Shiny Chandravel, Assistant Opinions Editor
People ask me where I’m from all the time. If you look anything like me, they ask you too.
I think people expect me to tell them my exotic stories of living in the Indian subcontinent, stories they’ve seen in movies like “Slumdog Millionaire” or in Nick Jonas and Priyanka Chopra’s viral wedding video. But the truth is much more anticlimactic. I’ve lived in Richmond my whole life, born and raised.
I’ve learned to meet people halfway with my response: “I’m from here, but my parents are from India.”
For a long time, that response did the trick. It equally satisfied their curiosity, my heritage and my stubbornness to be truthful to the city I’ve spent my life calling home.
I was recently asked this question again at the hospital where I work. In my rounds, I met an older patient who, like many before him, asked me where I was from. But when I gave him my usual response, I was thrown off when he pressed his investigation.
“What do your parents do?” he asked abrasively.
I responded that my dad worked in a pharmacy while my mom was a stay-at-home mom. Hearing this, he leaned back, relaxed, closing his eyes as if he had finally found what he wanted.
“Your mom better start working. We don’t let your people here just so they can sit around doing nothing.”
At that moment, as heat flooded my skin, I wanted to say so many things. I wanted to argue that my mother was not just “sitting around doing nothing,” but that she raised two college-attending children who now work in the medical field. I wanted to stress that she has sacrificed more than he’ll ever understand to be a good member of the community that he just happened to be born into.
But for the sake of keeping my composure — and my job — I instead explained that while it was her dream to work in the U.S., it was this country’s government that didn’t grant her a work visa for 15 years to do just that.
But when I came home that night, I wished I hadn’t responded that way.
Why should I have to justify to some stranger why my family — 20 years into living in this country — deserves to call this place home? No answer would ever satisfy him. I could literally be working in an emergency room, nursing him back to health, and yet he could still find a reason as to why I shouldn’t be there.
But his confidence in investigating me, a child of immigrants, does not exist in a vacuum. His comments are merely holding up a mirror to some of the most powerful figures of our nation.
On April 1, the Supreme Court case “Trump v. Barbara” platformed oral arguments that will soon decide whether or not to terminate birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to parents who are either undocumented or in the country on a temporary basis, such as those on student and work visas. This could undermine the interpretation of the 14th Amendment that’s been upheld since 1866.
It’s an unsettling feeling watching lawyers and attorneys, dressed in professional suits with heavy briefcases, walk into a courtroom looking to revoke the reason you call this place home.
The court’s decision is said to be made in mid-summer of this year. But to immigrants and children of immigrants, the decision isn’t pending until this summer — it was made before it even entered court.
The moment we entertained the idea of stipulating certain people’s citizenship within our legal conversations, it became acceptable in our social ones as well. Our leaders may not be successful in overturning constitutional law, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t people living among us who are willing and impassioned to take on that responsibility themselves.
We can see it in the language used to speak with one another — the baseless accusations and assumptions that trickle into our conversations.
We see it when people are celebrated for inciting violence — breaking into Somali daycares and heckling Haitians with accusations of “eating the dogs.”
We see it in how easily the most agitated individuals are hired by our government to point a gun at their neighbor’s back in the name of “security.”
Whether or not our leaders succeed in revoking birthright citizenship legally, they’ve already tainted it culturally.
Someone’s citizenship does not need to fit your narrative of being American. It is neither conditional on how “useful” you find someone, how well they assimilate nor whether they make others comfortable.
I am not more deserving of being here because I work in a hospital. My mother is not less deserving because she stayed home to raise her children, nor do I want to explain that to anyone again.
The Constitution already did.