What happens when you are no longer a refugee?
Today is #WorldRefugeeDay—which feels more like a marketing ploy by international “human rights” organizations to gather donations (that will likely pay the salaries of their staff, more than it will help actual refugees) than anything else.
Don’t get me wrong. At a time when Donald Trump is once again promising to round up undocumented immigrants, and Nigel Farage is gaining support ahead of the UK elections by promising to “stop the boats” and immediately deport asylum-seekers as foreign criminals, I think that it is unfortunately necessary to have initiatives that humanize refugees. At a time when genocide is being normalized and justified, there are worse things that you can be than a well-meaning organization jumping on a hashtag. But also, refugees shouldn’t need to be humanized because they are already human.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this word—refugee—and the way that I wish we would all just say “people who have had to flee their countries,” instead. But this would make it seem as if this experience can happen to anyone (it can). It wouldn’t allow us to create an us and a them, and for us to see them as “the other.”
But what happens when you are no longer a refugee? I will tell you a little story. I met my husband, Salem—the one that you all know and love from Love Across Borders, who makes fun of war journalists posing for flak jacket selfies for Tindr and writes his own lyrics to Britney Spears melodies—at a time when he was living in Turkey, did not have a passport, or even enough papers to open a bank account. Again, this was not a lifestyle choice—it was because he had just left Syria, which was (and still is) at war, and Turkey didn’t (and still doesn’t) want refugees—so made it difficult to start a life there.
I naively believed that this wouldn’t affect our lives at all—love conquers all!—but of course, I was wrong. I was a delightfully optimistic twenty-five year-old (she says, old and haggard at thirty-three).
Luckily he had managed to get a passport by the time he was kicked out of Turkey—through no fault of his own, this has now happened to hundreds, if not thousands of other Syrians and journalists have always been an easy target—which allowed us to both move to Iraq, the only country where we could live together. Why didn’t you just move to the United States, you ask me—Trump was President, had just passed the Muslim ban, and even if that weren’t the case, fiancé and spouse visas take a very long time to process, and when you’ve just been kicked out of the country that you were calling home, time is a thing that you do not have.
Time. This is a thing that most refugees do not have.
Our story took a bizarre and unexpected turn when he was granted a visa to the United Kingdom. Please keep in mind that this is only because, as we often joke, he is the bougiest kind of refugee that there is—he got a visa because he had made a film that was recognized at an awards ceremony. He claimed political asylum—and we finally had a country to call home.
Six years later, he was invited to a citizenship ceremony—one where he would be naturalized into a UK citizen. He received an email with a surprise—after this ceremony, you are no longer a refugee, you are a naturalized citizen. There were then instructions on how to destroy his residency permit.
Putting aside these words for a minute—naturalized, as if a previous state (often referred to as “alien”) is unnatural—what does it mean to “no longer be a refugee.” Do you change as a person? I am delighted to say that even though it is jarring to realize that I now have a British husband, he is still the same person. Papers do not change your identity. They do change your rights.
I also think that the experience of being a refugee is harder to shuck than the Home Office might make it out to be. Even though we obsessed over paperwork, and followed every rule that we could have and then some for six years, we still lived in fear of immigration coming and knocking on our door. Why? Because when you are separated by borders once, it no longer feels like an abstract threat—it is extraordinarily real, and feels as if it can happen at any moment, just as it does to hundreds of thousands of people.
I wrote an entire book about how this affects couples and families around the world (you should read it and give it to all of your friends who are experiencing immigration woes).
We obsessed over passports—the way that countries privilege citizens and make life deliberately more difficult for immigrants, the way that a passport affects how you are seen. Why could I be an expat, while he was a refugee, for example? If we were to have children—which is a big if, given our experiences of just how unstable the world can be—we would be obsessed with finding a way to give them as many passports as possible, “just in case.”
We are both aware that—even though it took six years, thousands of pounds and restarting our lives in a country where neither of us had any personal ties whatsoever—we had an extremely painless experience compared to most.
It feels strange to celebrate this momentous moment in our lives—and feel such enormous gratitude for the way that this country has adopted us—while covering an election while one of the political parties is literally gaining political power by shoving immigrants and asylum-seekers under the bus, where even the more traditionally left-wing parties prefer to create policies that keep people fleeing humanitarian disasters “in their home regions” and refuse to acknowledge that those regions are often also hostile, that this instability is often rooted in colonialism, that we—as in, those of us who come from powerful countries, who have powerful passports, who will likely not be made into refugees ourselves—have a responsibility that is larger than the whims of our humanitarian spirit.
I exhaustively researched the history of borders and immigration policies when I wrote Love Across Borders, hoping that it would help people reimagine a more open world, that put people first and allowed freedom of movement for everyone. Now, I don’t know what the future will look like, or if people in generations to come will even have the same opportunities which we had, which—though restrictive—were undeniably life-changing. I hope that they do—I hope that they experience a world that is more open and doesn’t allocate the right to move freely to some and not to others, where your life is not determined by the passports or papers that you were born with, or the ones that you are able to naturalize into by a stroke of fate and luck.
I hope that we can all experience a world where people are no longer punished for the choices that they had to make, where anyone can experience the freedom of traveling and the opportunities of a globalized world—and not just the privileged “expats” who are no more or less foreigners than anyone else living in a foreign land.
I hope #WorldRefugeeDay no longer has to be “a thing,” because refugees are just people who have had to leave home—and they’re treated as fairly and justly as everyone else.
Until then, may we all fight for a better world.
With love,
Anna