One constant in American life is that most of us fail most of the time to see just how American we are. Often, we have to leave and come back—from a trip abroad, for instance—to notice what qualities characterize us as a people. But a transporting book can do the trick, too. The new memoir from Somali-born green card lottery winner Abdi Nor Iftin, Call Me American, is one such book.
Iftin came of age in war-torn Mogadishu, where the other boys called him “the American” because of his grasp of idiomatic English and his all-consuming obsession with our culture. He endured daily whippings at the local madrassa and bouts of near starvation during the chaotic depths of the Somalia’s ongoing 26-year civil war, all the while clinging to a conviction that puzzled his compatriots. Iftin believed from adolescence onward that he was meant to be—and in a deeper sense already was—what his friends jokingly called him, and what he would one day officially become: American.
In 2013, when he was 28, Iftin won the controversial diversity visa lottery, an arguably flawed avenue for legal immigration which President Trump—along with nearly every legal immigration reformer in Congress—proposes to cut off. The program’s 50,000 visas make up just 5 percent of the annual influx of legal immigrants to American, but it’s the best chance for many (22.4 million applied last year). But for reformers, axing the lottery is the simplest call to make in a complicated game.
Deserving of a green card as Iftin may seem, the randomness of his winning the lottery isn’t lost on him, either. The moment he got the news, he considered how fate had handled him so far: “As I entered my application number and date of birth, I thought about all the good luck I had received in my life.” His unlikely luck is a revealing reflection of ours, an obvious foil to the comforts that many take for granted. But his bravery and conviction belong entirely to him: It’s through a combination of luck but also hard-won language ability and charming confidence that Iftin befriended a foreign correspondent who introduced him to the radio program that would earn him an English-speaking following and an adoptive family. His winning the visa lottery on top of all this is more arbitrary, but the luckiest of all, Iftin realizes, was his survival: “Every day that I could remember was a matter of life and death,” he writes. Iftin’s chance victory confirmed a foundational truth of the America he saw in movies, the America that obsessed him and motivated him.
“It taps into a deeper strand of patriotism, that doesn’t appear in these hyper-rational explanations for them,” said Hiroshi Motomura, an immigration expert and UCLA law professor, of the green card lottery. The program preserves something of the spirit of the Ellis Island age of immigration, he said, and its clearest rationale never quite works its way into the Congressional Record. “It’s an important part of the American ethos,” Motomura added, “that you can show up with very little, and make a contribution that’s unpredictable.”
Ethos and all, the immigration lottery remains on the chopping block. Trump last made public his opposition to it in a late July tweet reupping his requirements for a compromise on immigration reform. What he’d prefer: “Immigration based on MERIT! We need great people coming into our Country!” The value of immigrants like Iftin, whose English fluency has led him to a career as a hospital and courtroom translator, can’t be so easily measured.
In the ongoing debate over the diversity lottery, “The fault line is between people who think you can identify economic contribution on day one,” Motomura explained, “and people who think there’s value in the traditional idea that we’ve got to save a few spots for people who are chosen in a way that’s not the 21st-century show me your résumé model.”
The former—the rational way—dominates contemporary priorities. Thus, the lottery’s defenders are few. And its detractors tend to invoke its awkward origins: The program was first born out of a need to welcome emigrés from Ireland and Eastern Europe in the 1980s when Ted Kennedy championed the program. Since then, Motomura explained, it’s served immigrants from small African and Southeast Asian countries. It also serves the disproportionately dedicated—because, as Iftin recounts, there are multiple rounds of random selection, followed by a screening process that corrupt bureaucracies will happily hobble.
For Iftin, dedication came naturally. His love of American culture was an oddity among his friends in Mogadishu, and his commitment to learning gave him a sense of mission. “The things I saw in the movies seemed unreachable, but at least I could learn the language they spoke,” he writes, explaining the drive to fine-tune his English—a labor of love, as it served no perceptible use to his kin and compatriots at first. “I had been paying close attention to what the American actors were saying. Nobody else cared.” Before long he earned free admission to the movie shack, in exchange for simultaneously translating action flicks and rom coms.
He recorded English words, and played them back to himself on his boombox. He risked whippings at the local madrassa to steal charcoal pieces intended for Quran lessons and used them to write on his bedroom walls the slang words he’d learned and his favorite movie titles. When Iftin finally made it to Maine, he lived first with the family of one of his sponsors—a professor who’d heard him on NPR—but then he moved in with a group of Somali immigrants in Portland. There, as at his sponsor’s house, he kept a picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger next to his bed, but his fellow Somalis considered it idolatrous, just as his parents had the Madonna poster he salvaged from the film shack back in Mogadishu. When immigrants he met in Maine asked why he didn’t work his way out west where more Somalis from his family’s tribe had settled, “I told them I was not here to reunite with my tribe, I was here to be American.” His roommates in Portland, on the other hand, “felt like they were just biding their time until they could return to Somalia,” Iftin writes. “No one except me had a passion for America.”
There’s no “love test” for green card lottery applicants. Besides his lack of a criminal record—as a refugee in Nairobi, he’d been detained, beaten up, and robbed by the police, but they kept no record—Iftin had no on-paper proof of what an upstanding American he’d be. The lottery program’s persistence, for now, helps us hang on to a sense of who we are as a nation, and what sort of randomly lucky but also exceptionally stubborn persevering stock we, on the whole, actually came from. But its actual value is matter of faith. The best argument for keeping any form of the program, then, is the way it lets us see ourselves: as a people who put our faith in the rewards of freedom for all. The next best argument is Iftin, aka “the American.”
