Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), who fled civil war in Somalia and spent four years living in a ramshackle refugee camp, now believes that living in the U.S. today is a “challenge” and “an everyday assault.”
America: home of the ugly?
Omar discussed the pressures of being a “black, Muslim, hijabi woman” in the U.S. in a recent interview with Vogue Arabia magazine that was published on Friday. “Every day, a part of your identity is threatened, demonized, and vilified. Trump is tapping into an ugly part of our society and freeing its ugliness,” she said.
But according to Omar, that American “ugliness” was on display from the moment she arrived in a Western, democratic country under a refugee resettlement program. “It was the first time that all of the identities I carried and had pride in, became a source of tension,” she recalled of her new home. “When you’re a kid and you’re raised in an all-black, all-Muslim environment, nobody really talks to you about your identity. You just are.”
Yet, it’s difficult to believe that Ms. Omar’s identity never came up during her eight years of living in Somalia, or during the four years she resided in a Kenyan refugee camp. After all, it was clan warfare that forced Omar to flee from her homeland, where over 350,000 Somalis died from genocide and starvation in the first two years of the conflict alone.
In Somalia, clan affiliation — or identity — was everything. But Ms. Omar would rather whitewash her own painful past than speak honestly and openly about the nation that welcomed a 12-year-old refugee and her six brothers and sisters.
“It’s been a challenge to try to figure out how to continue the inclusion; how to show up every day and make sure that people who identify with all the marginalized identities I carry, feel represented,” Omar told Vogue. “It’s transitioning from the idea of constantly resisting to insisting in upholding the values we share — that this is a society that was built on the idea that you could start anew. And what that celebrates is immigrant heritage.”
Haven for refugees
Omar’s assertion that the immigrant communities she represents are “marginalized” and excluded does not reflect reality in Minnesota, where refugees are welcomed with open arms and at taxpayer expense. “I love it here. Every need of a human being is satisfied here,” said Ravindran Sivasundaram, a Malaysian refugee who came to Minnesota in 2014 with his wife and three children.
On average, each refugee welcomed into Omar’s district costs an estimated $107,000 in food aid, medical expenses and other services. Like other Americans, refugees are allowed to apply for government welfare assistance, and a 2017 Notre Dame study found that refugees who have lived in the U.S. for more than 20 years are more likely than native-born citizens to be on welfare and food stamps.
The problem, it seems, isn’t a lack of inclusion, but a failure in assimilation. More men and boys from the Minneapolis community that Omar represents have attempted to join foreign terrorist organizations in the past 12 years than any other U.S. jurisdiction.
Local authorities have complained that it is difficult to work with Minneapolis’s Somali-American community because Somali neighborhoods have become insular, clannish communities cut off from the rest of the city.
“You can buy your clothes at a Somalia mall. You can buy insurance at a Somalia insurance adjuster. You can buy real estate at a Somali real estate adjuster,” explained a U.S official. “I think that is pretty unique.”
No thanks
In a bid to penetrate Minneapolis’s Muslim community, the Department of Homeland Security’s Counter Violent Extremism program recently offered a Somali nonprofit that works with local youths a $500,000 grant. Despite applying for the money just months earlier, the group rejected the offer, citing President Trump’s “unofficial war on Muslim-Americans.”
So long as Ms. Omar continues her divisive crusade to malign and defame the president, and as long as she continues to mischaracterize the very people who offered her family hope and sanctuary 25 years ago, Somali-Americans will find it impossible to shed their feeling of “otherness.”
It’s time for these communities to assimilate, and the congresswoman from Minnesota should be the first. It’s time for Ms. Omar to lead.
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