(^36) The last word
Don’t expect me to be ‘grateful’
Ge
tty
futures of the people who are now arriving
at its borders, a cacophonous country, an
exceptional country, but one that seems
determined to continually sabotage its jour-
ney toward a more perfect union. Nobody
powerful ever gave the powerless anything
just because they asked politely, and immi-
grants don’t come hat in hand. I am an
uppity immigrant. I am entitled to be here.
Deal with it.
Should today’s migrants be “grateful” to
the countries that caused them to move
in the first place, the ones that despoiled
their homelands and made them unsafe
and unlivable? For example, in Somalia—
birthplace of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.)—
the United States sent $1 billion to the
dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, and the
ensuing civil war quite literally blew up
Omar’s childhood. She should be grateful
that her family had to escape their land and
their people, and live in a tent in a refugee
colony for four years?
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) should be
grateful that her parents had to leave the
West Bank and seek shelter in the country
principally responsible for backing (and
sending billions annually to) the govern-
ment that occupies their hometown?
Central American immigrants, too, should
be grateful to the United States? An
American banana company, for instance,
owned 42 percent of all the land in
Guatemala, and for decades Washington
replaced democratically elected Latin lead-
ers with dictators more malleable to its
will. Now, at our southern border, we turn
away people seeking asylum from the con-
sequences of those policies.
T
HE WEST HAS despoiled country after
country through colonialism, illegal
wars, rapacious corporations, and
unchecked carbon emissions. And now
their desperate migrants are supposed to be
grateful to be let in by the back door at the
mansions of the despoilers, mansions built
with the stolen treasure of the migrants’
homelands?
It’s not exactly all wine and roses for the
immigrants who get to America, either.
Never in my 42 years here has anti-
immigrant sentiment run so strong. For
many immigrants, particularly the skilled
ones, America is just one of many coun-
tries vying for their attention. But once peo-
ple get here, they find a broken health-care
system, some of the worst infrastructure
in the developed world, mediocre urban
public schools, and a judicial system of
mass incarceration that disproportionately
I am the kind of immigrant the haters think is ‘uppity,’ said Suketu Mehta in The Washington Post. I’ve been told
to ‘go back’ more times than I can count. I won’t. We’re stuck with each other—and we’ll be richer for it.
Mehta: ‘Never in my 42 years here has anti-immigrant sentiment run so strong.’
I
N JUNE, I published a book—
This Land Is Our Land: An
Immigrant’s Manifesto— arguing
that immigration is a form of rep a-
ra tions. It drew forth a fusillade of
hatred—on Twitter, in my inbox,
under the rocks of 4chan and
Reddit—suggesting that I return to
India. One reviewer on Amazon
called for me to be “skinned alive”
and to go back to my “turd-world
country.” Someone else tweeted,
“This cockroach needs sent back to
whatever s---hole he crawled out of.”
Meanwhile, University of Penn syl-
vania law professor Amy Wax, in a
speech at the National Conservatism
Conference, said I had argued that
“immigrants should not join the
mainstream or try to preserve and
protect what makes America great,
but should just take over from the
‘white power structure.’”
I’ve said no such thing, of course.
Wax accused immigrants like me
of being culturally inferior: “Most
inhabitants of the Third World don’t
necessarily share our ideas and beliefs....
Our country will be better off with more
whites and fewer nonwhites.”
I’ve been told to “go back” ever since
1977, when I enrolled in an extravagantly
racist all-boys Catholic school in Queens,
N.Y.—birthplace of President Trump, who
recently became the biggest, loudest mouth-
piece for this line of rhetoric when he
tweeted that four congresswomen of color
should “go back” to the “totally broken
and crime infested places from which they
came.” The idea is, white Americans get to
decide who is allowed to come in and what
rules we are to follow. If you come here,
don’t complain. Be grateful we took you
in. “Go back” is a line that’s intended to
put immigrants in our place—or rather, to
remind us that our place in this country is
contingent, that we are beholden to those
who came here earlier.
To this I say: No, we are not. I take my
place in America—an imperfect place—
and I make it my own; there’s a Con sti-
tu tion that protects my right to do so. I
will not genuflect at the white American
altar. I will not bow and scrape before my
supposed benefactors. I understand the
soul of this nation just as well, if not bet-
ter, than they do: a country that stole the
rick simeone
(Rick Simeone)
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