A changing immigrant America
An intergenerational conversation between Drift editors
In our first issue, we promised that The Drift would serve, among other things, as “a forum for young people,” a category that then included all of our original editors. Five years later, we’re all still young-ish, but not as young as we once were — and we’ve been joined by wonderful new colleagues who, while relatively close in age to us, fall on the other side of the line that divides the youngest Millennials from the oldest members of Gen Z. We talk a lot about how various parts of our shared world look from our slightly different generational vantage points, and recently we thought it would be fun to start letting our readers in on these conversations.
In this first installment, three of our editors — Krithika Varagur (Millennial), Shreya Chattopadhyay (Zillennial) and Saliha Bayrak (Zoomer) — convened to discuss coming of age as children of immigrants at various points in our recent history. They spoke about their experiences of the pivotal years of 2001, 2008, and 2016; state violence at home and abroad; and transitioning from a politics of identity to one of solidarity.
Krithika: So… where are you really from?
Saliha: I was born in 2000 in Albany, New York. I claim that I’m a New Yorker sometimes when it’s convenient, but in actuality I lived there for a year before moving to Massachusetts. My family originally immigrated from Turkey. My dad is from the northern Black Sea region, my mom is from southeastern Turkey, and they met in high school when both of my grandfathers were working in the coal mining industry.
Shreya: I was born in 1998 in Phoenix, Arizona. My parents are both from West Bengal in India. We moved around a lot when I was a little kid; my dad was working as an engineer, designing plants for different companies. After stints in Rhode Island and Ireland, we settled in Southern California when I was nine. So I mostly grew up in the suburbs of LA.
Krithika: I was born in 1993 in Sydney, Australia and my parents are from Tamil Nadu, in India. My dad is a software engineer, which brought them, in the ’80s, to Sydney. In the ’90s they immigrated again, first to California and then to New Jersey, where I grew up. America was always the hoped-for — dreamed-of — final destination. I wanted to ask if you guys heard much about the “American dream,” as well as the “melting pot,” when you were growing up?
Shreya: My family said “melting pot” more than they said “American dream,” but I definitely grew up hearing a version of a classic line: “I showed up in the United States with $200 and a pair of Bata slippers.” A true story, but not quite a complete one.
Krithika: I’ll be showing my age when I say we were told, and I completely believed, that immigration is the great American story, of which Barack Hussein Obama’s election was somehow the triumphant climax. One of the many ways in which 2016 was a turning point was that we started talking about this narrative in the past tense — what was the American dream? Because in retrospect, Clintonian America was an astoundingly easy place for a certain kind of immigrant to arrive.
Saliha: I think my parents did initially find refuge here, arriving in Clinton’s America. Their path is quite exemplary as a story of the American dream: my dad was a student working in a pizza shop when I was a child, and eventually pulled us into a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. When my mom was a student in Turkey, there were laws in place that banned women from wearing hijabs in public schools due to a history of rule by secular Kemalists (as loyalists of the nation’s founder, Kemal Atatürk, are called) who were set on purging the display of religion in public life. Those bans were not lifted until the 2010s. Quite ironically, she’s felt more free to practice her religion in America, albeit with some social hostility. So while Western imperialism made so many emigrant-producing countries inhospitable in the first place, I did feel that, at some point, the American dream wasn’t completely dead.
The turning point for my Muslim-American family was 9/11. My mom told me that she first knew something was wrong that day when a passerby shouted something hateful at her while she was on our balcony with me, before she went back inside to see the news. My brother was at a local mosque, and they called my mom asking to pick him up in fear of the immediate backlash against Muslims that was expected. For me, that story has always captured how quickly my family’s identity was politicized, and how much of my upbringing was shaped by that.
Krithika: How do you guys feel when you hear slightly older people (like me) saying that everything changed on 9/11? I found myself thinking about the Berlin Wall, which fell four years before I was born. That event still seems to have a singular grip on older Anglo-Americans — one that is, I think, much weaker if you weren’t there. Meanwhile, I do remember experiencing 9/11 as both an emergency and a turning point. When you hear people talking about an idealized pre-9/11 world, what’s your reaction? Are you like, “must be nice,” or “you sound so old,” or “how could you not have known (for instance) that America was Islamophobic”?
Saliha: I was ten months old then. Every memory I have is after that, and so for a long time I had just accepted the post-9/11 reality as the status quo. I didn’t realize until later that so many things, like our modern national security apparatus or a war-ravaged Middle East, were manufactured largely around this single event. That starting point was very formative to my personal politics.
Krithika: Looking back, what I most remember, though I was fairly young, was the PATRIOT Act and the era’s debates around free speech; I learned that something that was once really central to being American was no longer a given, and that you could expect to be surveilled, which was bad. More abstractly, something else that came to define the era, for me, was intense cognitive dissonance between my enormous interest as a young reader in the Muslim world (from the Mughals to Arabian Nights) and the Muslim world being portrayed on TV, in the news, and in the public discourse — “axis of evil”! — of Bush-era America. I’m sure this frustration prompted some of my later life choices.
Saliha: It’s interesting to hear that your intellectual interest in the Muslim world was rooted in your curiosity around peaks of Islamic civilization like the Mughal empire — these periods of peace and prosperity — whereas my interest in the Muslim world began with seeing war in Syria and Palestine and trying to understand how Western imperialism had caused such ruin. I wish I also knew then what had once been possible.
I wonder how you guys feel about collectively being racialized as brown, even though we are literally from opposite sides of the continent? I feel like that’s a very post-9/11 thing. Growing up in Western Massachusetts, attending a school that was mostly white, I always felt that Turkish people were racialized collectively with Arab people, especially if you’re visibly Muslim and wear the hijab, have a beard, or whatnot. And the more time I spent in Turkey, I realized that Turkish people would really identify more as white Europeans, or at the very least would like to very starkly distinguish themselves from Arabs and other Middle Easterners. Which is interesting to see when in the United States all of us here — whether you’re South Asian, Middle Eastern, Arab, Turkish — are perceived as brown and, on some level, as a threat.
Shreya: My orientation to “the brown community” has really changed over time. My school was the large public high school of a redlined suburb, and pretty socially stratified. When I went there, it was something like 60 percent white. It’s Southern California, so there was of course a large Latinx population. There were very few black students. And then there was kind of, like, a smattering of Asians, of which I was a part. So the idea of the brown community didn’t really arise in that context. But as the demographics of the suburb changed over time, with more South Asians of multiple religions moving there, I feel like there actually did arise a kind of community where the divides between Hindus and Muslims collapsed a little, at least for the younger generation. This was also after Ferguson, so the potential for police violence was treated as more imminent. I feel like my younger brother and sister experienced a brown community that I didn’t, where the kids were kind of united by Bollywood dance, being scared of cops and, like, hating the British.
Saliha: I agree. Immediately after 9/11, I feel that Muslims went on the defensive, trying to prove how well assimilated we were individually, even as we had this sort of identity collapse where we were all flattened into the brown bogeyman. Over time I’ve seen people identify with this categorization that was imposed on us in a more positive, solidarity-building way, as opposed to the previous “every man for himself” approach. As a visibly Muslim person in a white public school system, I found that evolution within myself too. I went from hating and hiding myself, to reaching some sort of cultural pride, to now being fully in the throes of building a rich cross-cultural community. And I think it was because I was unable to fully identify with the Turkish community, and unable to fully identify with the white, non-Muslim student body at my school, that I had to seek out those that had simply been othered.
Krithika: I don’t think I used the term brown very much, if at all in those years. And in retrospect, there was a shocking lack of solidarity with the targets of the new Islamophobia. Indian-Americans from a non-Muslim background rarely aligned themselves with those who were marginalized after 9/11. I remember a lot of jokes about getting “randomly checked” at airports. I neither used nor heard the word “solidarity” very much. And beyond the Iraq War protests, there was no real instinct to take to the streets. Really, my whole experience of growing up in liberal America was oddly apolitical. That’s another reason why I experienced 2016 as a huge paradigm shift – and I know how naive that sounds! (But I think it’s worth being honest about our journeys; few people are born with perfect politics, and even some who are turn out to be Pete Buttigieg.)
Frankly, it took me almost a decade to reckon with Obama’s track record. That does make me feel like I’m from a different generation from you guys. I’m curious how you related to Obama specifically, because I know everyone did not have the same naive experience of the Forever Wars era.
Saliha: Hearing you describe the 2000s as so apolitical and naive actually sounds so blissful. I almost yearn for it. I was politicized at a very young age, largely thanks to Obama. I remember being emotional during Obama’s inauguration; he appealed to immigrant families like mine, even though he didn’t necessarily align with many of my parent’s other beliefs and values. And as I grew up, I learned more about the Democratic Party’s foreign policy. Seeing the continued praise that Obama received from marginalized communities and liberals as this paragon of peace and tolerance while he intensified drone wars in Yemen and other parts of the Muslim world was very eye-opening. I immediately understood that there was an exception to liberals’ seemingly universalist ethics, and it was seen in their indifference to suffering in the Muslim world. For many of those who weren’t there yet, the Biden presidency dismantled any illusory hope in the Democratic party that remained. I think the betrayal that my family felt with Obama mirrors the betrayal that so many people felt with Biden’s policy in Gaza.
Shreya: I never heard anyone I trusted say anything bad about Obama until I was on Twitter. In my (sheltered!) town, I knew people whose parents loved Reagan and people whose parents loved Obama, and those were the options. My entry point into politics was gender, honestly. I was like, damn, the girls are getting treated like shit. I was definitely a Hillary defender in high school. I thought people were being sexist to her.
Krithika: I was just going to ask how you guys experienced the Hillary moment — her 2016 campaign, I mean.
Shreya: Ugh, Hillary…. As a teenager, I was canvassing for Democrats with vigor. My district was on the purpler side of blue; famously the Rodney King trials were held in my county because it was less liberal than LA County, just to the south. In my head the people to beat were Republicans. Then I got to college in 2016 and Hillary lost. I took a class about Palestine in 2017, and I think the combination of getting more critical about feminist politics and understanding the occupation opened things up for me. With Palestine in particular, liberals love to say “it’s so complicated.” That’s true in one sense; there’s a long history. For this class, though, we actually went there, and my main feeling was like well, no, actually. The power dynamic is very clear. That really changed my political world.
Then the next Bernie campaign began in 2019. I don’t know how you guys experienced it, but I remember that moment having such energy. I went to one rally in Queens in October 2019, and I kind of assumed it was going to be a lot of college kids like me, but it was so huge, with so many different kinds of people.
Krithika: My adult politics began when I realized my reservations about Hillary’s 2016 candidacy didn’t stem from her being a woman, but from her being a neoliberal. Like you and so many others, I owe so much to Bernie. I’ve heard from countless elders that they never could have imagined how many Americans would identify as being on the left. He really was, in the parlance of our youth, a “transformational leader.”
Saliha: Yeah, Bernie. Seeing my views articulated in such a mass campaign was a huge moment for me. I think I still feel a sense of loyalty to Bernie that maybe the even younger generation of socialists and pro-Palestine activists rightfully don’t. Precisely because I remember feeling the energy of seeing someone identify as a socialist and utter the word Palestine on the U.S. political stage at a time when it still felt inconceivable.
Krithika: I wondered if you guys have feelings about political figures in your families’ countries of origin? I didn’t think that much about Modi at first, especially because I wasn’t an Indian voter. Today, I feel more strongly, in part because there’s a Hindu lobby in the U.S. that directly connects these countries’ politics. (Aparna Gopalan has done great reporting on this.) Saliha, as a Turkish American, do you feel compelled to speak out about Erdoğan?
Saliha: I think my understanding of Turkish politics helps me bring an internationalist perspective to my political work here. Americans think they can analyze any foreign political event through their own left-right political spectrum, but it’s not that simple. For example, even Erdoğan’s conservative party — “Islamists” that terrify Westerners — advocate for universal healthcare and rights for minorities, and the left-of-center party in Turkey — founded by the Kemalists, who have wanted to purge religion from public life — has some pretty ethno-nationalist tendencies that I don’t feel comfortable aligning with either. And they both have authoritarian qualities. So although I can’t place myself in mainstream Turkish politics enough to participate, it helps me understand America’s position as a global power more, and how that’s skewed our view of governance in other countries. And I also try to learn from the Turkish people’s revolutionary ethic, which they’ve courageously been displaying recently; like us, they’ve had dissidents arrested. Their ability to mass mobilize has put the comparatively muted American response to the recent wave of ICE detentions to shame.
Krithika: My affective relationship to modern India changed in 2019 when I spent a few months as a journalist in Delhi, as I had dreamt of doing for my whole life. It had loomed large in my mind as the center of Indo-Islamic culture, as well as the home of a magical cosmopolitan literary world. But by the time I turned up, much of that was gone; the city was quite saffron (the color of the far-right Hindutva movement) and its universities were under attack. Modi’s party, the BJP, had won a sweeping second mandate in a landslide general election victory. I was working at a wire news service and I had some chilling official interactions. The vivid revulsion I experienced there yoked me, perversely, to the regime.
Saliha: A similar moment where I felt very intertwined with Turkish politics was after the 2016 coup attempt in Turkey. Turkey has a long history of military coups, ostensibly intended to revive secularism during “Islamist” regimes. But the 2016 attempt was, on the surface, led by a religious faction, the Gülen movement. And for all his power-hungry qualities, president Erdoğan was not necessarily widely unpopular at that time. At the very least, many Turks would have preferred his regime over the unstable and draconian nature of military rule. Civilians were throwing themselves in front of tanks to stop the takeover themselves. And yet, I watched as this terrifying night was depicted in American news as if it were a people’s revolution. It made me question whether the American media was really interested in the people’s aspirations, or just in a country descending into disorder and becoming ripe for foreign intervention. It shaped how I looked back at the coverage of the Arab Spring and the regime changes that followed.
Krithika: It’s been said that people’s notions of their parents’ home countries are frozen in the moment that their parents left. Maybe that’s why it took such a long time for me to understand the true scale of persecution of Muslims, the true scale of violence against women, and the true nature of modern India’s vaunted secularism. As with any nation-state, the way they treat minorities and migrants is the real test of their ideals — not what their constitution or founders said.
Shreya: I really feel that, the freezing of the home country. I remember in 2019, soon after Modi suspended Article 370 of the Indian Constitution and revoked Kashmir's semiautonomous status, while moving in tens of thousands of military personnel, some of the (upwardly mobile, largely Hindu, Democrat) Indian Americans whom I saw as comparatively liberal sang a completely different tune. There’s a huge gulf between a country with billions of people and an immigrant population that is a product of very specific historical forces, like how Indian immigration was encouraged during the Cold War push to recruit scientists and engineers. I feel like I still have a lot to learn about that gulf.
Krithika: Kashmir is definitely the issue on which I had to do the most deprogramming, too. As you say, many progressive liberal Indians remain in complete denial. But at some point, there’s no longer any excuse for claiming that you didn’t know any better. I guess that’s growing up. I feel like we’re all on that side of the divide now (which isn’t to say that our educations are finished).
Saliha: Krithika, I agree that how a country treats its immigrants and minorities is the real indicator of its ideals. There’s a very pervasive anti-Syrian rhetoric in Turkey, and it’s a result of the precarious economic situation being exploited by politicians. And even, or especially, the Turkish center-left, which is terrified of the “Arabization” of Turkey, really struggles with tolerance towards Syrian refugees, Erdoğan — who often positions himself as a leader of the Muslim world, rather than solely the head of Turkey as a nation-state — has had quite an accommodating policy towards Syrians that is hard to reconcile, and that I know many Syrians in Turkey find hard to reconcile, with his more authoritarian policies.
Krithika: I wanted to think through how we’ve complicated our identity politics as we’ve grown up. My experience growing up was certainly not deracinated, but “Indian-American” was simply not an important American racial category. Most of us had come so recently, and seemed so irrelevant to electoral politics. It didn’t even cross my mind that we might be more “represented” — the odd “Bobby” or “Nikki” aside.
Saliha: When I think about the limits of identity politics in America, I think about how Middle Eastern people were not captured on the census for so long, and how we were just categorized as white, resulting in us being a neglected demographic in electoral politics. We were taken for granted as a voting bloc, but that’s very much changing with the genocide in Gaza and this demographic’s impact on the last election.
I also become distinctly aware of our more recent racialization when I go to countries in which Muslims were colonial subjects. I’ve always found it interesting to see black American writers talk about finding refuge in France and other European countries. The first time I visited France with my family, I was stunned by how Islamophobic people were towards us. But of course France has a very long colonial history in North Africa, and an imperial boomerang that has created deeply rooted oppression of Muslims and North Africans in France, which is tangible even for visitors. And while anti-black sentiments are so deeply ingrained into the American cultural fabric, the oppression faced by Muslim and Middle Easterners in the states have been, until recently, more difficult to capture and articulate. As wars in the Muslim world accelerate, so too does our emergence as a marginalized class here.
Krithika: Similarly, when I visited London, around age ten, I was bowled over by the extremely mixed, extremely visible legacy of British India — so much context! I was both drawn to it and disturbed by it. I still am. I go there often, but I tend to come back relieved that we have this other place, where we’re relatively unburdened by that particular colonial story. That said, or as an aside, the U.S. and U.K. now share the common scourge of right-wing Indian diaspora politicians, which shows how we probably should have been thinking more critically, or dialectically, about those postcolonial migrations that scattered us all.…
Shreya: Yeah, and meanwhile, ultra-capitalists like Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella, as well as foot soldiers in the Trump administration’s white nationalist agenda like Kash Patel and Jay Bhattacharya, are also Indians and have been granted conditional acceptance into the American ruling class. In a sense it slightly parallels what Modi is trying to do with India: using capitalist nationalism to forget about the fact that it was colonized. India was the first “non-Arab” country to recognize the Palestinian Liberation Organization. And now it’s like, no, actually, we’re a modern nation with a modern economy, just like all these members of the Global North. People really want to hold strong to this idea that if you make enough money you can escape history. But you can’t. At the end of the day, even these acceptances are conditional, and if you stop serving capital, things change a lot.
Saliha: I saw the remnants of representation in politics in the last presidential election, when everybody was blaming Muslims and Arabs and Latinos for “letting” Trump win the election, as if we were responsible for not voting for the person that “represents” us best. And yes, a lot of people abstained from taking part in the last election or cast protest votes, because they were not necessarily thinking about representation but about solidarity. And maybe one option was more representational, but neither were conducive towards any real material change.
Shreya: Yeah, and that’s also a fallacy, because still, the demographic group that voted in the highest percentage for Trump was white people. Not to say that there weren’t many nonwhite people who voted for him. That’s definitely a reality. But this impulse to blame minorities when there is still a larger group here, that has more relative power, is maddening to me.
Krithika: Nothing exposed the bankruptcy of a certain strain of identity politics more than the candidacy of Kamala Harris, who stood for nothing and represented no one, even though she was, in some ways, beyond our wildest childhood dreams of what kind of person could be a national politician.
Shreya: Totally. It’s become clear that people are talking about so many different things when they talk about identity politics. The version that we’re talking about here is the liberal, representational, electoral version. But I was recently revisiting Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s Elite Capture, where he writes about how the term originated with the Combahee River collective, whose members didn’t see their priorities being pursued by NOW, the large feminist organization, mostly run by white women. And they also didn’t see them being pursued by other pro-black groups doing political work at the time. So the impetus to come together was not “hey, who looks like me,” but “who else currently cares about the things that I care about?” I’m interested in thinking about opportunities for solidarity between communities that already have shared priorities, and are already taking care of each other.
Krithika: So much of advancing my own immigrant identity politics has been about applying a key lesson of latter-day feminism: that there’s far more to the political than the personal. As you’ve said, Shreya, 2016 brushed away so many of our illusions about liberal feminism, and something similar is necessary, at scale, for racial and ethnic identity politics — truly internalizing that there’s more to solidarity than what happened to you.
Zooming out a bit — it’s been sixty years since the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which was directly responsible for so much of contemporary Asian America. That still doesn’t feel like a long history, but it’s twice as long as it was when my family first came here. It’s becoming clear that we grew up in a very unusual time, at the very end of the American century. I do wonder what it’s like growing up as an immigrant now. I almost wish they could have a few years with some of those illusions we enjoyed… On the flip side, they will never be as naive. And maybe solidarity will feel more natural?
Saliha: Throughout this conversation, we’ve been coming back to this subject of solidarity. Growing up, people were so focused on self-preservation instead of solidarity-building. I think we’ve moved past that. We’re seeing Turkish people and Indian people being detained by ICE, and we’re seeing that, yes, we’re all collectively seen as a threat to the state because of our identities, but also because of our ideas. Solidarity around ideas as opposed to identities is very transgressive. I think we can definitely build a very successful mass movement if we continue to focus on that.
Shreya: I do have a lot of hope — and I’m 27, so I guess I’m not that old — for the youth. Students in the pro-Palestine movement are really trying to make connections. There’s a more widespread understanding of domestic state violence — policing, prisons — and how that connects to U.S. imperialism. When Bernie repeated the propagandistic, misleading line that “Israel has a right to defend itself” amid the atrocities of the current Israeli genocide, on some level deep down I was disappointed, because I had experienced his primary campaign in 2019 as a moment of hope. But I don’t think it’s a bad thing that the kids don’t have that emotional valence. It’s a different context, you know?
Saliha: I also think the kids are all right. A lot of them are getting politicized by what’s happening in Palestine right now. And maybe they don’t really have the political role models that’ll be able to capture that energy and help them continue to politically organize. But the heart is there.
But I will recall the interesting point that the Indian diaspora that chooses to come to the US and the Indian diaspora that chooses to come to the UK and the people of equal social standing and education that choose to stay in/go back to India may be three different groups. (I subscribe to both Vizuara substacks which is a product of group #3)
As someone with a clear memory of Liz of @LizzsLockeroom and @LoveThePuck on Twitter who is a fellow AKA being completely insufferable about Harris when she was elected VP I hesitate to say that Harris represented _no one_. She probably also represented everyone on the original Black women's call.