On a spring evening in 2016, the day after Donald Trump won a series of primaries cementing his candidacy, I stepped into a hushed auditorium in midtown Manhattan and found my seat. I’d decided to attend a panel discussion hosted by PEN America’s World Voices Festival and was looking forward to literary conversation in place of election-cycle sound bites. The event was titled “Expats.” I’ve never identified with that word, though it’s familiar to my upbringing. I was born in Pakistan and grew up moving through different countries in southern Africa before migrating to the United States as an adult. In my childhood experience, expats were white people welcomed with red-carpet treatment, not Brown interlopers like my family and me. Even in Pakistan, my birthplace, I was a descendent of Indian refugees, and as such my identity had always been tenuous and conditional. Now, as a Muslim immigrant surrounded by the hate Trump was continuing to incite in 2016, my claim to belonging felt shakier than ever. This evening I was seeking a sense of community with immigrant writers on the panel who might share my growing unease. {read}