And Patrice, who was shot in the leg over a game of dice.” “Or my friend Reggie, who was stabbed while sitting on the ‘Jewish Steps’ playing dominoes. He is stopped on the way back to the US through Niagara Falls, where a Homeland Security agent asks: “How Muslim are you? Like on a scale of one to ten?” Usmani articulates so well the immigrant’s fear: “I’m scared of what I symbolise to people who don’t know me.” Jim St Germain describes his young adulthood in Crown Heights, where friends were murdered: Jigga, Breeze, Dread, Nate.

Just days before, on September 2016, Donald Trump Jr had tweeted: “If I had a bowl of Skittles and I told you that just three would kill you, would you take a handful? This is our Syrian refugee problem.”īasim Usmani’s delightful and sobering Tour Diary describes being on the road with his punk band, the Kominas, through different cross-sections of America. ‘Fernandez? Your dad is my gardener.’ I remember I turned to her and said, ‘My dad works in advertising.’” Fatima Farheen Mirza recalls the time her family, living in Texas, was given a bag of Skittles from their neighbour’s young daughter. In No Es Suficiente, Dani Fernandez recalls: “There was a white girl in my class, Emily, who used to tease me for my last name. There is plenty of that pain to be exorcised, still.

Only when they win an Olympic medal, treat you at your local hospital, or rescue a child from the side of the building do they become good.”ĭirector Yann Demange is among contributors who touch on that question, where are you from? Photograph: Victoria Will/Invision/AP They are job stealers, benefit scroungers, girlfriend thieves, and criminals. In their introduction the book’s editors, Nikesh Shukla and Chimene Suleyman, write: “The title was a response to the narrative that immigrants are ‘bad’ by default until they prove themselves otherwise. The title itself is tongue-in-cheek, calling attention to the absurdity of using “good” and “bad” to catalogue millions of individuals. The Good Immigrant USA follows the publication of The Good Immigrant in 2016, which comprised pieces from 21 British writers of colour.

It’s bad enough that we are immigrants, we are also – particularly if we are immigrants of colour – put into broad and limiting categories: “black” to describe a multitude of experiences, “Asian” to lump together whole countries and cultures, “brown” even more obliquely. The American immigrant experience necessarily involves labels, and this can feel blanketing and erasing. As a Nigerian immigrant to America, it’s in his new home that he’s called, for the first time, black. Blackness is “melanistic variants”, Cole explains, in a big cat’s coat colour. I n his excellent essay in this collection, On the Blackness of the Panther, Teju Cole asks: what’s a black panther, anyway? It isn’t a species.

The good immigrant