This is not my usual work here, but I want it to be seen.
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It is imperative that Rep. Ilhan Omar continue to criticize the US.
Many angry voices are shouting that she should be expelled from Congress, even the country, for criticizing it. The charge of treason is coming far too easily from a contingent that lusts for political blood without restraint. Those voices are saying that she should be more grateful. She should be celebrating America for taking her in, not criticizing it for its flaws. They seem to suggest that she is a Citizen Minus because she wasn’t born here. There are no tiers of citizenship. Once you’re in, you’re in.
A perspective of some use is the common wisdom’s opposite. Not only should Congresswoman Omar’s right to free speech be respected, tolerated, and allowed, it should be celebrated. Who else has earned the right to free speech more than a refugee who bled, struggled, fought, trekked, shivered, baked, starved, yet always hoped? Who else has earned the right to free speech any more than the people who studied their hearts out, who learned more about this country than most of its citizens, who worked at menial jobs, who supported families? Dear reader is probably, in all likelihood, a natural-born citizen. You haven't had to fight for your freedom to speak openly and without fear of repercussion from the government. You never had to escape warlords with an undying dream of one day being free. You never had to carry a child away from bombs and gunfire, slaughter and rape, across parched landscapes, with no food, no water, and nothing but thousands of miles between you and a land where you can work and flourish. You didn’t work for it. It’s your birthright.
They worked for it. They struggled for it. It sustained them on dark nights. It kept their vision forward during the march to freedom. They had a dream, and that dream is America.
The reality of that dream is harsh. Crime. Dirt. Crumbling roads and buildings. Exorbitant cost of living. Below-subsistence wages. Beastly hard work. On top of all that, a population who largely hates you, egged on by a government that does, too. Is that part of the dream? Is that part of the America you sought?
Of course not. The America we promise refugees and immigrants is one where you can speak your piece on a street corner and the government can’t stop you. The America we promise allows you to get together in groups in public, to print any message you want, to worship where and what you like, to be secure in your home, to not be forced to testify against yourself, to be protected in court.
Imagine that is your dream, and this is what you come to: kangaroo courts, racist judges and prosecutors, rogue lawmen, and wildly unjust prison sentences. Bigotry at work, bigotry in church, bigotry in public. Denied the opportunities enjoyed by native-born citizens. Imagine you’ve been dreaming of paradise, and what you get is desolation. What do you do? Slump into inaction? Or do you fight for the America of which you dreamed?
No one has any more right to a political opinion than a refugee citizen. No one.
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