The Golden Door Closes

Tram Nguyen

June 21, 2005

Tram Nguyen is the editor of ColorLines magazine and the author of the forthcoming book We Are All Suspects Now: Untold Stories from Immigrant Communities After 9/11.

It’s a terrible time to be a refugee. Nearly 30 years ago, refugee policy provided a political weapon in the war against communism, as it does now in the war against terrorism. The difference is that today’s government assumes that refugees are themselves the terrorists.

Historically, Americans have viewed refugees as victims requiring humanitarian resettlement. Yet the government’s list of who deserves such rescue has always been driven by political considerations. Eastern Europeans, Cubans and Southeast Asians fleeing Communist regimes have been favored, while refugees from U.S.-backed dictatorships in Haiti and Central America were routinely denied.

My family belonged to the deserving class. I was born in Vietnam just before the last helicopters loaded with South Vietnamese took off from Saigon. My father made the desperate decision to orchestrate the escape of three little girls, his wife and her sister, beginning our family’s role in the harrowing and often tragic journey of thousands of “boat people.”

The welcome we received, while conflicted, has since worn out for new arrivals. Twenty-five years after the passage of the Refugee Act, the U.S. acceptance rate has declined from a high of 142,000 per year during the 1980s to a low of 27,070 in 2002. With 12 million refugees around the world, the rate dropped by more than half after 9/11.

The United States is no longer willing to be a refuge, and it uses the specter of Al Qaeda to justify its withdrawal. The ironically named “Operation Liberty Shield” designates 33 countries whose nationals seeking asylum are automatically imprisoned upon arrival.

With the passage of the REAL ID Act last month, refugees fleeing torture, forced abortions, honor killings and other violence may be deported while the court decides their cases.

The Saeeds, a Pakistani family in Queens, N.Y., were waiting for the immigration bureaucracy to work through its backlog and grant them sanctuary from the extortion and death threats that forced them to leave their home.

But they were caught without legal status when the “special registration” program began in 2003. As a Pakistani national, Muhammad Saeed was required to report to immigration officials, along with thousands of men from 25 Muslim countries. To avoid likely detention, the family fled to Canada.

They waited there two years for asylum, but the Canadian government, taking a page out of the U.S. policy book, rejected their request several months ago.

Aleena Saeed, 16, had wanted to be a doctor, but no longer thinks it possible.

“They say, ‘Don’t wish upon a star, reach for one,’ but I don’t think that’s true,” she told me. “I’ve learned that you shouldn’t wish for something you can’t have.”

Today’s refugees are suffering from the political calculus at play in the war on terror. Fear of terrorism and an increasingly unsympathetic system have led America to retreat from its humanitarian commitment. Because the U.S. program is so unpredictable, advocates say, the United Nations refugee agency may become less willing to refer refugees here. And that is exactly what the Bush administration hopes for.