Thread by @JewhadiTM

No Need for Thanks

America rescued Ilhan Omar and her family, but to hear her tell it, we are the ones who should be grateful.

city-journal.org/ilhan-omar-imm…

What is surprising is the extent to which her narrative consists of complaints about the intolerance, racism, inequity, and filth that she found when she came to the United States, and since.

Gratitude, for the country and the people who saved and welcomed her family, is largely absent from her telling.

Interviewed on Pod Save America, Omar explained that when her family was preparing for resettlement in America, they watched orientation videos “about the life that they are to expect once they arrive here . . . "

"happy families, and dinner tables where there is an abundance of food, images of happy young children running off to their school buses . . . images of a country where people are happy...a life that is prosperous. You are really looking forward to life ...on that screen.”

Life in American was not like the images she saw in the welcome video, Omar insists. “When we landed,” she recalls, “I saw panhandlers on the side of the streets, there being trash everywhere, and graffiti on the side of the walls.”

Omar asked her father why America fell so short of what she had been promised, and he told her to “hold on, we will get to our America.” Omar has still not arrived in the America she was promised, though she has now been elected to Congress. We continue to disappoint her.

“The current reality . . . an America where you can’t access the justice system equally because you are born with a different race, or a different gender, or are born into a different class, that isn’t the America that I heard about, that isn’t the America that I watched.”

Omar told a similar story to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, saying that she noticed “a disconnect between the ideals of America and the actual reality.” This is a constant theme.

America is not only as deprived as an East African refugee camp, the country is also filled with people who don’t recognize how lucky they are to admit people like Ilhan Omar.

Unlike our violent & unpredictable natives, including the “ISIS bride,” whom Omar makes a point of noting is “not an immigrant, but an American born to a family of diplomats,” immigrants like her “went through years of vetting and went through the process of becoming citizens.

"I mean we have been fingerprinted, tested, more than any American has ever been who’s born in this country.” Like many on the left, Omar believes that America’s purpose is to admit immigrants and make them feel welcome.

To the extent that Americans “make room” for the next wave of immigrants, they fulfill the American dream; to the extent that they fail to be welcoming, they betray it.

The American Dream once referred to the aspirations of Americans to provide better lives for their children. For the Left, that idea has come to mean the intentions of anyone, anywhere, who wants to come here.

From this perspective, the people who now live in the U.S. are superfluous to America and the American idea. We are placeholders, keeping things together until tomorrow’s Americans—more deserving, though apparently less appreciative—get here.