and unaccompanied minors lived in a facility run by SERCO (an Australian corporation that operates prisons), meant to accommodate four hundred.42 Like other destinations for asylum seekers from Iraq at that time, as well as from Iran and Afghanistan, Australia had begun taking a harder line to deter boat people, eventually putting a freeze on granting security clearances, a prerequisite for granting asylum. Eventually they would be declared ineligible for refugee status in Australia. Policies would eventually emerge that denied the possibility for asylum for boat people who arrived on Australia’s shores.43
Despite the harder line emerging toward boat arrivals, Australia was at least doing its part in accepting refugees from the Middle East through its official humanitarian refugee-resettlement program. From 2003 to 2006 Australia accepted 5,170 Iraqis who had applied for resettlement, including one of Ibrahim’s sisters. The US during that same period accepted only 770.44
The Social Construction of the Worthy Refugee
At the peak of the violence in Iraq, the door to the largest resettlement country still remained closed. This lays bare the brute fact that who gains entry into the US as a refugee is an intrinsically political, rather than humanitarian, decision. To gain entry to the US, it must be demonstrated that refugees serve a government’s political interests.45 During the Cold War, refugees fleeing oppressive Communist states were an essential motif in the West’s narrative as the “beacon of freedom,” evidence of the superiority of its political system. Another interest served in refugee policy has been to protect those who have been the allies of the US in its imperial projects. “In general, the U.S. does not welcome refugees,” wrote Reginald Baker and David North to explain why one hundred thousand Vietnamese were allowed into the US in 1975 with little public debate on the matter. “We do, however, have a specialized interest in those who are our defeated allies in our world-wide struggle against Communism.”46 As the “world-wide struggle against Communism” has given way to the worldwide War on Terror, Iraqis became a litmus test for whether the same logic would hold about “defeated allies” in far-flung conflict zones being deserving of protection.
The US opened its doors to Iraqi Shi’a and Kurdish refugees immediately following the Gulf War (1990–1991), once again as acknowledgment of some culpability for the two million people who were displaced during the uprisings that followed. Prior to the US-led offensive that liberated Kuwait and routed the Iraqi army, George W. Bush had called on the Iraqi people to rise up and overthrow Saddam Hussein. In the aftermath of the defeat of Hussein’s army by the US and its coalition partners, there were in fact large-scale Shi’a and Kurdish rebellions. These were brutally suppressed with nerve gas and helicopter gunship attacks on civilians. The Shi’a refugees fled to Saudi Arabia and Iran, the Kurds to the Turkish and Iranian borders.47 In response to that crisis, the US accepted 29,080 Iraqi refugees for resettlement between 1991 and 1999.48
Iraqis who faced mass displacement after 2003 did not receive the same sympathy as those following the Gulf War. Total refugee admissions for the years immediately after the terror attacks of 9/11 had been reduced to 26,839 and 28,306 in 2002 and 2003, respectively.49 The US Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) was essentially shut to Iraqis from 2003 to 2007. Deborah Amos, whose seminal work Eclipse of the Sunnis provides one of the best accounts of Iraqis exiled in the wake of the 2003 invasion, detailed the many barriers facing Iraqis applying for asylum to the US during this time. The Patriot Act disqualified anyone suspected of “material support for terrorism,” and the Department of Homeland Security, responsible for security checks on asylum applicants, extended this liberally to families who had paid ransom to release a family member, to Shi’a who had risen up against Hussein after the Gulf War, and to former members of the Baath Party, to which the vast majority of Iraqis belonged for practical rather than partisan reasons during the Hussein era.50
Instead of the US government ramping up its resettlement operation to accept refugees from Iraq, it channeled humanitarian assistance to those countries shouldering the burden of hosting the displaced, either through direct support to the Jordanian government or to the UN and NGOs in Syria, Lebanon, or Turkey. This strategy allowed scenes of suffering to be effectively decoupled from the violent morass arising from the invasion. Jordan, a country of ten million hosting half a million Iraqi refugees, challenged the US to step up its resettlement operation: “The U.S. has demonstrated time and again its ability to be a leader in durable solutions for refugees,” observed HRH Prince Ibrahim bin Talal of Jordan in reference to the successful resettlement of refugees from Vietnam, Cuba, Russia, and Bosnia.51 Jordan had opposed the US invasion in 2003, and Prince Ibrahim’s message to the US signaled that doing something more to address the Iraqi refugee problem was in the US strategic interests; it would help alleviate the burden on one of its few friends in the Arab world. Thus, the concern for maintaining a strong relationship with a US ally, known as the “politics of neighbors,” became a political factor in moving the needle of US refugee policy toward Iraq.52
Refugee policy in the US has always lived in a tension between humanitarian concern and fear that refugees could be an existential threat to the US cultural and political order. In the massive resettlement operation in the wake of the US withdrawal from Vietnam, a nation’s gratitude toward non-Communist allies was enough to override fear of the “Yellow Peril.” A similar sentiment emerged within the US among those who had formed ties with Iraqis during the invasion and occupation. During this time of widespread asylum denial, Iraqis who had collaborated with the coalition forces and occupation were being systematically targeted for assassination by insurgents. The List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies, an organization founded by Kirk W. Johnson, a former USAID administrator in Fallujah, began calling attention to the plight of Iraqi allies—engineers, translators, and advisers—who worked alongside US troops and contractors: “As our military rolled into villages, this linguistic and cultural gap between occupier and occupied was bridged by a unique group of Iraqis who stepped forward to help as interpreters. They became, in effect, our eyes, our ears, and our voice as we tried to make the best of an increasingly harrowing situation. Without question, their work has saved American lives.”53 Being the eyes, ears, and voice of the “occupier” subsequently made Iraqi staff vulnerable. Johnson argued that the US was on track to repeat previous abandonments of its allies to death or imprisonment (e.g., the Hmong of Laos): “The terrorist group that has already abducted, tortured, and assassinated hundreds of our employees just announced plans to redouble their efforts as America leaves Iraq.”54 The List Project’s website listed the names of Iraqi collaborators who had been murdered, injured, or forced to flee Iraq. As a matter of saving these individuals’ lives, the organization advocated for asylum and the permanent resettlement of Iraqi allies and their families to the US.
The lobbying by the List Project and other refugee advocates led to an amendment to the Department of Defense authorization bill of December 2007, the Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act, sponsored by the late Senator Edward Kennedy.55 The act prioritized admissions for Iraqis and their families who had collaborated with the coalition. This included those who had worked on the reconstruction of Iraqi infrastructure by the US government and its contractors. The act opened the door to other vulnerable Iraqis, not just those who worked with the US government and its agents, and mandated that humanitarian concerns be taken into account for religious and ethnic minorities and “other persecuted groups,” as identified by the secretary of state. Asylum advocates in Washington, DC, were especially worried about war widows and young women and girls working the nightclubs of Damascus.56
The Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act provided criteria by which Ibrahim, Yousef, Suha, and their families deserved to be considered for resettlement in the US. Suha was doubly at risk, as part of a religious minority and a widow. Yousef and Ibrahim had loose ties with the Americans or the reconstruction efforts under the occupation, enough to put them on hit lists, as well as exposure to violence in ethnic cleansing at the neighborhood level. This transmutation of an asylum seeker, a temporary and merely tolerated migrant, into a “refugee,” as set forth in 101(a)(42) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, is dependent on these calculations, which tilted the worthiness scale in favor of these Iraqis and others like them who passed
