July 19 is an important date in my personal inconsequence. It was on this day in 1976, when I was not yet 12 and the Lebanese Civil War not yet 2, that my mother on a spitefully sunny morning informed me and my two brothers that our father had died. I’m pretty sure my childhood ended in the void of her sunken eyes that day. So did my trust in life. I’ve since lived as in a drizzle of shoes dropping, waiting for that final second.
Despite the raging war, I was somehow spared. Two years later on the same July 19 I was escaping from Lebanon after a clandestine drive to the airport through West Beirut, passing vile Palestinian or viler Syrian checkpoints where the equally vile Christianity written in our identity papers could have, in this suburb of the Holy Land, cost us our lives one last time. It did not.
After a four-hour flight I landed in Paris, and two weeks later was in Kingsport, Tennessee, for the summer. Its haggard downtown was not markedly different than Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, as my education in Americana would later fill in, though the girls all tan-lined and tantalizing at the Dobyns-Bennett High School pool made up for it. Kingsport was the home of our savior uncle the celibate pathologist, whose death-loaded wealth bankrolled our luck for a couple of years.
Then came July 19, 1979. That was the day I happily flew out of England, where a year in boarding school had been, as Clausewitz might say, terrorism by other means, and the day I landed at JFK in Queens, deliverance in hand. My mother had remarried by then. An American no less, thus giving us that unfair line-skipping advantage over others: a Green Card, which I presented to the customs agent–not yet an icepick back then–the way Victor Laszlo presented his precious letters of transit in “Casablanca.” Our border-crossing was technically legal but morally indistinguishable from those of the more desperate, the browner and the less lawyered.
JFK’s international arrivals terminal, bombed just four months earlier by Cuban terrorists, certainly didn’t feel like I’d landed in the America I knew from television. It was grimy, unswept, badly lit and smelly, though I loved every stench of it. It felt like liberation. Or am I confusing it with that Liberace poster inviting me to his Las Vegas show? That old TWA shanty would seem like the Hyatt Regency by the time we got used to Queens Boulevard’s Beirut-like chaos and the subway’s rauncheries of graffiti and crime, not so many years from when Gerald Ford had told the city to drop dead. It was doing just that. The record-breaking body count was alarming.
It was only many years later, in the more insipid comforts of the South, that I realized that my seven years in New York paralleled its history’s most crime-ridden era. A couple of subway muggings aside, I was oblivious. I loved the city. I loved its gall, its tensions, even its trash, back when we happily trampled underfoot all those New York Post covers featuring the most vulgar man in America. It was a daily miracle that I could buy The New York Times for 20 cents a day–20 cents!–at the corner Korean kiosk. I spent more time studying that mass of print every day than I ever did on schoolwork.
I was naturalized in 1986 in a Brooklyn courthouse along with a couple of hundred others, some of them with little American flags, many with flowers, all of us as if this were our own 1492. It was not a July 19. It was closer to Christmas, and it felt like it. That time I happily pledged allegiance. I may even have wept. We all did. When the great German writer Thomas Mann took the oath in Los Angeles in 1944, he presented the judge with a copy of Buddenbrooks, his massive autobiographical novel of a German family.
My Buddenbrooks was just beginning. The next decades were a fulfillment, like that July 19 in 2002 when I proposed to my bride on the porch of the Grand Hotel in Michigan. Only a few shoes dropped along the way, and I’m still here.
So where am I going with this? Hopefully, nowhere. But I never thought I’d see the day when this country would turn as thuggish as the place I’d left. I had taken my citizenship to be inviolable. It no longer is. The administration’s ethnic cleansing of migrants, not just “illegals,” is extending to the revocation of citizenship, putting me and 25 million naturalized Americans at risk. Supposedly, it’s only if you’ve committed certain crimes. That was the justification in 2020 when in its dying days the first Trump administration established the “Denaturalization Section” of the Justice Department. But “supposedly” is a moving target, a poisoned loophole with a president for whom law is a suggestion and Supreme Court judges his pimps.
If the president can threaten revocation even for U.S.-born citizens, as he did this week, and just for holding opinions he doesn’t like, the rest of us certainly aren’t safe. If a governor can invoke bogus emergency powers, steal land, spend half a billion dollars to run a concentration camp and cram it with migrants, most of them neither convicted nor charged with any crimes, too many of us are an ICE pogrom away from false imprisonment or worse.
For migrants, every night–every day–is Kristallnacht. A majority of Americans are either applauding or indifferent, while protesters are branded enemies and invaders to be crushed by militarized goonery. This is not the America where I landed in 1979. This is not the America any of us have known, or should tolerate. I lost my country once. I never thought it could happen again.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece airs on WNZF.
DaleL says
Our “President” threatens and says a lot of things. More and more they are blatant lies. Just recently, in a rambling speech at an energy council, he made wild false claims about his uncle, John Trump. John Trump was a professor at M.I.T. Had a PHD in electrical engineering. He died in 1985. Donald falsely claimed his uncle had three other PHDs. He falsely claimed his uncle taught longer at M.I.T. than anyone else. At least 10 others taught longer. The biggest tall tale was that he taught Ted Kaczynski. Kaczynski never attended M.I.T.
US born people, who are subject to US law, are US citizens in accordance with the 14th Amendment. No president can revoke their citizenship. “In limited circumstances, such as fraud, the U.S. government can revoke the citizenship of naturalized citizens.”
PolitiFact: https://api.politifact.com/article/2025/jul/14/Trump-revoke-Rosie-ODonnell-citizen-denaturalize/
Pierre, I sympathize with your childhood experience. Civil war is the worst kind of war there is. The American Civil War happened so long ago that most Americans do not understand its horror. It has been romanticized in movies. Many Southerners seem to want to fight it all over again. I grew up in a small Iowa town that has one of the original 12 National Cemeteries. It is older than the Arlington National Cemetery. The National Cemeteries were created out of necessity to bury the young men who were killed at Shiloh and other horrendous battles. The rows upon rows of grave stones made a lasting impression on me as a child. Make no mistake, the South was fighting to preserve slavery.
Just Saying says
First they came for the . . . .
Pogo says
@P.T.
FWIW
Resist fascism says
I agree no one is safe from the orange terror and his Nazi cult! They have dismantled rights and the government . I’d say prison would be a good end for the republicans but that seems highly unlikely with how corrupt even the justice system is. The cult republicans stand for nothing I care about! Freedom, decency, democracy, people over profit, the constitution they could care about none of it only money and control! USA died and nobody cared, it’s fascist murikkka now! Now cancel some poor guys healthcare so Elon gets a bigger tax break!! That Is the essence of pure evil! Haha remember that guy who paid a couple hundred million for several billion in government contracts then did the German Nazi salute behind the president podium! The cognitive dissonance must be mind numbing.
Future of now says
I appreciate you sharing your story with us. It’s important for people to know the imaginary lines they drew aren’t clear to everyone. We are all far more alike than different. And we need to bring a people first radical change throughout the nation with compassion and empathy to our elected officials to build a better tomorrow for our kids not an evil one that only benefits 300 people.
William Moya says
I’m also a naturized citizen, in a way my story is much less dramatic than yours, my mother brought me here and we stayed with my uncle for awhile and then she got a place for us. My knowledge of English was practically zilch, enrolled in a local High
school, which although in a affluent area the student’s biases were palpable.
The government is turning fascist out of evolving society whose leaders are stuck in the past and the glue that kept it together is gone. The future gets worse, the Liberal Order is crumbling, our Constitution becoming a hindrance, manipulated by clever lawyers and propagandists, the two major political parties are two sides of the same coin. The republicans know that politics is war without bullets, the Dems think is a musical. Is Rome burning?
Ray W, says
On July 8, 2025, four researchers with the Dallas Fed published what they described as an “in depth” study on what impact, if any, declining immigration might have on both GDP growth and inflation, based on the impact of past waves of unauthorized immigrant and the impact that could be seen on the economy of the time.
Using an economic model (algorithm) built with immigration data collected over the decades starting in 1955 (to avoid the skewing effect of President Eisenhower’s immigration deportation effort) to 2019 (to avoid the skewing effects of the pandemic years) the study looked at economic data for GDP growth and for inflation corresponding with changes in immigration patterns to discern the existence of any economic trends.
Specifically, the economic study speaks only to potential effects triggered by restrictions on unauthorized immigration, not on legal immigration. And the baseline scenario adopted by the researchers to assess future impacts on national GDP assumes a net decline in the number of unauthorized immigrants by a 2.4 million between 2025 and 2028 due to policies implemented thus far by the second Trump administration.
This from the paper’s conclusion:
“Leveraging historical variation in unauthorized immigrant flows, the model estimates suggest an unexpected rise in net unauthorized immigration increases U.S. GDP growth with little effect on inflation. These estimates are useful for examining the potential effects of a reduction in net unauthorized immigration. Our analysis raises the concern that a sharp tightening of immigration policies has the potential to substantially reduce output growth.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
The report at least to me is dense and packed with statistics. I do not claim to be an economist. At best I am a curious student. But I can read. When the authors say that that national GDP rises for two years after every wave of unauthorized immigration, that makes sense to me. And it also makes sense to me that they conclude that should the unauthorized immigrant population suddenly drop, GDP will drop, too.
In their words:
“Chart 5 shows that U.S. GDP growth typically increases for two years in response to an unexpected increase in net unauthorized immigration and then gradually reverts to its mean. Inflation shows almost no response in the first few years but decreases slightly at longer horizons. When expanding the model to include GDP components, we find that residential investment mainly drives the short-term increase in GDP growth, while nonresidential investment and consumption contribute to the response of GDP growth at longer horizons.”
Thus, I feel I can safely comment to the FlaglerLive community that researchers compared 65 years of ever-changing unauthorized immigrant data and looked for economic trends that correspond with the data. They concluded that, historically, whenever the rate of entry of unauthorized immigrants rose, there was a corresponding growth in national GDP output for two years after the rise, with no impact on inflation.
The researchers note in the body of their study that the Brookings Institute recently published an article in which a low immigration scenario for 2025, when coupled with a negative net immigration figure for the year, “would lower real GDP growth by 0.4%.”
They also note in the body of their study that a recently published Peterson Institute working paper has the mass removal of 1.3 million unauthorized immigrants would “lower real U.S. GDP 2.7 percent from 2025 to 2028.”
From the four authors’ own study of future immigration restrictions, “[t]he baseline scenario projects that the reduction in net unauthorized immigration will cause GDP growth to be 0.81 percentage points below the benchmark in 2025.”
Thomas Hutson says
Whoa, when will you REDS get a life??? This TACO ORANGE MAN mentally deranged! He is living in his whacked out vision of POWER and ROBERTS AND THE HOUSEMAID and the rest of the Hightower are encouraging him to believe his vision!!
PaulT says
Thank’s Pierre for that interesting retrospective of your journey to and in the US. Unfortunately your concerns are justified. DaleL’s quote, ‘In limited Circumstances …..government can revoke the citizenship of naturalized citizens.’ no longer holds true.
On Trump’s behest the Justice Department is already pursuing lawsuits against those he considers to be his political enemies while the State Department has cancelled Green Cards of permanent residents, targeting them for deportation on truped up accusations (pun intender).
But it’s early days yet so as Trump’s enforcement machine and denaturalization task force grow, so will the firing line. With the use of AI programmed with ‘the right parameters’ denaturalization may well be aimed at those who oppose any of the current administration’s policies using the pretense of fraud during their immigration process, while the government’s intent is to process denaturalization cases in in civil courts, obviating the constitutional the right to free legal representation. Many of the denaturalized would be hard put to fund their defence against the might of the federal government.
Pierre Tristam says
I remember a few years ago disagreeing with you William–not in principle, but in degrees, especially when he discussed the liberal order. I was wrong, you were right. Curious that you use the Rome burning analogy. Nero got shafted by historians of his day, leaving it to more recent historians to note that he was not in fact playing music while Rome burned. His cruelty was beyond dispute, but he did help fight the fire. The difference this time is that our current Nero is setting the fires and fueling them, in part with his beloved fossil fuels but mostly with a cruelty that would have thrown Nero off his ass faster than Paul, if he’d ever been on the road to Damascus.
Jim says
Pierre, you have quite a story there about your roots and getting to the USA. I read it twice to make sure I didn’t miss anything.
Like you, I never thought this country would ever come to the point we are now. I truly believe we are in the same atmosphere Germany found itself in the 1930’s. Hitler concentrated his wrath on the Jews. MAGA concentrates it’s wrath on anyone who isn’t white, isn’t Christian, isn’t “from here” or is different (LGBTQ). They obsess about the wave of transgenders taking over women’s sports. They hate public schools (and colleges) for being “woke” although they don’t even know how to define it. Currently, this congressional district has perhaps the most racist, homophobic and ignorant representative in Congress (the great Randy Fine). And I put him up against Lauren Boebert and MTG and see him as even worse.
And we can add burning 500 tons of emergency food rather than distribute it to those in need. I saw where this could have fed 29,000 people for a month. Tax dollars already spent but our government would rather destroy it than give it to others to distribute. Christianity at it’s finest…
We have a president and cabinet who do not know the laws and, more importantly, don’t care what the law says. Basically, any law that gets in the way of their agenda is just something to be ignored. And they put people(?) like Emil Bove into judgeships to assure over time they get enough judges willing to rule favorably regardless of what the law says.
We target 3,000 immigration arrests per day. We’re told we are targeting the “worst of the worst” – murderers, rapist, thieves, gang members, and such. Yet what we see is that the vast majority – up to 80% or so – have no criminal record or, perhaps have speeding tickets or similar. Somehow, America will be better without these people. We’re told they consume our tax dollars and take benefits they don’t deserve. Yet I see study after study showing this is not true; in fact they contribute much more than they consume. And all this is done by government forces dresses in military gear, armed to the teeth and wearing masks and no identification. These government forces are roaming the country pulling people in without regard for their rights or their standing in the country. Many pulled in are American citizens who are dark skinned or don’t speak English perfectly. And there are no apologies for any of this. Somehow this is now considered “patriotic”.
I’ve always felt there were many Germans who thought Hitler and his cabal were wrong and evil. Yet they stood by and let the Nazi’s run rampant through the country. Eventually, no dissent was tolerated. We’re heading there now. News organizations have paid millions to Trump to make frivolous lawsuits go away. Law firms have promised Trump millions in free legal services to get of his list of firms not welcome in government buildings. CBS just canceled the Late Show because Paramount’s owner wants to make sure the pending sale goes through. Principle just got in the way so they got rid of their problem.
I could go on and on. There is just so much anti-American activities within this administration that it’s hard to keep up. I do hope that – somehow – our morals and laws will withstand this onslaught. I hope naturalized citizens like yourself are not subjected to manufactured charges and deported for having an opinion that MAGA doesn’t share.
I don’t know how this is going to turn out but I encourage anyone who has any true love for this country and what we have stood for now for over 250 years to pay close attention to what your government is doing and raise your voice (and your pocketbook) in defense of our continuing this democracy.
Sherry says
Thank you again and again, Jim! You absolutely nailed it!
Dear wonderful Pierre. . . please remember my prior “private” warning and concerns for you and your family’s situation.
FlaPharmTech says
Pierre, thank you for this. It’s important.
Ray W, says
The Independent is reporting that an 82-year-old Chilean national who was granted political asylum 38 years ago in 1987 after surviving persecution by the regime headed by Augusto Pinochet lost his green card.
On June 20, 2025, the Allentown, Pennsylvania resident went with his wife to the Philadelphia immigration office to obtain a replacement green card. He was cuffed and taken away without explanation.
His family, after not hearing from him for weeks, feared he had died. Immigration officials did not respond to their requests about him.
Earlier this week, the documented immigrant was located in a hospital in Guatemala City, Guatemala after he had first been transported from Philadelphia to Minnesota. According to family members, the man has never even received so much as a traffic violation.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
If true, the cruelty of the act speaks for itself. Has the professional lying class that sits atop one of our two political parties so bastardized the meaning of the “worst of the worst” to include legal immigrants who have done nothing wrong like the Chilean national who was deported without notice to his family to Guatemala?
Steve says
@ RayW Thanks for the Article.
@PT Your History of getting to America adds alot of credeence, credibility as to what you say. I never thought I would see this Day in my Country.
Goid Luck
DaleL says
Make no mistake, the cruelty in the enforcement of immigration by the current administration is intentional. The individual who RayW refers to is Luis Leon. To quote from the story on The Morning Call: “Relatives of 82-year-old Allentown resident Luis Leon are headed to a Guatemalan hospital Saturday in hopes of reuniting with the man they say disappeared without a trace into the American immigration system a month ago — and who, for a time, they thought was dead.”
If Mr. Trump had his way, I have no doubt that his administration would treat naturalized citizens in a similar manner. At this time he is still constrained by the courts.
William Moya says
Pierre, thanks bro, I’ll see you in the “trenches”.
Dave says
“This is not the America any of us have known, or should tolerate.”, almost 3rd world like. And the sad part of this, we are stuck until the next election and hopes of a sweeping change in Congress and the president.
Laurel says
The Pedophile Party? Hey Trump, what’s it like flying on the Lolita Express? Enjoy staring at teenage girls naked bodies at your teenage girl beauty pageants, because you own the pageant?
Whatta guy! Presidential material. We’re so proud as the world watches us.