What we can learn from Uncle Naseem, N.J.’s new political bellwether | Opinion

By Tom Deignan
Donald Trump made a campaign stop in Michigan last week to accept the endorsement of the Hamtramck mayor, Amer Ghalib – a devout Muslim born in Yemen.
Wait, run that back. Didn’t Trump impose a Muslim ban weeks after taking office in 2017? Isn’t he the “build the wall” guy? Didn’t his Madison Square Garden rally Sunday feature all kinds of immigrant-bashing, race-baiting vulgarity?
How can it possibly be that an increasingly diverse America – one destined to be a majority-minority nation in two decades — remain torn between a high-energy woman of color and, basically, Mr. Burns from The Simpsons?
Answer? Watch Ramy.
There’s a Jersey guy on that Hulu TV show who tells us a whole lot more about 21st Century politics than my beloved Bruce Springsteen.
Because whoever wins the presidential election Tuesday, we will all need to rethink the conventional wisdom about immigrants and politics.
Actor-comedian Ramy Youssef — who grew up in Bergen County and attended Rutgers — has earned raves for his self-titled comedy, which features a supporting character named Uncle Naseem. As Youssef explained to NPR in 2019, Uncle Naseem is “sexist and homophobic and racist. We know he is the type of person who exists. . . . but usually, you wouldn’t show that.”
Therein lies part of the problem.
Anxieties about punching down against migrants — a well-intentioned impulse, to combat right-wing racists — has blinded never-Trumpers to the complicated realities about immigration and assimilation.
The most damning is an almost-religious belief that only white folks can be inspired to vote by the bigoted, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise insane array of grievance and conspiracy that passes for a platform in 2024.
Consider this headline from The Intercept a few weeks back: Racism Is Why Trump Is So Popular.
“In 1980, white people accounted for about 80% of the U.S. population,” two-time Pulitzer Prize winner James Risen wrote. “In 2024, white people account for about 58%. . . .Trump appeals to white people gripped by demographic hysteria.”
This is a story well-educated Americans have been telling themselves since at least 1997, when Princeton professor Paul Starr wrote about an “emerging Democratic Majority,” in The American Prospect magazine. Since then, progressives have been counting down to the day when non-whites become a decimal-point majority in the U.S., and conservative bigots (the thinking goes) are officially consigned to the dustbin of history.
But this dehumanizes immigrants – along with their children and grandchildren — in a different way. It’s as if they are incapable of being angry or scared about wedge issues like gay rights, crime, even undocumented immigration.
If that makes them hypocrites, it also makes them typical Americans. (Just wait until you see Uncle Naseem’s story arc in Season Two!)
Consider Republicans who rage about “the libs” using an open border to recruit future Democrats — even though it was two sons of immigrants, New Jerseyans Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito, who unleashed the 21st century’s most consequential political revolution: the rightward lurch of the Supreme Court.
In the end, immigration has always been the wildest of wildcards in American politics.
As CUNY historian David Nasaw recently pointed out, the nativist Know Nothings in the North were anti-immigrant, but they were also anti-slavery.
Meanwhile, 19th century anti-slavery activists spoke forcefully about recognizing the humanity of African Americans, even as many of them – such as Lyman Beecher and Elijah Lovejoy — claimed Irish Catholics were ruining the country with their slavish loyalty to the Vatican.
This might seem like ancient history. But just two weeks ago, Kamala Harris – daughter of immigrants – skipped the Al Smith dinner, which was named in honor of the New York governor who was denied a shot at the presidency a century ago, because the KKK worried that immigrant Catholics (and Jews) were bringing dangerous religious ideas to the U.S.
Yet Harris, as a senator, still smeared the Knights of Columbus, an Irish Catholic immigrant aid organization, because (no shock here) members generally followed church teaching on issues like abortion.
That doesn’t make her a bigot. But she was using the same kind of rhetoric that bigots used against Al Smith and JFK.
The rhetoric that Donald Trump uses unsparingly and unapologetically.
Which, sadly, has proven to be all too typical in American history.
Woodbridge resident Tom Deignan has written about history for the Washington Post, New York Times and New York Daily News. A contributor to books such as Nine Irish Lives (Algonquin), he teaches at CUNY, and is writing a book about the 1920s.
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