Arizona Attorney - December 2013

Captain Phillips is a brilliantly crafted film about an absorbing, disturbing event. If it offered nothing more, it would still garner Oscars and Golden Globes, but fortunately it offers much more.

By focusing on a handful of emaciated and desperate Somali pirates, none over 20 years old, Phillips raises questions about what drove the group to put two Mercury outboards on a broken skiff and attack a huge cargo ship. But it also examines what happens to Muse, the anti-Johnny Depp pirate leader, brilliantly played by Barkhad Abdi.

Equally important, the film makes you ask what happens to those who stayed in their villages to face the horrors of an endless civil war, a drought that turned most of the country into sand, a cycle of vicious warlords and inept politicians.

And it makes one wonder where the brilliant actors who play the pirates came from. Is there a Somali actors workshop hidden somewhere in Hollywood? What life experiences could lead them to so perfectly emote the fear and hope and madness of their folly?

The answers explore the tragedy and triumphs of the primary “pushes” behind global migration— environmental degradation, civil wars, corrupt leaders and epic poverty. Since almost no one would voluntarily remain in a place of random, horrifying violence, Somali migration is inevitable. The numbers are staggering. In a population of 7 million, 2 million Somalis have left their homeland, and several million more are IDPs—Internal Displaced Persons. With half their population wandering, the nation is shattered.

Phillips’ village scenes personalize these big numbers, and depict the non-choices young Somali men have; either they do the warlord’s bidding or their village and families are ravaged.

The migration choices for Somalis are just as limited; their neighbors are Kenya, Djibouti and Yemen, places with their own ferocious problems and restless populations. Even if they don’t die on their way to a safer country, Somalis are not free by crossing a border. They are taken to refugee camps that operate outside the grid of the host country, relying solely on United Nations help and the kindness of strangers. (CNN visited one such village here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydPlF3osolk)

Opinions in the magazine are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the State Bar of Arizona, its Board of Governors, the Editorial Board or staff. The magazine provides an open forum for readers. Send your letter to arizona.attorney@azbar.org

THE LAST WORD by Roxie Bacon

Roxie Bacon (on the right) has been
a lawyer in Arizona since 1974, shortly
after the glaciers melted. She has been
interested in immigration policy since her
Peace Corps days, which occurred
before the glaciers melted. She travels
extensively and still teaches,
writes, lectures and mentors in all
things immigration.
The goal for refugees in camps is to get
out. But that is no simple feat, and most
refugees will spend their lives waiting in
tattered tents for help that will not come.
To be among the chosen, selected to
immigrate to the United States or Britain,
is to defy all odds.
Under our law, to
even begin the pro-
cess, the migrants,
who travel with noth-
ing but their clothes,
must collect proof
that they have a “well
founded fear” of very
specific types of perse-
cution. Few can meet
the test, but no mat-
ter how many can, the
U.S. takes no more
than 80,000 refugees
from all countries in
the world in any one
year—a number less
than one percent of
our population.
The Somali actors are living proof that
the migration epic does not have to end in
death or despair. They endured camps in
Yemen, they landed in a frozen landscape,
they had nothing, and yet they made their
way. Not many years later, working as cab
drivers and short-order cooks, they
answered a casting call in Minneapolis,
where about 40,000 Somalis have relocat-
ed over the last few decades.