Rehabilitating the Iraqi Diaspora Should Be a US Priority

Too long the US has been asking the question, "Am I My Brother's Keeper?" when it comes to Iraqi refugees.

This morning's article in the New York Times about the vanishing Iraqi middle class, now mostly in diaspora and impoverished in neighboring countries, reveals the extent of our blunder and the depth of our transgression against the Iraqi people. Without a civically active middle class to help the country rebuild, a troop surge will prove futile for providing any lasting stability.

It is clear from the article that as the war trudges on, Iraqi refugees grow more and more desperate. Even Jordan has closed its doors to the tide of immigration. While diaspora communities usually maintain ties and send money home to their sending countries, this is not possible for the majority of Iraqis fleeing the war. Lacking any plan for the rebuilding of Iraq, the US should have recognized its responsibility to rehabilitate and shelter Iraqi refugees long ago. Doing so would not only have been the humane thing to do, but would have also been a way to invest in a segment of the population that could provide leadership and resources to the country.

The Times reports, "The United States promised to increase the number of Iraqi refugees it takes, and the United Nations has referred 9,100 Iraqis to it this year. But so far fewer than 200 have arrived, according to the State Department. Several hundred more are expected to arrive in the coming weeks." I would like to be optimistic that we are going to follow through on our promise, and that it won't be too little, too late.

Our Borders, Ourselves, and Our Classrooms

With the passage of the Secure Fence Act in 2006 calling for the construction of 700 miles of fence along the US-Mexico border, it seems like national boundaries are more real than ever. Yet some scholars have been arguing for a while that globalization has rendered national boundaries obsolete. From an economic perspective this is true, with many transnational corporations acting as essentially stateless entities. From a religious perspective this is also true, as Diana Eck underscores in her book, A New Religious America. Religion has indeed broken out of the box, making it seem weird to call Hinduism, Sikhism, or Buddhism “world” religions, since they are right here at home.

There are spiritual aspects to the boundary issues in the 21st century, as they deal intimately with our identities, our communities and our schools. Akhil Gupta, anthropologist at Stanford University argued nearly two decades ago (1993) that we must recognize that cultures are no longer bound to geographic locations in our postmodern world. With cultures being in flux, our identities are in flux as well, especially for immigrant students and students who do not fit easily into constructed demographic and cultural categories.

How we teach about cultures and understand our students' identities is important, and requires the breaking of old models. Gupta pinpoints “multiculturalism” as a flawed and shallow concept that does more to promote national myth (America as the “Melting Pot,” for example) than actually raise cultural literacy. I agree, and believe that multicultural education as generally practiced in public schools in the last decades has failed in 1) not giving students the tools to become aware of cultural assumptions and biases 2) celebrating cariacatures of cultures, rather than educating about cultural complexities, 3) not promoting religious literacy, and 4) not changing that most schools still propagate the belief that white American culture is what is "normal."

Gupta would likely say that the US-Mexico border fence is a concrete manifestation of our postmodern anxieties of feeling fragmented, rootless, and culturally invaded. This seems true. And as much as it may be packaged as a crisis of “national security,” the anti-immigration sentiment in our country today feels more like a crisis of meaning and identity with a spiritual dimension. For teachers who are capable of the challenge, the time for discussing borders, communities and identities in the classroom has never been better.