Ilhan Omar: The Immigration Villain

And the best friend of far-right

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For the sake of immigrants, Ilhan Omar cannot become our national spokesperson. Unfortunately, she is becoming that. On Sunday, the Minnesota representative appeared on Face the Nation to defend her fellow Somalis in Minnesota against recent reports of widespread fraud.

Among the cultural elite, Omar is the perfect representative of immigrants. She is a hijab-wearing Muslim, black, accented, and a progressive member of Congress. She is a minority who has succeeded in politics by joining the far-left, which confirms the biases of the elite.

For the far-right, Omar is the perfect representative of immigrants. She is a hijab-wearing Muslim, black, accented, and a progressive member of Congress. She is a minority who has succeeded in politics by joining the far-left, which confirms the fears on the right.

Immediately after Omar finished her interview, the administration’s Rapid Response Twitter posted a portion of the interview with the caption, “.@IlhanMN says expecting immigrants to assimilate to American society and adopt American values reminds her of the Nazis.” It was a fair summary.

The interviewer had asked Omar about presidential adviser Stephen Miller’s statement that mass migration prevents assimilation:

You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homes.

In response to Miller, who is Jewish, Omar said,

I mean when I think about Stephen Miller and his white supremist [sic] it reminds me of the way the Nazis described the Jewish people in Germany. … There have been many immigrants who tried to come to the United States who have been turned back, one of them being the Jewish immigrants. … To me … ethnically, Somali, we are in this country as Americans. We are citizens. We are productive—part of this nation, and we will continue to be.

The extremes in the immigration debate can hardly be persuaded out of their positions, but the far-right is relishing the congresswoman’s performance, evident in the administration’s tweet.

Miller’s original statement was a response to an excellent editorial by the Wall Street Journal, defending the Afghans against the acts of one individual murderer, though Omar is excused for being unaware and focusing on her own community.

It is a funny thing. The host did not bring up this context, which was the problem with Miller’s comment. Whatever one thinks of immigration, Afghans who fought with the U.S. military deserve an exception, for it was the United States that failed them and is ultimately responsible for them. But in a vacuum, he has a point.

Likewise, Omar made Miller’s point for him by narrowing it down to the Somali community in Minnesota, which is the worst example of concentrated immigration and resistance against assimilation. “We are productive,” Omar said, a statement undermined by the fraud story.

Seventy-eight of the people charged with fraud are Somalis, and only eight are not. This is a low percentage of the entire Somali population, but an extremely high portion of the fraudsters. Yet, Omar was quick to remind the audience, “So you have to remember that the woman who led the program is a Caucasian woman.”

Omar’s instinct to defend her group against accusations is precisely the problem here. As soon as tribal lines are drawn, which we know as identity politics, immigrants who stick with their own tribes lose. Because Americans like immigrants but foreigners in America. Drawing tribal lines prevents assimilation.

Back to the problem with the cultural elite is that assimilation has become a dirty word, so much so that there are very few polls asking Americans about their views. (I know because I could hardly find any.) But the few polls over the past decade I found, as well as the older ones, show that most Americans believe that sharing core American values is fundamental to a successful immigration policy.

Which brings us to the real problem with Omar. Omar is a Somali-American, but Somali gets the emphasis in how she presents herself. She talks more about the Somali community than Abraham Lincoln. Her commentary on the United States is filled with grievances against the country’s bigotry and rarely ever includes gratitude. Because she must: Her reelection depends on the Somali vote, and her progressive politics have a ban on patriotism.

This makes her a perfectly acceptable representative in her district, but not of immigrants. The ideal spokesperson is someone who can speak American—not American English—to the middle between the two extremes. He or she has won elections despite being an immigrant, not because of it. His or her background as an immigrant is central to their patriotism and success, someone who does not complain about the challenges of being an immigrant but says, “I have a thick skin because of it, and frankly more Americans need to be like that; we are becoming too sensitive.” Someone like Juan Ciscomani, a Mexican-born Republican congressman from Arizona, who loves talking about living the American dream, beginning with washing cars as a kid to make extra money for his parents.

Every new community enters a negotiation with the old inhabitants. College towns keep changing because the new students force change on them. Likewise, immigrants demand change, too. The larger the population is, the more the change will be tilted in their favor. Miller is right: Concentration of a large number of new immigrants in one area forces the old inhabitants to assimilate into their norms. This leads to anxiety among Americans, not assurance of the value of immigration.

If I know one thing about Americans, it is that they like their country and are not wild about people disparaging it and comparing it to Nazi Germany. When it comes to immigrants, Americans do not tolerate us. They love the ones who are more American than thou—if I had a penny for every time I was told I am the most American person people have met—and resent the ungrateful ones. They want affirmation from immigrants that this is a good country—an expectation that has the virtue of being true.

If the left is interested in helping immigrants, it should not appoint the least appealing ones as our representatives, and it should stop elevating the ones most Americans would look at as stories of the failure of immigration. Between Omar and Ciscomani, the man from Arizona is what the average American celebrates as success. The congresswoman from Minnesota is what the far-right celebrates as evidence that immigrants are a drag on the country.