Exiles on Main Street.("The Middle of Everywhere: The World's Refugees Come to Our Town")

The Middle of Everywhere: The World's Refugees Come to Our Town, by Mary Pipher (Harcourt, 416 pp., $25)

I approached this book with the maximum possible amount of ill will. Mary Pipher, Ph.D. -- that's how she is billed on the book's back flap -- is the author of Reviving Ophelia, the 1994 classic of victimology in which adolescent girls were revealed to be groaning under the iron heel of patriarchal oppression. I have been thinking of Mary Pipher, Ph.D., as part of that Axis of Evil that comprises, amongst numerous others, feminist Carol Gilligan, who was Harvard's first Professor of Gender Studies, and William Pollack, Ph.D. (what is it with these people and their degrees?), who wrote a 1998 book, Real Boys, around the basic idea that boys ought to be encouraged to act more like girls.

In her new book, Mary Pipher, Ph.D., takes on the issue of foreign refugees settling in America's heartland. She approaches this subject not as a political analyst, though she is quite free with political remarks, but as an observer who is involved, through both volunteer and professional work, in helping these people adjust to life in the United States.

I note in passing that there is a great deal to say about the business of asylum from a policy point of view. Like the larger matter of immigration, this is a topic so hedged around with fashionable taboos, it doesn't get half the airing it ought to. The asylum process is apparently riddled with abuses: In my newspaper today there is a report of a Manhattan lawyer who has pleaded guilty to submitting over 1,000 fraudulent asylum applications.

However, Mary Pipher is not a policy intellectual. Where political remarks occur in this book, they are gratuitous, and have the flavor of being addressed to the choir: We all agree on this, surely? I have the impression that Pipher, though indubitably on the political Left, belongs to that section I think of privately as the "innocent Left." She would, I believe, be genuinely astounded to learn that there are people -- thoughtful, well-educated people, not gap-toothed hillbillies -- who disagree with her on points of policy. She is certainly plenty innocent about the Third World: "I was embarrassed to tell her [an Iraqi-Kurdish refugee girl] that we Americans lie to people to make money." I do not think that Middle Eastern cultures are entirely free of this phenomenon.

The author's principal purpose in this book is to tell some stories about actual refugees, by way of offering advice to professionals -- teachers, social workers, and so on -- who have to deal with these newcomers. We are thus introduced to an assortment of refugees who, having passed through the appropriate process and been admitted to the U.S., find themselves in Lincoln, Neb., which is the hometown of Mary Pipher. (Federal policy is to disperse refugees to all parts of the country, rather than encourage them to congregate in a few big cities.) The refugees come from the Middle East, Southeast Asia, the Balkans, Africa, and Central America. Many of them have stories to tell of terrible things that happened to themselves and their families. Since such things undoubtedly have happened in those places, I am willing to believe that they happened to these actual individuals, though I wish I felt more sure that someone in the INS were checking diligently.

These case studies reveal odd fault lines in the doctrines of "diversity" and "multiculturalism." A conversation with three men from southern Iraq, for example, brings up the horror Middle Eastern Muslims feel at the way American men treat their women. They are ...