Opinion: Trump’s refugee ban betrays shared history of struggle, including mine
The refugee admissions program, a hallmark of American global leadership for over 40 years, was suspended the day President Trump took office. The reasons, according to his executive order, are to safeguard “taxpayer resources” and to ensure “appropriate assimilation.”
This move is misguided and damaging. I know this because I’m a refugee.
My family immigrated to the U.S. to escape the tanking economy and religious persecution in the Soviet Union after it collapsed in the early 1990s. When I arrived in the Bay Area, I barely spoke English. I lived in a tiny apartment furnished with items my family had found discarded on the streets.
At first, I received free school lunch; the shame of handing those meal tickets to the lunch lady in plain sight of my classmates is something I’ll never forget. My parents worked the night shift and trained for new jobs; after school, we’d pile into our old Buick to deliver newspapers. Meanwhile, everyone obsessively studied English — including my grandparents, who, in their 70s, had later joined us.
Since then, I’ve met hundreds of fellow refugees and asylum seekers from around the world who, despite their uniqueness, have similar values to mine — unrelenting grit, work ethic and hope.
Struggle is a part of our shared story: Some swam across the Rio Grande while fleeing the bloody civil war in El Salvador. Others escaped Saddam Hussein’s regime. Some came as boat people after the Vietnam War; while starting out in their new land, they slept in bathtubs and ate meals on newspapers on the floor. Others languished in refugee camps in Austria and Italy before resettlement. They went on to become lawyers, dancers, store owners and engineers.
One might think America opens its doors to an indefinite number of refugees. That’s not the case. During Joe Biden’s presidency, refugees were capped at just 125,000 per year. And during Donald Trump’s first term, that number plummeted to a record low, with fewer than 12,000 admitted refugees in 2021.
While immigrants are only a part of America’s legacy, they have helped forge the nation’s infrastructure while often enduring exploitation and racism.
Chinese immigrants, who built the Transcontinental Railroad, were depicted as caricatures in the media and physically attacked; in 1882, they were banned from entering altogether. Italian and Eastern European garment workers toiling in the Lower East Side sweatshops were called “morally below the races of Northern Europe” and “immune to certain kinds of dirt” by a top American sociologist. And Mexican agricultural laborers were recruited by employment agencies but repatriated when their services were no longer wanted.
Nonetheless, refugees revitalize their communities by opening businesses, paying taxes and buying homes. From 2005 to 2019, refugees contributed nearly $124 billion more to the U.S. economy than they received in government services, per a 2024 federal report. And today’s immigrants, according to a 2015 National Academies study, are learning English at the same rate or even faster than they did a century ago.
About 40% of the American population can trace their roots to Ellis Island. Why close the doors now?
The consequences of nativism and NIMBYism can be dire.
One such instance is the St. Louis, a ship with more than 900 German Jewish immigrants seeking asylum in the United States in 1939; 532 passengers would be returned to Nazi Germany, where only half survived the Holocaust. That same year, 20,000 European Jewish children were also shut out. And in 2017, the U.S. suspended the resettlement of Syrian refugees fleeing the civil war, in which more than 600,000 have died to date. Many could have been saved.
I shudder to think what would have happened if my family had been denied admission. We have the moral and historical imperative to help those in need, and our society stands to benefit.
We can and should do better.
Masha Rumer is a Bay Area writer and author of “Parenting with an Accent: How Immigrants Honor Their Heritage, Navigate Setbacks, and Chart New Paths for Their Children.”