AMMAN—”Can you believe that I will be the grandson of an American?” Although he’s in the Kingdom of Jordan, 24-year-old Iraqi refugee Remel Somo is thinking of Detroit. His relatives have been living there for years, and his grandmother is about to be naturalized.
A week later, Remel has much more sobering news. Two of his classmates, brothers, have just had an accident while illegally crossing into Europe. One of them died, and the other is severely injured. They had waited four years in Lebanon, exhausting all legal means of leaving the Middle East.
Chaldean-Assyrians, also known as Syriac Christians, have fled Iraq en masse, targeted over the past few decades for their ethnicity (neither Kurdish nor Arab) and religion. But rising anti-immigrant sentiments in the West have separated more recent Chaldean-Assyrian refugees from their relatives in the diaspora, with many families waiting for years—or risking their savings and lives—to reunite, writes Matthew Petti in his latest piece at Reason.
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