“If You Want to Live Here, You Need to Live by the Rules Here”
Here’s a Slate article on anti-refugee/anti-Islam animus running amok, fed by the rise of Trump:
This mounting demonization of refugees in Twin Falls has coincided, of course, with the rise of Donald Trump, who has called for a ban on Muslim immigration and has said that Syrian refugees are “probably” part of ISIS. People in town regularly repeat Trump’s oft-disproven claim that there’s no vetting process in place for refugees from the Middle East. “We can take in some of the refugees, just not all of them,” said Eric Odell, 35, the husband of Davis Odell, founder of the Justice for Our Children Facebook group. “They’re not vetting them, so some of them don’t care about our laws,” he said. “They don’t want to conform to our laws. They want to live Sharia law. And those are the ones we don’t want here, where they believe rape is acceptable, and a woman’s place is underneath their feet.”
It includes an account of a Christian Armenian refugee now being terrorized by American fascists encouraged by Trump:
For refugees in Twin Falls, it’s frightening that more people now feel empowered to say that publicly. “What was happening here happened before Trump got hyped up,” Babayan said. But, she added, “when Trump came in, it definitely gave more clout, a legitimacy, to those emotions.” Suddenly, she said, people opposed to refugees thought, “There’s a presidential candidate who sees it like us, and he’s saying the things that we’re feeling. And then you see the videos of the rallies. You’ve got a leader saying, ‘Get those people out.’ That energy spills out into the community, where the community says, ‘Get ’em out!’ ”
Babayan has felt the growing anti-refugee animus in her daily life. People have left her angry voicemails; in one, a woman complained about how much it cost her to have her “throbbing” tooth extracted while her tax dollars paid for refugees’ medical bills. Babayan’s car was keyed; she’s had nasty notes left on her windshield. In June 2015, she says, a woman who had been selling clothes at her boutique abruptly pulled all her merchandise, saying, “I want to do business with Americans.”
Later in the summer, she says, a woman who had overheard her speaking to her son in Russian walked into Ooh La La and said, “If you want to live here, you need to live by the rules here. You need to speak the language of this country.” The woman threatened to deface the store’s front window and told Babayan she would have her deported. (Babayan showed me the notice of trespassing she filed with the police to have the woman banned from the property.) In November, three men marched in to Ooh La La, one of them saying to Babayan’s sales clerk, “We’re just looking to see if you have an American flag displayed in here.”