I'm American, OK? (Part 3)
Still goin'!
Like Indiana Jones, this series is part of a trilogy (until it’s not…how many Indy movies are there these days, anyway?)—check out part 1 and part 2.
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Yesterday, millions of Americans marched in the ‘No Kings’ protests across the country. I’m not going to lie: I had a bit of FOMO. It’s been years since my last protest, and I feel like being part of the massive throng in downtown Chicago would’ve been invigorating. Instead, I spent most of the morning with my Afghan friends, clunkily using Google Translate and broken Dari to check in on how they’re doing, which feels like a good tradeoff considering the ICE age we now live in.
Speaking of ICE, when I see Kristi Noem’s frozen face rigidly regurgitating rehearsed talking points and butchering simple questions like “what is habeas corpus?” I think of how long it took me to find a permanent, full-time job and how many questions I answered pretty damn well in job interviews, only to get cut along the way or after the final round (that is if I was lucky to get an interview at all: it is absolutely brutal out there for marketers.)
I’m not saying I should run DHS….or maybe I should? I’d bring Andry back, that’s for sure…but when I think of how many millions of Americans are struggling to find work in an increasingly competitive and uncertain job market, and then I think of Ice Queen Noem and how she essentially Triple Axel’d her way into her position as Head of the SS, it’s admittedly infuriating. And speaking of job hunting, if I were one of these ICE agents, I would start considering what my transferable skills are and quit now, because the chickens will come home to roost at some point: wearing a mask won’t protect you forever.
When I think of the Afghans I’ve been working with (or mainly just befriending at this point) and the oppression and terror they fled in Afghanistan, only to resettle in a fractured U.S., for some of them, it must feel like they were sold a lemon. Not to mention the countless number of people still trapped in Afghanistan, waiting on the U.S. to fulfill its promise of evacuation, or the Afghans who simply dream of coming here as a student to temporarily participate in the experiment we launched almost 250 years ago.
Today, my Afghan mentee is terrified to leave his house because he’s heard whispers of ICE’s “citizenship” checkpoints along the highway, and knows that Afghans have been snatched and deported to who knows where. This is a man who has a legal right to be here, mind you, someone who works full-time doing the type of work most Americans would roll their eyes at, with a wife who wants to become a phlebotomist, and kids getting A+ grades at school.
When Trump was elected, he expressed some optimism, hoping that an administration change would lead to quicker immigration processing and perhaps even some sort of improvement on the ground in Afghanistan. I remember him asking me my thoughts about Trump, and in my head I weighed how honest to be with him. I didn’t want to be alarmist: after all, even though he’s lived here for a few years, he’s still new to the country and hasn’t wrapped his head around American politics (and maybe never will). I’m fairly unfiltered with my views if asked, which I chalk up to being the product of two families with strong opinions (I learned a few years ago that I’m quite Italian, which maybe explains that, or at least the excessive use of hand gestures while speaking.) However, I cautiously expressed that he wouldn’t be good for essentially anyone (except for the super wealthy), without explicitly talking about immigrants. His face registered soft surprise, which has today been actualized as “this shit is terrible.”
Meanwhile, my Dari teacher in Kabul has been accepted into multiple American universities (her goal is to study biology), yet with the uncertainty around international student visas and the detention of students publishing Pro-Palestinian op eds (not a crime, last time I checked), her educational pursuits in the U.S. are effectively on an indefinite pause. This is a woman who created her school’s first biology lab to help encourage classmates to learn science—the sort of innovation and DIY attitude we typically worship here in America.
Lastly, my newest friend Hamid, who just arrived in Chicago in March with his wife and seven kids, is simply happy as hell to be here, finally able to rest after being on the run for years. He may or may not be paying attention to what is happening in the country, or maybe he is and is choosing not to dwell on it. I like to believe he has yet to discover what’s happening; sometimes ignorance is bliss. I’ve spent enough time with his family now that, if something did happen to him or to my mentee, I would be devastated. Hamid’s kids now call me “khala” which means ‘aunt’—an indicator that this family is now sort of mine, too, and vice versa.
I write about the immigrant experience and perspective because it is an integral part of our country’s history. The immigrant experience is part of the patchwork quilt that is America: a blanket that’s both beautiful and ugly, warm and rejecting, accepting and afraid of the ‘other.’ But once America ceases to be a place that inspires the highest of aspirations in people who dream of something better (or at least different or safer), what does it become? This country has indeed been an experiment, a test to see what is possible when you light a torchlight in the darkness for the most vulnerable, while slowly also chipping away at its historical injustices, particularly slavery and its fraternal twin, Jim Crow.
America has never been perfect, and it never will be. But it runs on continual improvement, a refusal to accept the status quo for those who never benefited from it. So when we decide to punish those who came here in search of a new life—even those who literally walked across continents to get here—and detain them or deport them to fucking El Salvador, we invert the idea of America.
The only people who should live in fear in the U.S. are those who believe that strength is preying on the most vulnerable.
Because even if they hold the power today, someday everything they made happen or allowed to happen will come back to them. And for someone who’s never been much of a “law and order” person, I now understand how powerful that ‘long arm of justice’ is and know that someday it will reach them, too.
For many Americans, until it happens to you, it’s easy to believe it’s not happening…or to explain it away. But for those of us who have both empathy and an imagination, we know that stopping Nazi-like actions against those with the least is how to save both the lives and livelihoods of the rest of us, and ultimately how to save America from itself, because no one else will be coming to save us.