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Arab Refugees, Reproductive Exiles, and Regimes of Exclusion on the Margins of Detroit
Abstract
Michigan is home to “Arab Detroit,” one of the largest Arab ethnic enclave communities in North America. Arab Detroit has been the major receiving ground for Iraqi refugees, more than 35,000 of whom were resettled there after the First Gulf War, and approximately 45,000 since the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. These Iraqi Shia Muslim refugees joined an already large community of Lebanese Shia Muslim immigrants who were fleeing civil war in their home country. Although Arab Detroit has thus been a safe haven for Arabs fleeing war, it has also been the site of much Islamophobia and racial profiling since the post-9/11 “terror decade.” Furthermore, during the same period, Michigan’s auto-based economy faltered, leading to unemployment rates for Iraqis that were nearly three times the national average by 2011. The unprecedented 2013 declaration of Detroit’s bankruptcy, followed by the Michigan governor’s attempt in late 2015 to ban Syrian refugees from entering the state, suggests that Michigan is no longer a welcoming home for Arab refugee resettlement. This paper focuses on the reproductive lives of Arab refugees and war exiles who have fled to Arab Detroit. It is based on a five-year ethnographic research project involving 95 resettled Arab immigrants—55 men and 40 women, mostly Iraqi refugees, Lebanese exiles from the civil war, as well as smaller numbers of Palestinian and Yemeni forced migrants—all of whom were seeking reproductive health care at an Arab-serving clinic in the heart of Arab Detroit. As with an earlier study conducted by the author in post-war Lebanon, most of the men and women participating in this study were facing serious reproductive health problems, including both male and female infertility. Thus, they were dreaming of making a “test-tube baby” in order to achieve cultural mandates of adult personhood, to fulfill their ardent desires for parenthood, and to make citizenship claims through the birth of American offspring. However, this infertile Arab refugee population faced many arenas of constraint, including poverty and lack of health insurance, which limited their ability to seek effective health care. Furthermore, in the US, assisted reproductive technologies are not covered by insurance, even under the Affordable Care Act. Thus, Arab refugees face serious regimes of exclusion in the American health care system, becoming “reproductive exiles” within the promised land of test-tube baby-making.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
North America
Sub Area
Diaspora/Refugee Studies