I was worried it wouldn’t happen this time. But it did. When I arrived back in the United States after a trip abroad, the immigration officer said to me, “welcome home.”
Two words at the border reveal America’s true promise
‘Welcome home’ may seem like a small thing, but it shows what makes great nations.
May 4, 2025
Consider the alternative. In a scene from one of my favorite novels, Zia Haider Rahman’s “In the Light of What We Know,” the British Bangladeshi protagonist says: “If an immigration officer at Heathrow had ever said ‘Welcome home’ to me, I would have given my life for England, for my country, there and then. I could kill for an England like that.” There is an unmistakable longing in these words, a desire to be truly claimed by the nation one calls home. It’s something we Americans take for granted. We shouldn’t, especially now.
This contrast isn’t trivial. European immigration officers typically don’t welcome their citizens “home.” In Germany, agents tend to be perfunctory, focusing on document verification rather than words of welcome. This pattern extends across the European Union, where the focus is on procedural questions rather than expressions of belonging.
The Afro-German author Miriam Rosenlehner recalls her surprise in a North African country when the border officer warmly welcomes her, as if Africa — not Germany — is her land. It’s where she belongs, even if she hasn’t lived there, the agent seems to be telling her. Rosenlehner bitterly remarks, “Immediately, just like that, at the border: Welcome home. That’s something no [German officer] has conveyed to me in the last 50 years.”
The American greeting stands apart. On online forums, travelers frequently note the “rush” they feel when a U.S. immigration officer says “welcome home” after an international flight. One traveler described it as producing the “first stirrings of real patriotism I ever had in my life.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be American lately, now that we’re experiencing yet another crisis of national identity. For a Trump administration that has made deporting immigrants — even those here legally — central to its agenda, there is a curious lack of interest in what makes America distinctive in the first place. America is the rare nation that is built on an idea rather than blood or soil. Our belonging, as Americans, isn’t predetermined by ancestry but secured through a commitment to certain universal principles — freedom, equality and the radical notion that citizens create their own government rather than the other way around.
America, in other words, was already great. In Germany, you can have a German passport. But that doesn’t necessarily make you German. But you become American by choosing America, a choice my Egyptian parents made decades ago. As their child, it has been a beautiful thing to watch — that process of becoming something you previously weren’t.
As the late Post columnist Charles Krauthammer once observed, “America is the only country ever founded on an idea. The only country that is not founded on race or even common history. It’s founded on an idea and the idea is liberty. That is probably the rarest phenomena in the political history of the world; this has never happened before.” This understanding of American identity — as founded on principles rather than ethnic origin — has been central to our national self-conception since the beginning. The sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset argued this point explicitly, noting that the United States emerged from the American Revolution as “the first new nation.”
This vision of America stands in stark contrast to the ethno-nationalist view promoted by President Donald Trump’s allies like Stephen K. Bannon, who advocates for a different kind of nationalism. In a 2018 speech to France’s far-right National Front party, Bannon declared, “Let them call you racists. Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists. Wear it as a badge of honor.” What’s telling here is Bannon’s comfort with European nationalist movements that are explicitly defined by ethnic and cultural identity rather than by adherence to a set of ideas.
These competing visions of American identity — one based on a shared idea and another based on something older, darker — aren’t merely academic debates. They directly translate into practice, into policy — into lives as they’re lived. When an officer says “welcome home” to an American citizen who doesn’t quite look like the “average American” — whatever that is — he is making a profound statement about what America is. It’s a civic religion, not a tribal one. It’s the idea, not the blood.
This might seem like sentiment better suited for Fourth of July speeches than for serious political analysis. But I’ve come to believe that such seemingly small interactions between citizen and state are precisely what build — or destroy — a sense of national attachment. Politics, after all, is not merely about policy preferences. If it were, we’d be less passionate about it. It’s about identity, values and — yes, I’ll say it — love. Love of country, however corny or outdated the notion might seem in our cynical age.
When I shared my experience at the border on social media, one response particularly struck me. Asad Dandia, a Brooklyn-born Pakistani American, wrote: “When I was much younger and far more naive than I am now, I used to think of this as ‘cringe lib’ stuff, but I’ve grown to realize how meaningful it is, given the constant instability that permeates our world. Home is always worth fighting for.”
I don’t know if the border agent who welcomed me home was liberal or conservative, religious or secular, a Trump or Harris voter. What I do know is that in that moment, he embodied something essential about the American experiment, even if he didn’t quite realize it.
Perhaps I’m making too much of two simple words. After all, it was just the casual remark of an immigration officer. But it was so much more. Yes, home is worth fighting for.