THE TELEPHONE – “Hi,” I say. “I tried to text, tweet and email you, but none of them worked, so I am relying on an ancient method of communication, the phone. I’d like to pick up an order.” There is a pause. “You order a pickup? This is no dealer car,” says a heavily accented voice. “No, I want to call in a dinner and pick it up. Some Chinese food.” Another pause. “Dinner for Chinese? All one-point-four billion of them? Call Beijing.” And thus it goes. You have no doubt had this same problem, and get ready for another. The Afghans are coming. Maybe thousands of them. It goes like this: Every time someone loses a war they come to America. It all began with the Battle of Culloden of 1746, when the English beat the Scots and the losers came here. The French-Canadians came to Louisiana after the British beat the French – who hasn't? Today we call them Cajuns. They came to Texas after Hurricane Katrina – an estimated 250,000 of them evacuated to the Houston area and some 40,000 stayed. Wouldn’t you? This is not a compliant. We retained some great high school halfbacks and any number of excellent chefs.
Through the years immigrants left their teeming shores following defeats. German wars and the military draft sent millions of German refugees to the U.S. in the 1840s and 50s.Today, Texas is loaded with their descendants. We got lots of Czechs, too, as the Hapsburgs kept going to war. In the 1840s the Irish Potato Famine sent the peasants here. After our own Civil War, thousands of defeated Southerners followed the GTT rule – Gone To Texas. The Yankee invasion began about 1970 and continues to this very day. If God hands you a lemon, make a margarita out of it. The Mexican Revolution of 1910 sent numbers of Mexicans to Texas. Both preceding and following World War II we received lots of European refugees. Following the rise of Castro, thousands of anti-Castro Cubans came to the U.S. and are now a major political force in Florida. And when the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 collapsed, we received many Magyars (that’s “Hungarian” in Hungarian). Behind them were the Serbs and Croatians who stopped fighting each other so they could move here and fight each other. Newcomers joined us in 1979 when the Shah of Iran was overthrown.
In early 1975, fewer than 100 ethnic Vietnamese lived in Greater Houston. The first wave of immigration arrived here after the end of the Vietnam War. Apparently not many were from North Vietnam. As of the 2010 U.S. Census, Harris County had 80,409 ethnic Vietnamese. Today, the city is home to more than 100,000 Vietnamese-Americans. Houston has the largest community of Vietnamese in the U.S. outside of California. We even have our own Little Saigon. Almost one out of every four residents in Harris County is foreign born, and the number is obviously growing. More than a third of Houston residents who are older than 5 speak a language other than English at home.
As for the Afghans, they follow a well-worn trail. When President Trump pulled out most U.S. troops from the Kurdish-Turkish border, that allowed the Turks to invade the Kurds’ territory. Trump abandoned them despite the fact that the Kurds had been doing most of the fighting against ISIS. And we promised those allies we would stand by them “as long as the rivers flow and the desert blooms in the spring.” (This promise was translated from Comanche.) We know what happened next: Kurds who face torture and death because they fought alongside the Americans, came here – along with their immediate families and their cousins, in-laws, next-door neighbors, the guys who translated, drove for us or have a good immigration lawyer. When the U.S. military left Iraq, those residents who had worked for the Americans were fearful of what would happen to them and their families once the Yanks departed. According to State Department data reported by the Immigration and Refugee Services of America, 32,187 Iraqis entered the United States as refugees between 1989 and 2002.
There must be a lot tired, weak, huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Since 1975, the U.S. has welcomed more than 3 million refugees from all over the world. That is more than every other country put together. That total comparison still stands, although because of the wave of Middle Eastern refugees arriving in Europe, for the first time in more than three decades we are currently not taking in more than everyone else put together. In 2019, the latest year we have for tallying, 31,250 refugees from all over arrived here. These are just legal refugees, and does not include the thousands of Central Americans at our southern border seeking asylum. If (or more probably, when) the Taliban again take over Afghanistan, our former allies will be moving here. The U.S. has set up a special on-ramp for those Afghans. A visa program, established in 2009, is intended for Afghan citizens, along with their spouses and unmarried children under 21 who worked for the U.S. government in Afghanistan. It is a separate program and doesn't count toward the refugee cap.
About 18,000 Afghans have applied for these special immigrant visas to the U.S. and are still awaiting approval, according to the State Department. Many are translators who were particularly needed at the U.S. embassy where the turnover of U.S. diplomats every year is about 90 percent. The process has slowed down over the last year because of the Covid-19 pandemic. In fiscal year 2019, the State Department issued 9,741 special visas to Afghans, but in fiscal year 2020 they only issued 1,799 of the visas, according to State Department data. President Joe Biden has said repeatedly that we will take care of these folks, and Congress seems to agree. I, personally, welcome them, especially the translators. Maybe they can man the phones at restaurants.
Ashby translates at ashby2@comcast.net
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