I am having dinner at the Turkish restaurant, Mediterranean Grill, and there is a piece of me that does a slow motion dive to the memories of what my mother used to cook. This dive here in Freeport, Maine, in a restaurant where the owner, a Turk, is married to a Chinese. And before my mind starts running, I say to myself that I, born and raised in Pakistan of Turkish parents, married my soul-mate who grew up in South Portland and gifted me a wonderful father-in-law who is 100% Finnish. I am an immigrant in Maine; one of many who belong here in Maine; we belong to the Maine ocean and sky, long before and long after the immigration debate.

Yes, America belongs to the world and the world belongs to it.

So as the talking heads holler and scream about the dead immigration bill and what immigration is and is not, I want to tell them that Fr. Rene McGraw, a Benedictine monk from Saint John’s University who taught me Tolstoy, Heidegger and Nietzsche once said this to me, “Kerem, the light of the world is born from everywhere.”

Yes, America belongs to the world and I belong to it.

Build the walls on the border. They will break through it. Amnesty? Amnesty from what? We are ALL part of A LIVING social fabric; this fabric that clothes us. Ask us; those who came to live here even though we were not born here? Today, already there are graduated and comprehensive steps to acknowledge and attain the right of being part of that alive social fabric; work permits, work visas, green card permits, citizenship papers. Ask us. Since when did the nation-state get defined by the few? Ask us.

Yes, there are no easy answers but that is why I came to America; to ask, to seek, to be. I came, regardless of manifest destiny, to create, to extend beyond the limitations of my past, to be a world citizen on my own terms.

My Ellis Island was the JFK International Airport. Seventeen and a half years old and I landed in this country ready to live.

Yes, America gave birth to me. And there is a whole world of us, us immigrants, birthing America everyday.