The Ungrateful Refugee - Dina Nayeri

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I was drawn to Dina Nayeri’s The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You primarily because it advertises itself as a book that “defies stereotypes and raises surprising questions about the immigrant experience.” I had to believe that the stereotype of the “ungrateful refugee” would be one of the ones most strongly refuted by Nayeri. The last thing I expected was to come away from the book feeling that Nayeri had shot herself in the foot by exposing her own blatant hypocrisy when it comes to international refugees and their obligations to their host countries. But sadly, that’s exactly what happened.

Dina Nayeri fled Iran with her mother and her younger brother when she was just eight years old. Her father, a successful dentist, elected to remain in the country – where he remarried and began a new family. Dina’s mother, an activist convert to Christianity, was in danger of arrest and imprisonment, and her husband decided to help her and his children escape the country, in effect abandoning them to them to their fate. The author was ultimately granted asylum in the United States and educated at Princeton University, and has carved out quite a successful career for herself. Despite her success, however, Nayeri seems to resent still each of the countries she passed through as a refugee, including the one she eventually settled in.

Nayeri tells the stories of other refugees like her, people more or less forced to flee their own countries because of political or religious pressure, pressure strong enough to make them fear for their lives.  Surprisingly, the stories, touching as they are, add little new to the conversation regarding the obligations of the West to take in as many political refugees as possible and the obligations of the refugees themselves not to become long-term burdens on the countries taking them in.

Dina Nayeri

More surprising is the disdainful attitude of superiority used by Nayeri to reprimand Western governments for even requiring refugees to prove that they are political refugees and not  economic refugees. Nayeri argues that the distinction should not matter – that all the “mediocre” native-workers being replaced by refugees willing to work for lower wages don’t really deserve the jobs they do so poorly anyway.

These quotes from the book demonstrate why I find Nayeri’s points about stereotyping a whole people to be so hypocritical on her part:

            “Every day her bosses questioned her (Nayeri’s mother’s) intelligence, though they had a quarter of her education. They pretended not to understand her accent. If she took too long to articulate a thought, they stopped listening and wrote her off as stupid.” Page 187 (making the same assumptions about her mother’s “bosses” that she accuses them of making about her mother.

            “I began looking forward again. Oklahoma wasn’t a promised land. It was hot and mediocre and lazy. And I could never satisfy these people.” Page 192 (writing off a whole population and region as being “mediocre and lazy”)

“Daniel (the author’s brother) is a good immigrant – hardworking and talented and grateful, the kind who makes America better. He thanks his new country with his every move. And yes, the United States and England and Holland and Germany would be better if all immigrant were like him. I wonder, though, how many are just keeping their mouths shut and their ideas trapped in for fear of seeming defiant to the mediocre white man scrutinizing their papers.” Page 330 (fighting racism with racism of her own)

“In conversations about the refugee crisis, educated people continue to make the barbaric argument that open doors will benefit the host nation. The time for this outdated colonialist argument has run out; migrants don’t derive their value from their benefit to the Western-born, and civilized people don’t ask for résumés from the edge of the grave. Page 334 (her legitimate argument cheapened by words like “barbaric” and “civilized”)

“…I imagine what they (refugees) might become if they had, say, the same opportunities as the Trump children. My mind conjures Pulitzers, heart surgeries, books of poetry and philosophy and history. There is no logical reason for a mediocre few, shielded from competition, propped up by inherited riches and passports, to feast on the world’s resources under the guise of meritocracy.” Page 161 (pretending that only one of the groups is capable of mediocrity)

“Maybe I’m a hypocrite. I believe in open borders, but Europe is no paradise. The notion that the rest of the world is without beauty or joy, that everyone is clamoring to break down Europe’s doors, is nonsense. For many, the West would be unequivocally worse…” Page 341 (very true argument that calls for mutual respect, something Nayeri seem to grant to the West only very reluctantly)

Bottom Line: While The Ungrateful Refugee is interesting and thought-provoking, it weakens its own argument that refugees deserve more sympathy and respect than they get by basing that  argument on the assumption that the average refugee is smarter, and has more potential, than the average Westerner helping to decide whether or not the refugee will be granted asylum. The author is quick to call out the hypocrisy of the West while failing to recognize her own. This book could, and should, have made a much stronger argument in favor of refugees than it does, and that is Nayeri’s fault.