A nation of immigrants

While on the phone with an old friend who happens to be married to a man from the Middle East, she slid two sentences into our conversation about health and family: "The immigrant community is devastated by what is going on in Washington. You have to understand that they believed in this country more than anyone else."

Weeks went by. I couldn't get her comment out of my head, so I called her back to ask her what she meant. I treasure the insights she has gained from her years of contact with her husband Reza's world.

When I got her on the phone, she told me that immigrants are super patriotic no matter who is currently president, but Reza has been very hurt by events in the last few years. Immigrants counted on laws to protect you no matter who you were. 

According to her, "You can even see it in their posture: I have rights! They would hold up their passports with pride and tell you that a U.S. passport has respect everywhere in the world."
It was Reza's turn on the phone. He first came to the U.S. in 1957 to attend an Ivy League university.

After taking his Bachelor of Science he returned home hoping "to do some good for my country and for myself."

After three frustrating years of doing neither, he returned to the United States, eventually completing an M.S. and a Ph.D. He explained "In my country, there were books of law but not law. We had every law you could imagine, but everybody knew that one or two people or a small group decided everything. In Iraq, Iran, Egypt and Eastern Europe it was the same. I came here and thought, 'Now I am out of that mess.' I am in a country that is 95 percent law and order. No one has the power. Not even Nixon."

Reza told me that a lot of immigrants come here and "don't give a hoot about who is president or in office. But there are those who start thinking about it, who read a lot.

"The ex-president [Clinton] lied, but he wasn't going to do anything crazy like wire tapping and profiling. Under Bush, any industry, anyone who had the money could get what they wanted."

Corruption in the Justice Department has been particularly galling for Reza. Having lived in a nation of men, not of laws, watching the Justice Department's representative, Monica Goodling, "request immunity as if she were a member of organized crime on trial for racketeering" was a source of real grief.

She "perverted the very laws that she swore to uphold," Reza stated with considerable outrage. Justice was supposed to be about … well … justice, impartial justice, justice for all people, regardless of who they are.

People like Reza fell passionately, deeply in love with this country. Watching recent events has felt like a betrayal, "the death of an ideal," the end of a love affair. "This isn't the same country I came to," he told me sadly.

I was hearing this from a man who waited until 1976 to get his citizenship so he could do it in the bicentennial year, making the ceremony that much more significant.
I have always lived here. The United States wasn't my great hope; it was my home.

I've always thought I appreciated it, but when I got off the phone last night, sadness engulfed me. A lot of people here and in countries around the world have counted on the United States to be "at least 95percent about law and order."

They have counted on the U.S. to be the place where anyone could have his day in court, and the law protected all people, regardless of who they were. Even presidents were not above the law.

Reza helped me understand more clearly what is at stake and what we have lost. I thank him for that, and I want to see that the land he came to a half century ago does not fade into history, a Camelot that survived only briefly before powerful interests figured out how to undermine its foundations of justice and bend it to their will.  Reza has not given up.

For him, the United States of America is still "that bright, shining light of hope."  

Patricia Hunt is a Mary Baldwin College chaplain and Staunton resident.