Event Response 2: Mother of Exiles

Mae Ngai, an American historian, spoke about refugees in America and the myth that surrounds them. American stance on refugees and immigrants is encircled by a myth like the one that surrounds the founding fathers we talked about in class. The narrative we tell in history classes about the founding fathers is one of humble beginnings and extraordinary success. We do not hear of the slaves they owned, their refusal to grant all humans rights, the lack of flexibility the system has upheld beyond those eight men. A similar narrative reigns true for refugees. Professor Ngai summarized the narrative by the poem on the base of the Statue of Liberty. “The Colossus” poem suggests that a part of American’s foundation is immigrants and that not only would one find liberty in America, but also refuge. That myth defines the surface of our nation’s immigrant and refugee policies, but Professor Ngai went on in her speech to share staggering statistics about refugees in the US and around the world.

First and foremost, she put a crack in the foundation of the founding fathers. The Second Amendment went into the constitution to protect the vast diversity of religions in the new colonies. But in fact, in the beginning, each state still held their own policy and affiliation with a certain religion. The mythical utopia of diverse religions isn’t true. Then, globally the first policies to support refugees stated, and still do, that any person has the right to exit a country but holds no formal right to enter another. That policy is paradoxical. I believe as a result to this foundational declaration, there are 71.44 million “persons of concern” across the world. Most of these people are internally displaced, and refugees and that number does not include the 5 million people currently displaced in and near Pakistan. Only 1% of the world’s refugees are resettled. The rest remain in camps or are temporarily hosted in countries. One refugee camp has now hosted three decades of Somalian refugees. Professor Ngai emphasized that this is not an issue to be discussed country by country, but as the Geneva Convention on Refugees in 1951 states, a problem that is international. Yet, the US is accepting less and less refugees and asylum seekers as the total number of these people rises. The facts break the myth that begins at the base of the Statue of Liberty.