As Ronald Reagan was ushering in the era of neoliberalism, my parents immigrated to the United States from Karachi, Pakistan. Hoping to pursue academic careers in an environment of intellectual freedom and material abundance, they settled in a small university town in the middle of rural Pennsylvania, where there were no mangos in the supermarket.

In a large crowd of demonstrators at San Francisco International Airport, I imagined their arrival. As you would expect at an airport, the crowd was diverse, a global array of nationalities, ages, and dispositions. But in the place of exhaustion and anxiety, this crowd displayed energy and outrage.

They shouted loudly, against Trump and his Muslim ban, that refugees are welcome here. By sheer numbers they managed to shut down all departing flights.