Last night, Nicole and I watched the returns come in with a few of our neighbors while Will crashed in a portable crib in the other room. One of our neighbors at the party was a Spanish national who’s been working here--legally, duh--for a few years. She said that when she came to the United States to be closer to family living here that her friends and family still in Spain asked her why she would want to come here. This, she said, was a common view of the United States in Spain: not a place that welcomes foreigners. And still she came and she saw that the country was more complicated than the face that, um, reared itself in the rest of the world.
Nevertheless, early in the evening, she said she despaired that her time in Iowa may be coming to an end. It depended on yesterday’s outcome. What kind of country would we prove ourselves to be? Would she continue to feel welcome if it could so publicly reject a man who campaigned on being inclusive, on appealing to our best and highest ideals rather than our fears and our divisions?
Her phone rang all evening, a lovely trill, that she would answer in Spanish and step out of the room. Friends from home were monitoring the returns, and with each passing hour, their excitement and hopefulness needed to be confirmed by their expatriate’s eyes on the ground.
Finally, in the stretch between the still-cautious optimism of Ohio’s turning blue and the closing of the West Coast’s polls, we watched her get an answer to her question. Not long after 10 o’clock last night, my neighbors, my wife, and I toasted the United States’ new president and its newest applicant for citizenship.
Welcome to America, M. At the moment you found a new home, many of us rediscovered our own.
