Introduction: The New Americans

By Kevin Brooks

Top left: Kevin Brooks and his family. Back: Deng, Agot, and Caity. Front: Elizabeth Birmingham, Makeer, Griffin, and Kevin Brooks. Lower left: The author, second from the right, received the Chamber of Commerce Award for Distinguished Faculty Service in May 2015.

On Second Thought brings the humanities’ perspective to issues of vital public importance, and refugee resettlement and immigration are among the most hotly debated topics of the young twenty-first century. The humanities’ perspective pays attention to history, to language, to nuanced elements of arguments, stories, and situation, rather than getting caught up in the ongoing and complicated refugee crisis in Syria, the vitriolic rhetoric about immigration heard on the 2016 campaign trail, and even media and community conflict in North Dakota around refugee resettlement. On Second Thought privileges stories rather than statistics and gives voice to New Americans who might not otherwise tell their stories.

Immigrant and refugee stories almost always contain tragedy, but among that tragedy, we listeners, readers, and watchers find inspiration and catharsis. The challenges of our comfortable lives, for those of us fortunate enough to have them, are put in perspective; our view on the world is widened; our hearts are both opened and troubled when we come to understand that people just like us—farmers, teachers, nurses, truck drivers, journalists—from around the world have had their lives completely upended by a conflict or a natural disaster outside of their control. They are forced to rebuild their lives from scratch, often in a foreign language, while enduring bitter winds and cold temperatures like few ever thought possible.

In this introduction, I provide a very brief history (yet very long perspective) on human movement and refugee resettlement, especially as it has played out in North Dakota over the past twenty-plus years. I then try to bring some clarity to the language and labels often used when discussing refugee resettlement: New Americans, secondary migrants, and host communities. I am offering an introduction on the topic of New Americans for those who need or want it; I am not introducing the essays and poems in the magazine, because these authors do not need my help achieving their voice.

HUMAN MIGRATION AND REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT

In Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World, economist Paul Collier makes the compelling point that migration has been a constant human activity. Human life evolved in Africa and spread throughout the continents, including migration from Asia across the Bering Strait to the Americas. The willingness and sometimes necessity to move in order to survive is a powerful human instinct, and people will continue to move, legally or illegally, often as a matter of survival. Refugee protection and resettlement managed by the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) is a sophisticated means of handling the flow of dangerously displaced humans around the globe, and to end or significantly curtail resettlement, as some critics of Syrian resettlement suggest, would risk millions of lives and add pressure to an already volatile geopolitical system.

Kevin Brooks working at the African Soul, American Heart compound in Moyo, Uganda, with Deborah Akon Deng, the student he and his wife have sponsored since 2010.

As the nation and the state debate immigration and refugee resettlement issues today, we should also take at least one other very long view and remember that what has come to be called “the Americas” had a population of fifty to one hundred million indigenous peoples, 80 to 90 percent of whom were killed or displaced by the settler colonies from Europe. To claim that the United States is a “nation of immigrants” is insensitive to the history of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, and overlooks the fact that the United States has, according to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “welcomed—indeed often solicited, even bribed—immigrants to repopulate conquered territories ‘cleansed’ of their Indigenous inhabitants” (50). While the United States’ official definition of a refugee is that he or she is of “special humanitarian concern to the United States,” we cannot be blind to the fact that refugees are often a source of cheap labor, despite the degrees and qualifications many bring with them. And like the waves of cheap immigrant labor before them, they are never fully accepted as Americans. “[N]o matter how much immigrants might strive to prove themselves to be as hardworking and patriotic as descendants of the original settlers,” says Dunbar-Ortiz, “and despite the rhetoric of E pluribus unum, they are suspect” (51). Or, as I point out in more detail in the next section, former refugees/New Americans are seldom ever understood to be just “Americans.”

For those of us who attempt to welcome and support New Americans today, we should not forget this history of imperialism and white supremacy that has shaped the nation. Neither should we forget the ways in which the oldest Americans face many of the same challenges of social, economic, and political disenfranchisement that New Americans face. Resettlement efforts concerned with the human rights of refugees might be undertaken in conjunction with those pursuing indigenous rights and social justice. Philosopher Cornel West, in Democracy Matters, claims that for deep democracy in the United States to be achieved, we must recognize and then overcome the ways in which the US as an imperial nation marginalizes the indigenous peoples of America, as well as the global poor and the non-white.

So that’s the very long view on human migration, the relationship between settler colonialism and refugee resettlement, and the work that needs to be done to achieve a more equitable democratic framework for all Americans. The precise and legal history of refugee resettlement can be found on the US Office of Refugee Resettlement’s website:

Congress first enacted legislation in 1948 to govern refugee resettlement after World War II.

Congress rewrote legislation after the Vietnam War to standardize resettlement services for all refugees admitted to the United States.

Annual admissions figures have ranged from a high of 207,116 in 1980 to a low of 27,100 in 2002, with the Obama administration using a target figure, seldom reached, of 80,000 a year.

In between those two acts, the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act, according to immigration expert Margaret Sands Orchowski, brought the annual total of legal immigrants allowed into the US to over one million a year and changed the “ethno-racial-national population to ‘resemble the world’ rather than the nation that had grown out of the thirteen British colonies (and thousands of African slaves)” (Ch. 4). This expansion and diversification of immigration has affected refugee resettlement because it raised anxieties about immigration of any kind around the country, and the “diversification of immigration” is of course code for an increase in non-white immigrants.

Anthropologist Aihwa Ong, in Buddha Is Hiding, puts this change in the context of refugee resettlement. She explains that between the end of World War II and the end of the Vietnam War, 90 percent of refugees were from communist countries, were considered “freedom fighters,” and were most often white. After Vietnam,

the refugee acquired a more ambivalent image. Floods of refugees—both legal and illegal—escaping natural disasters, civil wars, ethnic wars, and adverse conditions in poor countries, flowed into the country. More and more, refugees came to be viewed as the byproduct of regional conflicts and underdeveloped economies that appeared to have little to do with American interests. Public sentiment gradually began to turn against the ‘boat peoples’ of the world arriving in a recession-slowed United States. . . . They arrived just as American domestic policy, under Republican regimes [Reagan and Bush, 1980–92], was shifting away from a welfare-state notion of custodial, collective support of the weak and poor towards emphasis on individuals’ civic duty to reduce their burden on the state. (82)

Despite two Democratic presidencies since the Reagan- Bush area, resettlement policy has not shifted back to “custodial, collective support of the weak and poor.” The expectation placed on refugees by their resettlement agency, whether Lutheran Social Services of North Dakota’s New American Services or other agencies throughout the US, is that the head of household will find work within ninety days of arrival, and the individual or family will be self-sufficient within eight months, regardless of the local economy, their knowledge of English, or their work skills.

The North Dakota history of refugee resettlement looks like the national picture, but the debate about immigration sounds a little different in the state. The North Dakota settler culture first marginalized the indigenous, then adopted, protected, and maintained an inward-looking, morally superior, racially coded attitude of “keeping the riff-raff out.” The state has never felt pressure from a large, visible minority that confronts the structural racism of the region; North Dakota has not seen significant migration from the US South or immigration from Central and South America like southern states or gateway cities (e.g., New York and Chicago) have seen. The weak agriculture economy and general economic downturn of the 1980s resulted in a state that had little to keep young people at home and nothing to draw immigrants from other states or countries, so refugee resettlement turned out to be one small stop-gap in the population drain. But that didn’t always mean these newcomers were welcome.

The first decade of professionalized resettlement was not without its controversies and pushback, but the 2002 Refugee Impact in the Fargo-Moorhead Community report prepared by sociology faculty at North Dakota State University offered a cost-benefit analysis: “It is clear that refugees impose dependency costs on the community, especially during their first year of resettlement. At the same time, refugees enrich the community culturally and, in the long term, provide positive economic returns on this community investment through their own employment, their employment of others, and their payment of taxes” (Slobin, Klenow, and Thompson 25). When asked, “How much money did you receive from the United States taxpayers?” and “When are you going to pay it back?,” Anna Astvatsaturian Turcotte, who came to Wahpeton in 1992 at the age of 13, responded, “I’ve repaid my debt ten times over.”

After the 2000 census, Minnesota Public Radio produced a story that documented the ways New Americans were enabling manufacturing companies to stay open while the state was losing its American-born workforce to out migration (Reha). The growth of higher education, the technology sector, and the medical sector in the Red River Valley and to some extent across the state, has resulted in a “foreign-born” population that is a mix of highly educated professionals coming to the area for economic opportunities and refugees resettled to the state over the past twenty years (Springer). The past twenty-plus years of refugee resettlement has diversified the three largest cities in North Dakota, but in much more modest ways than one might expect from the state that resettles more refugees per capita than any other state. According to US Census data, Fargo’s percentage of white population dropped from 94 to 90 percent between the 2000 and 2010 censuses, and of course, not all of that change can be attributed to refugee resettlement. The city of Fargo’s foreign-born population has grown, but remains at only 7 percent; Grand Forks is a modest 4.5 percent, and Bismarck a minuscule 1.8 percent.

Because the home countries for refugees change as global crises change, North Dakota does not have one dominant refugee group. The Bosnian refugees of the early 1990s came in large numbers for a few years but are not a visible minority because they are white. Somali and Sudanese populations have maintained a steady growth since the late 1990s and are more visible to the still predominantly white state. The large Somali populations in Minneapolis and St. Cloud move back and forth between the Fargo-Moorhead area, Grand Forks, and the Twin Cities area, making them the most likely secondary migrants in the state. The Liberian diaspora across the US has been discovering that Fargo and North Dakota generally provide good opportunities. Bhutanese refugees, who spent almost thirty years in Nepali camps that are now closed, have been the predominant group resettled the past five years, with Iraqi and Congolese families making up two other growing New American communities.

When the humanities’ long and thoughtful perspective is taken, none of the changes of the last twenty years have warranted the local anti-immigrant, anti-refugee rhetoric that emerged in 2015. An online petition calling for an end to refugee resettlement in North Dakota topped out at 3,287 signatures and claimed victory, but resettlement has continued in exactly the same manner as before the petition with no noticeable strains on the state’s economy, safety, or well-being. The (Fargo-based) Valley News Live four-part muckraking series on resettlement in fall 2015 went looking for trouble but couldn’t find any, and the extensive vandalism and damage done to Café Juba in Grand Forks in December actually generated an outpouring of support for the business owner and his Somali-American family. Returning to Collier, the issue is not whether there should be migration or immigration—there will be. The questions should be how much, where, and who? Lutheran Social Services of North Dakota monitors its capacity and participants closely without violating civil liberties. State and city local partners, like schools, businesses, and community organizations, generally continue to be supportive of the five hundred or so refugees who arrive in North Dakota each year.

LANGUAGE, LABELS, AND VOICE

When people talk and write about New Americans, who are they talking about? That’s not such an easy question to answer, because government agencies have their own specialized language (typically, “refugees,” “foreign born,” “foreign nationals,” and “aliens”), and public debate largely swirls around immigrants and paths to citizenship. “Immigrant” turns out to be a broad category of people who come to another country with an intention other than visiting, but these immigrants fall into the categories of legal permanent alien, illegal alien, refugee, and various visa holders. All refugees are immigrants, but most immigrants to the US are not refugees.

A refugee is legally defined by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services as “someone who:

Is located outside of the United States

Is of special humanitarian concern to the United States

Demonstrates that they were persecuted or fear persecution due to race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group

Is not firmly resettled in another country

Is admissible to the United States.”

Upon legal entry to the United States, refugees become “permanent legal residents” who will have an opportunity to obtain citizenship after five years in the country.

“New American” with a capital “N”—an informal but increasingly accepted term in resettlement communities throughout the US—generally means a refugee who has arrived in the US with the intention of obtaining citizenship, but has not yet obtained that status. The term “refugee” is one that many of the world’s displaced want to shake—it reminds people of the deserts, rivers, jungles, and oceans they may have crossed, the family and friends they may have lost. When someone from Bhutan, Somalia, or Congo arrives in North Dakota, they frequently will say, “I am not a refugee anymore.”

The proper noun “New American” is not typically used to refer to Mexican, Central American, or South American immigrants, even when those arriving from a country like Colombia as refugees are in fact New Americans. One reason this label isn’t applied is because Latino immigrants, according to Orchowski, are less likely to pursue citizenship than refugees who often see the prospect of returning to their home country as unlikely (Ch. 4). Canadian immigrants like myself blend so easily into the American milieu that we are never called “New Americans,” yet we bristle when someone says, “You have always been an American—a North American.” The Canadian identity is largely founded on being different, in subtle but important ways, from Americans—but I digress.

So, when “New American” as a proper noun is used in North Dakota and other refugee resettlement centers around the US, the designation is most accurately used for recently arrived refugees/legal permanent residents, but commonly used to designate anyone who has arrived in the US via a refugee resettlement program. The term can also be used to refer to a group of visible minorities, like “the New American community.” The term “New American” tends to stick with refugees who earn their citizenship, especially if those new Americans (not capitalized, because newly sworn in citizens are indeed now new Americans) speak an accented English different from our upper- Midwest, sing-songy “youbetchyas.”

Two other labeling issues come up in conjunction with refugee resettlement: 1) who is a secondary migrant, and 2) what do you call the people who have lived in the same place/region for a long time? A secondary migrant is typically used to refer to a refugee who was officially settled in one location, like Des Moines, Iowa, but who has chosen to move somewhere else, like Bismarck, for education, a job, to be with family and friends, or for some other perfectly legal reason. The concept isn’t particularly difficult to understand, but secondary migrants are often perceived by anti-refugee groups as dangerous, because they are not restricted in their movement, not tracked when they move, and they can potentially produce an unanticipated influx of New Americans to either a location that doesn’t have a formal resettlement program or a location that perceives it does not have the schooling, housing, or social service capacity to handle this surge. North Dakota has been a popular location for secondary migrants because of the strong economy, the low unemployment rate, and the generally sufficient support services, especially in Fargo and Grand Forks. The Bakken oil patch has of course been a population destination for secondary migrants, immigrants, and anyone else looking for a good paying job.

When trying to talk about New Americans in our communities, those of us who have lived in a location for a significant time have to figure out how to refer to ourselves. We can use the “mainstream community,” the “majority community,” or “the locals,” but the most palatable term, though by no means perfect, is “host community.” A host community is a welcoming community; the term acknowledges that refugees have indeed been invited to the community, and that in the best of hosting traditions, the guests’ needs are attended to and met. The negative implications of the term include an assumption that the host is in control; that this is their place, and the newcomers will always be outsiders. The term once again overlooks the fact that the so-called “host communities” were once terrible guests who displaced the indigenous communities throughout the Americas. Perhaps, as philosopher Jacques Derrida suggests in his meditation on this complicated notion of “hospitality,” we can be reminded of the negative connotations and work to overcome the controlling, possessive host as we pursue gracious and welcoming conditions.

While host communities often struggle to find the right label for newcomers, the central linguistic and narrative concern for New Americans is finding a public voice. They have fled the country where they might have voted, held office, spoke the local language(s), and had access to power and self-expression. As refugees, these displaced peoples typically spend time in a transitional country where they cannot vote or hold office, may or may not speak the local language, may or may not be authorized to work, and are unlikely to have access to power or self-expression. When they arrive in the United States, they are without the first two options for at least five years; they may not speak, read, or write English effectively enough to express themselves; and they are unlikely to have access to power.

The “New Americans” issue of On Second Thought is a unique vehicle for self-expression; the contributors do not necessarily have a record of publication. Some may have told their stories in other venues; some may be telling them for the first time. Perhaps the most widely read refugee story, What Is the What, is the story of Southern Sudanese Lost Boy Valentino Achak Deng, told through the powerful pen of one of America’s most popular writers, Dave Eggers. Deng and Eggers were able to tell a story that captures the best of the history, which often tells us what happened, and literature, which often tells us how events felt. We don’t have those stories set in North Dakota, yet, but some of the contributions to this issue will be a first step toward helping all of us understand better how it feels to be a New American in North Dakota.

KEVIN BROOKS is a professor of English at North Dakota State University, president of the New American Consortium for Wellness and Empowerment, and vice president of African Soul, American Heart. Brooks and his family have been immersed in refugee advocacy and resettlement since 2005.

Works Cited

Astvatsaturian Turcotte, Anna. “Paying Back Tenfold.” Originally appeared in the High Plains Reader, Nov. 21, 2013. http://www.annaturcotte.com/ selected-publications.

Collier, Paul. Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond. Translated by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.

Eggers, Dave. What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng. San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2006.

Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press, 2014. Kindle edition.

Ong, Aihwa. Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Orchowski, Margaret Sands. The Law that Changed the Face of America: The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. Kindle edition.

Reha, Bob. “Refugees Boost North Dakota’s Economy.” Minnesota Public Radio, August 20, 2002. http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/ features/200208/20_rehab_nodakcensus-m/.

Slobin, Kathleen, Daniel Klenow, and Kevin Thompson. Refugee Impact in the Fargo-Moorhead Community. Fargo: North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies / North Dakota State University, 2002.

Springer, Patrick. “High Proportion of Immigrant Citizens in ND Have Advanced Degrees.” InForum, January 19, 2016. http://www.inforum.com/ news/3927317-high-proportion-immigrant-citizens-nd-have-advanceddegrees.

United States Census Bureau. “QuickFacts.” Accessed March 4, 2016. http://www.census.gov/en.html.

United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. “Refugees.” Accessed March 4, 2016. https://www.uscis.gov/humanitarian/refugees-asylum/ refugees.

United States Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families. “About: History.” Office of Refugee Resettlement. Accessed March 4, 2016. http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/ orr/about/history.

West, Cornel. Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism. New York: Penguin, 2004.

SUGGESTED READING - North Dakota authors reflect on refugee experiences and resettlement in these outstanding works:

From Africa to America: The Journey of a Lost Boy of Sudan by Joseph Akol Makeer

Nowhere, a Story of Exile by Anna Astvatsaturian Turcotte

Walking Out into the Sunshine: Recollections and Reflections: A Palestinian Personal Experience by Ghazi Q. Hassoun

"You Have Been Kind Enough to Assist Me": -Herman Stern and the Jewish Refugee Crisis- by Terry Shoptaugh