Introduction
New York, July 2017
As he stood in line for immigration at John F. Kennedy International Airport, Asad Hussein tried to recall the final stanza of a poem by William Ernest Henley. In front of him, over the heads of a dozen disheveled travelers, stood a row of glass cubicles marking the border of the United States. Unremarkable as it must have seemed to the other travelers that day, the sterile, fluorescent-lit gateway to America felt surreal to him. Years before, in a desert refugee camp in East Africa, he had scrawled the poem on a slab of sheet metal he used to keep the sand from blowing into his tent. Henley’s words had famously sustained Nelson Mandela during his long imprisonment on Robben Island, and Asad had sought in them a similar source of inspiration. He had hoped they would strengthen his resolve to one day reach the United States.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
How many times had he read those lines, growing up a citizen of nowhere in the world’s largest refugee camp? A sea of sand and thorn scrub and makeshift tarpaulin dwellings in the dry badlands of northeast Kenya, the camp had been home to more than 500,000 people at one point—a city the size of Kansas City or Atlanta, except without electricity or running water. There were no paved roads, no two-story buildings, no permanent structures of any kind. Most of the refugees had fled the war in neighboring Somalia, but a growing number, like Asad, had been born in the camp and never seen their home country. Members of this new generation had spent their entire lives in limbo. Everything from food rations that kept them alive to the arcane resettlement process that offered the only hope of a better future hinged on the whimsy of distant powers.
In Dadaab refugee camp, no one is master of his fate.
Yet somehow, after twenty-two years of waiting, Asad had made it here. In his back pocket was a UN-issued travel document that contained a student visa. Tucked inside the document’s light blue jacket was a form stating the impossible: He had been admitted to Princeton University and awarded a scholarship worth $70,000 a year. It was more than his entire family, perhaps his entire block in Dadaab, had ever seen in their lives, and so improbable that he hadn’t allowed himself to fully process what it meant. He didn’t dare. Too many times he had been on the cusp of breaking free from Dadaab only to have it re-ensnare him at the last moment.
There was the promise from the UN Refugee Agency of resettlement in the United States that had gone unfulfilled for thirteen years, the prestigious Canadian scholarship he had devoted his entire childhood to winning only to fall short of the grade, and the desperate attempt to smuggle himself out of the camp that had ended with him behind bars. Then came an executive order by President Donald Trump that shook Dadaab like an exploding mortar shell. Just days before his parents were scheduled for an interview at the U.S. Embassy in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, the final step in the arduous vetting process for green cards, the United States suspended all refugee admissions and banned travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries, including Somalia.
Now as the customs line inched forward, he felt sure someone would snatch this opportunity from him as well. The Trump travel ban wasn’t supposed to apply to him, since he had been born in Kenya and granted a student visa. But he knew the agents at the border had the final say on who entered the United States, and there were plenty of reasons they might turn away a twenty-two-year-old ethnic Somali man. Already, a mysterious American official had intercepted him on his layover in the Frankfurt airport. She had peppered him with questions, some of them surprisingly blunt: “Have you ever been a member of an extremist organization? Do you know anyone who is a member of an extremist organization?”
With each shuffle forward, Asad’s anxiety grew. By the time he reached the front of the line and a young Latino agent with a crew cut beckoned with a pair of raised fingers, he could feel himself freezing up, the hint of a childhood stammer creeping back into his voice. Just answer the questions the way you practiced, he told himself. Look the agent in the eye. Smile.
The first few questions were pro forma: What did he plan to study? Was this his first time to the United States? The agent swiveled in his chair to face his computer screen. His sullen expression gave no hint as to what he was reading, but as the minutes dragged on Asad was overcome with a feeling of dread. Then, without warning, a light above him began to blink red. “Would you come this way, please?” the agent said, stepping out from behind his desk and gesturing to a dimly lit hallway at the end of the row of cubicles. “We’d just like to ask you a few more questions.”
* * *
I first met Asad about a year and a half earlier, a day or two after Trump announced his travel ban. At the time, I was the Africa editor of Foreign Policy, a small American magazine owned by the former Washington Post Company. My job was to rove the continent in search of stories, and to commission articles from other correspondents whenever news broke and I couldn’t cover it myself. I had recently visited Dadaab to write about Kenya’s threats to close the camp and expel its hundreds of thousands of inhabitants. I had also read an article in the New York Times Magazine by a young man who had grown up in Dadaab. Detailed and emotionally wrenching, it told the story of his sister’s first trip home to the camp after eleven years in the United States. Because it was so well written, I assumed the author had been one of the lucky few to receive a scholarship to study abroad. It didn’t occur to me that he might still be stranded in the camp. When Trump announced the travel ban, I reached out to the young man on Twitter to see if he would be willing to write something about families that were affected, not thinking that his would be one of those families. “This is such sad news for me personally,” Asad replied. “It somehow seems the world is working against us.”
It was only after he agreed to write the article and we met in person to discuss it that I discovered he had never been to college. He had traveled to Nairobi expecting to see his parents off to America, so we met on the ground floor of a gleaming, modern shopping center at a café popular with the Somali diaspora. Over steaming lattes near a glass elevator bank mobbed by hurried shoppers, he told me about his childhood in the camp, where there are no elevators, no lattes, and nowhere to rush to or from. He told me about how the resettlement process had disrupted his education multiple times, and about how for years he had sneaked into the library at night to teach himself what he had missed in the classroom. He read Tolstoy, Dickens, and García Márquez, designing a kind of “Great Books” education for himself from the dog-eared volumes donated by American charities. Whenever he encountered a word he didn’t know, he looked it up in a battered copy of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Asad is tall and lanky and wears thick, rectangular glasses that accentuate his already bookish appearance. He can be wildly animated, swinging his arms like a conductor as he rails against injustice or expounds on what he sees as the absurdities of life outside Dadaab. In between vignettes from his childhood, he peppered me with questions about my life. I sensed that he was mining me for information about the world beyond Kenya—a country that he had still never left. I had been to Somalia the previous year and embedded with African Union troops fighting al-Qaeda-linked militants not far from where Asad’s father was born. Asad had read my articles, and he wanted to know more about how it looked and felt and smelled. “How did you find it?” he asked me. “You know, I have never been to my own country. It’s crazy.”
Despite his frustration at having been denied access to so many things others took for granted, he seemed genuinely grateful for what he had gotten in the camp. “I was so privileged,” he said more than once. “To be in a place where there were aid agencies, it was a great privilege. In those days, the schools in Dadaab were outperforming the schools in the rest of northeast Kenya. We had a beautiful library built by an NGO—it’s not there anymore, people took the books—but back then we had a beautiful library. I had the whole world at my fingertips.”
The first residents of Dadaab arrived in 1992, a year after Somalia collapsed into civil war and more than a decade before mobile phones came widely into use. A quarter of a century on, residents can peer out at the rest of the world through Facebook and Twitter, but they remain trapped in an environment that is virtually unchanged, save for the steady creep of the desert into the semi-arid shrublands that once yielded firewood and game. The tents still buckle against the windblown sand, still get swept away by periodic floods. Their occupants now include second- and third-generation refugees—permanent exiles facing a lifetime in waiting.
Kept alive but prevented from living, the residents of Dadaab have clung to one eternal source of hope: resettlement overseas, sometimes in Europe or Canada but mainly in America. Since the end of World War II, when it opened its borders to more than 650,000 displaced Europeans, the United States has taken in more refugees than the rest of the world combined. In the last three decades alone, it has accepted nearly three-quarters of the more than 4 million refugees resettled anywhere in the world—more than Canada, Australia, Britain, and thirty-three other designated resettlement countries added together. That number represents only a tiny fraction of the total in need of asylum—the vast majority of refugees will never be resettled—but for a time it transformed the United States into a beacon of hope for millions of people around the globe. In Dadaab when Asad was growing up, nearly every aspect of life revolved around getting to America. For the tens of thousands of people who were in the U.S. resettlement pipeline at any given moment, America was the subtext of every conversation about the future, of every promise that someday things would get better.
Perhaps nowhere else on earth have so many people placed so much faith in a country they have never visited and are unlikely ever to reach. And perhaps nowhere else on earth have the results of a distant presidential election proved so utterly devastating. When Trump announced his travel ban in January 2017, there were more than 14,000 refugees at some stage of the resettlement vetting process in Dadaab. Some, like Asad’s parents, had waited decades for an interview. Others had received their visas only to have their flights canceled at the last moment.
The bar on refugee admissions was eventually lifted, but the resettlement pipeline from the countries affected by the travel ban remains mostly blocked. Just eight refugees from Dadaab were resettled to the United States in 2018 and fourteen were resettled in 2019. Even those with life-threatening illnesses have been denied travel authorization to seek medical care in the United States. Some of them have died. Yet that January afternoon in 2017, it was clear that Asad hadn’t lost faith.
The story of his escape from Dadaab, and of his improbable leap into the Ivy League, is a marvel of endurance and fortitude, Henley’s famous evocation recast for the modern age. It is also a chronicle of happenstance, of long odds and impossibly good luck, and of uncommon generosity. At various times, I feared it might turn out very differently. In that regard, it is also the story of the Asads who might have been—of his younger sister who died of malnutrition and is buried in a sandy unmarked grave, of his older sister who dropped out of school in the sixth grade but somehow managed to carry the rest of the family on her shoulders, of his brother who lost hope and spends his days chewing a stimulant leaf known as miraa.
So many futures were far more likely than making it to a university of any kind: recruitment into an extremist group, a dangerous sea crossing in search of work, death at the hands of Kenyan security forces who have killed and disappeared thousands of young Somalis. These were paths followed by many of Asad’s classmates and friends. He is the only person born in Dadaab ever to be admitted to Princeton University.
* * *
From the baggage-claim area behind immigration control, I watched helplessly as the agent led Asad away. I had already collected his luggage and mine, and was pacing anxiously in front of an empty carousel. For the past eighteen months, we had spoken almost every day. After our initial meeting in the mall, he had written another moving essay that chronicled his lifelong fascination with the United States, a place, he wrote, that “other refugees spoke about the same way they spoke about the hereafter.” Like so many of the immigrant writers he admired, from Junot Díaz to Vladimir Nabokov, he hoped to find his voice writing novels in America—if only he could ever make it there. “The words I write may travel all around the world, but I am confined to the refugee camp where I was born,” he wrote. “I can’t move freely in Kenya; I need a permit to leave Dadaab. My whole life, it seems, I’ve been living the American dream. I just don’t know how much longer I can bear to live it outside of America.”
We kept in touch after his essay ran, exchanging articles and tidbits of news about Dadaab. When he decided to remain illegally in Nairobi and apply to a prestigious boarding school, my wife and I agreed to pay the one-third of his tuition that wasn’t covered by a scholarship. By then Asad and I were meeting regularly at a crowded outdoor café set off from one of Nairobi’s busier roundabouts. Our informal interviews lasted hours, and often drifted into discussions about writing, journalism, and ethics. We bantered back and forth about the line between journalistic inquiry and political activism. It was important to Asad for journalism to serve a moral purpose. At one point, he sent me a New York Times article about a reporter whose life had become deeply intertwined with that of her subject, a terminally ill cancer patient. It was the kind of reporter-subject relationship journalism professors warn their students against, but in this case, it had resulted in a beautifully honest story.
It occurred to me that our lives were also becoming intertwined. The ethics of journalism demand a certain remove from our subjects. We are impartial observers, we tell ourselves, just here to witness and report back. But some stories test those artificial boundaries, and some shatter them altogether. The more of his story that Asad entrusted me with, the less I felt like an impartial observer. And the more time we spent together, the more outraged I grew at the obstacles he encountered that were mostly invisible to everyone else. In researching this book, I spent hundreds of hours listening to Asad recount memories from his past. But I also had a front-row seat to his present during a period in which his life’s trajectory was altered so suddenly and dramatically that his own family couldn’t fully comprehend what had occurred. That period was punctuated by near-daily setbacks and disappointments, however, as Asad attempted to break free from a universe defined by deprivation and into one of plenty.
There are so many ways in which the best universities in the world—nearly all of them located in rich countries—keep out people like Asad, people without bank accounts or credit cards, reliable access to the Internet or parents who can read and write. People who are de facto heads of households as teenagers and have younger siblings to clothe and feed. The application process was designed for residents of “a different world,” as he put it, one where people had second homes to list on financial aid applications or “favorite keepsakes” to describe in personal essays. Even the most basic requirements had tripped him up. There was the online common application used by most U.S. universities that didn’t have an option for stateless applicants, the teacher who refused to write a recommendation because Asad didn’t have a full academic transcript from Dadaab, and the SAT examiner who turned him away at the door because of a scheduling mix-up after he had spent months preparing for the test.
When Asad finally emerged from the interrogation room at JFK and flashed me a thumbs-up, I felt tears well up in my eyes. It turned out that the mysterious official in Frankfurt had flagged him for additional questioning in New York, but Asad had managed to answer everything to the agent’s satisfaction. The universe of plenty had thrown up one last obstacle, and as I had seen him do dozens of times before, he had found a way over. Still shaken and looking disoriented, he retrieved his luggage and we walked together into the humid summer sun. The ride into New York City took us through Queens and along a blighted stretch of Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, past desolate warehouses and crumbling brick tenements. A sign on one edifice advertised speedy eviction services. I wondered what must be going through Asad’s mind after dreaming of this moment for so long. But for once, I didn’t ask him and we drove on in silence.
Copyright © 2021 by Ty McCormick