My chosen home: A love letter to my fellow Mainers | Opinion
Fatima Saidi, an Afghan immigrant who has made Maine her home since arriving as an international student at Bates College in 2013, is using her platform to speak directly to fellow Mainers this Fourth of July about fear, belonging and the state’s long tradition of welcoming newcomers.
Saidi, who now lives in Auburn with her family, directs We Are All America at the National Partnership for New Americans. She previously served as development and membership manager at the Maine Immigrants' Rights Coalition.
In a written essay reflecting on her experience in Maine, Saidi described how a "federal operation" targeting immigrants and refugees in the state has changed the way she moves through her daily life. "I saw people being taken on their way to work, mothers being dragged away in front of their children and teenagers being pulled off the football field," she wrote. "It made my entire body turn cold."
The anxiety, she said, has seeped into ordinary moments that once felt safe. Walking through grocery store aisles or strolling through her neighborhood, Saidi found herself smiling wider at strangers, wondering whether she was welcome or whether she might encounter immigration enforcement at any moment.
"Though I'm a naturalized U.S. citizen, fear doesn't care about a passport," she wrote.
Saidi also recounted a recent trip to Washington, D.C., where she joined roughly 300 refugee and immigrant advocates from across the country in the Capitol. Standing among them, she wrote, she felt "an overwhelming wave of pride to represent my state."
She pointed to her own family’s experience as evidence of what Maine has to offer. In 2022, Maine welcomed her mother and siblings, who fled Kabul on the eve of the Taliban’s takeover. Since arriving, one sibling has earned a degree in computer science, another graduated with a double major in math and physics and is preparing to pursue a Ph.D. in quantum physics at an Ivy League institution, a brother graduated as a mechanical engineer, and her two youngest siblings are currently attending college in Maine.
"My family's story is not unique," Saidi wrote. "There are so many immigrant and refugee communities across our state thriving in the exact same way. Our state is better, richer and stronger because we give refuge to people who need it."
Saidi also thanked Mainers who have stood alongside immigrant and refugee communities in recent months. She praised those who marched in the streets for immigrant rights, who contacted their senators and representatives, who shopped on behalf of families unable to leave their homes, and who donated time and resources to immigrant-led and legal defense organizations.
"Above all, I am grateful to the people who looked at us and said, 'I see you as a human being, and I want you to stay,'" she wrote. "After all, isn't that the very principle upon which the United States was founded?"
Maine’s history, Saidi noted, is one of welcoming people fleeing global crises, from the world war refugees of the last century to the French Canadians who crossed the border generations ago to build new lives. The homes they built, she observed, now house some of the newest arrivals to the state.
She closed with a message aimed squarely at the moment: "This Independence Day, let us celebrate the courage it takes to build a community where everyone can live warmly, openly and without fear. We Mainers shall survive this winter together, shoulder to shoulder."
