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Exploring The Intricacies Of Refugeehood By Analyzing Lina 's Refugee Experience Essay

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For the podcast, I interviewed Lina Abdulnoor, with the intention of exploring the intricacies of refugeehood by analyzing Lina’s refugee experience. Lina lived in Iraq with her family until they began receiving death threats due to their religious beliefs. Convinced that they needed to flee the country to survive, they left Iraq as refugees. After leaving Iraq, they settled in Jordan, where they waited two years until the U.N. to approve their request to move to the U.S. in 2012. Lina and her family initially settled in Virginia, where she experienced culture shock as she adapted to American culture and the English language. However, Lina did not feel accepted in Virginia; her experiences in the state led her to think that Americans treated her according to negative stereotypes of Iraqis. After living in Virginia for several months, Lina and her family chose to resettle in San Diego, California, which harbored a larger Iraqi population than Virginia did. Supported by San Diego’s Iraqi community and various refugee organizations, Lina flourished, and she currently studies at UCSD while holding a stable job. Lina emigrated from Iraq because someone who held different religious beliefs than those of Lina’s family threatened her safety. Linda Trinh Vo states, “Unlike most immigrants, refugees do not leave their country voluntarily, but are compelled to leave by life-threatening circumstances or are forcibly expelled” (291) in her work “The Vietnamese American Experience: From

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