Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Editorial: An immigrant's thanksgiving
An Iraqi immigrant still waiting for his green card is already so American, he might remind us of the freedom we should be thankful for.
From the RoundTable blog
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Americans are so disillusioned with their leaders that Barack Obama's inauguration can't come soon enough. The nation's financial structure is in peril, its citizenry swamped in debt. People are scared, for the first time in generations, that they could face a future of real want.
So what is it that's so great about being an American? What in every American's birthright is so powerful that on Thursday, many of us still will be giving thanks for the accident of being born here?
Haidar Khairallah, an Iraqi, knows.
Haidar is "Homeboy" to "the boys of the 82nd" Airborne Division. He worked with them and lost a leg for them five years ago, during the intense street-fighting in Baghdad that then dominated U.S. war efforts in Iraq.
He came to Roanoke in March, after years of waiting for refugee status to get to the United States. In a profile last Sunday, he tells staff writer Beth Macy that every day he asks himself, "Why wasn't I born here?"
The bombings that still occur in his native land surely contribute to his affinity for America, where he and his wife and young son can live in peace. But Haidar obviously was pursuing something other than personal safety when he greeted U.S. troops in Baghdad with tea, and became an interpreter, mediator, adviser and friend.
He seems simply to have a taste for freedom, evident from his childhood -- spent, in part, in England -- to his settling in Roanoke, where he says he feels right at home.
He's likely to have an easier transition than most. He is well educated and speaks English fluently. As the son of a Sunni father and Shiite mother, he avoided getting drawn into radical Islamic sectarianism in Iraq. Having witnessed its effects, he may have a deeper appreciation than some native sons of America's separation of church and state.
Haidar needs no lecture from Americans on the cost of such freedom. He lost his leg from a wound suffered trying, in vain, to save one of his American buddies' lives.
And already, he and his fellow Iraqi immigrants have had to face the gap between expectations and the reality of transplanted lives. Even educated émigrés may have to start again with menial jobs -- no disgrace in America, with its ethos of pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps.
Haidar, too, is frustrated, yet insists he's more American than Iraqi -- and has the near-requisite optimism of his adopted land. He's waiting out the year it takes before he can apply for his green card, then hopes to get a good job, the kind he truly deserves. That doesn't always happen in America, but it can.
It can.
Even in times of high anxiety, Americans can be thankful for that.
