The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You

The author switches to the story of Kaweh, whom police officers take to a station in London. After making little progress in the first interrogation, the police bring in an Iraqi Kurdish interpreter, who butchers his last name Beheshtizadeh (or “heaven-born”) to fit Iraqi Kurd conventions (196). The police distrust Kaweh’s escape story but take him to a temporary hostel in Dover. Kaweh learns English during the day and lies about his ethnicity and reasons for leaving in case of Iranian spies. Kaweh pays for a solicitor who wrongly believes that he must return to Turkey, forcing him to find a second solicitor in London who would advocate for the UNHCR recommendation. In 2005, after 50 days of waiting, Kaweh completes a contentious six-hour asylum interview with two women.

The authorities move Kaweh to Cardiff, Wales, where he shares expenses with three other men. He improves his English through books, the BBC, and the TV show Friends while taking college courses and handling correspondence for his co-residents. Kaweh cycles through 20 housemates over 21 months until he attains asylum in September 2006. Kaweh avoids the common fate of homelessness by securing acceptance to university just before his government allowance ends and landing an overnight job at a clothing factory. Later, Kaweh earns a job at the British government that he excels in, and he marries and has a child. One day, he discovers the government’s tabulation of his allowances, which is around $2,000. He also thinks of the refugee roommates who didn’t make it and a story of a refugee who lit himself on fire.

This chapter opens with Kambiz, who, in 1999, lives at a camp in Ter Apel, the Netherlands, where he dreams a new life and possibly bringing his young sister. At the home of Hadi, a host for Iranians living in the Netherlands without documentation, Kambiz refuses to claim that he was a Christian or gay (a member of either population would likely have been driven out of Iran as a refugee), refusing to lie out of personal pride as well as fear of endangering his family. However, the national immigration authority (IND) does not believe his story that his association with journalists made him a target, and he loses his asylum seeker status and placement in the camp. Kambiz stays in Hadi’s home and makes money as a black-market electrician, but he can’t rent his own place, buy a phone, or obtain an ID.

Over the next decade, depression from past struggles, an inability to build his own family, and anxiety about the future damage Kambiz’s mental health and social ties. He wants to reopen his case, but Hadi warns him that Dutch authorities pretend that the Iranian government is trustworthy. Kambiz visits the activist Ahmed Pouri to learn how to appease European officials, but when Kambiz gives himself to the police, the officers throw him into detention for about a year. Kambiz begins having suicidal thoughts. The organization Refugee Aid and asylum lawyer Frank van Haren learn about his case, and they tell Kambiz to find new documents. Kambiz obtains this evidence after leaving the facility and presents it to Van Haren, but he tells Kambiz to return another day. The documents go missing when Kambiz accidentally leaves them in his carrier overnight.

His refugee friend, Parvis Noshirrani, encourages Kambiz to leave the country, but he is a broken man. On April 6, 2011, Kambiz sets himself on fire in Amsterdam’s Dam Square just a few meters from Van Haren’s office, dying later in the hospital. His family is shocked with how little he had to his name after receiving money from him over the years. The media misreport details of Kambiz’s story and quickly move on. Nayeri’s cousin-in-law Sara collects news clippings of his story, and Pouri advocates about the flaws in the asylum process. Amsterdam’s mayor ignores these protests, stating that Kambiz “used his democratic rights” (215).

In Amsterdam, Nayeri learns about Kambiz’s death just as she is preparing her “second escape” to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a graduate-level residency program (216). She rewatches footage of his death and brings Philip to a vigil. Nayeri asks around about how this could have happened, with some blaming the officials and others “opportunistic migrants” (218). After a Persian friend pokes holes in the Three Miracles story, Nayeri questions her own memories even though it’s clear that Maman was never as well off in America as she was in Iran.

In 2017, Nayeri visits Kaweh, now a celebrated asylum lawyer with a near-spotless case record. Kaweh tells her that applications tend to fail due to bad advice, out-of-context success stories, and experiences in other countries. He tells clients to avoid lying. Nayeri asks him to conduct an asylum interview on her but stops after she realizes the questions’ intent.

At the writer’s workshop, Nayeri agonizes over the perception of lying even though that is the basis of fiction. She learns concepts: Orphan details are strange details that make the world believable, and autofiction includes stories that take details and characters from real life. The latter clashes with her mother’s worldview as she criticizes characters who resemble her and stories that are not about their struggle.

Nayeri considers whether asking a refugee to write a story is a better way of judging truthfulness than the current system, and at one point asks a workshop of refugees to do so. She notes that the storytelling styles of Iranians, often oblique and symbolic, conflict with Western tastes that demand factualness and feelgood success. Even if refugees adhere to Western standards, they may still not reach the interrogators, who are numb to these painful narratives. Nayeri concludes that “even the greatest writer can’t reach a lazy, cynical reader” (231).

Nayeri visits Parvis’s café and talks with him and customers about Kambiz. They tell her to meet the “refugee whisperer” Ahmed Pouri, leader of the nonprofit group PRIME (231). A fan of Sun Tzu, Pouri believes that asylum officers find excuses to decline cases and that refugees don’t understand “Dutch logic” (235). Pouri shares the story of an Iranian who spent 10 years in Iranian prison and five years in a Dutch camp because he said he only fled because his friends disappeared. He also notes how, despite reforms, officials still ask invasive questions to LGBTQ refugees.

At Parvis’s café, Nayeri talks to Houshiar, a dayworker living in the country without documentation and who failed several asylum attempts. He converted to Christianity after praying for his son’s recovery from an illness, but he can convince neither the officials nor other refugees that he is an apostate. An elderly couple Houshiar works for, concluding that he is a repressed gay man, indirectly suggest approaching the next interview from that angle, but Houshiar believes that a Christian couldn’t be gay. Nayeri notes that it would take years for Houshiar to accept his sexuality and that an asylum story, like fiction, must be believable even if inaccurate. 

Nayeri visits her father’s cousin, Forough, and her philosopher son, Pooyan, both refugees. They discuss Houshiar’s case with Pooyan, bringing up Cartesian foundationalism, stating that Houshiar cannot accept his sexuality because it redefines a foundational part of him. The philosopher notes that the Protestant Dutch believe in internalized belief over rituals, which leads many Iranian Christians to miss the “deeper” faith of underground churches (250). Forough refuses to elaborate on Maman’s story and criticizes Nayeri’s first novel as dishonest. Nayeri feels that her early writings and Harvard Business School education reflect a desire for acceptance and decides to stop verifying her mother’s story. Nayeri visits Dam Square on the seventh anniversary of Kambiz’s immolation. There are no memorials, but she overhears a conversation in Farsi about death and whether one should live a passive or active life.

Nayeri meets Pouri at the airport and learns that he fled Iran as a communist in the 1980s and that his family left him in 2002 after he began devoting his time to refugees. He helps stop hunger strikes and suicide attempts, but he believes that the police exploit their power and “humiliate” refugees (255). Authorities ignore contradictions like why a man would spend 11 years in poverty if returning to Iran was possible. Pouri also says that rape victims and closeted LGBTQ refugees are ashamed to reveal their stories. Pouri tells Nayeri about Zeinab, a Turkish Kurd who suffered rape and attempted murder by her husband. She cried for 30 minutes after obtaining her papers.

For centuries, civilized nations accepted asylum as a fundamental right. Yet Western nativists now reframe a humanitarian situation into debates about honesty and usefulness where fearful and sometimes undereducated refugees must fit their stories into “narrow conceptions of truth” (260). Media coverage resorts to clichés like “deluge or flood or swarm” to describe immigrants (262). It also misrepresents statistics, such as reporting high application figures without noting that refugees often apply to multiple countries. Of the 68 million displaced people in the world according to UNHCR, only a few million attempt to reach the European Union, and refugee representation in the EU population is just 1:2,000. Once refugees gain asylum, they find their idealized vision of Europe is not what they thought it would be.

Nayeri thanks Pouri for his time. While departing, she wishes that she could be like him and wonders what drove his family away from him. She compares Pouri to Baba and spends the flight thinking of her father.