In the 239-year history of the United States, the closest this would-be nation has come to accomplishing that largely unfulfilled promise of immigration at Ellis Island is letting in the multitudes of Europeans who have arrived on its shores in several waves since the earliest decades of its founding. Like the Statue of Liberty itself, a gift  from one occidental community to another, most arrived in the United States with little more than the shirts on their backs as their sole worldly possession, but a path to possible acceptance and integration nevertheless.

Other would-be immigrants from elsewhere: the Orient, the non-western world, and nether regions have found the fabled “golden door” of America firmly shut to this promise.

Look no further for the evidence for this assertion than the uninformed, yet calculated statements of Donald Trump, the man who might easily become President of the United States were the presidential elections to be held today. In announcing his candidacy for the Republican nomination on June 16, 2015, Trump boldly declared to global media that “…when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best…they’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems…”

Is that not, in fact, the promise enshrined at the feet of Lady Liberty? If Trump’s inarticulate and rather unfortunate assertions had any element of truth in them, why should Mexico not send their worst when America, arguably the most prosperous country yet in the history of human civilization, boldly promises to welcome “…poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” and make better citizens out of them?  How does this country conceive of immigrants, and of the idea of freedom itself?

Opinion polls have since shown that Trump’s contemptuous attitude towards would-be immigrants is actually a pervasive sentiment across the contemporary American political landscape and within the cultural mainstream, one shared by many respondents in opinion polls around the country.

Trump’s claims were not only outrageous and divisive, they were also largely untrue. When most countries around the world today send their immigrants, Uncle Sam demands that only their brightest, their most talented and most diligent be allowed to remain.

Except for the State Department’s Refugee Admissions Program and the Diversity Immigrant Visa Lottery Program, current immigration laws of the United States demand that visa applicants and travelers demonstrate binding ties to their home countries such as property and family. It is expected that legal immigrants be educated with at least a high school diploma. Most of those who come through legal immigration channels, in fact, arrive with far more than that, comprising the upper echelon of society in their countries of origin.

Statistics from the United States Census Bureau  and Data from the Department of Homeland Security show that the more substantive percentage of immigrants to America are legal immigrants and not illegal immigrants, as falsely claimed by Trump and believed by most of his sycophantic followers.

From Silicon Valley to Wall Street, Fortune 500 companies and other major economic stakeholders are staffed with some of the most educated and talented immigrants anywhere in the world.

The denial of entry to those most in need is not exclusive to the United States. Across the Atlantic, the ignominy of the current immigration discourse in Europe is sadly similar to that championed by the far-right in America.

This summer has seen perhaps the highest mass transnational migration of human beings the world has seen this century. From the war in Syria, the post-Gadhafi instability in Libya, and the continuing political and economic crises in several parts of Asia, central and North Africa, refugees have fled by boats and land routes in desperate bids to reach the relative peace and stability of European shores. The Syrian refugee crisis alone has generated over 4 million refugees in neighboring countries, with over half of the country’s population displaced.

Their mass arrival in many parts of Europe has been met with scorn akin to that faced by the most outcast of minority groups in Europe, such as the Romani, have faced in their history of transmigration across Europe.

From train stations to open fields, refugees and migrants[1] have been left to perish in the elements while European politicians dither in deciding what to do about and with them. Only recent coverage of children’s bodies washing up on European shores and deaths of dozens of migrants on a truck in Austria have spurred enough outcry to generate a more organized response from the EU.

Ironically, the greatest migrants the world has ever known, Europeans, now refuse to countenance those caught in similar predicaments and circumstances as thousands of their ancestors.

From the revered Pilgrim Fathers who arrived in the so-called “New World” to Boer Trekkers in the Veldts of Southern Africa, Syrian, Asian, and North African migrants are now undertaking the same perilous journeys for similar reasons –religious freedom, economic opportunity and safety.

Everywhere they arrived across “new worlds,” from the Americas, through Africa, Asia, Australia to New Zealand, European migrants supplanted autochthones, transforming the very definition of citizenship in the process: If you brave oceans and arrive anywhere in the world, if you fancy your destination, if you plant roots and make it your own, you may belong and claim a place…but only if you are European!

Look no further for affirmation of this perverse doctrine of citizenship than the fates of native communities– Aborigines, Maoris, and Zulus, and Native Americans in the Americas, as they continue to fight for recognition in their native lands.

Yet, whereas the exploits of the Pilgrim Fathers or the European explorers are lauded as brave, intrepid and adventurous in historical accounts, those of the current boat migrants and refugees who are in similar circumstances are described as desperate, and even foolish, for jumping on rickety boats and risking all with their families to disturb the peace, tranquility, and  more critically the economies and narrowly defined national characters of Europe. The regard for the quality of an endeavor, and the humanization of those involved, still depends on the place of origin of the subjects in question.

The hypocrisy of “open borders” is unfathomable when you contrast how migrants have been treated in the summer of 2015 with discourses of global trade and economic exchange. “Globalization is inevitable!” “To trade…everyone!” “Open borders!” Weaker countries in the developing world are constantly harassed, bullied, humiliated and reprimanded by the World Trade Organization, the European Union and other hegemons of neoliberal reforms to open their borders to global trade, as long as their people always stay inside those borders.

Had Cecil the Lion’s murderer been denied a visa to enter Zimbabwe, you can bet your last dollar that the State Department would have been furious at the Zimbabwe government for being foolish and petulant over a “few travel bans” on Zimbabwean authorities for “human rights violations.”

As soon as conflicts erupt or are instigated through the interventions of European powers or their American counterparts in the postcolonies, however, those same advocates of the “free movement” of (European?) people and goods change their tone and cry out for their borders to be closed. “Keep the hordes at bay,” they weep, “lest Europe collapses under the weight of the problems they bring with them.”

Thus, we now have arrived at another shameful milestone in the history of the human community. Future conflicts will be deadlier precisely because belligerents will be reassured by the fact that the Europeans and Americans who have long dominated the economic and political landscape will stand by and do nothing as countries are ravaged and civilians displaced. They also know no one will directly intervene to stop them and, more disturbingly, they know Europeans will promptly shut their borders to innocents trying to flee the atrocities.

On Wednesday, September 2, 2015, body of a dead boy washed up on the beach of a popular tourist destination in Turkey. Only in death was the boy recognized as a human child in crisis. There cannot be a more symbolic reminder of the world’s failure to offer refuge to those who seek it, just as Pilgrim Fathers once sought refuge from their oppressors in Europe. The boy was found face down in the sand as if the innocence of his young life that was prematurely extinguished had proclaimed a big “shame on you Europe…I have left your world for a much better place!”

The post Braving Oceans: Migration and Subjective “Illegality” from the Pilgrim Fathers to Boat Migrants appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

There’s no never-again ending to their stories of displacement: From Congo to Burundi, from Iraq to Syria, From Darfur to Tripoli to Tunis, to New Haven.  They’ve had to flee persecution on foot, by boat, by air, moving under duress with the traumas of forced migration.  They are walking with scars, and yet they are marching, in protest of yet more violence near their new homes in Connecticut.  The struggle for justice can be as hard as trying to march on crutches. But every hop-step we take with another is a movement towards solidarity.

…

Last spring, sitting beside an Afghani grandmother whose name means Moon in Farsi at the Criterion Cinema, I got a taste of the beloved community Martin Luther King, Jr. envisioned.  Moon and I were among a group of IRIS clients and volunteers who went to a screening of “Girl Rising,” a documentary film about nine young women who were deprived of a basic education in their home countries.  It was Moon’s first American movie. She only speaks a few words of English.  When the tub of butter popcorn came around to her, she took a handful and then dropped the kernels in the cone shape she’d made of the movie flyer, a small, make-shift tub of her own—I should say our own.  Every few minutes, she would look at me and smile, pushing the cone-tub of popcorn towards me, saying khosh, khosh. I was not hungry, but I took the popcorn. I don’t know a word of Farsi, but I could tell khosh, khosh, means something like “Take, Eat.”

The following week, Moon came to participate in a cooking group for refugee women to pool their culinary skills using Connecticut Food Bank Food to prepare a meal to share together.

The food-bank item most left behind in the IRIS pantry, the iron-chef secret ingredient of the week, was artichokes.  “Ard shawqy,” a woman I’ll call Zeinab said, Arabic for “thorn of the earth,” I recognized.  I’d never learned the word for artichoke before.  But I’d learned earth, and I’d learned thorn, from my Uncle Latif, my dad’s brother, who taught me how to speak Arabic.

“Ma feesh ard shawqy fiy Eritrea, mish kidda?”  (“There are no artichokes in Eritrea, right?) I asked a woman I’ll call Aamina, one of the few Eritrean refugees with whom I can communicate.  I don’t speak a word of Tigrinya, but Aamina speaks the Arabic dialect most familiar to me: She lived in Sudan for nine years, and Sudanese Arabic sounds much like the Upper Egyptian accent of my dad’s side of the family.

Talking to Aamina is like going back to a place where I was from, a home that never was my home, in a language foreign and yet strangely native to me.  Talking thorns of the earth with Aamina is an inkling of what I imagine speaking phrases in Tigrinya must be like for her.  Though my experience growing up with an Egyptian father in an affluent suburb of Birmingham, Alabama is not comparable to Aamina’s coming of age as a refugee in Sudan, our disparate stories converge in the guttural cadences, the slang phrases, of the dialect we half know by heart.

“Aiwa, bas fiyha fiy Malta,” she told me, they have [artichokes] in Malta. It was the artichokes that got Aamina telling her migration story.  She’d spent her first nine years in Eritrea, the next nine in Sudan.  Then, like many Eritrean refugees, she crossed the desert by jeep to get to Libya.  From Tripoli, she took a boat to Malta.

We took a walk with Zeinab through the irises, opening wider by the day, in the garden outside the church kitchen we use for cooking group.  I saw a loose, half-built, empty bird’s nest in the crook of the limbs of small dogwood tree, and I took a few pictures with my phone.  Zeinab looked up, to the place higher in the tree where the sound of a bird was coming from.  “We can hear her, but we cannot see her,” she said.

Aamina was exploring another tree. “Shufty!,” she said, “Look! Beit al asfoor, house of the birds,” she said, showing me a complete nest holding three blue robin’s eggs.

I remembered, from my days of learning Arabic with my Uncle Latif in Alexandria, the root word for bird, safara, means to travel, journey.  My father, aunts and uncles have all passed away.  That day, Aamina and Zeinab helped me remember them. That day, we had journeyed from thorns of the earth to house of the birds.

We could have sat out there under the dogwood trees all day, but we were called inside.  It was time to eat.  The feast had been laid out on the table: spinach-potato latkes, cabbage-apple slaw, a cake and muffins made of the canned carrots that always get left behind in the food pantry.

On her way up the stairs, to the kitchen, I heard Moon whispering with each and every step, gingerly, B’ism allah al-rahman, al-raheem, “in the name of God, the most merciful, the most compassionate” the beginning of every Muslim prayer.

While the women were serving themselves, one of my fellow volunteers was putting the muffins she’d baked in Zip-lock bags for the ladies to take home to their families.  She was cutting the cake she’d made with the same batter, saying “Here, we eat from the same cake.”

We didn’t know what to do with the fennel leaves, so Zeinab put them in a vase of water at the center of the table next to a white flower Moon had improvised out of paper towels.  Our grace that day was B’ismallah ya rahman ya raheem, Amen.

IRIS Community Liaison Ashley Makar shares stories about refugees in her presentations to congregations and community groups. This piece is an excerpt of a sermon entitled “Making the Shapes of Justice,” which was published in full on the website of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Hartford: http://www.ushartford.com/sermons.html.

The post Refugees, Language, Family, and Cooking: Sermon Excerpt by Ashley Makar appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

This piece is part of a continuing series in which The Postcolonialist seeks to highlight and engage issues of refugee status, conflict, and asylum.

As the conflict in Syria rages on and the refugee crisis deepens, media outlets and governments alike risk becoming inured to the massive scale of the resulting humanitarian crisis. Yet, even as it continues to be greatly difficult to access reliable reporting on Syria—the dangers are great for journalists, and few are able to enter the country—social media has provided continuous coverage of the indiscriminate loss of life and scope of the displacements, one tweet, Facebook post, and Instagram image at a time. The role of social media as both a source of news and as a tool of advocacy has facilitated the steady and quick diffusion of conflictive and simultaneous narratives. Social media platforms have functioned as real-time sources of event notification, as well as digital archives and keepers of memory.

The complex and fragmented narratives on Syria sustained through social media allow an immense amount of public access to and participation in the chronicling of history. Yet they are also capable of abstracting events from their human context and consequences. The volume of concurrent (re)tellings and the circulation of innumerable horrific images of violence and death have paradoxically insisted upon an awareness of happenings, while also allowing a detachment from the Syrian people most affected, among them the many children left orphaned or hungry in refugee camps.

Syrian-American painter Kinda Hibrawi, co-founder of the Zeitouna Program for Displaced Syrian Children, which works with children at the Syrian-Turkish border as well as at refugee camps and schools within Syria, has witnessed the needs of youth in conflict situations. As a result, she has undertaken a series of Twitter portraits that seek to reconcile fragmented narratives with a complex and humanized lived reality. Ms. Hibrawi has begun a painting series that deploys the multiplicity of texts on events in Syria, using Twitter posts as a visual backdrop for the carefully crafted visages of real children residing in refugee camps. Each canvas recalls the site of a particular massacre (Ghouta, Houla) and overlays words with the face of a child gazing directly at the viewer. Hibrawi creates powerful text-images that highlight the quotidian nature of these events for the children of Syria, who must constantly negotiate the lives they once knew with the world they now inhabit.

Kinda Hibrawi is currently working on her next Twitter memorial portrait, based on the Qubeir Massacre outside the city of Hama.

The post Seeing Syria: Kinda Hibrawi’s Twitter Portraits appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Last December, we visited the Turkish town of Reyhanli, close to the Syrian border, to volunteer at a local Syrian school for refugee children with the Karam Foundation’s Zeitouna programme. Many of the children had been displaced as a result of the Assad regime’s repression after an initially peaceful revolution. The escalation of violence meant many families had to seek refuge across the border in Turkey.

When you cross over into the Atmeh refugee camp just within the Syrian border you are crossing into another world. It is a world of mud and despair peppered with a few specks of hope. There is bitterness, and people quickly shout at us, telling us to stop taking pictures, to bring blankets and heating gas instead. We pick our way through what is the main thoroughfare, a thoroughfare that had only recently had members of ISIL driving up, who would surely have taken exception to expat Syrians wandering freely through the camp and mixing with the inhabitants. Atmeh had, on the day of our visit, about twenty five thousand cold, hungry and desperate souls encamped within its olive groves.

As we walked past a makeshift clinic we came across a long queue of children holding buckets. This was the central kitchen where food was prepared once a day with whatever food was in their stores. We were yelled at and told to wash our shoes with water. It wouldn’t do to bring the mud of the camp in there. An apologetic supervisor explained to us that it had taken a long time to try and bring up hygiene standards in the kitchen, and we watched as the cooks prepared a gruel of some sort in half a dozen large vats. The children were still jostling outside when we walked out, and a man who stood guard outside had to yell at them to stand back. The mud sucked gratefully at our shoes as we returned to its fold.

This was my first time back in Syria since before the revolution, even if I was only less than a hundred meters past the border. My two companions had been there six months before, but it had been easier then, before the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) had started to overrun the border areas. The Atmeh crossing is an unofficial crossing where people can ferry back and forth using a rudimentary microbus system that seems to go through based on the whims of the commanding officer at the Turkish guard post.

In their last visit my companions had taken pictures of some of the children in what had been called the School of Return. The School had now been moved out of the tents where it was held previously into a rudimentary set of rooms that one could almost have mistaken for stables, were it not for the sign that declared it to be the School of Wisdom. Its central muddy courtyard sloped and lacked proper drainage. If rains fell the lower level, classes would flood. This was the harsh world that the children of the Atmeh camp had to endure.

Photo Credit:  © Mohamad Ojjeh, 2013 (Syria)

Remarkably, and in spite of the material hardships, life has found a way to carry on. There was a butcher, a green grocer, and a man who had opened a “supermarket” which consisted of a tent and a square cut in the side through which people can buy the merchandise on offer. There was a “fast food” shop proprietor selling soft drinks who had shrewdly invested in a bit of marketing by throwing a morsel of fat onto the hot coals. The sizzling sound and the smokey flavour of barbequed meat floated past us, giving a surreal impression of normalcy for what was anything but. In one small brick shop a barber busily plied his trade. Life also carried on for the children. On his previous visit, one of my companions had taken pictures of several children in the camp, and as he proceeded to take more pictures he was angrily rebuked, “No more pictures. We are tired of pictures. We are dying of the cold!” But thankfully these protests quickly died out as we were mobbed by the cries of children asking to be photographed. It was the simple, innocent curiosity of children who, in spite of spending over a year in such conditions, still felt it a novelty to have their picture taken. And my colleague had thought of that. Since his last visit he had printed out the pictures of dozens of the children he had met previously, and we walked around the camp seeking them out, asking our guides if they knew who such and such a person was. Often it was the groups of children themselves who would recognize their friends, and who would helpfully lead us to their parents’ tents.

When we arrived at the tents we were entreated to stay and join the tenants for tea, with many inhabitants even insisting that we join them for dinner or stay the night. We experienced a remarkable hospitality that stood in sharp contrast to the wretched conditions of the hosts. We politely declined and moved on after sipping our tea. During this visit, I saw a child with some kind of scarring over her nose. Surely, I thought, this isn’t the leishmaniasis I had read about? It was, and the girl I saw it on was one of the lucky children who was being treated. It’s worse the deeper you go inside, we were told. Deeper, I thought. It sounded like they were referring to some terrible and dark place, a jungle, or maybe something like in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. And always there was the mention of ISIL, in hushed and fearful tones. In my mind’s eye I saw our little group being surprised by them, taken calmly somewhere and shot or perhaps beheaded. It gave the whole visit an underlying rawness and reality. It was only as we left the camp that I noted with some irony that fear of the regime was the last thing on anybody’s mind.

Earlier, as we had stood by the camp soup kitchen, I had noticed a pretty blonde girl with a pony talking and wearing a black baseball cap bearing an Islamic creed of faith, the Islamic Front’s logo, emblazoned on its front. We had also seen a jeep marked with the Islamic Front drive down the muddy thoroughfare as we entered the camp. The girl had been staring vacantly, her mind elsewhere, when she noticed me smiling at her. In an instant her face lit up in a toothy smile that melted my heart. My colleagues had been busy talking with children and asking about the pictures. Later I met her with her friends as they asked us who we were and where we had come from. They didn’t go to school, they told me, but intended to enroll in the “new school,” the School of Wisdom with the muddy courtyard and the classes that flooded when it rained. As we chatted a man drove up the thoroughfare with a pickup truck. He was selling lettuce and cried out, calling for people to buy. A gang of children had already gathered, and I watched silently as they picked the errant remnants of his produce. Sometimes they would pick it out of the mud and munch on it hungrily. There were no fat children in Atmeh.

When my colleague finally found a child or children he had photographed, all the other children would gather around, chattering away or squealing with excitement. “Is that what I look like?” asked one of the girls. It then struck us that even something as mundane as a mirror would probably be a luxury for most of the people in this camp. The young girl probably hadn’t even seen what she looks like since arriving. Perhaps that was a good thing, that they could not see the utter hopelessness of their situation. Their parents, however, saw it, and one man who was wondering what the fuss was about came over to see if we were distributing anything useful. He sucked through his teeth and nodded indifferently. “Pictures?” he said, and gave a look of disgust. “That’s no good to anybody.” But for the children it meant the world, specks of hope floating amidst the misery.

The post A Day in Atmeh: Reflections and Images from Syria appeared first on The Postcolonialist.