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''' '' STUDENTS BAN
STORMING '' ''': OPINION
THE 'MUSLIM BAN' IS OVER. THE HARM LIVES ON : ON MAY 30 - 2019 - STUDENT MOHAMMAD ABDULRAHMAN AHMED should have been in class preparing for exams.
Instead, neighbor's found this gifted high school senior hanging lifeless from a beam in his home in the Dadaab refugee camp in northwestern, Kenya. He had taken his own life.
Mr. Ndonga, the principal, said that Student Ahmed often reported to school as early as 5.: 30 a.m., and didn't leave until late in the evening. Ramadan Ibrahim, a business manager at the school, told me, ''Most of the time, he talked about resettlement, about leaving the camp for a better life.''
When a Canadian scholarship did not materialize, Student Ahmad ended his life, speaking of falling short of his aspirations in a suicide note.
People who knew Student Ahmed said that he worked feverishly in pursuit of his goal. His parents had returned to Somalia but he had stayed behind in the camp to repeat his final year of high school to better his exam score.
The year before student Ahmad had scored poorly in the national high school exam, far below his expectations. He lived alone and dedicated nearly every waking hour to his studies.
A sea of sand and thorn scrub and makeshift tarpaulin dwellings, Dadaab is home to more than 200,000 people - a city the size of Richmond, Va,or Spokane, Wash, except without electricity or running water.
The camp was established in 1994, a year after neighboring Somalia collapsed into civil war and refugees streamed into Kenya.
Twenty-nine years later, the mostly Somali residents of Dadaab, now including second- and third generation refugees, are forbidden to work formal jobs or to find homes outside the camp. They cannot even construct permanent dwellings, since doing so would run counter to the camp's official status as temporary.
Student Ahmad, who was 26, had grown up in Dadaab and dreamed of finding a way out through education.
He had been a star student, especially in the younger grades, and his classmates called him Qaddafi - not because he had any of the Libyan strongman Muammar e-Qaddafi's traits but because he had been their elected leader long enough to be a Middle Eastern despot.
Over the years, refugees in Dadaab have clung to one hope : resettlement overseas, sometimes in Europe or Canada but mostly in the United States. Tens of thousands of Dadaab's residents have come to the United States; in 2015, for instance, more than 3,000 people from the camp were resettle there.
Those hopes of a better life were dashed on Jan 27, 2017, when on his eighth day as president, Donald Trump suspended all refugee admissions and banned entry to citizens of Muslim-majority countries, including Somalia.
[Restrictions were eventually applied to 13 countries in all]. The travel ban all but slammed shut the gates of the United States which, which had accepted roughly three million of the more than four million refugees resettled anywhere in the last four decades.
In one of his earliest actions in office, President Biden rescinded the Trump travel ban. During his campaign, he promised to lift the cap on refugee admission from 15,000 to 125,000, seeking to raise it over time ''commensurate with our responsibility and values.''
Keeping that promise would be a vital first step toward restoring the United States to its role as a leader in refugee resettlement, but Mr. Trump's life-0altering legacy will reverberate for generations of refugees.
Repairing the damage to the refugee admissions program may take years.
Truly, living up to our responsibilities and values would mean significantly scaling up refugee resettlement and rallying the 40 or so richest countries in the world to do the same - so that a fourth and fifth generations of refugees are are not born in places like Dadaab.
Such an effort would come late for Students Ahmad whose bright star fizzled out during America's hour of darkness. But for others like him it would restore a flicker of hope.
The Honor and Serving of the Latest Global Operational research on Students affairs and Refugees and State-of-the-World, continues. The World Students Society thanks author Ty Mccormick - an editor at Foreign Affairs.
With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all prepare and register for Great Global Elections on The World Students Society : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter - !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :
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