For Syrian-Americans, the Travel Ban Feels Alarmingly Familiar

This article originally appeared on this site.

The flag of the Syrian National Coalition waves behind protesters at a Borough Park rally against Donald Trump’s ban on refugees and on immigrants from seven Muslim countries. The flag of the Syrian National Coalition waves behind protesters at a Borough Park rally against Donald Trump’s ban on refugees and on immigrants from seven Muslim countries.CreditPHOTOGRAPH BY MOHAMMED ELSHAMY / ANADOLU AGENCY / GETTY

On Saturday morning, I woke up to a panicked message from my friend Kinan Azmeh, in Beirut. He wanted to know, “Do you think I can no longer go back to America?”

A virtuoso on the clarinet and a brilliant composer, Kinan was fresh from a concert in Germany where he had débuted his latest work with the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, with whom he tours as a member of the Silk Road ensemble.

Kinan had just arrived in Beirut to perform with a Lebanese orchestra hosting Belarusian musicians when he heard about President Trump’s executive order banning all refugees and citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries. His message also asked, only half-jokingly, “Do you need a place to live? My apartment might be empty from now on.”

Kinan, like me, is Syrian. Unlike me, he’s not an American; he holds a green card and will be eligible for citizenship in a few years. He has been in New York City since 2001, when he arrived to study at the Juilliard School. In January, 2011, just before the Arab Spring erupted, Kinan bought a house in Damascus’s beautiful old city. It was a promise to himself that he’d eventually move back, or at least split his time between his city of birth and the one he’d adopted.

That March, after Syrian security forces tortured boys who had painted anti-regime graffiti, and also opened fire on peaceful protesters, Kinan stopped composing music. When he finally wrote again, a year later, he called the new piece “A Sad Morning, Every Morning.”

At a performance in the Middle East that summer, he said something about how history only moves forward, and how Syria would inevitably become a secular democracy. He also played a concert that raised money for humanitarian relief in Syria. His fate was thus sealed. Soon after, a message was delivered to him by an unofficial source: don’t bother coming back to Damascus.

It is not uncommon for Syrians to find out that, because of their speech, beliefs, or dissent, they are on government blacklists that might prevent them from entering—and leaving—Syria safely. Until now, hearing the same about the U.S. was a rare experience.

Kinan began to open all of his performances—from the smallest jazz venues on the Lower East Side to Carnegie Hall—with “A Sad Morning.” Last year, when I was reporting on the refugee crisis in Europe, I saw him play a free concert in a small town outside Amsterdam, to a crowd of Dutch citizens and refugees, who walked over from the nearby camp. I was there with a Syrian mother and son, whom I had followed on their journey to Europe. After the concert, I went backstage to greet Kinan and to introduce them. The mother fell into his arms, smiling, crying, and thanking him for the music.

In the last six years, there have been many occasions like that moment, visual reminders of how our lot depends on what suffix happens to follow “Syrian”—refugee, immigrant, American.

Born in the U.S., I have always been grateful to be the latter. It has meant safety and a lack of worry about my basic needs, which cannot be said for family who remained in Syria. Growing up, the most meaningful distinction for me was that in the United States, citizenship meant rights, liberties, and freedoms, which the state guaranteed, and when the state failed, it could be held accountable. This could never be said for Syria.

As I followed the Syrian refugees from Turkey across Europe, during 2015 and 2016, I often thought of how different their circumstances were from my parents’ journeys to the United States. In the early seventies, my mother, pregnant with me, simply flew from Damascus to join my father, who was completing his medical training in Baltimore. Her departure was painful, but she had left on her terms, and the ache was mitigated by my parents’ steadfast belief that the separation from their country would only be temporary.

Back then, what the new Hafez al-Assad regime would mean for Syria was not yet fully obvious. Once it became clear that Assad’s rule would be totalitarian, brutal, and seemingly permanent, my parents reluctantly gave up their dream of returning, for our safety and our futures. They became American citizens, years after their four children were all born American. And that fact is what separates me from the Syrians unfairly maligned, banned, and banished today.

In Baltimore, we were raised with the Syrian values of generosity, solidarity, and neighborliness, which, with American liberty, we were able to actualize. In Syria, the regimes of Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar spent decades trying to stifle these impulses as a way to deny a robust civil society, which might challenge totalitarian control.

My father, a doctor who saw so many poor patients free of charge, and my mother, who was previously a pharmacist but ran his practice and raised the four of us, ingrained in us the duty to serve. I started my career as a lawyer in the U.S. Department of Justice. Upon graduating from college, my brother and sister joined AmeriCorps and Teach for America. Today, they are an economist and a professor, both in federal service. Our other sister is a professor of medicine at a public institution and a practicing doctor serving a predominantly Medicaid population in West Baltimore. We all graduated from the public-school system and were taught to revere teachers.

We are like the many other Syrian-Americans and immigrant Americans who have been contributing to this country for generations, in countless ways, even in our dissent, which we have voiced when American foreign policies have fallen short of American ideals.

But that didn’t stop American governors from making loud declarations last summer about how they wouldn’t take in Syrians, as if we weren’t already part of the people they were meant to serve. When Larry Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland, joined in, it felt like an insult to my family.

Now Trump has chosen to demonize Syrians and the people of six other countries, most of whom have been under bombardment by the U.S. or U.S. allies. Trump’s actions are particularly alarming because they do not appear to serve his proclaimed goals of protecting this country. Whether his motives include fostering fear to justify greater executive power or intimidating certain American communities, they undermine American values.

And, for Syrians, this all feels dismayingly familiar.

If there’s one thing that we learned from Syria, it’s that authoritarian regimes require the complicity of others. Many American politicians, including Vice-President Mike Pence, who months ago declared that a Muslim ban would be unconstitutional, have done what officials in the Syrian regime long have: gone along to get along.

From Syria, I also learned that a people living under such a regime can be both its bystanders and victims. Fortunately, many other Americans, from judges to lawyers to ordinary citizens, have refused to go along, true to the traditions that actually make America great. Not surprisingly, and almost straight out of the Middle Eastern playbook, Trump denounced the Americans who took time out of their lives to stand up for their rights and the rights of others as “professional anarchists, thugs and paid protesters.”

The public outcry clearly had an effect; while the White House’s position on refugees and other visitors from the seven banned countries is unchanged, earlier this week the Administration was forced to walk back the executive order’s application to green-card holders. Still, the situation for legal permanent residents remains uncertain.

My friend Kinan, for his part, decided to board his flight.

People like him, though, who live here but aren’t citizens, must now try to calculate the risk of travelling abroad; they must decide whether to fill concert halls, attend their parents’ funerals, visit loved ones, or present their research at international conferences—all examples of activities that were disrupted just this week.

Kinan and I stayed in touch as he made his way from Beirut to New York. On Thursday evening, he texted me that he had landed at J.F.K., and I debated how long would be too long not to have heard from him again. I’ve long been used to making those estimations about Syrian-border crossings.

In the end, it wasn’t long at all. It was, as Kinan messaged, “all normal.” That evening, America felt like America again, even if the respite promises to be only momentary.

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