Afghanistan to the U.S. a local
migrant story:
I met my interviewee
through a friend I made at ASU. She is my friend’s sister.
Their names will not be used in this paper due to some personal
discomfort that could arise should their parents read the website and
be embarrassed that other people know their lives. These are very
private people, which is something we can all understand on some
level. I scheduled the interview through my friend, and both her
and her sister were both present when the interview was
conducted. We kept the setting friendly and social to remove any
clinical feeling that could have been uncomfortable. I wanted to
hear the story, not stare at her under a microscope. Only the
respondent spoke or offered any information and the interview with this
lovely Afghan migrant led to the compilation of the following story,
her story:
My family originated in
Afghanistan. They were there when the Soviet Union invaded and
all the trouble started that would eventually become the Soviet Viet
Nam. My maternal grandparents fled the country at that point and
went to Iran. It was in Iran that my parents started their own
family by having my sister. That was in 1983. My parents
and my sister then moved to Pakistan, where my brother and I were
born. I was born in 1985 and he was born in 1987.
My mother worked in the
refugee camps there trying to promote women’s rights. This was
very unpopular with the fundamentalist Muslims in the area. They
threatened her, and threatened our family because of what she stood
for. It got dangerous, and the U.N. came and moved us out to
Holland, but not as refugees. We lived in Holland for six years,
learning the Dutch language and becoming a bit westernised. It
helped us when we moved to the U.S. because many other Afghans that
moved straight from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran to the U.S. had a
lot of trouble overcoming the culture shock. We came to the U.S.
in February of 1996.
I thought that the U.S.
was going to be really cool because I had seen many movies. I
thought the whole country was going to be like this big beach scene,
like all of it was like Los Angeles. When we arrived in Phoenix,
I was sort of disappointed. My siblings and I were put into
American schools, and it took a couple of months to pick up
English. They tried putting us in the ‘English as a Second
Language’ classes, but since no one there spoke Persian or Dutch, it
didn’t really help at all. I think the best thing about coming to
the U.S. was that we all grew as people, and learned a lot more about
life. The worst part, was that in that learning process, our
childhoods ended.
No one ever suspects you
to be an Afghan. Living in Arizona, people often assume you are
Mexican or Latin in some way. The people didn’t really give us
much of a hard time as Afghans in the U.S. until 9/11. At that
time, we would hear people saying stupid things. They were
ignorant.
My Dad still has family
in Afghanistan and in Pakistan. He sends them money even
today. He doesn’t go to Afghanistan to visit. He hasn’t
been back to visit Pakistan since he went about four years ago to visit
my grandmother. She died a few months after he left. Those
countries don’t really seem to care –politically- about who comes and
goes, or if you left and are back visiting. But the people
probably care a lot. They are very traditional and do not like to
see people become westernised. I wouldn’t go there! I am
definitely westernised, and don’t feel any need to go back. I
don’t even try to keep any of the Afghan cultural traditions
alive. My family does these Afghan parties every so often, but I
don’t go. I have too much spirit, and am too accustomed to having
choices as a woman. I don’t think I would be popular there as a
westernised Afghan lesbian!!
I don’t even hang out
with any other Afghans besides my older sister and younger
brother. I am friends with some people from other countries
besides the U.S. and Afghanistan, but mostly my friends are
Americans. I don’t even really think of it all like that until
you ask me. The Afghan people that come here try to be all
traditional, and they keep mostly within their own groups. So you
never really hear their issues or see what they have to offer out in
the general American public. That’s not for me. I’m
here. I’m western, and that’s how I live. I got my American
citizenship this year, so I don’t even need to think about it
now. They gave me a bit of a hard time getting the citizenship
because my brother and I had no birth certificates. We had to
have blood tests done to show we were our parents’ children. But
other than that, we just waited through the process.
As far as strain from
moving from one country to the next, one culture to the next, it
varies. It is different from person to person, but over all I
would say that the older people have a much harder time adjusting than
the younger ones. My mom went from advocating women’s rights in a
Pakistani refugee camp, to denying those rights as a “traditional”
Afghan woman here in the U.S. It’s almost like a bit of backlash
from the culture shock. Some of the Afghan men that come
here still want to own their women and make the women do what ever the
man wants. Some of them can accept the change. I have an
uncle that married an American woman, so not all of them have
difficulty with the western lifestyle.
Education here in
America is where we learned to speak English. I don’t even have
an accent really. Not that I know of. I was young when I
learned these languages, so my English, Dutch, Persian are all pretty
good.
I think my life is much
better here than it would be in Afghanistan or Pakistan. I have
rights and the freedom to be gay. I can do my own thing. I
would say that it was definitely worth coming to the U.S. I
didn’t have a choice anyway, I was a kid. But I am glad to be
here. My parents are headed more and more towards the traditional
Afghan values, which makes it difficult on the children because they
raised us western. My sister was almost married off to a
guy from California by my parents, but she just moved out rather than
be sold off like that. I don’t know why my parents are taking
that direction all of a sudden. Thankfully my sister and I are
well over 18, and my brother will be in a few months, so we can do our
own thing now.
To put this story into
perspective, here are some points about Afghanistan to consider:
As of 2003, the
purchasing power in Afghanistan (per capita) was $700. In
comparison with the United States (per capita) purchasing power of
$37,800, one can see why there is a migrant labour force in
Afghanistan. Since the person I interviewed was also from
Pakistan, we can look at their purchasing power in 2003, which was
$2,100. Not a lot better than Afghanistan. This is why her
father still sends remittances back to both Afghanistan and
Pakistan. He can support his family here, and have a middle class
American lifestyle while still sending money off to relatives in these
places.
From 1979 to 1989 the
Soviet Union was trying to take, and hang on to Afghanistan and caused
a great deal of stress in the area. From 1996 to 2001 the Taliban
dominated Afghanistan, stripping away virtually every right that women
in that country had. Women had to be covered from head to toe if
they went outside, and they had to have a male escort. They could
not educate themselves or have professional jobs. These two major
events spanning decades kept many migrants from returning to
Afghanistan after leaving in search of jobs, or leaving to escape one
or both of these catastrophes.
Afghanistan today is
struggling to pick up the pieces. Women’s rights have been
restored to a large degree in the urban areas, but almost completely
unsuccessfully in the rural areas. Rural women are still under
tremendous pressure to remain subservient and uneducated.
Afghanistan has elected
its first female governor and is pushing for more women to get into
politics. There is still a bit of instability though, and women
there know that they could be putting their lives at risk by running
for office. To their credit, many women are up to the challenge
of putting Afghanistan back on its feet.
A once religiously and
culturally diverse nation, Afghanistan has suffered major set backs and
still has a long road of recovery ahead. People who have
emigrated away are still reluctant to move back just yet. Some,
like the woman I interviewed, have distanced themselves so far from it
that they will never even seek to return.
An interesting point
about this particular migrant story, is that the respondent considers
herself a migrant from Afghanistan even though she has never set foot
within the boundaries of that country. Her family’s sense of
cultural history and nationalism is so powerful and invasive, that the
story becomes that of a whole, not of an individual. Technically,
the respondent is a Pakistani migrant, having been born in Pakistan,
and making her first international journey from Pakistan. Her
sister was born in Iran, and also considers herself to be Afghan.
This is a relevant point to illustrate the power of identity.
That identity is tested
when you come to America. People of European descent often do not
realise how much of the rest of the world is not “white”. My
respondent indicated that she is mistaken for a Mexican from time to
time. This is not uncommon. In Crossing the BLVD by
Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan, we hear an Afghan woman named Shekaiba
say “I’ve had people assume that I’m anything from Greek to Italian to
Spanish or Native American. Maybe Hindu. But very few
people ever guess that I’m an Afghan.” (p.164).
In my interview I heard
the respondent talk of a change in her parents from being westernised
to becoming more ‘traditional’ Afghan. She expressed that this
was not a welcome change. This idea is also addressed in Lehrer
and Sloan’s book on page 168, “My father was liberal when he came here
but I guess America brought out the patriarchal Afghan in him. I
couldn’t date. I couldn’t wear skirts or make-up. Couldn’t
go out on my own. They wanted to find a boy for me to get married
to and I didn’t want that. …I switched from a political science
major to art and announced that I was moving out.” It is almost a
second migration that happens here. Parents migrate their
children away from a physical place, where perhaps they were in
physical danger, and then the children migrate away from the culture
where perhaps they are in emotional danger.
Remittances sent back to
the home country are done solely by the men in the family, the father
and the uncle of the respondent. Many other cultures send their
women out as the migrant labour force, and the women end up in factory
jobs, or in domestic positions. This is not often the case with
Afghan migrants. What is more true to the form of Afghan migrants
is the “push-pull” theory. In the book Disposable Domestics:
Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy by Grace Chang, the
point is “Moreover, the “draw” of the United States is more accurately
described as a calculated pull by the United States and other First
World countries on the Third World’s most valuable remaining resource:
human labour. This “pull” or extraction is often facilitated by a
desperate “push” or expulsion of people by sending countries, which are
also often the result of First World economic and military
interventions.”
What is being said here
is that the First World (1979 U.S.S.R and 2001 U.S.A.) goes in
militarily and destroys Afghanistan’s economic stability and
Afghanistan freely sends its people out to go work in Europe and the
U.S. because they know that the remittances sent back will aid their
economy. In return, the U.S. and Europe get cheap labour and
people willing to do the jobs that westerners don’t want.
So when the interviewee
is talking about her family moving away from Afghanistan when the
Soviets arrived, and her father sending back his remittances to this
day, she is talking about her family’s involvement in this “push-pull”
theory.
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