My first encounter in America was with a luggage cart. In the summer of 1992, when I landed at Kennedy Airport, I carried with me a travel bag filled with books. It was so heavy that it could not be checked in at my originating airport in Casablanca, Morocco, without putting me over the weight limit. Since I couldn’t afford the excess baggage fee, I brought the bag with me on the plane, where the flight attendant helped me hoist it into the overhead bin. In New York, I hauled it down the jet bridge and through passport control, my hands blistering from the effort. Relief washed over me when I saw a row of carts. I tried to get one, only to discover that it required three dollars to unlock. I remember thinking: What kind of a heartless place is this?

I didn’t have three dollars, or a five or a ten. The money I did have was in the larger denominations I had received at the currency exchange office where I’d traded in my meager savings. I began to doubt whether I would make it to the terminal from which my flight to California was scheduled to leave. Then a voice behind me called, “Do you need help with that?” A middle-aged man in a baseball cap picked up my bag and carried it for me to the terminal bus. All the way to my next gate, other people stepped in to help. This wasn’t a heartless place after all, I thought; Americans were more than willing to lend a hand to a stranger.

I am no longer a stranger here. In the 20-odd years since I arrived at Kennedy, I have had ample time to learn about this country’s history, culture and politics. Although my plan had been to complete a graduate degree in linguistics and return to Morocco, chance intervened: I met an American, we fell in love, got married. Now, I’m an immigrant. There is nothing extraordinary about this condition — I share it with millions of others — yet hardly a day goes by when I am not reminded that to be an immigrant is to have crossed a threshold, to see the world from two vantage points at once, to perceive it in shades of gray rather than in black and white.

When I hear elected officials talk about immigrants, they seem to be speaking about figments of their imagination, conjured up to illustrate talking points. The president rants about “criminals,” “rapists” and “terrorists,” then uses them as justification for building a wall, separating families at the border, jailing refugee children in tent camps and banning people from five Muslim countries. The president’s critics, meanwhile, portray newcomers to this country as singularly talented people who start new businesses, serve in the armed forces, innovate new technologies, run for Congress or otherwise “get the job done.”