America is not one creed or colour: Pak origin WH staffer

America is not one creed or colour, one dish or accent; it is a collection of people, 300 million-strong, each having their own tales of migration, a Pak-origin White House staffer said today days after the terror attack in California that killed 14 people.
"Being an American has never meant giving up who you are to become something else," Asra Najam, whose parents immigrated from Karachi in 1996 to Detroit in Michigan and is now a presidential writer at the White House, wrote in a blog post today.
Having lived in the US ever since she was four-years-old, Najam wrote on the White House blog that being American means using the sum of parts to establish communities, build livelihood, reimagine identity, and grow their dreams.

"It means that even though there are imperfections in the immigration experience, they are always eclipsed by the overwhelming sense of possibility that makes our nation great," Najam wrote in the blog post which gains significance in the wake of questions being raised on Pakistani-Americans in the aftermath of the terror attack by a Pak-origin couple at San Bernardino that killed 14 people.
While the husband was of Pakistani origin, the wife was a Pakistani national. Both were killed by the police in an exchange of fire.
In the blog post, Najam narrated her personal story of what it means to be in the US.

"It means that an automotive engineer and his wife can proudly pledge their allegiance to this country and that their daughter can now look out onto the White House lawn and thank her parents for their pursuit of the American Dream.

"We lived in an apartment complex fifteen minutes away from the airport and befriended two or three neighbouring Pakistani families," she said.
"My sister and I spent our days at school and our evenings playing in the courtyard with the neighbouring children. Our mothers would drink chai and watch over us. You could find our fathers nearby discussing world politics," she wrote.

"The community we built in that apartment block the first year we moved to Michigan became the cornerstone to my American identity," Najam wrote.
"Every time I go home, I still find myself in the company of those same neighbourhood kids. Even though we've all grown up to lead different lives, we still look back to the days when we were all nervous and excited to live in a country where we could be anything we wanted," she said.
By the time they got their green card in 2002, they had already been woven into the fabric of America, she noted, adding that six years later, her parents finally took their oaths of citizenship.

"I knew our family's future was now inextricable from this nation. I watched closely as my mother pledged allegiance to this country. That day, we all felt a collective sense of pride, relief, security, and possibility.
"That day, we knew that the home we had built for ourselves here could never be taken away from us," Najam said.