Renewing America

The huddled masses gathered at a nondescript Charlotte business park just before Independence Day to help renew America.

Sixty people from three dozen countries, seemingly of every hue, color, age, and background, became flesh-and-blood representatives of e pluribus unum as they sat together on folding chairs in a fluorescent-lit conference room while a middling official from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services emceed a ceremony that would culminate in the oath of citizenship, a ceremony, he told us, that had created a million new Americans over the last year.

It started with the national anthem, a parable about perseverance amidst struggle: dawn lighting the country’s still-flying flag following a night when it may well have fallen, and may yet fall, an offer of proof that freedom can prevail, but never without a fight.

Then a word from the League of Women Voters reminding everyone to register this election year. (Aging and elderly women are the unsung heroes of American self-government, staffing polling places around the country to make sure the machinery of democracy works on election days.)

“Congratulations,” the LWV volunteer said, an unremarkable salutation rendered otherwise by the political moment, when a former president, his party’s standard-bearer and a potential future president, has spent a decade baselessly calling immigrants like these — like my dear, sweet husband — vermin and poison and murderers, a hateful, harmful message that, sadly, too many of my fellow Americans have adopted as their own.

“He’s talking about other immigrants,” our former president’s supporters might say. Nonsense. When demagogues dehumanize entire categories of people, our duty, if we possess the decency necessary for the survival of an open society borne of fellow feeling and committed to self-government, is not to explain away the plain meaning of a president’s cruel words, but to bear witness to them. Honesty is imperative, not optional.

Besides, I’m sure those immigrants were present, too. In the area reserved for friends and family — so many people were there to celebrate their loved ones’ sometimes-long journeys to make America their home, whether for reasons of love or opportunity or refuge — I sat next to Maria, whose husband would take the oath just as mine would. She said he came to the States thirty years ago from Mexico, precisely the sort of person demonized by those who say immigrants are swarming across the southern border to take our jobs, rape our women, and somehow replace us.

Maria waved at her husband. He nodded back. And so it was throughout the room: I saw smiling people before me, proud of their new home, excited to be a part of it, and hopeful about its possibilities. Our former president would see only snakes.

So dark has our politics become that encouraging new immigrant-citizens to vote is seen by some as part of a malign conspiracy, a partisan plan to stuff ballot boxes and thereby steal the country away from real Americans, whatever that might mean and whoever they might be. A democracy that sees something sinister in the act of voting may soon cease to be a democracy, and a free nation whose leaders teach us to fear each other may long persist as a nation, but not a free one.

Everyone in attendance was surely aware of the paranoid politics threatening to drown American democracy, and they also surely knew that powerful people cast them as the millstone around our nation’s neck. No matter: We celebrated. We cheered. We clapped and snapped pictures and waved flags. We cried.

Despite the efforts of some to make immigrants feel unwelcome, these men and women, these immigrants, sought to become a part of our national community because America, as an idea, calls out to everyone who believes that ordinary people and common citizens have a right to govern themselves, to lead lives of liberty and equality, to be free of princes and potentates of every kind and character. These undoubtedly lofty ambitions are often frustrated and always imperfectly realized, but so long as we remain faithful to America’s possibilities by rejecting the temptations of those who would fan our fears while seeking to extinguish our hopes, no failure is final. We may yet do better: What we got wrong today we can make right tomorrow. That is the promise of our nation.

And so America’s newest citizens took their oath: They abandoned loyalties to foreign powers; pledged to support the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic; swore to bear true faith and allegiance to the United States; and promised to serve the nation in times of war and peace. It was done. People who started the day as Cameroonians or Russians or Mexicans were now Americans. Out of many, one.

We filtered into the parking lot just an hour after arriving, the flag out front fluttering in the breeze, still there.