Keep being a refuge, America
When my grandpa began his long journey from Baghdad to New York in December 1945, he said goodbye to his home country of Iraq and the life he had known until the age of 18. And while he knew it would likely be a long time before he would be able to return, even he couldn’t imagine just how long that return would be delayed.
No one in my family set foot in Iraq in the 73 years since my grandfather left — until last month, when I had the chance to return to my family’s home. Returning to Iraq was a powerful, emotional experience, not just because it reestablished my relationship with the country we left, but also because it reiterated my appreciation for the country and the city that provided refuge to my family when we needed it the most.
My family called Iraq home for centuries and was part of the large Iraqi-Jewish community which comprised 40% of Baghdad’s population by 1917. But things rapidly deteriorated for the country’s Jewish community as anti-Jewish violence grew. The Farhud, an anti-Jewish pogrom in 1941 that ransacked Jewish homes and killed several hundred Jews in Baghdad, persuaded my grandmother’s family to flee Iraq. Four years later, my grandfather sought refuge in America on an academic scholarship.
My grandparents were part of the first wave of Jews to leave Iraq, but by the early 1970s, nearly every single Iraqi Jew had fled the country. Several thousand members of this historic community ended up in New York City, including my grandparents.
As refugees in a foreign land, my grandparents felt apprehensive in their new home, but the open embrace offered by the United States and New York allowed them to thrive. My grandpa received his Ph.D. from MIT and went on to become a nuclear physicist. My grandma sang opera and later became a small-business owner. Soon after they moved to White Plains in Westchester County and gave birth to three children, including my father, Daniel.
Since my family left Iraq in the 1940s, the country has been through seemingly endless waves of turmoil, violence and misfortune. Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party executed, tortured, gassed and repressed millions of Iraqis, with a particular level of brutality reserved for the Kurds. The U.S. invasion in 2003 unleashed its own wave of violence, culminating most recently with the rise of ISIS, which inflicted unspeakable atrocities on Iraqi communities.
On the last day of my trip to Iraq, as I was standing amid the destruction of west Mosul, I couldn’t help but think that the trauma and violence Iraqis have endured for the past several decades could have easily been my life had my grandparents not found refuge in the U.S.
We were lucky to escape, and for that I will forever be grateful for the courage of my grandmother and my grandfather, but also for the humanity of the United States.
Now that lifeline offered to me and my family is rapidly fraying for so many others. The longstanding tradition of American refuge is under attack by the Trump administration. U.S. refugee resettlement is down 73% from last year, which was also a shockingly low year for admissions, and just 21,292 refugees are projected to be resettled this year.
Particularly striking has been the effect of the Trump administration’s policies on Iraqis like my family. Last year, 6,886 Iraqis were resettled in the United States. This year the number is likely to be less than 200. Had my grandparents sought refuge last year, they would have been among those blocked by the administration’s travel ban, which targeted seven Muslim-majority countries. In New York — where the Statue of Liberty has greeted tired, huddled masses yearning to breathe free for 132 years — the number of Iraqis resettled has dropped from 226 last year to just one since October.
But the losses caused by this administration’s strangulation of the U.S. refugee resettlement program cannot be measured by numbers alone. For families like mine, refuge has proven the difference between a safe, happy life in America and the horrors inflicted on civilians by despots, terrorists and foreign militaries.
How many families have now lost that chance to escape?
My family includes nuclear physicists, small-business owners, teachers, accountants, artists and humanitarians — and I’d like to think we have repaid the welcome offered to us by our country many times over by our contributions to society.
My grandfather loved his homeland of Iraq. I grew up hearing many stories of his life in Baghdad, living just off the lively al Rasheed St., learning to swim in the Tigris River, eating masgouf at their home. But he was also an intensely patriotic American. He loved his adopted home because it welcomed him when he was vulnerable and embraced him as an Iraqi, a Jew and an American all at once.
He never forgot the power of American refuge in his life, and he made sure I understood just how lucky we were to be in this country. My only hope is that America doesn’t forget the power of its own refuge either.