My family was given a chance. Who gets one now?

The couches came first. Then the dressers and the beds, carried into an apartment on the near west side of Indianapolis by members of White Harvest United Methodist Church on Ditch Road, who had agreed to sponsor a refugee family they had never met. It was May 1981. I know this story as my parents tell it. My mother remembers the relief of having a place to start again. She also remembers how lonely she felt.

Forty-five years later, the president of the United States posted that Minnesota was being “taken over by Somali Immigrants,” that there was “Violence, Murder, and Mayhem all over the State,” and that its people “must fight back.” He was describing a community of refugees and naturalized Americans. My family once belonged to such a community.

My father had taught nursing in Ethiopia and held a master’s degree from Cornell University. My parents fled the Ethiopian dictatorship and were forced to leave their ...