Egyptian immigrant: My children pledge allegiance to the same flag as yours
BY Amgad Naguib
The Baltimore Sun
A few months ago, at an event at my son’s school in Maryland, I watched as my 6-year-old — half Irish-American, half Egyptian, brown eyes, freckles, reddish hair — stood by his classmates as they pledged allegiance to the flag. They were a diverse group of kids, many of them the children of immigrants.
I began to think how they represented a better future for America. In many ways, it validated my decision to immigrate here 16 years ago.
I arrived in Washington D.C. in 2001. After four years of college in Montreal, I was given a choice by my parents: go back to Egypt to a much more comfortable life or try to make my way in America. I made my choice. Armed with a Western education, I soon found myself working in the nation’s capital in public relations and public affairs.
My career became an immersion into the world of think tanks, legislation, political parties, non-profits and interest groups. I began to see how American democracy works and to appreciate how the system welcomed me. Despite it being a post-9/11 world, and despite my being a foreigner, I never felt like an outsider. Merit was the only qualification that mattered.
Later on when I met my wife, an Irish-American from Massachusetts (accent and all), I was introduced to another side of America: an America of Thanksgivings and Fourth of July celebrations, birthdays, baptisms and funerals — and too many Patriots games and trips to Disney. This America was welcoming too, never making me feel uncomfortable to be who I was: Egyptian, Arab and Muslim.
Now, standing in a school in one of the country’s most diverse cities earlier this year, I realized that many of the parents and grandparents standing next to me might have vastly different stories of how they got there. Different pasts. Some may have even gotten here illegally. But the kids on the stage meant that we now all shared a future.
It is a future that, if we take him at his word, Donald Trump wants to stop from happening.
He wants this so badly that he has spoken about his plan to create a “deportation force” that he could send into the homes of some of these kids to deport their parents.
Donald Trump, unlike nearly all the other Americans I have encountered since 2001, basically talks about people like me — an Egyptian, Muslim-American — as suspected members of a fifth column colluding with terrorists, secretly cheering them on. He wants to single out, harass and intimidate people like me. Even my son and his four-year-old sister see him as a genuine threat, asking me sincerely whether Mr. Trump doesn’t like me because he doesn’t like “brown people.”
Both of my children know that Donald Trump’s proposed policies could prevent my mother from visiting our family. The impact of his words is not theoretical. It is real. My wife and I have to assure our children constantly that I won’t have to leave the country because I am a citizen. There is a Constitution to protect our rights, we tell them. We even took them to Philadelphia to show them where it was signed.
I remain unabashedly proud to be American, but I am wondering how I can teach my children about inalienable rights when someone who may be president sees them as negotiable. Imagine how many other immigrant homes across the country are going through the same thing. Even families like the admirable Khans — whose sacrifice for their country was to bury their child — are pointing to America’s founding documents to ask if we are all still on the same page.
Immigrants know how lucky we are to come to this country. We sacrifice so much of ourselves for it. We leave our loved ones. We endure loneliness and wonder if we gave up too much. We watch as life back home moves on without us. And we watch as our American children adopt new ideas and attitudes while shedding our languages, customs and beliefs.
But still we come here. We make the choice, like I did. And most of us thrive because we believe in the humanist ideals this country strives for.
And many immigrants know that America has always lived up to its promise to be a refuge for what Emma Lazarus in “The New Colossus” called the “tempest-tost”— those across the decades fleeing religious persecution, drought, potato blight, pogrom, famine or outright war.
Most of all, we appreciate the opportunity to raise our children as Americans, free of the hatreds and baggage that come with the ethnic nationalism, state-imposed religion, social stratification or demonization of the other that so many of us left behind.
So, as you head to the polls in a few short days, I am asking you to remember the America that welcomed me and brought all of us here in the first place. When you vote, understand that while I and others like me are immigrants today, our children and their children will be Americans tomorrow. That whether your grandfather’s name was Herr Drumpf or Haj Mohamed, our children will all end up on that stage pledging allegiance to the same flag.
And finally, remember that all of us are responsible for making sure they are pledging allegiance to a nation that truly, unequivocally, and perpetually strives for freedom and liberty for all. Not for some. Not just sometimes.
For my part, I am going to keep teaching my son about how America is already great, and how great it has been to me. That he should have faith in the integrity of his fellow Americans who are still bending that arc of the universe. That his country will never deprive him of his humanity.
I hope our leaders will never make me out to be a liar.
Amgad Naguib (amgadnaguib@gmail.com) is a senior communications director with a nonprofit environmental group in Washington D.C. The opinions expressed here are his own.