Unsettled Lives: Refugees Reaching Out to One Another

Michigan is home to the nation’s largest population of Iraqi refugees, estimated to number over 40,000 and drawn primarily from Iraq’s large Christian minority—especially ethnic Chaldeans—and an equally large number of anti-Baathist Shi`a Muslims. This public history project focuses not on how people became refugees, but rather on the process by which they have made a home for themselves in Michigan. We ask how their ideas about themselves and their communities have been transformed by the refugee experience. How did they see/imagine the U.S. when they first arrived here? How did they see the city’s well-established Chaldean and Arab populations? How have these opinions changed over time? More importantly, we focus our questions on the challenges individuals faced in adapting to life in Detroit and the resources they identify as having helped smooth the way for them. We also ask about the types of aid they wish they had received but did not. Our goal is to think about the many ways in which the experiences and insights of a migrant community that began arriving in the region 20 years ago can be made use of to better facilitate the arrival and adaptation process for Syrian, Yemeni, and other refugees arriving in Detroit today. Working with students and a local museum, this project will also generate a public facing product as well, designed to help Americans better understand the impact such a large refugee community is having on the region, and to produce a guide for the refugees we hope to welcome here in the future. I look forward to discussing this project and the challenges my students and I face as we navigate the sensitive spaces in which Iraqis are constructing new lives for themselves in Michigan.