my*gration

Artful

Here's a story you might like:

During the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, many Persians who had reason for concern about their own safety under the incoming regime fled to the U.S. Many of these were wealthy or secular, and many of these had been supporters of Muhammed Reza Shah Pahlavi. In fact, historians have later said that President Carter's offer of refuge to the Shah, who had ruled the country with arbitrary brutality since his near ouster and return to power in 1953, may have been responsible for antagonizing an already inflamed people, prompting the Nov. 4, 1979 hostage crisis. The militants who held 52 Americans in the US Embassy in Tehran until Jan. 1981, it has been said, feared US involvement would return the Shah to power again, as it had in 1953. (Find a concise breakdown of Iranian history here).

In Southern California, from one city in a polluted basin ringed by hot, dry hills, to another, fleeing Iranians moved to what has come to be known as "Tehrangeles" or "Irangeles". In the glittering swath of land between Brentwood and Beverly Hills, some of the world's most valuable real estate, lives the largest Iranian population outside of Iran, beautifully described in Tara Bahrampour's "Persia on the Pacific".

On Sunset Boulevard, where wealth to the point of tackiness collides with snobbery to the point of bitchiness on a daily basis, one wealthy Iranian man bought himself a fancy fancy mansion. This mansion sits on a sweeping, lovely property, which is enclosed with a high wall. Such prisons are not meant to be aesthetically displeasing, so the wall is decorated, at regular intervals, with miniature nudes, statuettes reminiscient of early Greek art. The wealthy Iranian man who bought the home thought it shameful the way his Mediterranean brothers had left the figures naked and exposed to the prying eyes of the world, so he decided that he should remedy the situation.

So the guy bought wigs and outfits for each of the nude statuettes decorating the high wall surrounding his wealthy property.

Reverberations: or how policy change impacts society in unforseeable ways

A coupla days ago, NPR's Marketplace aired a story called "The Surprising Legacy of Y2K". Although most of us remember how much money and panic was invested into IT preparedness for the change of the millennium, we figure that story ended when the ball dropped, no major economic crisis happened, and everything went on as usual. In this piece, producer Chris Farrell looks at the many unexpected costs and impacts of the Y2K.

Offshoring and outsourcing of IT projects started with Y2K, when armies of programmers and tech geeks were called up to service from India's IT boot camps. They were a low-cost, quick solution - trained reserves of computer professionals who would work for less. And, as Farrell puts it, "That temporary solution has permanently changed the global economy."

Now I'm not going to get into a whole discussion about the costs or benefits, myths or threats, virtues or drawbacks of IT outsourcing. The debate is long and exhaustive - I think economist and political scientist Daniel Drezner's article in the May/June 04 Foreign Affairs, "The Outsourcing Bogeyman" is illuminating. Also illuminating is how little talk of outsourcing we hear since the election ended.

The Farrell piece is interesting enough. But after I heard it, I got to thinking, and here's what grabbed me:

The demographics, economy, and culture (in that order) of entire regions in this country have changed because of Y2K and the scores of Indian tech geeks it brought here. Like many of the 21st century's new Americans, Indian immigrants have largely skipped the urban stop on the immigration line and headed straight for the suburbs, bringing their consumer interests with them. Throughout suburban America, Indian restaurants, grocery stores, Bollywood CD/DVD rentals, and electronics stores have opened. California's Bay Area, northern Virginia, greater Houston, and New Jersey (to name a few) feature suburban towns with visible ethnic boundaries. These are not just Indian, but Asian, Central Asian, Arab (again, to name a few). For example, a well-off, socially and politically active Uzbek community is thriving in Parsippany, NJ - and New York City, with it's huge Russian, Ukrainian, and Bukharan (Uzbek Jews) communities, has virtually no Uzbek immigrants.

It's a whole new era, folks. Immigrant neighborhoods in the cities? Old hat. They're still there, don't get me wrong. But the immigrants with the real national power, the social capital and drive to form lobbies and exert political influence - they're all in the suburbs. And they want their stores where they can get to them, where they can park their fancy SUV's, where they can stop off for a quick ingredient or DVD on their way to pick up their kids from their extracurricular activity of the day. While this means that the rift between urban and suburban, affluent and low-income (though let's make it clear that these are not one and the same) Indian-America is dividing, it also means that means that Indians are no longer interested in assimilating, or "passing" for American (ie: Caucasian middle class). For an interesting portrait of Indo-American Suburbia, check out Suburban Sahibs.

Combine the Indian immigrant presence with the Indian pop cultural presence (yoga, Indo-British pop music and movies, Bollywood ditto), along with pan-South Asian political mobilization, and you have a more visible Indian minority in this country than ever before.

When I was growing up in North Carolina, it was not unusual for people to ask me if I was Cherokee when I said I was Indian. Now, my brother lives outside of Charlotte, and his yoga practice is a thriving, daily expanding enterprise. One of the most popular restaurants in Winston-Salem, the town I was born in, is an Indian restaurant. This is a change that has taken place, not just in my lifetime, but well within the last decade. Is it all because of Y2K? Probably not - a confluence of economic, political, and cultural trends made us visible - but it certainly is worth thinking about its influence.

The Levels of Free Will

Happy, healthy 2005. Been a little slow to post these days - news of the tsunamis in Asia had me thinking, hoping that the eye of sudden compassion outlasts the devastation of natural disaster. Victims of manmade violence - poverty, instability, incessant conflict - are many and invisible. Sad fact: the places worst pounded by these tidal waves (Sri Lanka, Aceh) are sites of protracted war and economic weakness. Even as landmines impede relief efforts in Sri Lanka, efforts to remove landmines in other places stall. Hoping for more foresight on the part of our policymakers this year.

On another note: I've been thinking more about all the factors driving individual decisionmaking and personal circumstance. Sure, we all face choices. What informs our decisions?

A friend of mine is working with a UN agency to develop an analytical framework for international development researchers and policymakers to understand the relationship between gender and poverty in any developing country. This ambitious undertaking aims at providing one model that accounts for economic, cultural, governmental, geopolitical, and individual factors in assessing what is keeping women in poverty throughout the world.

In the course of her research, my friend came across a study on women in Kuwait, which showed that wealthy, elite women had the same high birthrates as poor, illiterate women. The study showed that elite women were encouraged to have large families by cultural norms (large families are a status sign) and economic supports (in addition to cheap, foreign domestic help, many women receive financial incentives from the government to have children). One reason the study gives for the government to give these financial incentives is that Kuwait is interested in boosting its population size to assert its presence in the region.

Of course, if you were to say that geopolitical demographic concerns drive a woman's decision to have a baby, you'd sound like a nut job, but taken from this perspective, this is a true statement.

Something to chew on.

Crossing Over

Last night, I crossed through the infamous Kalandia Checkpoint, halfway between Jerusalem and Ramallah. To either side of the checkpoint, surrounded by lengths of barbed wire and swathed in darkness, lies the Kalandia camp, populated with nearly 10,000 refugees who fled the 1948 war that led to the creation of the state of Israel. The road leading to the checkpoint is ravaged and bumpy torn up from the construction of the nearly completed West Bank Security wall. The wall is tall and cement, as thick and nearly as long as the Berlin Wall was. On the lane leading out of the West Bank into Israeli territory, a long line of cars and trucks wait, some with their engines idling, others with their cars turned off, as young soldiers slowly let them through. But on the lane leading into Ramallah, we must only pass through a turnstile, like we're entering a carnival ride. Just on the other side of the checkpoint, there are makeshift kiosks, what the locals affectionately call their "Duty-Free Shops", selling sweets and cheap toys.

People in Ramallah, which came under the control of the Palestinian Authority during the 1993 Oslo Accords, live literally in a city on a hill. The city has experienced occasional curfews and riots, regular strikes, and high scrutiny from the Tel Aviv government, which in March 2002 invaded and bulldozed Yassir Arafat's Mukataa compound. But what I see is a thriving, thronging city full of coffee shops, internet parlors, boutiques, crowded open-air markets and traffic, whose air is saturated with the aroma of dates, arabic coffee, and exhaust. In short, any Arab city on the eve of Ramadan. Inside the cafes, those who won't be fasting discuss lunching options with greater fervor than they do the war in Gaza. Local newspapers, they say, announced that it would be prohibited for restaurants to open before 4 pm. Restauranteurs. Tonight, the restaurants and bars are crowded with youth (who are a considerable part of the population, as in all Arab cities these days). Unlike residents in the besieged cities and refugee camps in the other parts of the West Bank, Ramallah people are active, reasonably employed (average unemployment in the West Bank is at 30%, compared with around 45% in Gaza), and sociable.

This capital city is very small, only about 280.000 in population. But it still is a capital city, and with the constant presence of foreign journalists and aid workers, it feels both cosmopolitan and familiar at the same time.

A Festival of and in Exile

This past weekend, I traveled to a small town outside of Dortmund, to a Kurdish festival. In its 12th year, the festival has taken place through the Turkish-Kurdish civil war in Anatolia, the capture of the PKK leader, Oecalan, the bitter and sometimes violent infighting among the PKK (Kurdish Workers' Party) leadership and between the many Kurdish parties, and the recent outbreak of war again. Here are some impressions:

A sea of v-shaped fingers. 100,000 people, maybe more, and absolute stillness. In memory of the "fallen ones". Yellow and red flags whipped in the wind – the military banner of the PKK guerilla army, the Kurdistan flag, the Yezidi flag with a tall brass lamp in its center, the green and white flag of Islam, scarlet flags with Che Guevara's face on them, flags of Abdullah Oecalan.

Everywhere, red yellow green. Braided into headbands, wristbands, keychains, scarves.

On the stage, music. Traditional and pop, dance upbeat, slow and full of longing. Speeches in Turkish, Kurmanci and Sorani, French, English, German. Solidarity with the Kurds, their right to speak their own language, to have their own land, against Turkey’s admittance into the EU.

Throngs of people reminiscent of refugee lines, Kurds fleeing wars in many countries across the years. Men in military tan and olive, kiffiyes wrapped around their waists or shoulders, women in traditional dress carrying plastic bags full of food.

A huge field, inside a horse racing complex. Kiosks and lines of stinking port-o-lets on the edges of the fields. Doener – and huge, messy buckets full of sliced red cabbage and iceberg lettuce. Stalls selling books and info on Islam, Alevitism, Yezidism, Kurds and Genocide and Human Rights, on Che Guevara. Stalls selling sequined and beaded Kurdish dresses, headscarves – both chiffon and white linen.

Add to this: the wedding market. Tricked-out fillies, done up in Turkish fashion, with obvious highlights and heavy makeup and high high heels, or with high-piled headscarves and sateen tunics. Hordes of young men with highlighted tips, gelled and moussed, wearing stone-washed jeans and Brasilia or Italia jackets or belts.

Banners in German, Dutch, French, Turkish, Kurmanci. Against genocide, against war, for war. A sudden hush: a propaganda film with cuts of "Apo" (Abdullah Oecalan) speaking in enlightened tones to circles of Kurds in the sun, sleeves rolled up, or sitting on couches with foreign politicians. Cut to Turkish tanks and soldiers. Between cuts, a computer animation globe with chains around it. Some gentle weeping, muffled sighs.

Many people here have lost family members, been imprisoned in Turkey. Many face imminent deportation from Europe, which has not acknowledged that war war has broken out in Anatolia, southeast Turkey, again. The leadership of the PKK has grown weak and splintered. Some say that this outbreak of fighting is a hastily scrabbled together grasp at legitimacy, an attempt to distract the Kurdish people from all the political infighting, internecine assassinations and lack of direction among the party leadership. Will this new war lead to the creation of a Kurdish state or, at least, to a degree of social and cultural self-determination for the Kurds in Turkey? Not likely. Rather, it could create an opportunity for more oppression, which will lead to greater suffering in the already impoverished Kurdish areas in Turkey. Europe has already deported hundreds of people back to this war zone. A one-day trip by an EU official to the Kurdish capital, Diyarbakir, and the EU is convinced that human rights reforms have progressed enough to where Turkey might be reasonably considered for eu membership. Many Kurds, frustrated and shocked, listen as EU ministers spend days debating Turkey's lack of divorce laws as grounds for refusing admission, all the while ignoring rumors of thousands of imprisoned Kurds, the rampant torture and abuse of Kurdish women and children, and the daily reports of civilian deaths.

Clusters of people sitting down to picnic fill the field halfway through the evening. At each cluster, a circle for men, a circle for women. Other clusters of mixed company scattered throughout. The men, in tan and black, smoking, discussing heatedly, telling stories, singing songs. The women, laying out a spread of food, minding the children. There is homemade flatbread, stuffed grape leaves and cabbage, roasted chicken, potato salads, stuffed and seasoned bread, sliced tomato and scallions, sprigs of parsley, thermoses full of hot tea, bottles of cola and spring water.

Also, several circles of dancers, many with drummers and horn players in the middle. At each end of the circle, a dancer twirls a scarf, sometimes just a simple scarf, sometimes a red-yellow-green one, and the women trill their tongues.

Desperation, hope. Feverish, almost compulsive enjoyment.

Despite the chilling cold (40 degrees, whipping wind, boiling gray skies, intermittent drizzles) they have come to celebrate their nameless homeland and their endless war.

Back in Berlin

So I'm back in Berlin again. Two hours after I landed last Thursday, I found myself sitting in a large, softly lit kitchen, sipping strong coffee and nibbling on a thick slice of multigrain bread, chatting about identity and art (Gott und die Welt, as they say here). I felt like I was sitting in both the past and present at the same time. Berlin has a uniquely lazy culture, and the entire city seems to have perfected to a fine art the mere act of sitting around, snacking and discussing deep thoughts. I had enthusiastically adopted this culture during my past visits here, and the combination of nostalgia and jet lag has produced this pleasant kind of dizziness.

Around the same time the next day, I sat down to some pide and cay (pronounced chai in English) with my dear friend Halil to enjoy the imported Mediterranean (ok, primarily Turkish) variation on this Berlin culture. The sun was bright and sharp, as only possible at the beginning of Autumn so far north, and it lay a deceptive warmth over the otherwise crisp air.

Halil has just finished researching a dissertation (if I've understood it - if not, forgive me, Halil) on family relationships and generational transformations in Zazaki-speaking families from Southeast Turkey. We discussed the many ways the values systems and social structures of both immigrant families and the larger societies in which they live impact each other. According to Halil, there are stong parallels between patterns of conflict and change within families and similar transformational processes in the larger, surrounding society.

In communities where women are the primary seat of a family's honor, identity, and culture, women's choices in love and relationships are very important. A woman's choice to marry outside of the community can often be seen as endangering the cultural identity of future generations. Pluralist societies, like those you'd find in large, Western metropoles make these choices possible and probable, and families must work hard to establish firm social structures that make marrying within the community desirable and important. This leads to a unique type of generational conflict, often found in immigrant communities, which is unique in its cultural implications.

Halil says that an immigrant community's presence in a larger, majority community poses a similar type of conflict. If the larger community sees itself as threatened, sees its own cultural future as threatened, it similarly struggles to establish rules and methods for preserving its own cultural character. He says that, although immigrants are often told that they have lost something, that they are broken or hyphenated during the process of migration and integration, it's the larger community that's undergoing a rupture and transformation. The immigrant, through the formation of his new cultural identity, has created something complete and whole, and the larger community must find a way to incorporate that new identity into its own cultural character. This is the challenge facing pluralist societies, and the immigrant communities within those pluralist societies.

It never ceases to surprise me how many immigrants who were born and raised in Germany, whose families are in their third or even fourth generation in Germany, continue to feel like outsiders and foreigners in German society. Even though I went through a phase during college where I thought I was different from other Americans, identifying myself with other "hyphenated" or first-generation people, I eventually came to see myself as American. When I was living in India, I noticed that, not only was my mentality and values system different from everyone else's, their values system was shared. Social rules and limitations they applied to themselves seemed irrelevant to me. Even though many Berlin Turks say they experience a similar sort of alienation when they go to Turkey, they find it difficult to see themselves as Germans. Is that because Germanness is somehow seen as an ethnic characteristic and not as a certain state of mind, state of being, set of circumstances? Or is it because pluralism is different in Berlin, a city divided into several parts (Bezirke) intent on preserving their own cultural character - East v. West, Leftist v. Bourgeois, Working Class v. Professional, Multicultural v. Homogenous?

Berlin is a very multifaceted city, full of subjective memories and realities, where people tend to think about identity and belonging a lot. Over coffee and snacks. Or tea and pide. For long periods of time.

Invisible Markings of Flight

I had known Sirwan (* name changed for his protection) for three years before he told me the story of how he came to Germany. We were walking alongside a riverbank on a damp cobblestone street late on a November night, catching up. We were both visiting Berlin, I from the US, he from Hannover. We were telling stories, I guess because we were walking late at night in a drizzle, in a city that was home to neither of us, which always seems to jog nostalgia. Sirwan was chain-smoking, as usual, talking about the love of his life, who had just left him a few months before. I tripped on a cobblestone and twisted my ankle, so we decided to duck into nearby bar and order some drinks.

Sirwan's voice was always laden with melodrama and metaphor, even when he was talking about groceries. After all, he was a poet, from the mountains of Kurdistan, who had just lost the love of his life. But when he told me about his flight from home, his tone was simple, matter-of-fact. If there was sadness in it at all, it was soft. Because of the way he had left, he would never be able to return home, so he thought about home as if he was looking at a picture, small, perfect, frozen in time, not real. In his village in Syria, he said, the sun always shined, the fruits were always fragrant, and the people were always warm.

Two weeks before he left, Sirwan had never thought about leaving Syria. But two weeks before he left, he was picked up by Syrian secret agents for interrogation, and, as it turned out, some recreational torture. He had encouraged his employees to demonstrate against the state, they said. He had two weeks to either leave or wait for secret agents to find him again. So he fled to a small apartment in Damascus, taking his mother and sister with him. From there, he made arrangments to leave on a flight to Saudi Arabia. From there, he bribed his way into the Czech Republic with a carton of cigarettes, and then crossed over the mountains into Germany on foot. He and his sister took turns carrying their mother on their backs, for she could not walk in the knee-high snow.

After he finished telling this story, he sat quietly, smoking.

I sat across from him, looking for some physical proof that these things had happened. All I saw was a slightly balding man in his late 30s, smoking a cigarette, drinking a glass of wine.

Before and since then, I have met many refugees and undocumented immigrants with stories so incredible they border on the fantastic. Their lives are like parables or fables, only with no real lesson tacked onto the end. On the bus, in the grocery store, at a local restaurant, at school, we interact with people who have come through extreme circumstances to live where we live. Their scars are not often visible. We can know them for years without knowing what they had to do to get to this place and get to know us.