Forum: Have You Thought About Leaving the US?

Where else can we go when this country turns on us? That’s the question writer and commentator Wajahat Ali wrestles with in his recent column for “The Daily Beast” called “Is It Time for Me to Leave America?”

Is it time to leave?

I’ve caught myself asking my wife this question several times over the past year. We were both born and raised in America, a country of opportunity for our immigrant parents who left Pakistan with little more than hope and belief in a dream that anyone, even brown-skinned Muslims, with some luck and hard work, could make it and be accepted. But that dream is becoming a nightmare.

If you’re a person of color, it seems foolish and reckless to not, at least, have an exit plan when looking at the political and cultural landscape.

It’s a query that a growing number of people — particularly those in liberal enclaves like the Bay Area — seem recently to have been contemplating — if not concretely, at least in the abstract.

KQED Forum’s Mina Kim recently spoke to Ali, author of the book “Go Back to Where You Came From,” about how this political and cultural moment is causing some people to lose faith in their country — and why he ultimately decides he will stay put. During the conversation, several listeners called in to the show to explain the difficult process they had gone through in deciding whether or not to leave the country. Some said they chose to stay because they were ultimately unsure whether another country would have better options for them, or whether similar issues around abortion access, the rise of fascism and immigration hurdles would follow them there.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Mina Kim: So how often have you asked yourself if it’s time to leave, or talked to your wife about it?

Wajahat Ali: It was my father, a man who came here after 1965, an immigrant with the American dream, thanks to the Immigration Nationality Act, who built himself up from the bootstraps — he’s been here for most of his life. My mom and my dad have gone through a lot. He was the one for the first time in his life who brought up the topic, “Hey, have you thought about moving? Because I don’t think this country will be sustainable, especially for Muslims and people of color. I think if Trump wins again in 2020 and even with Trumpism, I think they’ll turn on us. I think it’s safe just to consider researching.”

And I thought he was just having fun, but he actually literally has spent time thinking about other countries. And so I kind of ignored it.

But increasingly, I broached this topic with my wife a couple of months ago. I said, “Listen, I don’t know what’s going to happen in this country and we’ve got three kids and I’m willing to stay here and fight. But for our three children, who are brown-skinned, with multisyllabic names, who we are raising Muslim, this country might turn on them like it has turned on so many others. And maybe it’s just wise for us as parents and guardians to at least entertain the idea that maybe we might have to go somewhere.

And then the question becomes, “Well, where can you go which is safe? What place is safe right now?” And so that’s what began this thought experiment.

And then the reason I wrote about it was because I realized I was not the only one. So many other parents of different generations, different ethnicities, were entertaining, for the first time, the idea of, “Well, what happens if America becomes unsustainable for us to live and to raise our children in a way in which they feel safe and secure?” And it’s saddening and painful to even have this conversation. But I realized very quickly we weren’t the only ones.

What are the incidents or experiences that have prompted you lately to keep returning to this question of leaving?

If you’re a person of color in America, oftentimes you have to love a country that doesn’t love you back.

I was born and raised in this country and when I was growing up, the worst thing I was called was Apu or Gandhi. And it’s like, “Well, thank you for comparing me to a beloved peaceful leader who helped overthrow British imperialism.”

But now, you know, in 2022 America, Islamophobia and anti-Muslim bigotry are so mainstream that one of the major political parties just campaigns on it openly. People say, “Oh, things have gotten so much better.” Of course there’s been progress. But my kids are inheriting an America where literally, a Republican elected official can promote hateful conspiracy theories about Islam and Muslims and get rewarded. And that’s an America that I did not know.

So that’s an America … which my kids are inheriting. That’s an America, which, right now, Asian Americans are being beaten up and killed because they’re blamed for COVID, a pandemic that has killed 6 million people, that has no ethnicity.

And we’re seeing the rise of fascism, the normalization of white supremacist talking points. A third of Americans believe in the replacement theory. That literally is a conspiracy that came from the swamps of the KKK, skinheads and Nazis, that says that people like you and me are actively replacing white folks and trying to weaken Western civilization.

And then you also see disinformation. You see a fractured America where people feel like their votes no longer matter. You see this latest poll that came out of The New York Times that young folks feel like the systems and institutions of democracy do not benefit them.

You’re seeing a rollback on 50 years of protected rights. You’re seeing the Supreme Court hijacked by extremists who now say, they’re hinting that they’re going after birth control. And it’s kind of like one of those situations where you’re like, “Oh, we emerged at the tail end. We’re on the downward slope.”

So I’m willing to stay and fight until the end. My wife and I are. But the concern then is, what about my kids? And at the end of the day, as a parent or a guardian, you want to protect your children. And you can be a patriot and be like, “I’ll stand my ground and I’ll fight.” And then I sometimes think, to give an exquisite “Game of Thrones” reference, is my job to be Hodor? Do we sacrifice my body and let the demons kill me just so my kids and the next generation has a head start and they run off into the forest? Well, where are they running off to? Are they running off to an America that will embrace them? Or do I have to think about another country where they can have security and peace?

Do you think also what’s contributing to people losing faith is just this sense that if you’re a Democrat, you don’t feel like your party is fighting back hard enough?

Yeah. I often say that Democrats bring a blunt pencil to a knife fight and Mitch McConnell brings a bazooka and everyone loses. It’s a reflection that the institutions that are put in place to allegedly help people have failed us and are only benefiting those individuals who are wealthy, powerful and privileged. So many are asked to buy in and believe in these ideologies and systems that have never benefited them.

So when you see young people say, “You’re asking me to invest in democracy and you’re asking me to invest in capitalism and asking me to believe in the Supreme Court as an institution. What have they done for me lately?” And I stood out during a freaking pandemic and voted for Democrats to bring about change. And now there’s gridlock.

Most people do understand how the government works. But thanks to gerrymandering and systemic inequality in the structures that are put in place, the majority increasingly is being ruled by a minority. So what happens is it increases this type of exasperation, a type of helplessness and a fatigue.

And sadly, Mina, that type of fatigue is exactly the ingredient necessary for fascists. They want you to feel helpless. They want you to feel that you have no power. And this, in a strange way now to flip it, inspires me to stay and fight because I know this is part and parcel of the strategy for authoritarians and fascists is to make the majority feel like their voice doesn’t matter and there’s nothing that you can do. And so cynicism and apathy become very comforting, but then they also become very cheap and lazy. But you can’t blame people for feeling this helpless when they do everything and they don’t see their leaders represent their values.

And so this is why the hope here is that enough people feel this way, enough people feel exasperated, enough people feel angry and upset, and you need to mobilize the majority to put pressure on our elected officials. And if we can organize a groundswell, we can maybe shift this country towards a better future. The story is still being written.

Do you wonder if other places are really going to go through what we’ve been living through already for years?

There’s no utopia. We’re seeing the rise of fascism and white supremacy, which has turned into a death march all over the world. What’s happening, though, in Canada or England, in some other countries, is they don’t have guns in these countries. They don’t have the same level of gun violence. I joke about it, some dark humor, but that’s No. 1.

No. 2, the United States joins two other countries in the past 50 years that has actually gone backwards on abortion rights, whereas the majority of the world has gone forward. So now it is a very real possibility that if Republicans take control of the Senate, they’ll eliminate the filibuster and essentially ban abortion. So women’s rights. And then No. 3, the right-wing parties in Canada and other countries.

Yes, they are extreme, but even those right-wing parties believe in climate change. The Republican Party in the United States is a very unique, unique outlier with the right-wing parties all across the world in which they deny climate change. And Donald Trump calls it a hoax created by China.

So if you’re looking at literally an existential threat, guns, climate change and a woman’s ability to have an abortion, which if you’re a health care professional or if you’re just a woman and you know how the body works, you realize that many women have to have abortions to save their lives due to miscarriages, ectopic pregnancy in the United States of America right now, in many states, zero exceptions for rape and incest, zero.

So this is so extreme and beyond the pale that many people like your listeners have called in and said “these are my red lines. Like, if they ban abortion, I got to leave.” Guns are already my red line. Climate change is my red line. And unfortunately what we’re seeing is a backsliding where in these other countries where it’s not perfect, at least on these issues, your kid won’t get shot in school.

You were about to share with us why you don’t want to leave us feeling punched in the face?

Yeah. I mean, I think there’s enough to be depressed about nowadays, right? But in all seriousness, I’m an American. I was born and raised in this country. This is a country that I call my home. This country belongs to me. And this is a country, like I said before, that I love, even though it doesn’t always love me back, I have chosen to marry an American citizen. She is also born and raised in this country. We have decided to raise our three beautiful kids in this country called America.

And as a student of American history, I know that people who have looked like me have been the outsiders, the antagonists, the villains, the punchlines, the sidekicks. We have always had to fight for democracy and for rights, and we’ve had to fight for our country. This is nothing new. And so there is a part of me which is this stubborn curmudgeon, like, you know, patriot who realizes that this is the big fight. What gives me hope is just listening to the people who have called. There is a passion, there is a sincerity. They care about this country. There’s a fear, there is a desire to make it better. We have the numbers. And I feel like if those numbers organize, there’s still an opening here. There is still an opening that we can take this country back for the majority and push back against fascism. But we need allies. We need enough people to get off the seats and we need enough people to throw us in the ring.

I feel that everyone can contribute a footprint and do something, at least locally in your family, in your workplace, in your community. You can be the America you want this country to become. Everyone has something minor, but you have to do something in your local community, and that gives you a feeling of autonomy and power. Because otherwise, if you look at what’s happening around the world, you feel overwhelmed. So I want to invite people to throw their hat in the ring and start first and foremost in your family and then move out, you know, in your community and in your workplace. And this is how we make systemic change.