Kirk Wallace Johnson served with U.S.A.I.D. in Baghdad and Fallujah. When he returned to the United States, he spent much of his career helping thousands of Iraqis and Afghans, many of whom risked their lives working with American troops, gain refugee status in the United States through the List Project. As President Trump closes the door on the American refugee program, Johnson and the Times columnist Lydia Polgreen grapple with how to live now, through Trump’s second term, in the face of a muted resistance movement.
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Kirk Wallace Johnson: I get emails from refugees all over the world every day asking for my help. And the day after the presidential election there were Afghans that had worked for us that were asking if I would help them or if I could help them.
Lydia Polgreen: What did you tell them?
Johnson: I had to tell them that there was no chance they were coming to America at this point. That they needed to put their hopes in some other country. And it brought me no joy to say that. But the worst thing you can do to somebody who’s in peril is to give them some sense of false hope. Or to deceive them. I knew what was coming and so I told them, “Don’t even try to come here because the incoming administration does not want you.”
Polgreen: You’ve stepped back from the List Project, and it sounds to me, like a lot of Americans, you’re reassessing what you can and should do at this moment. How are you thinking about husbanding your energy and your resources and your emotional strength to engage with the enormity of the difficulties out there?
Johnson: There is so much change happening so quickly that the easiest path for all of us that are troubled by this is to just shut down and pay less attention. But there’s a point at which that atrophies into disengagement.
I genuinely worry for myself that the things that are infuriating us now, we might not even remember in a few years of this. This is more of a survive this period and do the grunt work when it’s over to claw our way back to the value that’s on the base of the Statue of Liberty.
President Barack Obama always loved to quote Martin Luther King that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. Every time he said it, I would wince a little bit. It’s the kind of quote that I think Americans gobble up because we can look at all of the shameful parts of our history and say, “Yeah, we had slavery. All right, we had Jim Crow. But hey, it’s getting better.”
“The arc is always bending towards justice”: It’s BS. The arc of the moral universe does not have any natural direction. It has no shape. It’s not an arc. I don’t think there is such a thing as the moral universe.
But what I do know is that all of these values that we’ve been talking about in this conversation, that we thought were enshrined and carved in stone — it only took a couple of weeks for Americans to realize that they’re written in sand. They can blow away in a heartbeat.
So, sorry, this is a knife fight. All of the gains that were made in the last generation on … pick your issue. What you see as progress, there is another group of people that see it as a problem. And they are fighting like hell to bring the football back in the other direction.
Right now, people who support the notion of opening our doors to refugees, we’re going to get our asses kicked for at least the next four years.
Polgreen: I think if you look at history, it’s likely to be much longer than that. For much of the past year I’ve been working on a series about global migration. Just looking at American history — — we think of ourselves as this Statue of Liberty nation. But the reality is that beginning in the 1880s with the Chinese Exclusion Act, right through to 1965, migration to the United States was extremely tightly controlled and it took a very long time for that to change.
I think it is this kind of pacifying fiction to believe that if we just stay the course things will get better. It’s very self-absolving for us as citizens to think, “Well, eventually we’ll get to where we need to go.”
But in fact, I think history tells us that there have been moments of progress followed by profound, profound backlash. And what people do in those moments of backlash I think is the greatest proof of the timber of American character.
Johnson: I think that’s absolutely right. We should have the humility in the face of that sweep of history to consider that what we grew up with was a blip. It was an anomaly. It is not the norm.
All I can say right now is that I know I will never be convinced that it was wrong to help all of these Iraqis or Afghans, that it was wrong to give them a chance at a new life here. But I’m not deluding myself into thinking that anyone is going to get in under this administration. And the surest way to madness and total burnout is to imagine that you have more political power than you do in a given moment.
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