CHAPTER 12

Money and Responsibility

The challenges of becoming a citizen are different from the challenges that a member of a tribe faces. In many ways, the challenges of citizenship are far easier than managing the complexities of traditional societies’ taboos and superstitions. But what makes modernity so elusive, even treacherous to some, is precisely that it looks so easy. It isn’t. If you are not prepared—if no one teaches you a fair approach to sexuality, for example, or new ways of dealing with aggressive impulses short of violent revenge—then naturally you will fall back on what you know. Your habits and attitudes have been ingrained by clan and faith. But these values of the bloodline are not compatible with those that underlie citizenship in the modern world. If one is to succeed in modern society, one must unlearn anachronistic, out-of-place attitudes. This unlearning applies to money as much as it applies to sex.

In 1992 I lived in an asylum-seeker center in Lunteren, a small village in the heart of Holland. It’s mainly farmland. The people are staunchly Protestant, of the Dutch Reformed Church. I felt I had been honored with the greatest gift that I could ever receive: I had been granted permission to stay in the Netherlands with what is called the A status. It permits you to move freely in the country, to worship freely any religion you choose, to profess any political creed you want. It meant I could escape the marriage that my father had contracted for me against my will. It also gave me access to the Dutch welfare state.

Once I had received the A status, I had to go to the city council, meet a social worker, fill out forms, and be registered for an identity card. I could also apply for housing and to receive an unemployment allowance of 1,200 guilders per month. That seemed to me to be an enormous amount. (It was at the time roughly equivalent to $800.) It seemed a lot because money was something I didn’t know much about. Before arriving in Europe I had never managed money of my own.

In the asylum-seeker center where I had lived while waiting to learn whether or not I would be granted refugee status in the Netherlands, I was given 150 guilders every three months to buy clothes, in addition to a stipend of 20 guilders per week. Every Tuesday I stood in line in the center, showed my pink card to the man or woman behind the counter, received two bright blue notes equal to 10 guilders each, and then waited for my girlfriends to do the same. We would then walk to the village of Lunteren, where, within minutes, my money would evaporate. Instead of two bright blue notes I would now be holding a plastic bag containing a jar of body lotion, perhaps shampoo, a bar of chocolate, and some oranges. The 20 guilders was meant to last me a week, but it was gone. Yasmin’s allowance would be gone too, and so would Dahabo’s. We were astonished that those 20 guilders, which were worth so much in the places we had come from, were not worth all that much in Holland. We gathered in new groups from many parts of the world and lamented about how little 20 guilders could buy.

When I was given my 150 guilders to buy clothes, I bought a telephone card for 50 guilders, which seemed like a truly serious amount. I called my sister Haweya. Within minutes I heard a click and then a long tone indicating that my card was finished. At the time, the cost of an international call from Holland to Kenya was 4.95 guilders per minute. We had not even finished discussing the weather by the time my card ran out.

Now that I had received my A status I would no longer have to live in the asylum-seeker center. I registered with the Ede City Council to be allocated an apartment where I could live with Yasmin, who had told the authorities that she was a minor. (This gave her an advantage when requesting residency.) I too had lied on my refugee application, and I was nervous about it. Not only had I invented a story of my involvement in the civil war in Somalia and neglected to point out that my sojourn there was brief, but also, in order to conceal my whereabouts from my relatives, I had altered my name and date of birth.

While waiting to be allocated an apartment, I decided that I wanted to work. I found temporary jobs as a cleaner and in factory assembly lines. For every job I had to inform the center authorities that I was working and being paid for it. As a result I was not given any pocket money, and I was even supposed to give back some of the money I made, so that no matter what, even if I had worked five or six days a week, I had only 20 guilders per week of my own. I asked one of the social workers, “Why, when I work all day, am I not allowed to keep my money?”

She patiently explained to me that I was receiving food and boarding and that those things were costly. So it wasn’t as if the authorities were confiscating my money, she said: I was contributing to my upkeep. The reward I got from working was that it fought back boredom, taught me Dutch, and helped me feel as if I were doing something useful. But there didn’t seem to be any connection between the hours I worked and the money I made. Surely my upkeep cost far more than the few guilders I earned doing odd jobs.

Finally a letter came in from the housing agency informing me that I had been assigned an apartment and that the minor, Yasmin (who was actually my age), would be released to live in my care. For the first time in my life I had to deal with paying rent and utilities, cable, and telephone bills. I had to find furniture for the house. I hadn’t grown up in a country where the temperature was different between winter and summer; here, you paid for heating, so life in the winter months was more expensive than in the summer.

I went to the social security office, where people were taking turns talking to the civil servants, who stood behind a long counter. After a little while I realized that I was supposed to pull a small piece of paper with a number on it from a pole at one of the two corners of the waiting room. As people finished their business with the civil servants, new numbers would appear on a screen, and each time the number changed I heard a loud ping. I was fascinated by the ingenuity of this. People did not have to line up as we did in Africa; they did not have to cut in line, shove, or otherwise act in aggressive ways to defend their place in line. You could take a seat while your piece of paper stood in line for you. It was even more impressive to me that the civil servants worked at such a speed that you never waited longer than ten or fifteen minutes.

“Next!” called a blonde woman with a scarf around her neck and a tight smile on her thin lips.

I went rushing to the counter. I said, “That’s me, Ali!”

“Show me your ID,” she said.

I was wearing a jacket with five pockets. I opened the zipper of my right-hand pocket and shoved my hand in, but the ID wasn’t there. I tried my left-hand pocket; my ID was not there either. I looked into the breast pockets, and finally found it safely tucked into my sleeve pocket, where always I kept some coins and a 10-guilder note for the bus in case my bicycle tire ran out of air. My jacket sleeve pocket was to me what a safe-deposit box was to the Dutch and the pillowcase was to my grandmother. I deemed my ID and my 10 guilders the most precious things I had on me, so that’s where I kept them.

Always nervous before a government agent, I half expected the woman to tell me to go back to my country. I imagined her losing her temper and snapping, “What are you doing here? Get back! Go back home, go back to your parents.” Or that she would say in a conspiratorial tone, like so many officials I had encountered in Africa, “Have you got a present for me?”—meaning Give me a bribe.

Instead she waited patiently for me to find my ID and hand it over to her. She looked at me, at the picture of my ID, at me again, and at the papers she had in a file that seemed to hold all the details on my case from the time I had asked for asylum. “Tell me your first name,” she said.

“Ayaan.”

“And your last name?”

“We don’t have last names,” I said. “I can tell you my bloodline.”

“Is it Hirsi?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “He is the son of Ali.”

“Ali?” she asked, and nodded her head. “Good, come with me, please.”

I walked around the counter and she led me into a small office. She took a seat behind a desk and asked me if she could fetch me tea, coffee, water, or anything else to drink. My nervousness must have shown on my face.

“I am getting coffee for myself,” she said. “I don’t mind getting one for you.”

“All right,” I said. “Coffee, please.”

When she came back she smiled and said, “Congratulations, you now have an apartment in Ede. In order to furnish your place you’ll need some money. Do you have any savings?”

“Savings?” It was probably the first time I heard the word. My grandma used to sew into her pillowcase money that she was given by my mother, her son, or my father. She never seemed to spend it. “What is that?” I asked.

“Have you put any money away to spend later?”

“We get only twenty guilders a week,” I said, “and mine always vanishes the day I get it.” This was how I felt about it. It wasn’t that I chose to spend the money; it just walked out of my pocket.

“So you haven’t saved any money?” she said.

“No,” I murmured. I felt ashamed, although I didn’t know exactly what caused the shame. Everyone seemed to talk about money very bluntly in Holland, but it always made me uneasy. I was further embarrassed by the fact that I didn’t know the meaning of words like savings or anything at all about bank accounts or any of the related jargon she began using. The idea of setting aside money in a bank account that collected interest was completely foreign to me.

“Okay,” she breezed. Her attitude toward me remained polite, warm, and friendly. She was not judgmental. But her next question almost made me choke on my coffee. “Did your parents save any money for you?”

This was an incredible question that fully laid out the vast differences between Holland (and the West in general) and where I came from, the nomad culture. This woman took it for granted that most parents are able to save money for their children, putting it in a special bank account in their child’s name. “P-p-p-parents?” I spluttered.

“Don’t you have parents?” she asked. “Where are they?”

I was sweating; I could feel the sweat in my armpits. The more I tried not to be nervous, the more I thought it showed. I had told a lie when I asked for asylum, and it seemed to have gone well, because I received the A status. But I thought this was another test. At the time I did not realize that different agencies of the Dutch government do not communicate on these things.

“Where do your parents live now?” she continued. “I see you have an A status. I know there is war in Somalia, that must really be bad for you.”

I felt a sense of relief and delved into the story that I had rehearsed for months now about the civil war. She stopped me and said, “Let’s continue with the application.”

“Application?” I asked, confused. I thought I already had an A status.

“Yes,” she said, “I’m talking about the application for a loan. You need a loan to furnish your apartment.”

“Oooh!” I exclaimed. “I need to furnish my apartment.” Furnish … My … apartment. Three huge separate concepts were thrust at me all at once.

“How much do you need?” she asked.

“Just enough,” I answered warily.

She said I could borrow anything from 1,200 to 5,000 guilders. “You don’t know what things cost, do you?” she went on.

“No,” I agreed. “I don’t know how much things cost.”

“Well, do you have friends?” she asked. “They could take you to the cheap stores.” At the word cheap I felt a deep sense of dishonor, a sense that I now was at the lowest rung of this society, that I had fallen low.

“Yes, yes, I have friends,” I said. I couldn’t bear to say that I didn’t have friends.

She continued to fill out the application. “When do you think you are going to pay back the money?”

“Do I have to pay it back?” I asked. “I thought you were giving it to me.”

“No, I am not giving it to you. It is a loan. L-o-a-n. It is a loan.”

“What is a loan?” I asked. “Oooh, you mean a debt?” I was disturbed at the idea of owing a debt to an infidel. That would surely mean I would have to pay interest, which is un-Islamic and wicked. This was certainly an infidel trick.

“Yes,” she said. “You would have to pay interest.”

“But in my religion that’s forbidden!” I squawked.

“You don’t have to do it,” the social worker counseled me. “In fact you should not take a debt at all, it’s not good for you. Your religion is wise. But you don’t have any furniture and you have an empty house and it will get cold soon after the summer. Do you want to think about it and come back sometime next week?”

I said no, I did not want to think about it. I felt that this additional sin of participating in usury would not truly make any difference. I had already sinned so much. I had taken money from the infidel, I had slept in their camps, I had disobeyed my parents, I hadn’t been praying much, I had cut my hair short, and I wore trousers just like a man. I was certainly damned in any case. And it was cold, and I did want a nice apartment, and this lady was offering me a truly alluring amount of money, over $4,000. “I would like to continue with the application, please,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “The payback plan is this: as long as you have no job, you receive an unemployment payment of twelve hundred guilders. Every month we will subtract one hundred guilders from your unemployment allowance to cover the debts. We will do this for five years, until it is paid back. If you find a job, I or a colleague of mine will sit down with you and we can arrange for you to make a new payment plan. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said, feeling a little stupid.

“Then sign here, please. And the date, then you are all set.”

“But how do I get the money?” I asked.

“Open a bank account and then let us know the account number.”

I had never had a bank account. A volunteer caseworker from the Dutch refugee assistance organization had to take me to a bank to open one. The woman at the bank asked me if I wanted to deposit any money. I offered her the 10 guilders in my jacket sleeve. “Oh no, you can keep that,” she said. “It’s okay.”

I received a little shiny blue card that said Giro. It didn’t work in cash machines—it was just a record of my account number—but I thought it looked terrific.

The volunteer caseworker was very kind and very precise. He advised me that I should get a wallet instead of putting my money and documents in my jacket pockets. I was too embarrassed to ask him what a wallet was. We were speaking English, but wallet wasn’t a word I had ever looked up.

Two weeks later, two good things happened. My 5,000-guilder loan arrived in my brand-new bank account, and the bank sent me a debit card. I could get money out of a machine in the wall along the road any time I felt like it!

Yasmin and I were jubilant. I suppose we had both dreamed of becoming rich. Grandma and Ma used to allude to the possibility for my sister and me. But getting rich to us meant that we would marry wealthy men who would take care of us, as well as provide for Ma and Grandma. Thus becoming rich was connected to luck (you were lucky if a rich man proposed to you) but also to impeccable behavior as a very docile, baarri girl and a virgin whose honor and purity would stand above that of all other women.

Now, thanks to Allah, Yasmin and I were rich. We talked about decor, about curtains and carpets and furniture. We said “pretty” and “beautiful” a lot, but never anything specific. The last time I had lived in a decorated house was in Addis Ababa when I was eight. Other than that, my mother’s idea of decor was to unpack our squat gambar, which are Somali wooden stools with cowhide seats, and lay thin mattresses on the ground. They were all-purpose: we sat on them and slept on them, and we ate on the floor. (In one house in Kenya we had a dining table and four chairs, but Ma broke them in a fit of anger.) Ma covered windows with sheets or long cloths from the street market.

My family led a nomadic life even when we lived in cities. We moved often, and each time we rented a new house, finding windows was like a revelation. “Windows,” my father would say, pleased with himself. “Lots of windows. Noor. Light, lots of light, lots of light.”

My mother would cut him short. “Daah, daah, daah,” cover, cover, cover. We would need curtains. My father would grimace. There would be a fight.

“Why do you choose a house with so many windows if you don’t want to pay for the curtains?”

“Why do you want to plunge us into darkness? What do you need curtains for? We have nothing to cover up. We are pure, we are Muslim, we are the children of Magan.”

So curtains had always been an issue.

Yasmin wanted deep burgundy, silk brocade curtains. She wanted lush carpets, sofas with cushions you could sink in so deep, chandeliers. Her wealthy urban grandmother had brought her up in Nairobi—Yasmin was also a Somali exile—and her situation had been the very opposite of my relatives’. She would invest a lot of money, energy, and time in getting the right tint of curtain to match her upholstery.

Brocade. Upholstery. What did I know? These were words from Jane Austen, and I was already living in the Alice-in-Wonderland world through the looking-glass, with a bank card and an apartment.

A security guard who worked at the asylum-seekers center offered to drive us to furniture stores after his work hours. He asked us what our budget was, and when we told him he said he would take us to stores that were cheap. But we didn’t want to go there. Yasmin and I held our noses and said, “Oh, no, this is not who we are, we would like something more upscale.”

He tried to reason with us: “You can’t afford it. You’re wasting your time.”

“No, no,” we said. “That’s what we want, please take us to the upscale stores.” I had never been to any kind of furniture store, but I wanted brocade, upholstery, quality—nothing nasty and cheap; that would be low.

So this dear man drove us from one store to the next, and at one point we settled on a sample piece of wall-to-wall carpeting that was black, pink, and purple. A salesman informed us that it would cost us 110 guilders per square meter.

We were euphoric. “Yes,” we said in chorus. “This is what we want, this is what we want.”

The expression on the face of our Dutch friend was incredulous. He just stood there, frozen.

Then we fell in love with some wallpaper. It was white, with a pattern on it. There was no real need for it—the walls of our apartment were not falling apart—but I was genuinely fascinated by the idea of wallpaper. It reminded me of covering our textbooks in school. It seemed so grown-up, so rich.

The man in the store who took our bank card was happy. He said there had to be someone at home when the carpet was delivered, that they would remove the old floor materials and put the new carpet in. We loaded the rolls of wallpaper into the car. We spent four days with our Dutch friend peeling off the old paper and pasting up the new one in our living room, hallway, and two bedrooms. A week later our new wall-to-wall carpet was installed.

And here is the surprise: we had 400 guilders left from the loan of 5,000. In other words, we had a carpet, wallpaper, and nothing else. No curtains, nothing to sit on, no beds, no chairs, no dishes.

Yasmin and I were at first baffled.

The money was worth nothing here. Was the whole loan about just a carpet? We quickly decided it was God’s will. There was no need to quarrel: Allah had willed it thus.

The carpet had been cut to fit and glued down. We had no choice but to pay.

The following week, Gerda, a volunteer teacher of Dutch as a second language, came to see us. As soon as she was inside she exclaimed, “Ooooh, you have a nice carpet!” Her expression, however, could not have been more different from her words. She seemed horrified.

We urged her to come in and sit down with us on the floor. We patted our carpet.

“How did you get this … this … carpet?” she asked.

“They brought it,” I said.

“Who is ‘they’?”

“The store.”

“And who picked out the colors?” she asked. “If you want any help from me to return it, all you have to do is say so.”

“But we want to keep it,” I said.

Gerda’s father rang the doorbell. She had brought him so he could help us fill out forms to settle down in Ede; he was retired, she said, and would enjoy it.

“What a cheerful carpet,” he said, when he came in. “Did you find this in the house? If you want, I can take it out. I can get a couple of young men to remove it.”

“Oh no,” I replied. “The carpet is new, it is ours, we want it.”

We showed her father our bookkeeping, which was in envelopes that we kept in a plastic bag. He brought out two huge files and a perforator and proceeded to show us how to make holes with it and how to file our papers. I had been to a Kenyan secretarial college, so although I had very little practical experience of filing, I did understand what he was trying to teach us.

Next he took a look at our receipts. He saw the bill for the carpet and exclaimed, “It is your entire loan, except for four hundred guilders!” He was visibly upset. “This is wrong!” he said. “A scandal. The salespeople have taken advantage of you. I will write them a letter that this is indecent and should not have happened. We have to reverse this.”

I was speechless. Yasmin thought she would rescue the situation by serving mountains of cookies and tea.

“Uhmmmm,” I stammered. “Uhm uhm uhm, but we like the carpet.”

“But now you don’t have anything else,” he said.

“More tea?” I asked, hoping to change the subject.

Gerda and her father spoke in rapid Dutch. Yasmin and I looked at each other helplessly. Then Gerda saved the day. “Okay,” she said, “if you really like the carpet, then keep it. We will get you some furniture. You need beds, you need chairs, and you need a table, a desk, a TV.”

Within a week she and her father had mobilized their old but incredibly fit retired friends and relatives to help us. They brought furniture, beds, curtains, plates, forks, and knives. Because I spoke English (I did not yet speak Dutch), my role was to answer the phone and open the door. For a couple of weeks, all that came out of my mouth was “Yes, thank you. Of course we like it. Thank you very much.”

Kind volunteers walked in carrying more chairs, side tables, little ceramic statuettes, even gnomes, and every time I opened the door I said, “Yes, yes, yes, come in, please, thank you.”

We had four beds, three televisions, two sofa sets, two tables, and more than a dozen chairs; on one of them sat a pile of various sizes of lacy acrylic curtains. Our airy three-room apartment resembled a furniture storage room. I was sneezing from all the dust.

One day Yasmin started crying. She hated living this way. So we took everything we hated down three flights of stairs to the basement. When Gerda or her father came by, they always called in advance, so we would spend a couple of hours bringing everything back upstairs.

We still hadn’t put up curtains. Neither of us knew how, and we didn’t really like any of the ones we’d been given; they looked like nasty cast-offs. One day when I came home from Dutch-language class Yasmin said she’d found a perfect answer to the curtains. She had a large glossy catalogue on her lap with lots of photos in it and a great big smile on her face. “Ayaan, look, we can throw out all the rubbish!” she cried joyfully. “We can get fresh new curtains, furniture, anything we want!”

In that catalogue were clothes, shoes, gadgets, utensils, everything you could ever wish for. “But how are we going to pay for this?” I asked.

“You don’t have to pay for it!” cried Yasmin. “You buy and you pay later.” She told me about visiting some people she’d met at the asylum center. They had also found an apartment, but, she said, unlike us, they lived in beautiful surroundings—and they didn’t pay.

“Okay,” I said, “let’s order curtains.” So we ordered thick, beautiful curtains, gold and brown with a satin-like surface and a thick cotton lining. They arrived twenty-four hours after Yasmin ordered them, in boxes that were delivered right to the door of our apartment. That was another magical thing about the buy-now-pay-later stores: instant gratification.

Yasmin seemed to know exactly what to do, and began fitting little pieces of bent metal into pockets in the curtains. It took us half a day to hang them all up. But when we were done they were much too long, leaving a lot of textile curled up on the floor along the wall. Yasmin said that if we had chosen the shorter measurement that was available in the catalogue the curtains would have been too short. So we left them too long, again thanking Allah and agreeing that it was his wish.

A week later a letter informed me that I was now another 4,000 guilders in debt. Four months later, Yasmin disappeared. A short time later I received a bill from the telephone company: she had run up 2,500 guilders in phone calls.

A number of helpful Dutch people assisted me in applying for various long-term payback plans. In the following months my friend Johanna, a lovely woman who had offered to teach me Dutch, showed me how to shop in large, cheap supermarkets and tried to teach me how to budget. In 1995, as my Dutch-language skills improved, I got a job as a translator and interpreter. I made more money this way than through other odd jobs.

I began to avoid friendships with my fellow Somalis in Ede, although many of them would invite me over so that I could translate for them into Dutch. They continued to buy from various mailorder catalogues that gave you the option to pay in the distant future. Others borrowed money from banks and the social services, which they then sent to their relatives in Somalia or in the Somali diasporas of Africa. I translated for several people who had taken out the same 5,000-guilder loan that I had, and who had sent it all to relatives so that they could pay the entire sum to someone who would smuggle them into Europe.

To pay back these loans, some Somalis took on occasional jobs, but they usually neglected to tell the social services that they were employed. This meant they could continue to receive an unemployment allowance as well as their salary. But it was considered fraud, a felony that could get you in a great deal of trouble. If you were discovered you had to pay back the excess money you had received, plus a fine. This meant more loans, and sank you ever deeper into debt. You might also lose your job because you now had a criminal record, so you had to go back to welfare. In such cases, the authorities would retain part of your unemployment allowance to cover your debts, paying out only enough to cover essential monthly expenses, such as rent and utilities. Many people neglected to pay those bills and became locked into insurmountable debts. I heard of several people who absconded to England or Scandinavia to try to avoid paying back the debts they owed to various banks and agencies in Holland.

Practically everyone I knew had built up overwhelming debts. They applied for credit cards, magical pieces of plastic that meant you could just sign a tiny piece of paper and walk out of any shop with whatever you wanted. They received endless stipends from the social services—for unemployment, for child support, for various medical benefits—and yet in almost every conversation they would lament the miserly amount of money they had to live on, wholly oblivious to the sacrifice of the society that was paying for it all.

They had no idea, in other words, of the obligations of a citizen, let alone the complexities of the welfare state.

*    *    *

As an interpreter for the Immigration and Naturalization Services, I translated for men and women who pleaded desperately to be allowed to live in the Netherlands. The civil servants who interviewed them asked them the same questions that I was asked when I applied for asylum: Had they been persecuted? How did they get to Europe? Had they resided in any country other than Somalia before reaching Holland? Had they ever committed any criminal act?

All these questions were about the past. None of the applicants was asked what he or she expected once admitted into the country. Their skills were not tested. They were not questioned about their values, customs, practices, or their knowledge of Dutch customs and laws.

Like me, some of these applicants were granted residency. But none of us had been citizens before, in the modern sense of citizenship. We had never felt a participatory loyalty to any government. We remained loyal to our bloodline.

In a tribal culture everyone is required to share his earnings with family members and extended family, who take happily. The obligation is also emphasized in the Quran. A poor member of the family who wants help from a well-off member will cite verses from the Quran and sayings from the Prophet to induce his relative to give him money. The tribal code of honor and shame does the rest.

The pressure felt by most immigrants, even second- and third-generation immigrants, to share their earned income with family members living in their country of origin is admired by some development economists and aid workers, but it is part of what keeps people poor. They never save enough money for themselves or for their offspring.

To my fellow Somali refugees, admission into Holland meant, above all, material gain. Some of it—money, clothes, and other luxury items—could be shared with relatives back home or flaunted in front of other Somalis to distinguish oneself from lower clans. My motivation to become a refugee was slightly different: I did not want to be married to a man I did not choose. But none of us was driven by a motivation to become Dutch citizens. Our arrivals were random, an accident or coincidence, depending on one’s perspective.

Imagine you are a Somali who escaped the civil war and you are now in Nairobi. Kenya is considered by most Somali refugees a port of transition to the rich West. So you go to see a smuggler of people, whose business is making fake passports, visas, and other immigration documents. The smuggler, like any other businessman, will show you his wares: entry to the United States costs (say) $20,000; Canada, $15,000; Germany, $10,000; Scandinavia, anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000. Switzerland is really expensive. If you can raise enough money, usually with the help of your relatives already in one of these countries, then you belong to the lucky few who will have access to a life without hunger and with free health care and housing and the opportunity to smuggle in more of your relatives now in refugee camps or some other limbo land.

Most people in this situation never get out of limbo. They court and marry and have children and survive as best they can. Some go back to Somalia and then back to Kenya; some give up in defeat. Those who can afford the smuggler will get a choice of all the countries they can ask for asylum. Some smugglers will provide more than just papers, if you pay for the extra service; they will give you an entire fictitious life story based on the questions that various immigration and naturalization bureaucrats will ask you.

Very often, of course, the scam doesn’t work. Some who pay a smuggler to deliver them to the United States are detained in a European port. Some are deported straight back. Yet many manage to linger on by following the instructions given to them by the smuggler: “Tear up all documents that you have on you with any personal information on them if you are caught anywhere at a transit point. Flush them down the toilet. Upon landing as you approach passport control, put your hands up and ask for asylum.” In this way, as European airports are pressured by the United States to more closely control travelers transiting from Africa and the Middle East, more and more would-be migrants end up in destinations they have not chosen, often in Europe.

A long process follows after they ask for asylum. A lucky few, like me, are allowed in and eventually become citizens through naturalization. But they ask for asylum, which means they apply to the state to be recognized as refugees. Refugee status, if given at all, is given to those who can convince the state that they would be persecuted if returned to their home country. In return, the host country demands that they never go back to their country of origin. If they do go back, their refugee status is nullified, as they no longer meet the condition for protection. People who come to Europe this way end up settling in Europe, not because they desire or even understand what it means to be a citizen but purely for the sake of convenience or because they genuinely do need protection from persecution. These people are therefore not the slightest bit motivated to adopt the values and customs of the countries they flee to.

None of us was remotely prepared to adopt new values. Nearly all of us got in trouble in the society of milk and honey to which we had serendipitously been admitted. And of all the challenges we faced, the biggest was money.

Once in a while I socialized with my colleagues who were translators in Arabic, Farsi, Dari, Berber, Turkish, and other languages, and we would share our experience with the clients from our respective countries. Money was the number one problem. Refugees borrowed too much, were unable to pay back loans, abused credit cards, didn’t pay their taxes, and sent money abroad to relatives rather than caring for their own financial well-being. Our clients all seemed trapped in a cycle of poverty, overwhelmed in a swamp of debt so deep that, even if they acted responsibly for the rest of their lives, it would take almost a generation to work their way out of it.

None of us was prepared to grasp the very sensible and frugal Dutch mantra Earn, save, invest, and reinvest. All of us lived beyond our means. In later years, as I began studying public policy, I came to see that this pattern of debt was clearly related to the enduring poverty of immigrants as a class. Debt perpetuates poverty. When I looked into the causes of debt among Moroccans and Turks—who, unlike refugees from Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, had come to Holland to work—I found that their attitude toward money (borrowing it, failing to save, remitting large amounts of money back home, spending to show off, buying from catalogues, overusing their credit cards) was roughly the same as mine, Yasmin’s, and other Somalis’.

All of us came from countries that were broken-down or corrupt, with a massive gap between the rich and the poor. If you were wealthy, you lived lavishly, owned cars and homes and had expensive jewelry and other rich man’s accessories. Others lived off their wealthy relatives. Then there were the poor: those who lived as servants, beggars, or thieves.

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As a child I learned Arabic, Amharic, and English with no pain, no stress; I have no memory of ever working hard to learn them. One day I didn’t speak them, and the next day I did. Learning Dutch was different. I remember every single effort: the irregular verbs, the exceptions in rules, the verbs at the ends of sentences. I remember working at memorizing the vocabulary.

Clearly, even if you have a knack for it, learning a language as an adult is more arduous than imbibing it as a child. And so it is with regulating your personal finances. I simply didn’t learn how to do it. It sounds pathetic, but nobody ever taught me the difference between ten cents and twenty-five cents, the denominations of coins. I was amazed to find out that Dutch children receive pocket money, not as a gift to spend on whatever they want, but as a deliberate method to teach them how to budget and deal with finances.

Late in life I discovered that money matters. If you don’t deal with it, it will hurt you. It involves choice and planning. Tearing myself away from my father and the man he chose for me had opened up a huge world of freedom, but it also forced me to think about new kinds of limitations to freedom: health insurance, taxes, rent or mortgage payments. I had to have priorities: how much to spend on what. I was bewildered, insecure, confused.

In 1997 I moved in with my Dutch boyfriend, Marco. He was appalled to find that I, a woman who appeared to be independent and relatively prosperous, was in fact a financial child. He would find damp little wads of guilders (notes of ten guilders, or twenty-five or fifty or even a hundred) in the pockets of my shirts or jeans after washing them. After months of explaining that the cloth wasn’t worth the money that it had been washed with, he tried to explain why it was important to carry a separate accessory just for money. So he bought me one exactly like his. Unaware that what Marco called a portefeuille had a male and a female version, I found myself carrying a man’s wallet, and I was constantly surprised by the number of tiny women’s purses (which I later learned were simply women’s wallets) I was given as gifts.

I still struggle to manage even everyday transactions of money. Because I have been brought up to say yes, I cannot say no to salesgirls. All my life I have signed things, and sometimes bought things, just to please a merchant. I lie to get out of conflict situations rather than tell the truth. If a real estate agent shows me a rental, I’m embarrassed beyond words to say I don’t like it; I invent ridiculous stories to explain my way out of this rather routine and obvious situation, then take the agent to an expensive lunch to apologize.

In a very slow and painful process I stumbled forth and discovered the intricacies of financial responsibility. What I did not know, I learned. Based on that experience, I believe it would be prudent to teach refugees a few basic skills before giving them loans and presenting them with credit cards and furniture catalogues, before they get sucked into a subculture of borrowing and fraud.

In a modern, Western society, citizens’ financial ethics, like their sexual ethics, are based on individual responsibility. Within the tribe, ethics are about obedience to clan values, and because of the obligation to assist impecunious family members, those who are irresponsible with their money get away with it. Loyalty to members of the tribe in faraway countries requires borrowing money to send to them. This makes it hard to see the country of your new citizenship as “home;” it has a cost too in terms of your own prosperity. At face value, it may seem very generous to share your money with your extended family, but when this involves taking out loans it has a serious long-term cost.

Skills of earning, budgeting, and saving are indispensable for citizens. But we are not born with them. Muslim girls and women, in particular, are not trained to have such skills. Their ignorance of all things money-related affects them personally, of course, but it also perpetuates the poverty of their families. These girls become mothers too soon, and as mothers they fail to teach their children what it is to be financially responsible. They fall prey to easy credit and fantasy spending. This breeds dependence on welfare states that are already overstretched.

There is growing disaffection in Europe with immigration, a feeling that many immigrants do not deserve the help they receive from generous welfare states. It is said that immigrants disproportionately abuse the system, behaving like parasites. It is important to take this disaffection seriously as the demographic share of people from a tribal background grows.

My proposal is not to kick out the immigrants and their children, as some populist politicians suggest, or to recommend that Western societies shut their borders or stop welfare altogether. But my own financial learning process and knowledge of the struggles of clients for whom I translated, as well as the many studies of poverty and debt of immigrants I read as a member of Parliament, suggest that many people who share a background with me are not familiar with the prevailing morality of money in the countries they have adopted. Rather than respecting their culture, Westerners who feel compassion for the poverty of immigrants need to encourage them to learn new attitudes that will enable them leave that poverty behind.