Pakistani-Americans wins US election

• The Pakistani-American community is hostile toward Donald Trump due to his desire to impose travel restrictions on Muslims and immigrants to the US.
• They typically support Hillary Clinton out of fear and disdain for Trump. Sajal Khan, 19, fears what might happen to Muslims if Donald Trump gets elected.
• Asim Malik, 27, is undecided about voting, but finds himself drawn to Hillary Clinton.

Amara Chaudhry Kravitz was raised and born in the country. Kravitz, a civil rights lawyer from a Pakistani-American family from Lahore, lived her entire 40-year life in the US.

She claims that in light of the political language being used against Muslims during the presidential election, she has thought of leaving the only nation she has ever known.

“As a person living in the United States, I was looking for jobs overseas,” Kravitz says. “I was credibly considering relocating only to keep my family safe.”

Kravitz is only one of several Pakistani-Americans who have had difficulties as a result of the presidential election and its consequences on the neighborhood.

The Pakistani-American community is now hostile toward Donald Trump due to his desire to impose travel restrictions on Muslims and immigrants to the US.

As a result, they typically support Hillary Clinton as “the lesser evil” out of fear and disdain for Trump.

“I was speaking to my husband, and our eight-year-old doesn’t want us watching coverage of the election cycle at all,” Kravitz says. “If Donald Trump comes on TV, she will actually leave the room crying. Because she’s very concerned Trump is going to ban all Muslims in the country, just expel us all,” she adds.

Remshah Raza, 21, was born in Azad Kashmir and moved to the US when she was two years old.

She says she will vote against Trump in this election, regardless of who is running.

“Honestly, none of them are better,” she says. “It’s just Trump is more racist, and I feel he’ll be worse to Muslims than Hillary will be.”

Remshah does not feel as if she faces racism regularly in the US, but she worries that will change if Trump becomes president.

“I think after Donald Trump becomes president, racism will be more open. Right now, there’s racism, but they don’t show it,” she explains.

Her sister, Redah Raza, 23, says she doesn’t know if she will vote because she finds the whole process pointless. “I don’t know if I would actually want to vote,” she says. “Because nothing is going to happen: If Hillary wins, it’s the same old, if Trump is going to win, same old.”

Redah, a hijab-wearing woman, claims that she does not handle racial prejudice well.

“That’s the thing I’m really scared about,” she adds. “Because I hate racial comments and I feel I’ll be out of control, I’ll get really mad.”

Because she doesn’t think Clinton has the best interests of Pakistani-Americans at heart, she claims she would have voted for Bernie Sanders if he had not dropped out of the race.

Sajal Khan, a 19-year-old from Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, says she would like to support third-party candidates because she believes neither Trump nor Clinton are deserving of her support.

However, she doubts the point of doing so because she knows they have no chance of winning. “I think it’s a joke we have two bigots running,” she says. “The other parties I have looked into, they’re good. But nobody’s going to vote for them.”

Khan fears what might happen to Muslims if Trump gets elected, especially since she wears a hijab. But she believes the worst is yet to come for Pakistanis in the US.

“If he were to get into office, God forbid, he would make life really hard for us,” she says. “And we would have to struggle.”

Asim Malik, 27, a marketing consultant, says he is undecided about voting, but finds himself drawn to Clinton.

“I’m undecided, but I’m drawn to Hillary Clinton because I don’t believe anything Trump says,” he explains. Malik is half-Dominican, half-Pakistani. Born in Harlem, he now lives in Langhorne, Pennsylvania. “Trump is building upon the Islamophobic aspect of American culture that’s been growing since 9/11,” he says. “Even since 9/11, there’s been more understanding [of Islam] in majority of American culture than there is in the fear of it.”

For Malik, Trump’s Islamophobia delegitimizes him, because it makes him look “uneducated”. But Malik isn’t sure if he will vote for Clinton.

While he values Clinton’s initiatives for affordable education, he finds himself too indifferent to participate in the election.

“I think if you’re not going to vote, or if you are going to vote, it’s not going to matter,” he adds. Malik shares he has voted before, but he didn’t vote in the last election.

“I didn’t vote for Obama to go to a second term. Not because I didn’t want him to, I just didn’t vote because I didn’t care enough,” he says. Malik doesn’t care enough to vote this election either, whether it’s for Clinton or against Trump.

“Over time, people have seen the overall outcome doesn’t actually come into existence,” Malik says. “Not because who they voted for isn’t the person who came to term, but who they voted for didn’t do what they said they would.”

On the other hand, Mohammad Aziz, a founding member of the Emerge USA Pennsylvania chapter, a non-profit organisation that politically engages American Muslims, Arab Americans, and Pakistani Americans, claims that if Pakistani-Americans choose not to participate, they will not have a voice in politics. Aziz declares, “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.” “Getting involved and doing it in an organised way has many advantages.”

Aziz immigrated to the US in 1979. A worker in the IT industry, he is 63 years old and the father of five children. He believes young people need to get involved to make a difference.

“When we are working with them, they can’t talk against us, because then we can defend us,” he says. Aziz notes Emerge has a good relationship with the Clinton campaign, which he believes will benefit Muslims. He says he will vote for Clinton because she is “the lesser of the two evils”.

Kravitz also plans to vote for Clinton, even though she doesn’t consider the candidate left-wing enough for her taste. “I would prefer someone who’s willing to go further on issues such as criminal justice reform,” she says. “I also think America’s stand on Israeli-Palestinian relations has been very one-sided.”

But Kravitz will vote for Clinton, because she finds the candidate the most reasonable choice for America. “She seems like the wiser choice strategically,” she adds.

“I also think she’s an incredibly confident, well-qualified person. She is a very centrist political person like her husband; she is center-left, not far-left.

You need a centrist political figure to help balance out the country, stabilize it, and attempt to build bridges where they are possible,” she says, adding the Obama presidency led to the right-wing backlash represented by Donald Trump and his supporters.

Although Kravitz anticipates a sizable number of Pakistani-Americans will support Clinton, she notes that wasn’t always the case before to 9/11. She explains that historically, Pakistani-Americans were Republican Party supporters and socially and politically conservative.

The Republican Muslim Coalition’s founder, Saba Ahmed, 31, says she would support Trump despite his “hurtful” remarks about Muslims. She says, “I thought Islamic principles were in direct opposition with the liberal ideas that Democrats advocated, and I found it difficult to defend myself as a Democrat.”

Because Trump is more capable than the Democratic Party in terms of defense, national security, and economic policy, Ahmed says she will support him in the election.

And while Ahmed comes from the side opposite of Emerge, she too believes Pakistanis need to be more politically engaged in America.

“Getting involved in campaigns is a good start,” she says. “This election year is a great opportunity to make a difference, not just by your vote, but who you’re supporting financially.”

Even when they pursue other forms of political engagement, young would-be voters still exhibit indifference since they don’t think their vote would make a difference.

“If you want something to really change, it doesn’t take one person,” Malik says. “It takes multiple people. But how do you do that?

You don’t send out flyers, you don’t sit there and do propaganda and you don’t go talk to a bunch of different people and make them join your side because there is no side. It’s all one side. It’s the human side.”

Tuesday, November 8 is election day in the US. Obama cannot run for office in this election cycle for the first time in eight years, which signals the end of his tenure and the start of a new one.

Philadelphia-based activist and independent journalist Iman Sultan is of Pakistani descent. She attends Temple University to study journalism and political science.

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