The Ungrateful Refugee

by Dina Nayeri

We had created our life’s great story; next would come the waiting time, camp, where we would tell it. Then struggle for asylum, when we would craft it. Then assimilation into new lives, when we would perform it for the entertainment of the native-born, and finally, maybe in our old age, we would return to it, face it without frenzy: a repatriation.

Unlike economic migrants, refugees have no agency; they are no threat. Often, they are so broken, they beg to be remade into the image of the native. As recipients of magnanimity, they can be pitied. I was a palatable immigrant because I programmed myself with chants: I am rescued cargo. I will prove, repay, transform. But if you are born in the Third World, and you dare to make a move before you are shattered, your dreams are suspicious. You are a carpetbagger, an opportunist, a thief. You are reaching above your station.

What is hell enough for the West to feel responsible, not just as perpetrators of much of the madness, but as primary beneficiaries of the planet’s bounty, who sit behind screens watching, suspicious and limp-fisted, as strangers suffer?

As for volunteers, even the most good-hearted want to feel thanked. They have come for that silent look of admiration that’s free to most, but so costly if you’re tapped for gratitude by everyone you meet.

Accepting charity is an ugly business for the spirit. It rubs you raw, especially if you were once someone with pride and lofty goals, someone who shook hands and locked eyes.

But I do know why I’m here—I’ve come because the world is turning its back on refugees, because America is no longer America and Europe is going the same way: these once-Christian nations have abandoned duty in favor of entitlement and tribal instinct.

For centuries, the civilized world has respected “the right of asylum.” It is an ancient juridical concept recognizing the right of the imperiled to sanctuary. Historically, whatever criticisms arise, every Western government has respected and understood this principle—until now.

How do you make your true story the “right” kind of true? If your listener already has far greater lies embedded into their worldview, then the only way to sneak the truth into their mind is covertly, like sneaking medicine into a child’s food. Perhaps this is why Christ spoke in parables.

George Orwell warned that the most common way we lie isn’t with stories but with words, which we twist to suit our purposes.

And here is the biggest lie in the refugee crisis. It isn’t the faulty individual stories. It is the language of disaster often used to describe incoming refugees—deluge or flood or swarm. These words are lies.

Nativist fury, not an exile’s pleas for rescue, is the irrational spectacle, the unearned reaction, in today’s refugee narrative.

New immigrants are lonely and cautious. And refugees arrive traumatized. Every last one, even the happiest, is broken in places. They won’t always behave deservingly. Many suffer from shame, notions of inferiority. They are prone to embracing the very racism and classism that most harms them. They want to believe that the systems are fair, that they can earn their way into the good graces of the well-placed white man. They need friendship, not salvation. They need the dignity of becoming an essential part of a society. They have been so often on the receiving end of charity that when faced with someone else’s need, their generosity and skill shines. Now and then, they will fall short, their wounds will open, they will have too many needs. You might misstep and cause harm. That is better than drawing a thick line around them. In life, people disappoint each other. Messes are made. The only way to avoid pain is to distance yourself, to look down at them from the rescuer’s perch. But that denies them what they most urgently need: to be useful. To belong to a place.

But there is help, waves of kindness spilling through the cracks of the day. People are generous, longing to plunge in with their fellow men.

We need each other to make a community—the immigrant can’t transform by sheer will.

A lasting, progressive kind of assimilation requires reciprocation. It is mutual and humble and intertwined with multiculturalism, never at odds with it. It is about allowing newcomers to affect you on your native soil, to change you.

Our shame has helped create a cynical, sedated world wherein being a fully realized human is the privilege of whites, Christians, and the native-born.

I wish I had held back the tears; the pastor misread them. He hurried over to apologize. I was too young and inarticulate to explain that it didn’t matter. Yes, I had wanted that letter, but Baba had disappointed me before, and there would be other letters. I was moved by the image of the pastor on the bench, wringing his hands. After years of daily calibrations—one day I belonged to someone or someplace, the next day I didn’t—I knew I could eventually earn my place in America, but I never expected to register in the emotional calculus of an American adult. I didn’t have that kind of power. Was his swaying for my sake? Now, years later, I remember how much he cared, how the possibility of hurting me affected him. How, as an insecure teenager, I marveled at that and thought better of myself. Here was someone who wasn’t pretending to want me around. What a thing, to be loved by a stranger, to have a stranger bother to meddle in your life.

In conversations about the refugee crisis, educated people continue to make the barbaric argument that open doors will benefit the host nation. The time for this outdated colonialist argument has run out; migrants don’t derive their value from their benefit to the Western-born, and civilized people don’t ask for résumés from the edge of the grave. Achebe said, in 1988, “I do not see that it is necessary for any people to prove to another that they built cathedrals or pyramids before they can be entitled to peace and safety.

Gratitude is a fact of a refugee’s inner life; it doesn’t need to be compelled. Every day after rescue pulses with thanks. My gratitude is personal and vast and it steers my every footfall. But it is mine. I no longer need to offer it as appeasement to citizens who had nothing to do with my rescue.

We drift from the safe places of our childhood. There is no going back. Like stories, villages and cities are always growing or fading or melding into each other. We are all immigrants from the past, and home lives inside the memory, where we lock it up and pretend it is unchanged.