Introduction

Coming to Citizenship in a Near-Global Age

At 8 a.m. on September 11, forty-year-old Fekkak Mamdouh was asleep, having worked the previous night’s late shift from 4 p.m. to 12 a.m. His wife, Fatima, lay beside him; she had dropped off their daughter at kindergarten four blocks away and then climbed back into bed. For six years, Mamdouh, whom everyone knew by his surname, had been a waiter at Windows on the World, the luxury restaurant on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower. He had started working there in 1996 when Windows reopened after the 1993 terrorist bombing in the building’s basement. Mamdouh’s wide brown eyes and the round apples of his cheeks gave him a disarming look of innocence. These mellow features hid the scrappiness that had made him a beloved, though sometimes controversial, union leader.

The first call came from Mamdouh’s sister Saida, who lived in Italy. She told him to turn on the TV. The second call was from his brother Hassan, who lived down the street. “Listen, brother, there was a plane that just crashed through the Twin Towers,” Hassan said. “Guess what? You’re not going to have a job for a couple of months while they fix the place.” Mamdouh and Fatima turned on the TV thinking of terrible accidents when the third call came—their neighbor telling Fatima to get their girl out of school. Fatima hurried to retrieve her daughter Iman. When she got back, Mamdouh was still transfixed by what was flashing across the television screen. He said, “You watch. They’re going to say it’s Muslims.”

Fatima asked him why he thought so.

“Because they did it in ninety-three,” he said, referring to the earlier attack.

Without eating, Mamdouh left their house in Astoria, Queens. He went to 8th Avenue and 44th Street, the offices of his union, Local 100 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE). He and other union members made two lists: one of all the workers who ... continue reading >

After Sept. 11, 2001, the immigration debate raging on in Washington took a turn for the worse. Immigrants were cast as a threat to national security, increasingly becoming associated with law-breakers, criminals and terrorists. The framework of immigration reform became one of enforcement and policing, evident through the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act and the creation of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security not to mention the renaming of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Addressing the shift in the immigration debate post Sept. 11, The Accidental American, co-authored by Rinku Sen, publisher of ColorLines magazine, and Fekkak Mamdouh, is an ingenious amalgamation of personal narrative, historical context and thorough policy analysis. Weaving in the history of neoliberal policies in third world countries, Sen and Mamdouh underscore the global movements that force people to migrate, defying the argument that immigration can be “fixed” by sheer enforcement.

In 2008, 345,710 immigrants were deported from the United States, nearly double the 195,000 deported in 2006. Yet mass deportations and workplace raids have done little to stem the large waves of immigration. ... (Read the full review)

Rinku Sen's new book The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization is an amazing feat of intersectional analysis. She takes one man's story (her co-author, Fekkak Mamdough) and uses it as the narrative vehicle for an analysis of the ways in which immigration, nationalism, racism, globalization, September 11th, worker's rights, community organizing, gender dynamics are threaded together in an inseparable knot. Overwhelmed already? Don't be. The impressive thing about Sen's writing is that, despite the fact that she is juggling so many story lines, themes, and transnational issues, she manages to keep the language very clear and the structure very simple.

She argues that the current framing of the immigration debate—keep "them" out or let "them" in so they can provide much-needed labor—is limited and, in essence, immoral. ... (Read the full review)

IE: What do you hope readers take away regarding U.S. immigration policy from reading The Accidental American?

RS: I hope they take away a real sense of how the United States could prosper if immigrants were more widely included. There is a huge contrast in the book between Mamdouh’s story of an ever-expanding community that eventually finds a way to reach the entire restaurant industry, and the approach that Congress has taken, which is to define the American community more and more exclusively.

IE: What is the work of the next president when it comes to immigration policy?

RS: The next president hasn’t put immigration on his first year agenda, which means there won’t be any real reform soon. He should address some of the brutality and corruption present in workplace raids and immigrant detention through executive orders . . . Then he should engage Americans in an honest new dialogue about immigration—why people migrate, their overwhelmingly positive effect on the U.S. and global economy, what it means to embrace cultural change, and how we can make migration a choice rather than an act of desperation. ... (Read the full interview)