began their evolution from migrant, exile, guest, or asylum seeker into “refugee.” Because they had been judged to have a “well-founded fear of persecution” and because they had relatives in the US, their case files were recommended to one of the processing centers managed by the US Department of State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM).58 The Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act authorized the establishment of PRM processing centers where significant numbers of Iraqi refugees had already fled: Amman, Damascus, and Istanbul.
From the point when a refugee status determination is made by the UNHCR to the moment when a refugee arrives in the US, a minimum of two years will have elapsed (as in Ibrahim’s case) or as many as eight (as in Yousef’s). During this time, their lives will have been touched by several UN agencies, several NGOs that have provided some humanitarian support, and at least five agencies of the US federal government, as well as the International Organization for Migration, which coordinates travel arrangements. The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) will have coordinated a series of security-clearance interviews by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Medical exams will have followed, then coordination with Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) and its NGO partners at the federal, state, and municipal levels. Each government player had a role in the construction of that person’s status as a refugee and in setting his or her final destination. This Foucauldian knowledge-power of the state exerted on asylum seekers, observes Ong, is intended to mold future citizen-subjects who will contribute to “the security and strength of the state.”59
The Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act named and justified to the American people a specific nationality group of people to be authorized for resettlement in the US. To be so named in an act of Congress requires that support to Iraqi refugees had to be justified. The act implicitly considered them good future citizens on the basis of their support of the US war effort and the reconstruction of Iraq. Like the Vietnamese decades earlier, the US had a “moral debt” to Iraqis who had supported the US military. Resettlement of “up to 25,000” (for fiscal year 2008) was in alignment with the US foreign-policy objectives in the Middle East, by helping to mitigate the destabilizing effect of three million refugees spread through the region and by removing a “fertile recruiting ground for terrorists.”60 The reference to countries like Afghanistan and Iraq as breeding grounds of potential terrorists has been the constant background noise of the War on Terror since 9/11. Iraqis, like the Arab Americans they would soon join in the US, exist for Americans primarily within this narrow frame of reference. As such, Iraqi refugees came to the US as both potential good citizens and potential terrorists.
The refugee narrative as a whole tilts toward vulnerability. Humanitarian crisis is what opens the wallets of the American people, while the “moral debt” argument, along with foreign-policy interests, especially those claiming to mitigate the terrorist threat, justifies congressional appropriations. The Iraqi experience follows a well-worn pattern, that refugees are admitted for resettlement on a large scale when there is a convergence of foreign-policy interests, moral obligation, and humanitarian appeal.
The year 2008 saw Ibrahim and Zaynab and their three children get on a flight from Amman to Los Angeles; they were part of the 13,822 Iraqi refugees admitted to the US that year, enabled by the passage of the Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act. Yousef and Suha and their families came five years later. Yousef and his family had endured eight years in exile. Between 2008 and 2015, a total of 124,159 Iraqi refugees were resettled in the US.61 Iraq was the number-one refugee-sending country to the US for four of those seven years.
The lives of Yousef, Ibrahim, and Suha are windows onto a world of both the loss and the creation of belonging. Having lost it in the violence of postinvasion Iraq, they re-created contingent forms of it within communities in exile. Once they made the decision to apply for resettlement, they became engaged in a process in which they were vetted and prepared for the path to citizenship in the US. Toward that end, they arrived with immediate permission to work, a green card soon followed, and legal citizenship was expected in five years. Once they arrived, however, they discovered that the meaning of national belonging and good citizenship was intertwined with cultural notions of work and self-reliance. Refugee programs were implicitly justified to US taxpayers by the presence of model refugees—successful entrepreneurs and professionals who realized the American dream and were not a drain on the US welfare system. And yet there was a problem, because in the year 2008, when Ibrahim arrived with the first major wave of Iraqi refugees, the United States was facing a financial meltdown.
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