I became a citizen of the United States more than nine years ago, but in my heart I remain an immigrant. What I mean by this is something quite simple. I’m constantly aware of the gulf between my experiences as an immigrant and those of the native-born citizens around me.
Some of these differences are trivial, everyday matters, such as the fact that I am still far more fluent in celsius than in fahrenheit (and, honestly, how can the weather possibly reach 100 degrees?). Others reflect differences in upbringing. I can’t recite the Pledge of Allegiance from memory, for example. But the biggest difference is more profound. Unlike most of the native-born, to be an immigrant in this country is to keep one eye always trained on the exit, just in case you’re forced by circumstance to make a dash for your life.
Discussions of the precarious existence of non-citizens are often reserved for the undocumented, for obvious reasons. I’ve never been undocumented, so I can’t speak personally to that experience, but I’ve gone through the gamut of immigration authorizations while living in this country, from being an international student, to landing a work visa, to holding a green card, to becoming a citizen. And while it has ebbed and flowed over the years, that uneasy feeling just won’t go away.
While still an international student, I was driving back to New York City with friends after attending my best friend’s wedding in Lake Placid. On the way, we were stopped by US border patrol. Lake Placid is over 70 miles from the nearest border crossing, and yet the armed agents still demanded to see my passport and student visa, which were tucked safely away in my apartment. Who knows why they let me go. My English-language fluency? My New York state-issued driver’s license? The fact that a native-born American in the car vouched for me? And this was long ago. I can only imagine how this same scene would have played out during the Trump administration.
I was in Manhattan during the September 11 terrorist attacks. I recall not just the endless horror of that event but also how the fallout from the attacks burned like wildfire through immigrant Muslim communities around the country. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq brought microscopic scrutiny by the FBI to Muslim communities. And every time I crossed a border or had to deal with the authorities, I would get extremely anxious and then worry even more that this same rising anxiety would be used as a cause for suspicion against me. I probably wasn’t a lot of fun to travel with.
As horrible as those times were, and they were often very frightening indeed, they still don’t compare to Muslim immigrant life in this country when Donald Trump rose to political prominence and then became president. While there was a period immediately following the September 11 attacks that was characterized by large-scale vigilante violence, the prevailing position of both George W Bush and the Obama administration was to contain the vigilantes by essentially co-opting their violence. In effect, this left the vigilantes out in the cold. During the Bush and Obama years, Muslim immigrants in the country felt targeted far more by the government and its specific policies – everything from the Bush administration’s Special Registration program to Obama’s Countering Violent Extremism – than by attacks by vengeful citizens.
That changed with Trump, who ushered in dramatic rises to all kinds of hate crimes, including anti-Muslim hate crimes, with his political consolidation. What Donald Trump accomplished in becoming president was the unification of this country’s rightwing vigilante movements with the awesome resources of the federal government. The result was that violence was coming at us from all sides.
Nor was this violence limited to Muslim immigrants. Trump’s white supremacist government made it clear that every non-white person, every trans person, every Jewish person, every disabled person, and so many more were worthy not just of contempt (as per his rhetoric) but also outright physical assault. Hate crimes against individuals reached a 16-year peak in 2018, the last available date for the data. During the course of the Trump administration, which began with the Muslim ban and ended with the administration unable to reunite 545 immigrant children with their parents, the administration passed more than 400 executive orders, many draconian, related to immigration. It will take years to undo this damage.
Although it shouldn’t, it still surprises me that we were governed by explicit white supremacists in the 21st century. The result was not just the Muslim ban, immigrant kids in cages, and the end of asylum, but an entire system of unspeakable cruelty along with a nearly transparent desire to legislate the end of basic human compassion. If Trump had won a second term, we would likely have had to confront the end of birthright citizenship, the elimination of Daca and Temporary Protected Status programs, zero persons admitted as refugees, and everything that Trump, Stephen Miller, and the rest of these unfunny racist clowns would have juggled in order to keep the country as white as possible for as long as possible. Mercifully, we’ve been spared the continuation of this nightmare.
Today, we must seize Joe Biden’s affirming victory not just as a repudiation of Trump and what he stands for but, more importantly, as a moment of political regeneration. Trump, after all, was always the symptom rather than the disease, and the racist and anti-immigrant worldviews he represented won’t magically disappear on 20 January 2021.
When people talk about the USA as a country of immigrants, they’re usually referring to American history – though we must never forget the non-immigrant indigenous and enslaved populations of our history, either. Whether coming from Italy or Russia or Mexico, from small towns in Asia or the metropolises of Africa, in the 19th century or the 21st, immigrants have been key drivers of political and economic regeneration in this country.
But maybe it’s better if we think of the idea of “a country of immigrants” not as something to remember from the past but as something we guarantee for the country’s future. A truly immigrant-welcoming America is one where there’s no need to be eyeing the exits for your own survival. An immigrant-welcoming America is a stronger America, a prosperous America, and a compassionate America.
And it could be Biden’s America, but only if we want it to be, if we’re willing to fight for it. This vision of the country is fundamentally what Biden has promised us during the campaign, and it’s one we must hold him to with all the conviction we can muster. The opportunity is finally here. We’ve let the politicians get away with far too much over the years. Now it’s time for all of us, immigrant and native-born, to get to work and make it happen.
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Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is a professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York.