Zak Sayid is co-owner of The Horn Coffee in Nashville and a member of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own.

Watching the migrant caravan edge north through Mexico, I'm reminded of my own family's long, dangerous journey to America in the 1990s. These days, I'm a proud US citizen and a successful business owner — but I'm only here because the United States helped my family escape persecution.

We're from Somalia, where my mother was a bank clerk and my father was a successful food-industry entrepreneur. But when civil war broke out in 1991, my father bundled my pregnant mother and my older brother into a car and fled across the border into Kenya. I was born soon after, and spent the first four years of my life in a Kenyan refugee camp before American Catholic missionaries helped us resettle in Tennessee.

My earliest memories are of growing up in Nashville, and I've always felt every bit as American as any of my native-born neighbors. That's why President Trump's efforts to close our doors to refugees and asylum seekers is so upsetting. The White House is cutting the refugees we admit to just 30,000 people a year — a third lower than current levels, and a dramatic decline from President Obama's target of 110,000 in 2017. The Trump administration is also implementing new policies that will make it harder for Central Americans to obtain asylum at our country's southern border.

Zak Sayid, left, with his brother and The Horn Coffee co-owner, Ahmed Sayid

As someone whose family once benefited from America's generosity, I believe that the Trump administration should walk back those policies. Our country must stay true to its core values, and that means reinstating Obama-era refugee quotas, and working to make it easier, not harder, for refugees to gain the help and protection they need.

Besides helping people fleeing persecution, war and gang violence, doing so would also be good for our nation's economic wellbeing. Everywhere refugees go, they work hard, pay taxes and start businesses, supporting local economies and creating countless jobs for native-born Americans. According to New American Economy , 13% of refugees start their own businesses, compared to just 9% of the US-born population; in total, our country now has more than 180,000 refugee entrepreneurs, running businesses that bring in $4.6 billion a year.

When we came to America, my father worked 60-hour weeks, putting in back-to-back shifts at multiple factories to put food on the table. He worked so hard that at one point, he collapsed from exhaustion, and we had to stage a family intervention to ask him to give up at least one of his jobs." Zak Sayid