last number of years. The last decade and a half perhaps? 

 

Many of us who survived growing up in the Religious Right, whether more mainstream or, like me, eventually in a cultic group, have been looking back and trying to figure out what happened. How did we get to the point where Trump was thinkable, where racism and xenophobia would literally be the issue that won an election? 

 

For some - maybe even most - they have concluded that the signs were already there: their parents were always racist; they just felt more free to express it in public in the Trump Era. 

 

For me? 

 

Not so much. And believe me, I have gone around and around in my head - in my memories - trying to reconcile the people who raised me with the people who chose racism over a relationship with me now. 

 

The fact of the matter is that my parents raised me to be anti-racist. 

 

I remember the books, of course: Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry, Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird come readily to mind. But not just that. My parents actively pushed back against he casual racism in the A Beka curriculum we had. (Not a lot of options for homeschoolers in those early days - and they were less racist than Bob Jones University Press, for sure.) 

 

And also books that would now be considered suspiciously “communist,” like David Copperfield (opposed to child labor, leading to government action to abolish it), The Octopus (by a socialist author who revealed the unholy alliance of big business and corrupt government), and Christy (which describes a religious leader grooming and raping a young girl - not unlike the leader of the cult my parents later dragged me into…) 

 

I also remember the discussions. So many deep discussions. 

 

And in my memory, I recall being taught that the core value of being an American was that we embraced immigrants and refugees from around the world. The “tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free” were literally what made America great. (And, remember, for all his other issues, Ronald Reagan proclaimed this too back in the 1980s!) 

 

Our family history too was one of immigration. Some of my ancestors fled religious and political persecution. Others fled dire poverty looking for a better life - economic opportunists! So this was our identity as a family. 

 

Even deeper than that, I was taught that to be a Christian was to love my neighbors, and that particularly included refugees. When we saw refugees, we were to see Christ, and act accordingly. 

 

(Weirdly, by 2018, when I would express that sentiment, most white Christians I knew acted like I had just waved The Communist Manifesto around in church.) 

 

There is no doubt in my mind that my parents would have taken in a refugee family - just like Nayeri describes their conservative Christian sponsors as having done. And, I still think that, confronted with an actual need, they would find it in their hearts to do the same. 

 

Just not politically. 

 

Which is how we got to the point where in 2016, my dad literally said that the biggest problem with our country is that we kept letting in all these refugees: “We need to just shut that whole thing down.”

 

What the actual fuck???

 

Or in 2018: “I don’t like Trump’s style, but at least he is finally doing something about the Hispanic problem.”

 

How do we get from “the core identity of an American and a Christian is to take in those fleeing violence and poverty” to “we just need to shut that whole thing down”? 

 

How do we go from teaching your children to follow Christ to literally following the Matthew 25 path to “depart from me, I never knew you”?

 

And how do you get to the point where you cut a child out of your life because he called you out on saying disgusting things like that? 

 

Obviously, impossible to entirely see into my parents’ souls to understand what went wrong, but I have observed a few things along the way. 

 

First, the Los Angeles riots broke something in my dad. You can read about that in the footnote to this post. I think finding himself to not be immune from black rage just because he was one of the “good guys” flipped his thinking on race issues. 

 

Second, the 1990s brought Rush Limbaugh, and eventually Fox News. I have written about my own embarrassing Limbaugh era. 

 

It was also at this time that my parents got into Bill Gothard’s cult - and a main attraction was how WHITE the organization was. Well, they didn’t say it like that, but they mentioned the rows of “clean cut kids from middle America” in rows of navy blue and white. I recognize this now as a dog whistle - later expressed as a lament that there was nowhere in America you could go anymore to get away from “those people’s culture.” 

 

At this time too, there was a significant political shift. In the 1980s, the Republican Party was the pro-immigration party - the Democratic Party was the opposite. This persisted through the Clinton presidency for the Democrats, but for the Republicans, it was in the 1990s that they started going full-on xenophobic. The Prop 187 debacle here in California was a paroxysm of xenophobia that ended up ending the viability of the Republican Party in the state, but was also a harbinger of the trajectory of the party nationwide. 

 

And, unfortunately, it was also an indication of where people like my parents would go over the next couple of decades. 

 

How these external factors intersected with my parents’ internal life I will never know. But the result has been plain. I feel like their souls were eaten by the Religious Right and the Republican Party. In the end, their loyalty wasn’t to the moral and ethical values they raised me with, but to the dogma of their tribe. And by dogma I mean their political affiliation, and by the tribe, I mean their identification with right wing Evangelical white people of their age. Christ never came into it at all, apparently. 

 

I do not think my parents understand the horror and trauma of discovering your parents don’t believe in the values they taught you. 

 

So that’s my family history. 

 

How about mine? For a period - see Limbaugh, Rush - I followed my parents, as kids do. But after moving out, I started to change. Or, maybe more accurately, I returned to the original values I was raised with. 

 

I remember reading an article in Slate.com back when they were just getting started - so easily over 20 years ago. It was part of a greater discussion of immigration policy, and I don’t remember who wrote it, and I can’t find it now. But a line stood out to me:

 

Lost in the endless arguments about whether immigrants are good for us (meaning native born whites, mostly), is the more important question: is immigration good for immigrants? 

 

In other words, this author (who I believe was an open atheist) was the one to raise the question of whether our policies exemplified “love your neighbor as yourself.” 

 

Yeah, instant epiphany of the most unpleasant kind. Here was an atheist reminding 20-something me who still listened to Limbaugh (occasionally) that decent human beings consider others and their needs. 

 

Ouch. 

 

Since that time, I have had to consider that rebuke whenever I think about or write about immigration. If I am not loving immigrants as myself - granting them the same rights and opportunities as I have - then I am blaspheming by calling myself a Christ follower. It isn’t that complicated, unless you are determined to justify selfishness as a moral virtue. 

 

That’s why, when I heard Trump leading chants of “build that wall” and saw Evangelical leaders line up behind not just the man but his evil policies, I realized I would likely not be able to continue to be a part of my faith tradition - at least the institutional part - and that is why I haven’t been part of a church in nearly eight years. 

 

***

 

For more on this blog about immigration:

 

Immigration Series

St. Patrick’s Day and Immigration

“Shithole Immigrants”

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Tear Down This Wall