Trump began the first of his three presidential campaigns warning that immigrants were not the best. I would never presume to be the best of my old country, nor the best of my adopted one. I don't have to be, and I don't apologize for that.
I first arrived in the United States as a 3-year-old boy, the youngest child in an immigrant family from Peru. Over the past several decades, I've made my life here, studying and working and building a family. I'm still an immigrant, of course, but that label has moved lower on my drop-down menu. When Donald Trump declared in last month's debate with Kamala Harris that immigrants were "eating the dogs" in Springfield, Ohio, I was struck by an overwhelming sadness at his relentless diminishing of America's ideal as a nation of immigrants. The feeling prompted me to look back on his xenophobic cacophony, building so relentlessly over the past decade, in attacks that have narrowed the distance for me between immigration as a memory and being an immigrant as a present identity. When Trump started his 2015 presidential campaign by saying that Mexico was not "sending its best," he robbed my family of agency, implying that immigrants will passively go wherever a leader sends them. When he derided our homelands as "shithole countries," he bypassed the tragedies that compel immigrants to move and how leaving hurts, despite the hope that what awaits on the other side will be better. When Trump told four Democratic women in Congress to "go back" to their countries, he unknowingly trivialized how often I've gone back in my mind, wondering what that other life, that other person, might have been like. When he mocked immigrants for not speaking English, he ignored the interplay between native tongues and new ones and how demanding purity in language — and in people — is utterly self-defeating. How can immigrants "poison the blood" of the nation when we have always been its lifeblood? With his accusations, Trump is administering his own brand of venom, one whose cumulative effect is to disfigure a nation, not exalt it.
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Saturday, October 19, 2024
Opinion Today: When Trump rants, this is what I hear
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