Mohamed Osman Mohamed is executive director of The Nation of Poets, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit that helps Somalis in the United States connect with their community’s poetry, storytelling and oral history.
I was 19 the crisp December night I landed at Indianapolis International Airport. It was 2010, and I had never been on an airplane or seen snow before. I had traveled from the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, where I had spent nearly three years with almost half a million other Somalis waiting for a life that might never begin. But three years was nothing. In Dadaab, I met people who had been born in the camp, grown up there, married there and had children there. I had no reason to believe my story was going to be different.
America was everywhere in Dadaab. The tents we slept in carried the logos of U.S.-funded agencies. The food came from the World Food Program, significantly funded by American taxpayers. The containers were stamped USAID. America was the Great Provider, keeping us alive but keeping its distance.
Everything changed when I was selected for humanitarian resettlement in the U.S. As I prepared for my journey, I expected to be treated like an outsider in America. I expected a lifetime of feeling like I was living in someone else’s house. Their rules, their values, their country. And I told myself I could accept that bargain. It was, after all, a much better deal than Dadaab.
What I did not expect was kindness.
It began that night at the airport. Smiling workers from a resettlement agency called Exodus Refugeegreeted me with hugs and flowers. I did not trust them. Why were these strangers so happy to see me? There had to be a catch. In my experience, there always was.
Weeks passed. Then months. No catch appeared.
Exodus Refugee clothed me, housed me and fed me. They took me to doctors and dentists. Helped me get my legal documents. Taught me how to ride the bus. Enrolled me in English classes and helped me find my first job. No catch.
Perhaps these workers, dedicated to their mission, were the exception? But at grocery stores and gas stations, strangers met my broken English with patience. People smiled at me, not with suspicion but with warmth. At first I found it unsettling. Later I realized it was the Midwestern way of saying: “I see you. You belong here.” Still no catch.
Years passed, and my assumptions about life in America kept collapsing. I enrolled in a federally funded job training program, where I started out learning to be an electrician and left with a path to college. I studied public affairs at a public university while working about 30 hours a week as a bus driver. I interned at a federal agency in Washington. I graduated with high distinction and was chosen to give the commencement speech for my class.
People opened doors for me. They offered mentorship without expecting anything in return. They connected me to opportunities I did not know existed. In college I spent a semester in D.C. as part of a leadership program funded by a generous American sponsor. Later, I studied abroad, financed by another generous American who did not even know my name. I graduated and started working for a Fortune 500 company. I continued my education further than I ever imagined possible, all the way to a top business school in this country.
Along the way, I eventually accepted a truth that would have sounded impossibly naive to my 19-year-old self: America really does try to live up to its ideals.
So I started to relax. I built a life. I made friends and developed hobbies. I got married and I had children. My oldest will be 5 soon. I have always planned to tell him how America surprised me. How it disproved my worst fears. How it gave me chances I never could have imagined in Dadaab.
Suddenly, I’m not sure what story to tell him.
Watching President Donald Trump attack immigrants and single out Somalis, especially Somalis like me in Minnesota, is like watching a country argue with its own reflection. He has painted the Somali community as dangerous and foreign, and held up crimes by individuals as proof that we’re all criminals. He said we “contribute nothing.” He called us “garbage.”
The president’s rhetoric validates every dark expectation I brought with me in 2010: Immigrants are welcome for our labor but not our presence. We are tolerated, not embraced. Our belonging is conditional, our dignity negotiable.
This is exactly the bargain I thought I was accepting 15 years ago. I was wrong then. I am terrified of being right now.
What saddens me most is the betrayal — not of me, but of every American and every institution that helped me get where I am: the caseworkers, teachers, mentors, strangers and government workers who choose to welcome, house and educate people from the farthest corners of the world. Together, they were investing not just in refugees like me, but in an idea that America stays great by living up to its ideals.
That investment has paid off. Not just in my case, but in thousands of others. Refugees who arrived in this country with nothing have become doctors, nurses, teachers, entrepreneurs and taxpayers. I am not exceptional. I am what happens when a country decides to believe in people no matter where they’re from.
When leaders attack refugees, they do not harm only us. They devalue the work of every American who believed in this country’s ideals to help a stranger.
I spent three years in a refugee camp learning not to hope for too much. America taught me I was wrong. I want my son to grow up knowing the America that surprised me. I want to keep telling that story.
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