“…I have been a stranger in a strange land.” Exodus 2:22
That was Moses. If you studied the Hebrew Torah or Christian Old Testament, you read about him as a central historical and religious figure. The quotation above comes after he fled Egypt, the land where he was born and raised. Then he lived in a desert community where he made a new life. He experienced immigration, and he felt like a stranger even after he lived there long enough to have married and had his first son.
I’ve been thinking about this line of text a lot because of what’s happening in the U.S. as the current administration conducts authoritarian-style arrests of immigrants and people here on study visas – while banning travel from certain countries. Those actions make the challenging experience of being in a strange land even more difficult.
The analytics of this blog tell me that there are people who read this in places like Brazil, The Netherlands, Vietnam, or Singapore – I assume to get better understanding of the U.S. I decided to write for those folks about my experience of being a stranger in this strange land. Also, I write to my fellow citizens. It’s important that they know of, at least, one person’s experience since so many voters in the last election seem to agree with the president about keeping out some foreign-born people, a sentiment that could include me.
I came to the U.S. when I was turning five. My father was a U.S. citizen teaching in Ethiopia, so that meant my sister and I were born with U.S. citizenship. But we lived our early lives abroad and began our time here with a secondary understanding of the U.S. from our father’s and others’ stories. I hadn’t yet learned to read, and this was before I’d seen a television; so I could only reference those stories and the phonograph records my parents played to know anything about the U.S. Arriving here was arriving at an exotic place. Still, I came with some connections to the country because of my African American father and his family. However, as is the case for many immigrants, the feeling of being apart from this society never left me – as happened to Moses.
My estrangement has many reasons. My mother, an Ethiopian national, was naturalized as a U.S. citizen a few years after we came to the states; but she continued to raise us with the values of her homeland. Until we came to the U.S., she spoke three languages to my sister and me (Amharic, Greek, and English – three of the seven she spoke fluently). As a result, my sister and I were tri-lingual until we arrived and our mother insisted that we speak only English like others around us. I’ve since come to understand how much cultural belief gets conveyed by the languages people speak. People who learn multiple languages from birth gain a cultural fluency that mirrors their linguistic fluency. As a result, I’ve learned to listen and adapt to the place and group where I find myself. However, that skill doesn’t make me a member of those groups. And losing memory of two of those languages over time meant that I lost an important part of my childhood.
People are often surprised that I was born abroad. Even more are surprised when I explain that I still feel apart from the society after all the years I’ve lived here. I’ve had more than one person assert something like, “But you don’t have an accent, and you act so American.” Well, I’ve lived in the U.S. longer than at least 85% of the people currently in the country. I’ve been living here since I was five – a long time ago. So, yes, I’ve externally adapted. Some people assume that someone who’s been living in the U.S. since the late 1950s when he was a child would feel integrated into the country. While arriving here as a child gave me some time to adapt to the shocks an immigrant experiences, my external adaptations mask an internal sense that echoes Moses.
When I came to the U.S., I was surrounded by hundreds of daily practices and customs that everyone around me absorbed from early childhood forward, yet I never did. Decades after my arrival, I’m still constantly playing catch up. Being able to speak the language when we emigrated was a start. But acclimating to the uniqueness of a new place is much more than mastering the language. The disconnection can be as simple as understanding a childhood game like rock-paper-scissors. Everyone around me played it, but no one explained it. I even watched a documentary that explored its origins, but I still don’t understand how to play it. And I only discovered who Winnie the Pooh was when I became an adult. My mother told me other childhood stories about the minotaur-slaying hero Theseus or the foolish King Midas.
More complexly than childhood games or stories, the structure of something as foundational as the hierarchy of relationships in the U.S. also escapes me. That’s because I was raised understanding formal roles that corresponded to people’s status. It’s hard to decipher that in the U.S. For example, I’ve learned to put people at ease in my professional life by asking them to call me by my first name instead of my titles (Dr. Hughes, Professor Hughes, etc.). Despite the casual external cues, though, people in the U.S. still defer to others with titles. I took my first job as a dean at a college where I’d been a member of the faculty for years. People knew me as “Bob” and continued that after I’d changed roles. Yet once I moved into a dean’s role, my colleagues whom I’d known and worked alongside for years suddenly waited for me to offer an opinion before they’d do so.
The U.S. has a coded and hidden deference where status is implied but not openly acknowledged; and I don’t fully comprehend how it all works. In my family and cultures, people’s status was always afforded a title that identified that status. I would’ve never thought to call any adult by their first name as a child – and I still recoil when I hear any child of any age refer to their parents by a parent’s first name. My inability to apprehend social structures like this is one example among many. There are hundreds of daily and common activities which I didn’t internalize as I did with the lessons that my family taught me.
However, don’t read this description as me defining a deficit in my life. It’s the opposite. The experiences of being disconnected from the larger society are what allow me to connect to others and to extend my connections to people who aren’t like me. I don’t know what it’s like to be transgender or physically disabled; but my feelings as an outsider teach me how to walk alongside those who are. My experiences allow me to engage with multiple communities that are different than me. Thus, the challenges of being a stranger in a strange land define me in very positive ways. However, it is important to note that there are challenges. It’s also important to note that immigrants’ challenges are compounded for people who didn’t have the advantages I had with knowing the language and arriving to a ready family network.
Today, the challenges for immigrants are exponentially multiplied since the U.S. has become a place that is, once again, openly hostile to people from some other countries. It’s not just the president’s xenophobic rants. During his first election and incumbency, the nation became more honest about its relationship with immigrants. Until 2016, the U.S. publicly claimed open harbors to people who wanted to share the democratic experience. People commonly quoted the first lines of the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed onto the base of the Statue of Liberty. That public stance masked the true story. The mainstream of the nation has never been comfortable with differences. Now, the U.S. overtly returns to nativism that openly proclaims it only wants certain people from certain places. This isn’t the fringe speaking.
The president and his vice-president claim that the push against immigrants results from the undocumented people living amongst us. But look at how they pushed racist narratives about criminals and pet eaters to make their case during the election. Their actions since being elected have cast a wide net around all immigrants. This is about anyone who is Brown or Black and whom the government can attack. It was clear from the current president’s first term and in his most recent campaign. Voters knew this is what he promised. Because I’ve seen and experienced decades of daily life, I didn’t see this as some radical change in 2016. This is who the country has been throughout its history. The difference, now, is that the government that was supposed to protect all people’s rights is being used to violate those rights.
From the theft of Native people’s lands to Chinese exclusion laws to Jim Crow to the internment of citizens with Japanese heritage in WWII to the attacks on anyone perceived to be Muslim after 9-11, the nation has always shown what it is. Now we have a government that won’t protect Afghan refugees who risked their lives to support the U.S. in its longest war. We have a government that violates constitutional protections while it imprisons immigrants – even those with legal status. We have a government that seeks to exclude foreign students from studying here. We have a government that has revoked the temporary protected status of people who came here to flee war and famine – re-traumatizing them with fear of being returned to those conditions. But if you have $5 million to pay for a “gold card” visa, the door is open. Or if you’re an Afrikaner pining for the days of apartheid, the door is open. The resulting messages’ clarity is unmistakably a jingoistic chauvinism that tells people that this isn’t a good place to come unless you can fit in with White, Christian nationalists.
When I came to the U.S. as a child, the laws said the nation had to accept me because my birth certificate said I was a citizen. But the society I came to live amongst made it clear that I wasn’t welcome. Laws at the time also declared limits to what I could do, where I could go, and with whom I could socialize. Over time the laws changed to make the country more protective of people of color like me. Now, though, there’s a push led by elected leaders in the federal government to withdraw those hard-won protections that people of color pressed the government to enact over the past half-century. The retrenchment to that progress didn’t come from radical-right groups. It’s the action of the nation’s official, elected or appointed government in all three branches. So people like me are threatened. My sense of being a stranger here is now heightened by fear.
I can anticipate responses to all this from some fellow citizens because I’ve heard them: “Well, you’re a U.S. citizen by birth, so you’re not a foreigner at all; and life couldn’t have been that bad. You’ve gotten educated, had a career, and have friends and family – you’ve done okay.” Unspoken in that is the suggestion that even if they were to consider me a foreigner, I’d be one of the good ones. Those comments often get followed by, “You aren’t like those people.” “Those” people? Do you mean like my mother who was naturalized in her 40s? So maybe you met my mother at some point and would respond, “She was one of the good ones, too.” At this point you’re in a rhetorically illogical mess. How did you decide that my mother and I are “good”? More importantly, how did you decide that there’s some group of people that isn’t good?
The answer to that last question isn’t hard to find. The U.S. has a centuries-old history of defining which group of people is good and which is bad. Fears of certain ethnic and racial groups are what the current president played to in his first and his most recent election campaigns. He didn’t have to convince anyone that people from Africa or Central and South America are bad. The lore that supports that position is in every part of this nation’s social mythologies that are embedded in books, movies, and folktales.
When I was a child, Central and South Americans were portrayed as lazy schemers with no moral compass. That morphed in recent years as they were popularly believed to be dangerous drug dealers and violent criminals. People with African heritage were similarly stereotyped as dangerous, sub-intelligent, and only good for physical tasks. Those are the fears and tropes that the current president stoked to get elected. He didn’t create the images; he exploited what many people already thought. While he campaigned on ridding the nation of dangers posed by rampant criminality, he’s now fulfilling his promises by targeting all immigrants. Yet, the image that many people have of dangerous Brown and Black folks is so strong that he need not provide any evidence of the dangers posed by the people his masked goons arrest.
That fear of Black and Brown folks is deeply embedded in the public psyche. So when someone encounters me, an educated and successful African American professional, they have to adjust their perception; however, they do that by making me an exception rather than seeing that their prejudiced perspective is wrong. But wrong it is, and that perspective is what makes 77 million of our fellow citizens ignore or support the racist rants of a candidate who becomes more open about his beliefs each day. Whether or not they openly acknowledge their beliefs, those 77 million share them with the president. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have ignored his bigoted and nativist statements. They may profess only to approve of one part or another of his agenda. But they didn’t have objections to his blatant racism, homophobia, antisemitism, etc. – beliefs that make him unfit for office.
What does that mean for the nation’s future? The loss of immigrants is a loss of the future. In nature, any organism that becomes isolated and insulated eventually becomes sick and dies. I believe that to be true of nations as well. What does this mean for immigrants? The sickness of isolationism has already spread with the message: Unless you can prove you fit in with White, Christian nationalism, this nation doesn’t want you coming here. In the rush to prove that immigrants are dangerous, the federal government is rounding up and imprisoning people while violating rights guaranteed in the Constitution, laws, and court rulings that were in place until the current Supreme Court. The government is detaining people at the borders as they come with valid visas. There are even places like Arizona, Texas, and Florida where I, a U.S. citizen, don’t feel safe right now because of the policies and practices of the state governments there – policies and practices that put people like me at risk. With the passage of the president’s major funding bill, the Department of Homeland Security will grow to become the nation’s largest federal law enforcement agency. Over the past six months, that agency has been responsible for persistent and unchecked lawless acts of aggression against people of color. That will grow as the agency rapidly expands its size to become the equivalent to Mussolini’s Black Shirts. It’s challenging enough to feel like a “stranger in a strange land.” But what’s happened in the past six months has added a layer of fear to that alienation.
