Biden has rescinded Trump’s travel restrictions, but it will take years to undo the damage.
On May 30, 2019, Mohamed Abdulrahman Ahmed should have been in class preparing for exams. Instead, neighbors found the gifted high school senior hanging lifeless from a beam in his home in the Dadaab refugee camp in northeastern Kenya. He had taken his own life.
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 1992, 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.
Mr. Ahmed, 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 el-Qaddafi’s traits but because he had been their elected student leader long enough to be a Middle Eastern despot.
Source: New York Times