Nov. 1, 2019
Samia Ismail, Photo by Kevin Snyder
“Why are you involved in politics?”
This question followed me while I worked on 2018 election campaigns, always with an emphasis on the “you.”
Why are you involved in politics? What are you doing here? My answer is that by virtue of being me, a first generation American Muslim woman of color, I simply do not have a choice but to be hyper aware of the political whims of our country’s leaders. Being the daughter of immigrants has taught me that nothing about the American experience can be taken for granted, including apathy towards the system of governance that affects us all.
The fact of the matter is that the U.S., for all of its rhetoric about welcoming immigrants into the American experiment, exploits new residents in the labor market and entrenches discrimination into the very policy we codify about them. Distrust toward immigrants is as natural to our culture as it is hypocritical given the relationship of the history — and our sordid canonization of said history — between white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans and the Indigenous and African people they subjugated on arrival to this land. As a whole, this nation exhibits a reprehensible incomprehension on how our foreign policy often creates environments in other countries that instigate many immigrants’ decisions to come to America. However, we can’t talk about the modern immigrant’s experience without first understanding the history of the country that has served as a beacon of hope for generations of migrants seeking opportunity, safety and liberty.
We have all been taught the typical timeline of events leading up to the creation of America. I remember sitting in my 5th grade history classes and being enthralled by Christopher Columbus’ nautical voyages and the bravery of the first English settlers of Jamestown. I was touched by the kindness that the indigenous peoples and pilgrims showed each other at the first Thanksgiving feast that our class reenacted year after year. The use of slaves in the earliest eras of this country was taught merely as an example of how the long arc of American morality always bends towards justice and equality. By the time we got to the unit on the Declaration of Independence, I completely believed in the U.S. as a bastion of equality and freedom. After learning about just and fair our nation has always been, how could I not?
I honestly can’t blame the American public for failing to understand how our history provides the conditions for the nationalist divisions we’re experiencing today because for the longest time, I didn’t either. What our collective U.S. history classes lacked in context and critical viewpoints of American, they made up for in warm and fuzzy rhetoric about founding principles of liberty and justice.
Our teachers never told us that the “peaceful” European explorers, whose courage we revered, were murderers, rapists and the fathers of white supremacy. The settlers searching for religious freedoms, a concept still so radical in the Old World, were cultivating the origins of America on land stolen from Indigenous tribes. For 250 years, from colonial infighting to declarations of freedom to the birth of a new nation and beyond that still, America built its successes and claimed its place on the global stage on the backs of slave labor, the remnants of which are still entrenched in our economy, according to the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project. The basis for the American Dream, the ideals that anyone regardless of extenuating circumstances can come here and create success through resilience and hard work, have always been an illusion.
Approximately a million hopeful immigrants from all corners of the world undergo tests of emotional and physical endurance in order to come to this country in search of the American Dream every year, according to a study of U.S. immigrants from the Pew Research Center.
They are refugees desperately trying to seek security in the midst of economic hardship, warfare and violence. Like my mother, they are members of skilled professions who wish to participate in a meritocracy. Like my father, they are family members, loved ones who yearn to close the gaps between family members. They are regular people taking the ultimate gamble in the lottery system at the chance of a better life in America.
As far as immigration experiences go, my mother was one of the lucky ones. Upon her arrival in Detroit 30 years ago, she was a 28-year-old doctoral resident who spoke English fluently; blessed with a family back home who could help support her yearly pilgrimage to the American Embassy in Karachi to get her student visa renewed every year.
I think you might have just read that and not understood the scope of what I’m describing to you. I’m telling you that my mother moved by herself to a new country where she then had to navigate a financial and employment system she had never worked in during the dark days before Google in addition to taking time off in order to fly 22 hours back to Pakistan to line up at the U.S. Embassy with no guarantee that she would actually get her visa approved to travel back to the new life she was building herself. And like I said, she was one of the lucky ones; however, lucky or not, every immigrant, except refugees, are required to fulfill these same steps year after year until they become eligible for a green card.
And why wouldn’t they? America is accepting of immigrants, aren’t we? We are famously a nation of immigrants, the “melting pot of the world.” The rights to freedom and equality are enshrined in our founding documents and recited by every school kid in the country, ensuring that every generation knows how much we claim to accept those seeking liberation. The invitation to join us in the land of the free is carved into our most recognizable landmarks, landmarks that are themselves love letters to the plight of immigrants.
Unfortunately, generation after generation of American migrants verify that regardless of the legal status of their immigration path, regardless of their reason for coming to the U.S., regardless of almost everything save the color of their skin (if it is light enough) or their religion (if they’re Christian enough), they face almost immediate contempt both from individuals in this country and from the very system they are trying to utilize, according to research studies from Vanderbilt Law and the Smithsonian.
Xenophobic ideologies are often based on existing racist tendencies, a phenomenon that my family can speak to personally, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Misconceptions about immigrants can range from vitriolic and cruel, such as the time my younger sister’s classmate accused her of terrorism in the middle of her pre-AP English class, to simple ignorance, like an instance in my 8th grade study hall when a girl asked me if I spoke Chinese upon telling her that I am Asian.
America’s disdain for immigrants is not new either: in fact, as the institution of importing, buying and selling slave labor was weakening under intensifying moral and political pressure, immigrants began supplementing the cheap labor market indicating the continuation of a pattern of exploitation of foreigners that had begun when Africans slaves were being imported and indigenous tribes were forced to relocate at the whim of early American politicians.
In South and Central America alone, the U.S. has covertly overthrown no less than four democratically elected leaders in order to instate leaders who will economically and diplomatically benefit us: Guatemala, Brazil, Chile and the Dominican Republic, according to a compiled report by Foreign Policy Magazine. Imagine, even for a second, the historical implications that may have ensued had a powerful European country overthrown President Washington in order to prop up a regime whose only path to power was their allegiance to serve in the best interests of a foreign country. It is no wonder that, according to a Migration Policy Institute report, the Central American population in the U.S. tripled due to political instability and economic issues as a result of that foreign policy.
It is only fitting then that once immigrants who are fleeing countries induced into turmoil for the benefit of the U.S. to seek refuge in the “greatest nation on Earth” experience inhuman treatment during the legal process of requesting asylum and cruel rhetoric accusing individuals of upholding systems of crime in their home countries that the U.S. helped create. Indeed, contrary to popular rhetoric, immigrants are 50% less likely to commit a felony or serious misdemeanor than their native American counterparts according to research by the Cato Institute. We project our nationalistic insecurities onto migrants while failing to possess the awareness that by upholding short-sighted and ultimately destructive foreign policy, we are a major contributor to the reason why people across the world try to come here. We demonize and scapegoat immigrants in order to explain the conditions in their home countries that America itself played a part in generating.
It’s time to reckon that the American Dream, our rallying cry for those across the world “yearning to break free” is nothing more than a fraud unless we begin reforming our immigration policy at every level of government.
It’s time to reckon that we as a world superpower cannot both tout that the American Dream is a hallmark of our ideals while also scapegoating any immigrant who arrives at our border with the hopes of sharing these very ideals with us until we end our invasive foreign policy platform.
It’s time to reckon that it is cruel to continue failing to educate ourselves on the impacts of our white nationalist roots both within our own history and within the world today. We will be doing a disservice to future generations of all Americans as long as we shield children from the sins of our past, robbing them of the ability to recognize when those patterns begin to repeat themselves.
It’s time to realize that the American Dream is nothing more than just that: a dream of what America could be if it comes to terms with and amends the violence it has inflicted on anyone who challenges us and this perfect vision of freedom without consequences that we have conjured.
It’s time to realize that we are not the representative of the inclusive ideals we preach at the base of Lady Liberty, but that doesn’t mean it’s too late for us. For years the American Dream has been a symbol of hope for those abroad, a promise that in the best country on Earth, you can realize the best of who you are and who you have the potential to be.
It’s time to wake up and get to work, America.