When my father arrived in America from Ethiopia in 1978, he was resettled, with the help of an immigration agency, to Peoria, Ill. He found a job working on the factory floor of a Caterpillar Inc. plant, and by the time my mother, sister, and I joined him two years later, he’d already found a two-bedroom apartment two blocks from the Catholic school my sister and I would attend.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]It was a startlingly American childhood, made more so by the fact that we spent our weekends at a Southern Baptist church on the other side of town. My parents, raised in the Ethiopian Orthodox church, had never heard of Southern Baptists before coming to America. But every Sunday, there we were, in the front pews, the first and only Black family to have ever attended the church.
On a recent cross-country road trip, my wife and I decided to take our two children on a detour to Peoria. My family had left the city at the tail end of the 1980s recession, when unemployment hovered near 20%. I wanted to see if we could find Sharon, one of the members of the church my family had been especially close to. I hadn’t spoken to Sharon in at least 10 years. We arrived unannounced at her doorstep just in time to take her to lunch. It was the first and most likely the last time she would meet my family. On the drive to the restaurant, Sharon pointed out the Greek Orthodox church near her home.
“Your mom and dad tried to go there,” she said, “but the priest or pastor told them not to come back. He said they would be more comfortable somewhere else.”
When I told Sharon I had never heard that story before she didn’t seem surprised. She shrugged.
“That sort of thing happened a lot back then,” she said. “Your parents had a hard time fitting in.”
I was about to ask Sharon how they were able to do so at a Southern Baptist church, but she saw the question coming.
“Your mom and dad met with Brother Gene, and he saw that they were good people and told them they would be welcome in his church,” she explained. “Before you all came, though, he went around and called every single person. He said if anyone gave your family a hard time, they’d have hell to pay for it. And that was it. I don’t think anyone bothered you at all.”
It felt like a confession when Sharon told the story, and I suppose to some degree it was. If no one at the church ever told us to our face that we didn’t belong—if no one ever explicitly asked us to leave—it was because the good people of the church had been compelled, even threatened, into accepting us. Had they not been, it’s unlikely we would have ever lasted more than a week at the church.
Given the current apocalyptic narrative surrounding immigration, it’s hard to imagine the leader of a conservative Southern Baptist church making a similar kind of phone call today. Whether or not Brother Gene knew my parents to be good people, he knew they were refugees, and in the early 1980s, the political and cultural framework had yet to solidify into the often dehumanizing imagery that’s common today.
Read More: Welcome to the Immigration Election
As a writer whose work is rooted in stories of asylum, I’ve sat in on numerous discussions in which immigration experts debated the best alternate stories to cast immigration in a more positive, humane light: immigration as an economic necessity, immigration as a moral and ethical obligation, immigration as part of our cultural heritage. The idea that the story can be changed, however, sits on a precarious premise, one that reinforces the idea that the dominant narrative being told is actually about migration, or the border, when in fact, that’s never been the case.
A year before Brother Gene called the members of his congregation and told them to welcome us, another Southern Baptist, President Jimmy Carter, signed the Refugee Act of 1980. That transformative piece of legislation defined a refugee as any person unable or unwilling to return home because of persecution or well-founded fear of persecution—the same terms as the ones adopted by the U.N. in 1951. More important, the act established an annual refugee–admission limit free of race-based geographic quotas and created the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which helped families like mine establish new lives in places like Peoria, Ill.
That the Refugee Act of 1980 passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in an era of double–digit inflation and negative economic growth says something critical about how we frame and imagine the competing narratives surrounding immigration. Despite the economic challenges, the relatively open-armed embrace of immigrants that defined that act was part of a larger story the country needed to tell in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. In that story, the global refugee crisis that followed the end of the war became an opportunity for the U.S. to recast itself as a land of hope and opportunity, particularly for those fleeing the tyranny of political repression.
The current narrative framework when it comes to immigration couldn’t be more different. Today, the voices of authority on the other end of the line insist at every opportunity that the refugees at our border and in our communities represent nothing less than an existential threat to the country. They are criminals, terrorists, and drug dealers, many from hostile or “sh-t-hole” countries, armed with fraudulent claims of persecution.
It’s a damning and obviously racist narrative, at odds with both the current and historical facts of migration. The number of migrant encounters (which includes apprehensions and expulsions) at the southern border in 1986 was roughly the same as in 2023 when adjusted for population growth in the U.S., while the total number of global refugees admitted into the country fell from a high of 207,116 in 1980 to just over 25,000 in 2022. The numbers on their own, however, mean little, even when paired with numerous other statistics that prove that immigration is a net gain to the economy and that immigrants are 60% less likely to be incarcerated than people born in the country. The narrative persists, indifferent to facts, because it allows us to point to something other than ourselves.
It’s no coincidence that today’s border narrative mirrors some of our country’s most intractable issues. Addiction, and the incalculable toll it has taken on our country’s most vulnerable communities, is a “border crisis” rather than the product of a broken health care system. Decades of political dysfunction and neglect have created a system of horribly underfunded agencies at both the state and federal levels, and so our asylum process is overwhelmed because of the devious immigrants sneaking into the country—not because U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which processes asylum applications for refugees currently in the U.S., is a fee-funded agency within Homeland Security, financially unable to process the more than 10 million pending asylum cases in its backlog.
When the Office of Refugee Resettlement was created under the Department of Health and Human Services in 1980, more than 90% of its $416 million budget was allocated to help state agencies cover the medical and educational expenses of their refugee populations. That amount is more than triple what Congress allocated to the agency two decades later, making it that much easier for Americans to imagine that a wall would fix what we broke.
While it may be hard to change the current narrative, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t imagine what those other stories might look like. They would have nothing to do with better, or fewer, or less economically vulnerable individuals and families attempting to enter the country. Those stories would instead consider what our borders might look like if we saw them as an integral part of our country rather than the end, and they would imagine what our immigration system might look like if we devoted the resources necessary to creating a just asylum process rather than the ineffective militarized frontier that currently exists.
Tell those stories enough, and we might see that both the problem and the solution is us.
