Through seven years of sustained listening, I continually and deeply felt the truth of these people’s experiences as they narrated them to me. This truth was not static; their stories lived and breathed in open-endedness. Details were added later that in the first telling had been left out (purposefully?). For some precious moments, I was invited into a “place where we feel the truth of how things are.”12 Much of this “truth” was found in the intimate and ordinary realms of life—work, school, family life, and picnics.
Introduction
Achieving a sense of belonging in the United States is complicated for all new immigrants. But imagine that your home country is blamed for a terror attack it did not cause, and then the president of the United States decides that you are part of an unholy trinity he calls the “axis of evil.”1 When that is your starting point, only the most optimistic of souls would predict a good outcome. This was the challenge facing the 124,159 Iraqi refugees who were resettled in the US between 2008 and 2015. This book is a witness to their uphill climb as they have sought membership and belonging during the displacement of the Iraq War and the seemingly endless global War on Terror.
“National belonging” is commonly understood as legal citizenship. Hannah Arendt writes in her seminal work The Origins of Totalitarianism that citizenship confers the indispensable “right to have rights.”2 But even after the oath is uttered—“I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince”—the felt sense of belonging can be elusive. In the pre–World War II Europe analyzed by Arendt, refugees challenged the nation-state’s homogeneity and imagined rootedness in ancestral soil: the xenos that threatened the national ethnos. Meaningful societal participation was denied for those who were “born into the wrong kind of race or the wrong kind of class.”3 In the post-9/11 United States, legal citizenship has not protected Arabs and Muslims from Islamophobia or from the hard edge of the Patriot Act.
It is vital for subordinated groups, writes Renato Rosaldo, to be “conscious and articulate about their needs, to be visible, to be heard, and to belong.”4 The felt experience of social belonging hinges on the immediate and daily experience of inclusion, captured in the concept of “cultural citizenship.”5 Iraqi refugee lives demonstrate that belonging is not only something granted but something people claim, even under appalling circumstances, alongside the daily rounds of life.
President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 left an irrevocable imprint on Iraqi lives, triggering the largest forced migration in the Middle East since 1948. Bush’s first attorney general, John Ashcroft, allowed surveillance aimed disproportionately at Arab and Muslim Americans. Just when it would be hard to imagine a more unfriendly environment for Iraqi refugees, a bellicose Donald Trump ran for president and named refugees from Iraq as threats to national security. Once elected, he greatly restricted refugee admissions. For Iraqi refugees in this time and place, what shall be their cartography of belonging, their pathways and possibilities? That is this book’s central purpose, to see if the felt experience of belonging is possible even for people who face active hostility.
The pathway toward belonging is inevitably preceded by the loss of belonging. Refugees are commonly portrayed as suddenly and cruelly uprooted from an idealized normality. Liisa Malkki reminds us that more often refugees have found that their country ceased to be a place of belonging before they left, the welcome mat already removed.6 They saw the writing on the wall, which said, “You do not belong.” They left with no home to return to, only certain arrest by security police or someone else occupying their house in an ethnically cleansed neighborhood.
The invasion of Iraq by US and coalition forces in 2003 caused a loss of belonging for Iraqis on a scale previously unseen in their turbulent history. In chapter 1, we meet four individuals and their families who serve as our windows onto the wider experiences and pathways that Iraqi refugees took toward finding safety and livelihood. They initially intended to wait out the war in neighboring countries, but their hopes that the security situation in Iraqi would improve were not realized. This book focuses on a group of those who after years of waiting in exile were eventually accepted for resettlement in the US.
The door to resettlement of Iraqi refugees in the US did not open easily. It took an intense and successful lobbying effort to convince Americans that Iraqis, as collaborators with the coalition in the Iraq War, earned their eligibility to be resettled in the US. They were labeled “good” Arabs, that is, allies of US geopolitical interests in the Middle East. It was as if being accepted as a refugee in the US required a worthiness quotient.
Of the 124,159 Iraqi refugees who arrived in the US, approximately 500 were placed in California’s Inland Empire, located sixty miles east of Los Angeles. I cannot say why this region is burdened by the label of “empire.” There is probably a historical reason, but I prefer Lewis DeSoto’s lyrical explanation: “It was an empire of things. Oranges, tract homes, steel, freeways, earthquakes and floods, desert and deep water. Crackling fire in the hills . . . It was the empire of mountains, deserts, and weird inland seas. It was marvelous and abject. It was filled with opposites: blue mountains and white snow presiding over crispy weeds and sunbaked lots, balmy palms.”7 The vastness and extremes of the Inland Empire, its diverse social and physical geography, are what garnered the appellation of “empire,” four and a half million people concentrated in the metro areas of Ontario, Riverside, and San Bernardino, as well as in smaller blue-collar towns along iconic Route 66—Rialto, Fontana, Colton, bordering the metropolis of Los Angeles to the west, Orange County to the south, and the Mojave Desert to the east. Only a small community of people of Middle Eastern descent lived in the Inland Empire prior to 2008. Earlier settlement patterns taken by Iraqis after the Gulf War were to the well-established Arab American enclaves of El Cajon and Anaheim’s Little Arabia. After 2008, the unusually large number of Iraqis settling in the US pushed the newer arrivals into new frontiers of the majority-Latinx neighborhoods of the Inland Empire.
Historically, the immigrant pathway to belonging has been shaped by finding specialized neighborhood gateways into ethnic business, political, and religious institutions. But what is the pathway to belonging for Arab immigrants within the sprawling urban majority-Latinx communities of the Inland Empire? Understanding refugees in this region of California that is not densely populated by people of Arab descent will tell us something about how Arab immigrants have survived outside their ethnic communities.8
As it happens, Iraqis arrived in the US in the throes of the Great Recession and in a place suffering from foreclosures and bankruptcies. For immigrants in the US, the meaning of belonging and good citizenship has been historically tied to their economic value as laborers and entrepreneurs. The refugee success story in the US offers membership and belonging to those who make a valuable economic or social contribution to society: the high school valedictorian, the successful entrepreneur, those who combine a high level of acculturation with economic success. Successful cultural adaptations and economic success implicitly grant permission to say, “Now we belong.” In chapter 2, we find out how Iraqis navigate through their economic discouragement and financial strain. I explore the relationship between societal belonging and the ability to find meaningful work. Iraqi youths had much to say about the meaning of economic success in the “money country,” fearing that preoccupation with money could tear families apart. By the time Iraqi families arrived in the Inland Empire, they were already fragmented—some children and siblings still in precarious exile in the Middle East, others building new lives in