"With the ‘War on Terror’ and ongoing panic about migration and Islam, the few Iraqi refugees the US has admitted have faced particular challenges. Ken R. Crane shows how some of them have met these challenges with an account of how struggles to belong—that began with sanction-induced stresses and the US invasion—continued as refugees settled in the US. His up-close analysis of Iraqis living in the far-flung suburbs and exurbs at the edge of Los Angeles, known as the Inland Empire, shows how they “obliquely” resist assumptions about success and the good life implicit in state efforts to mold ideal immigrants, make concerted efforts to maintain connections among themselves, and find common ground with their Latinx neighbors. Based on nearly a decade of research that altered Crane’s own previous assumptions as a humanitarian worker, the book critically connects US foreign and domestic policies by letting the reader follow the evolution of families of different backgrounds and faith communities as they face Islamophobia, racialization, and find their way into new American lives at bake sales, soccer practices and neighborhood tiendas."

Ken R. Crane is a scholar-practitioner who has worked with Vietnamese, Iraqi, and Afghan refugees in California, and in development and relief programs in Jamaica, Haiti, Sudan and Kenya. While at the Julian Samora Research Institute he studied the migration patterns from Mexico to the Midwest and the religious involvement of US-born Latinx youth. Since 2008 Crane has been teaching sociology, anthropology, and global studies at La Sierra University, in Riverside, California. He is author of Latino Churches: Family, Faith, and Ethnicity in the Second Generation, and a contributing author to Apple Pie and Enchiladas: Latino Newcomers in the Rural Midwest (eds. Jorge Chapa & Ann V. Millard).