Novelists explore the impact of America’s immigration policy

By N.M.

DONALD TRUMP’S executive order of January 27th—alleged to protect “the nation from foreign terrorist entry into the United States”—has been widely condemned by writers. The Writers Guild of America attacked the order as “unconstitutional and deeply wrong”. Ammar Ali Hassan, an Egyptian novelist, has said that the order cements America’s status as “no longer the land of dreams”. Reza Aslan, an Iranian-American scholar, delivered a stinging chastisement of Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who was “literally the first person in Congress” to voice support. Mr Aslan, who has written a biography of Jesus Christ, drew attention to Mr Ryan’s famine-stricken Irish ancestors who battled anti-Catholic sentiment when they arrived in America in 1851. “It seems like you’ve forgotten something,” Mr Aslan said. “You forgot your own identity. You forgot where you came from.”

Blasphemous though the order may be for a country whose founding raison d’être was to welcome the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”, to some it is merely the extreme manifestation of years of prejudice directed at Muslim passengers. Post 9/11, Muslims—especially Muslim men—flying to America have become accustomed to extreme vetting. Last year, Shah Rukh Khan, a Bollywood megastar, tweeted: “I fully respect & understand security, with the way the world is, but to be detained by US immigration every damned time really really sucks.” In 2002 Rohinton Mistry, a celebrated Canadian novelist, abandoned a book tour after being repeatedly “singled out at airports because of the colour of his skin” (never mind that Mr Mistry is Zoroastrian). Laila Lalami, a Moroccan-American novelist, is regularly subjected to “random” pat-downs but was stunned when an immigration officer at Los Angeles airport asked her husband how many camels were “traded” for her.

Writers have captured the prickly dynamic between immigration officer and Muslim traveller. Changez, the Pakistani protagonist of Mohsin Hamid’s novel “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” (2007), enjoys the trappings of New York life. But when he returns from a business trip days to Manila after the attacks on the World Trade Centre, he realises that he has come back to a very different country. At Manila airport, he is stripped down to his pink boxer shorts and body searched. In New York, he is stung when asked about “the purpose” of his trip to America by an immigration officer with “a mastery of English inferior to [his own]”. Suddenly, Changez is aware that the cosmopolitan markers of identity he so cherishes—from his Ivy League education to his metrosexual underwear—are irrelevant. To border control officers and to some Americans, he is a co-religionist of Osama bin Laden, and little else. The novel is a cautionary tale, hinting that Changez eventually becomes the fundamentalist of the title. His experience at immigration marks the beginning of his radicalisation.

Mr Hamid is not alone in seeing airport immigration as a defining moment. In his novel “In the Light of What We Know” (2014), Zia Haider Rahman suggests that a friendly immigration officer can make all the difference. The narrator, a nameless Pakistani-American, tells a friend of his happiness at being greeted with a simple “welcome home” at the airport; those two warm words move him in a way that “The Star-Spangled Banner” does not. “At that moment,” the narrator says, “I have felt to varying degrees the sensations of a breeze kissing the back of my neck, which might very well be called patriotism.” His friend, a Briton of Bangladeshi heritage, responds by saying that “if an immigration officer at Heathrow had ever said ‘welcome home’ to me, I would have given my life for England, for my country, there and then. I could kill for an England like that.” Two words are the difference between loyalty and radicalisation.

The scene resonated with novelist Aatish Taseer, who quoted it in “The Day I Got My Green Card”, a moving piece penned for the Wall Street Journal. “Half Indian, half Pakistani, with a British passport”, Mr Taseer described arriving in America last year with his “tall white” husband, and hearing those “three very sweet words”—“welcome home, sir”. They made him feel at ease in a way that he had not in Britain, India or Pakistan. “As a South Asian male with a Muslim name I had hardly ever entered the US without being carted off to secondary screening,” he wrote. “Now, married to an American, I was entering for the first time as a permanent resident.” He feels overcome by “what must be one the most unfashionable emotions of our time: boundless, unqualified love for America”.

Boundless, unqualified love for Trump’s America is certainly unfashionable right now; it seems likely that writers will chronicle this dark moment in history for decades to come. Yet they should also give space on the page to the scores of lawyers who descended upon airports to help stranded passengers pro bono; the thousands of protesters hitting the streets; the judges who struck down the executive order, and the American-Muslims offering community prayers at airports across the country. This was America’s way of honouring the words of Emma Lazarus, inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. This was America’s way of saying “welcome home”.