Highway 59 Revisited

ack in the days of the first Muslim ban—that catastrophe, a million catastrophes ago, at the onset of the current administration—people on social media started to post lists of the many remarkable things that immigrants (and Muslim immigrants specifically) have done in the United States, across every field. Lifesaving doctors, innovative leaders, great teachers. Steve Jobs, even. It was a bighearted impulse. Yet some of us thought, uneasily, Well, sure,? The president wasn’t trying to turn Americans against Islam out of a belief that the religion inhibits individual achievement. He was doing it because most Muslims have brown skin. This, of course, is not a thing anybody could, or should, hope to achieve their way out of—not even if it made them Steve Jobs.