If An Immigrant Leaves U.S. Indefinitely, How American Are They?

If you’re an immigrant who came to the United States as an adult, but you leave America for an indefinite absence to attend to a family emergency in your country of origin, in what sense are you really an American? Is America actually your home, or is home your country of origin?

Let’s say you also happen to be a representative in your adopted state’s legislature. Are you really able to serve your constituents and your district by going overseas indefinitely? If family obligations require that of you, then what business do you really have representing the people who live in your district?

These are important questions that get at the heart of our ongoing national debate over immigration, assimilation, and what it really means to be an American. And as it happens, they aren’t hypothetical questions. A Texas Democrat, state Rep. Salman Bhojani, issued a statement on Sunday that he had left the country “for the foreseeable future” because of a family medical emergency overseas.

We don’t know the nature of Bhojani’s family medical emergency, and I wish him and his family well as far as that goes. But the Pakistani-born lawmaker’s sudden and indefinite departure suggests that he has not really made the United States his home and calls into question whether someone in his position should be serving in the state legislature.

Simply put, if you have to drop everything and go back to your country of origin to attend to a family emergency “for the foreseeable future,” then maybe your home is really over there, where you came from and where your family still is — along with family obligations. What’s more, it suggests that you view America not as a nation and a people you have joined forever — that your identity is not unreservedly American, but something else.

I’m qualifying what I say here because I don’t know Bhojani’s circumstances. But we do know that he came to the United States as a 19-year-old, having emigrated to Canada with his family when he was 10 years old from Pakistan. We know he is a Muslim, and he has made much of his Muslim identity and status as a minority since joining the Texas House in 2023. He has that in common with other foreign-born Muslim politicians on the left, like Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. And we know that he has left the country, presumably to go back to Pakistan and attend to family matters.

Under different circumstances, Bhojani might have been able to leave the country without issuing a statement at all. But his overseas departure comes at an interesting time. Democratic members of the Texas House of Representatives left the state on Sunday in a political stunt meant to prevent Republicans from adopting a redrawn congressional map. They accused Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and the Texas GOP of attempting to gerrymander the state and then ironically decamped to Illinois, the most gerrymandered state in the country, to deny the Texas House a quorum.

Bhojani was among those Democrats condemning the proposed congressional map. “I just boarded a flight to be with a family member suffering a medical emergency, but remain committed to my constituents, my district, and the fight against Trump’s demand to gerrymander our state,” Bhojani posted Sunday evening on X. And now, like his colleagues, he has fled the state. Unlike them, however, he has obligations overseas — obligations that will tie him up “for the foreseeable future.”

In the past, it was considered impolite or even bigoted and xenophobic to question the Americanness of immigrants or question their ability to assimilate fully into the American nation and people. But it has to be said now: America is not able to absorb and assimilate large numbers of immigrants — especially immigrants from non-western countries, whose habits and customs and morality differ significantly from our own.

To say this is not to engage in racism or xenophobia, but to acknowledge candidly what for too long we did not want to confront or admit: that America is not merely an idea or an economic zone or a tax farm, but a nation with a particular people. We are bound together as a people by a common language (English), morality (Christian), and heritage (American and European).

That’s not to say someone from Pakistan cannot become an American, but that it will be harder for him than someone from England or Australia. On a larger scale, it will be — and has been — nearly impossible for large numbers of non-western immigrants to assimilate into American culture and become part of our nation. What we’ve seen happen here is what has been happening for much longer in Europe: the creation of unassimilated ethnic and national enclaves that often develop an adversarial relationship to the nation in which they live.

An immigrant’s national identity, under these circumstances, rarely becomes American in the full sense. Take for example Democrat Rep. Delia Ramirez, the daughter of illegal immigrants from Guatemala. Speaking at a conference in Mexico City over the weekend, Ramirez proclaimed (in Spanish) “I’m a proud Guatemalan before I’m an American.” And this from someone who was actually born and raised in the United States. How much less adhesion to America and an American identity will someone like Bhojani have, who came here as an adult?

It’s time to recognize this for what it is and put an end to it. There was a time in America, and not that long ago, when we expected that immigrants would take on an un-hyphenated American identity. They would not be Somali-Americans or Pakistani-Americans, but simply Americans. We have to get back to that way of thinking. The preservation of our distinctly American nation depends on it.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.