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I’ve never considered “immigrant” my calling card, even though it’s one I’ve always carried.
I arrived here first as a 3-year-old boy in the mid-1970s, settling with my family in Northern California, in a small town with trees so thick that their branches mingled high over the roads. My mother introduced us around the neighborhood not just as a new family, but as a Peruvian family (she signed cards, “from your Peruvian friends”). It mattered to her that people knew, whether to convey her pride or pre-empt their questions. Even when you’re trying to fit in, you can’t help standing out.
She connected with other women in the area from Spanish-speaking countries, forming a group they called the Lovely Latin Ladies. The food, music, laughter and nostalgia infusing those Triple L gatherings remain among my most vivid childhood memories. It’s taken me this long to realize that in Spanish the verb for “longing” and the noun for “stranger” — “extraño” — are the same word.
I am older today than the lovely ladies were then. After some back and forth between Lima and California in my childhood, I’ve made my home in the United States for decades now — going to college and graduate school, passing the citizenship test, marrying a native-born American, even seeing our children born in the nation’s capital. I’m an immigrant, but over the years the label has moved lower on my drop-down menu.
Is immigration something you do or something you are? Is it a step on the way to becoming something else or does the passage itself forever define you?
The longer I’m here, the more it’s become a memory, an evocation of a long ago that I share with my children, much as we might construct a family tree.
In recent years, though, the distance has narrowed between memory and identity, between immigration as a once upon a time versus a here and now. In our politics, the presence of immigrants is again a contested campaign issue. But even that word — “issue” — is too convenient, a buffer between policy and humanity. It’s one thing to ponder and debate issues, as I do in my work. It’s another to be one.
When Donald Trump cried out in last month’s debate with Kamala Harris that immigrants were “eating the dogs” in Springfield, Ohio, I was struck by an overwhelming sadness. Sadness at the cruelty of the unfounded accusation and at the damage it would inflict on the people in that one town, but also at the relentless diminishing of an American aspiration, an aspiration I still refuse to dismiss as naïve. I’ve long regarded Trump as a challenge for America — for democratic institutions, for honesty and, yes, for its immigrant tradition — but this xenophobic cacophony, building so relentlessly over the past decade, now feels overpowering. It also feels directed my way, at who I am and the choices I’ve made.
It would be wildly ahistoric to say that Trump, on his own, has eroded the ideal of America as a nation of immigrants. His opponents love to say that “this is not who we are,” even if, in truth, it is who we have often been. For all of Trump’s particular efforts — the wall, the travel ban, the family separations and now the pledge of mass deportation — he is part of a long tradition. You don’t have to go back to the expulsion of Mexicans and Mexican Americans during the Great Depression, or the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in the late 19th century, or Benjamin Franklin’s musings on those inassimilable Germans. But you could.
Ronald Reagan invoked America’s immigrant tradition in his 1989 farewell address, when he reminded the world that if his shining city needed walls, “the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.” When Trump rejects this parallel heritage — promising bigger walls and locked doors — his words strike at the hopes and insecurities that I always bear. Even when Trump’s words are false, their aim is true.
I do not speak for immigrants, for Hispanics or for my family; I take on neither the burden nor the arrogance of representation. No doubt, Trump’s various statements attacking immigrants strike different people, including other newcomers, in different ways. To me, they show that the man who accuses immigrants of poisoning the blood of America is administering his own brand of venom, one whose cumulative effect is to disfigure a nation rather than exalt it.
‘They’re not sending their best’
“When Mexico sends its people,” Trump declared on June 16, 2015, announcing his first presidential campaign, “they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you.” He went on to brand immigrants as drug traffickers and rapists, then added the most casually dismissive of caveats, “and some, I assume, are good people.”
That assumption of criminality became the first of many transgressions that, while seemingly disqualifying, merely anticipated core elements of Trump’s appeal. Yet those words were not the ones that struck me hardest. Listen to his case again, and you’ll find so much more to choose from.
When Trump twice stressed “they’re not sending you,” he physically pointed at his audience, at you, emphasizing the gap he finds between those who belong and those who never will. And when he could only “assume” that some immigrants were good people, he tacitly acknowledged the remove at which he holds them. Trump does not say that he knows any good immigrants; he must imagine their existence.
But to me, Trump’s starkest message in that moment was the passivity he implied with one word. “They’re not sending their best.” Sending.
Nobody sent me. No government shipped me, my parents or my sisters to LAX, our official port of entry. We chose to leave, and we chose this place. Obsessed with our education, my father believed his children would receive better schooling in the United States, that we would learn to speak English well. I have few strong memories of those earliest days — I do recall how distasteful it was to drink my milk cold for the first time — but I know the story of our choice, because I heard it so often. No one forced us aboard that plane. I’ll forever wonder if it was the right choice, but I’ll never doubt that it was ours to make.
“Little is more extraordinary than the decision to migrate, little more extraordinary than the accumulation of emotions and thoughts which finally leads a family to say farewell to a community where it has lived for centuries, to abandon old ties and familiar landmarks,” John F. Kennedy wrote in “A Nation of Immigrants.” He called it a “highly individual decision” and “an enormous intellectual and emotional commitment.”
“Sending” reflects not just how Trump views immigration but how he sees the world: all-powerful leaders making decisions, unquestioned and unreviewable, over people’s lives. But “sending” robs me of agency over my own fate. After seven years in California, we moved back to Lima, and I lived there for another seven years until I finished high school. Then I decided to return to the United States for college, to make this my home. These were choices, not orders. “Sending” renders the immigrant not just unwanted but submissive.
Whether I am the best or worst of immigrants is a matter of opinion. That I chose to come here is not.
‘Go back’
In 2019, Trump told four members of Congress to “go back” to the countries “from which they came.”
“So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe,” the president posted on social media, “now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done.”
Disregard for the moment that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib were born in the United States and that Ilhan Omar migrated here from Somalia as a child. To me, Trump’s most egregious error was his blithe assumption that going back, that returning and belonging to an ancestral home, is truly possible.
You’re lucky to be here, Trump’s post suggests, so make no demands. And remember: Whatever conditions prompted you or your ancestors to leave the old place will forever be used against you in the new one.
The irony is that I’ve often thought about going back. Not about returning to live in Peru, necessarily, but about going back in time, to the moment my family decided to leave, or later when I chose to come here myself. What alternate life, what pains and joys and regrets, might I have known had the choice been different? There is a parallel existence always shadowing me, a version I glimpse in the cousins and friends who remained. What if I’d stayed?
I’ve always been jealous of those Americans who claim one unmistakable hometown, the place whose streets and rhythms they instantly recognize, a singular setting that anchors their memory. I ache for that, but I lost it. When I visit Lima, I feel out of place. My cultural references are dated, my mental maps fragmented, my friendships treasured but fragile. I don’t quite get the jokes. My longing is for a place that no longer exists, just like that other person I might have been.
“I will never be American enough for many Americans,” the journalist Jorge Ramos writes in “Stranger,” a 2018 memoir. “Just as I will never be Mexican enough for many Mexicans.” The plight of living in between makes Trump’s “go back” admonition especially harsh. The old place is gone, so I cling to the new with the zeal of the convert; I read and write about U.S. politics, history and ideals for a living in part because I’m still trying to stake my claim, to make this place the home to which I can always return.
‘Shithole countries’
Six years before Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, began spreading rumors about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Trump complained in an Oval Office meeting that he didn’t like admitting immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador or African countries. “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” the president asked, as he rejected a bipartisan immigration proposal. With little subtlety, he said he’d rather draw from Norway. “Why do we need more Haitians?” he reiterated. “Take them out.”
Why does Trump think people leave their homelands, often at such risk and uncertainty? Some quarter of a billion people live in countries other than those they were born in, and many more wish to join the exile. “When migrants move, it’s not out of idle fancy, or because they hate their homelands, or to plunder the countries they come to, or even (most often) to strike it rich,” Suketu Mehta writes in “This Land Is Our Land,” a 2019 manifesto. They move, he explains, “because the accumulated burdens of history have rendered their homelands less and less habitable.”
For Haiti, those accumulated burdens include political turmoil, repression and foreign interventions, and today, gangs brutalize its citizens. The accumulated burdens of history have not made Haiti a shithole; they have made it a tragedy.
My parents enjoyed a comfortable life in Peru; neither poverty nor oppression compelled our departure. But that life was not enough. My father’s American dream was less for himself than for me and my sisters, and we came here to find it. I chose to return to the United States for college because the Peru of my youth was mired in hyperinflation and terrorism; because I missed the sisters who had made that choice already; because the taste I’d had of America, even as a child, was impossible to forget.
That does not make the departure simple or unambiguous. Hoping that the new home will be better than the old one does not diminish the pain of truncating the life you have known, leaving a hole so gaping that even a land of opportunity has trouble filling it.
If they were shitholes, they’d be easy to leave.
‘They can’t even speak English’
In the presidential debate last month, Trump suggested that Democrats were importing immigrants to vote illegally. “They can’t even speak English,” he said.
I owe my existence to an aspiring immigrant’s desire to learn English. At a beach party in Peru some six decades ago, my father, who did not speak English well, approached other guests with a question: ¿Quién aquí habla inglés? He wanted to practice it. My mother, who had learned the language from the American nuns who taught at her school in Lima, answered affirmatively. That’s how they met — and there’s my origin story.
It must be hard for native speakers to understand the constant tension — the constrained opportunity and heightened self-awareness — that comes from inhabiting a country whose dominant language you don’t quite grasp, full of phrases moving too quickly and words spelled too weirdly. Try to imagine it, and then add politicians who declare you unworthy for those very linguistic shortcomings you are striving to overcome.
As a child, I watched my father pore over books in English with a pen in hand and a dictionary at his side, underlining and looking up the difficult words. His canon included novels by James Clavell, John Jakes and Leon Uris — yes, even immigrant dads read dad books — as well as a nonfiction work, “All the President’s Men,” by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. I still have his movie-edition paperback, the one with Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford on the cover, and his underlining still visible:
“Woodward fumbled for the receiver.”
“Five men had been arrested earlier that morning in a burglary at Democratic headquarters.”
There’s also “shrugged,” “sprawling” and “byline.”
I won’t say that watching him read “All the President’s Men” inspired my career in journalism. Life isn’t so cinematic. But the book did inspire him — my father loved the idea that we now lived in a country where what happened in that book could, in fact, happen. He never mastered the language, but he spoke it loudly, as though daring anyone to correct him. (His mash-up version of “kangaroo” as “can-GU-ru” sticks in my mind.)
I underline my books, too, but my struggle is not about unfamiliar words or idioms. It’s about staying true to the two languages that still compete for my attention, about reconciling their power over my thoughts.
I came here so young that I don’t remember not knowing both languages. During my childhood in California, we spoke Spanish at home but English everywhere else, so much so that when we returned to Peru a few years later, my Spanish featured a slight American tinge. The contrast between my mastery of English and my accented Spanish prompted my new fifth-grade classmates in Lima to call me “gringo” — a nickname some of them still use with me now. I never minded it, but it told me, even then, that I almost, but didn’t quite, belong.
In Peru, the emphasis flipped: English at home and Spanish everywhere else. By the time I finished high school and returned here for college, Spanish had become dominant, whereas my English was packed with words I could define and spell but not easily pronounce. (I still remember mistakenly sounding out the “p” in “coup” in a freshman writing seminar, and even now I have difficulty with “iron,” often pronouncing it as “eye-run” rather than “eye-earn.”)
Today, my Spanish is alive, and English is my living. I feel as though I have two strong second languages rather than a single native one; they’re still trading punches. When talking or writing, I mentally scroll through both vocabularies, searching for the best term. I’m a better writer and speaker in English, yet I default to Spanish in moments of stress, and my wife says I speak in Spanish in my sleep. When I am speaking in one language, a part of me is always offering criticism in the other.
Trump’s “they can’t even speak English” critique misunderstands the challenge of language and assimilation. In 2015, the National Academy of Sciences reported that “language integration” for immigrants to the United States is taking place “as rapidly or faster now than it did for the earlier waves of mainly European immigrants in the 20th century.” And while the study suggested that Spanish-speaking immigrants and their descendants may learn English and relinquish their native language more slowly than other immigrant groups, by the third generation the transition to English is close to universal. ¿Quién aquí habla inglés? Lots of us.
A few months ago, a Times reader emailed me feedback about an essay of mine — he did not focus on what I’d said but on how I had said it: “Sentí al idioma español en tu uso del inglés, y no como una falla, sino como una fuente de amplitud tonal. Ahora quiero leer otras cosas tuyas.” (Translation: “I felt the Spanish language in your use of English, not as a failing, but as a source of tonal range. Now I want to read other things of yours.”)
Perhaps my Spanish and English have reached a truce, enhancing each other, adding range to what I can write and imagine. To demand purity in language is as self-defeating as seeking purity in people; in America, the overlap is everything.
‘Poisoning the blood’
Today, the immigrant’s offense is not just how you sound, what you do or where you come from, but who and what you are.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do. They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump said at a New Hampshire rally in December. “That’s what they’ve done — they poison — mental institutions and prisons all over the world. Not just in South America, not just the three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world they’re coming into our country.”
Should Trump win the election next month, I no longer must wonder if America regards immigration as something I did or something I am. He has provided the answer, and his audience has validated it: Immigration is a chronic condition, and the only cure, Trump tells us, is a “bloody story” of mass deportation.
But there is no American race or blood that outsiders can pollute. How can immigrants poison the blood of the nation when we have always been its lifeblood? “Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America,” Oscar Handlin wrote in “The Uprooted,” his 1952 work. “Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.”
Many politicians and citizens distinguish between those who entered the country legally and those who arrived or stayed through unlawful means. It’s a meaningful difference, but it is obliterated the moment a party or a president asserts that immigrants poison the blood of the nation. Do American-born children taint the country if they have an immigrant parent like me, one with “bad genes,” as Trump might put it? What is my citizenship certificate worth once my very presence contaminates? Disease does not respond to documentation, only eradication.
Erika Lee, a historian at Harvard, writes that Trump’s policies are the “logical evolution” of xenophobic pressures in American life. “Xenophobia has been neither an aberration nor a contradiction to the United States’ history of immigration,” Lee writes in “America for Americans,” published in 2019. “Rather, it has existed alongside and constrained America’s immigration tradition.”
That evolution continues. Trump’s pledge to build the wall was his essential promise in 2016; the call for mass deportation is his crucial commitment today. The immigrant threat has been redefined from those who are coming — remember the caravan arriving just before the 2018 midterm elections? — to those who are here. The wall purported to protect America; deportations are meant to purify it.
The pretenses are growing less tenable. Politicians can say they are pro-family and pro-child, but when I form a family, I am befouling the nation. They can say immigrants should not take advantage of social services, but if I work, then I am stealing someone’s job. They say that homeownership is key to the American dream, but if I secure a home, then I am distorting housing prices for the native born. The argument is not just about keeping immigrants out or kicking them out, but about denying the full American experience even to the ones who remain.
‘We welcome you’
Almost 10 years ago, I stood in a Baltimore federal building with dozens of other immigrants and swore the oath of U.S. citizenship. Two memories stand out. During the ceremony, there was a pause to list, alphabetically, all the countries from which the new citizens hailed. But one country was inadvertently skipped, and the new citizens and their families protested. Even when promising to “bear true faith and allegiance” to the Constitution of the United States, they wanted to make certain that the home they’d left behind would not be forgotten.
Not only did I “renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty”; I also had to give up my green card. It was a document that, in different iterations, I’d had since age 3, a wallet-size golden ticket that protected and justified my presence here. I was always scared of losing it, so I rarely carried it with me, but I did keep a copy in my wallet, just in case I ever had to prove, as it declared on the back, that “Person Identified by this Card Is Entitled to Reside Permanently and Work in the United States.”
I remember its laminated feel, and I can still recite the alien registration number it bore. So, when I handed it to an official who casually tossed it in a box with many others, I panicked. How would I now prove that I belonged?
The citizenship packet included a letter from President Barack Obama (“we welcome you to the American family”), a flier with the Oath of Allegiance on one side and the Pledge of Allegiance and “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the other, a listing of my rights (including the freedom to express myself) and responsibilities (including to defend America “if the need should arise”), a guide to federal elections and a brochure describing a lengthy “Guide for New Immigrants,” which I could obtain online in 14 languages (among them, Spanish and Haitian Creole).
But with citizenship, there’s no red-white-and-blue card to replace the green one. You’re just supposed to know, to start cutting through the world with that land-of-the-free swagger. I think my temporary panic was a reminder: There’s a difference between lawful and included, between needed and welcomed, between tolerated and accepted.
Trump began the first of his three presidential campaigns warning that immigrants were not the best. I would never presume to be the best of my old country, nor the best of my adopted one. I don’t have to be, and I don’t apologize for that.
If Trump’s attacks render me even more of an immigrant in the eyes of this nation, I’ll accept that outcome, even embrace it. It’s a reminder that so much of how I think and write and act and feel— so much of who I am — flows from that status, that the pang of living in between is a classic American condition, one that both enriches and complicates. I am grateful to live that life here, with the same opportunity as anyone else to help perfect this union.
I don’t have to go home to do that. I’m already here.
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