In 2017, the Trump administration’s Muslim ban effectively set U.S. immigration and refugee resettlement policy back more than 100 years. Trump’s reactionary policy evoked the dark days of the Chinese Exclusion Act, signed in 1882 by President Chester A. Arthur, whose aim was to prohibit all Chinese nationals from entering the country. And in the midst of this rekindled far-right fear of refugees and immigrants, Austin-area activist and writer Jessica Goudeau has bravely researched and written After the Last Border. Goudeau’s book is a much-needed nonfiction corrective to the increasingly popular fiction that refugees and immigrants are economically and culturally burdensome to the American way of life.
The book is a bracingly empathetic portrait of two refugee women’s struggles toward resettlement in the Texas capital: Mu Naw, a Christian who fled the genocide in Myanmar, and Hasna, who barely escaped Assad’s bombs in Syria. After years of struggling to survive in their home countries and elsewhere, these women and their loved ones find themselves adjusting to resettlement in Austin in wildly different political climates. The book is especially ambitious in its dual function as an informative 100-year history of refugee resettlement in America and also a swift-paced narrative-driven work of nonfiction. Goudeau’s history-of-refuge sections show that U.S. refugee resettlement policy has always shifted with the political winds of change.
Even though both of these women were eventually granted the “golden ticket” to asylum in America, Mu Naw and her family were lucky to experience resettlement at the tail end of the George W. Bush administration in 2007, when U.S. policies were surprisingly liberal (or perhaps “compassionately conservative”). Conversely, Hasna was a Syrian trying to secure resettlement for her family in 2016 and 2017, during an extremely unwelcoming time for asylum-seekers, especially Muslims. As Goudeau’s research indicates, in 2018 countries like Turkey were accepting over 1 million Syrian refugees; that same year the United States took in a total of 62 Syrians.
