My friend Rasheed and I are both fathers, grew up watching Saved by the Bell and 1990s professional wrestling, and once boiled crawfish together.
We are also both Americans—though his story is a bit different than mine.
Rasheed is Muslim.
His family came to the country as Muslim immigrants. Like the men and women detained in airports over the weekend, Rasheed's family once boarded a plane and headed for a better life.
For me, Rasheed puts a human face (one I like a whole lot) on the Executive Orders Donald Trump signed over the weekend. While Trump maintains that the Orders are not the "Muslim Ban" he advocated for during the campaign, in an interview Saturday Rudy Giuliani stated that Trump contacted him asking for a legal method to enact a ban.
Even if you've never personally known a Muslim and can't get to a place where you have compassion for refugees and immigrants based on religious beliefs, constitutional principles, or the words of past Republican presidents like Ronald Reagan and both George Bushes, there is a bottom-line reason why you should oppose Trump's policies on Muslim immigrants and refugees.
The bottom-line reason is this:
America's economic strength is based on attracting the best and the brightest to come here and help build a better future.
That competitive advantage is baked into our entire economy.
When a college student gets an engineering degree and goes to start his or her own company, investors know that student succeeded in a system that attracts the smartest minds from all over the world. Foreign airlines buy Boeing planes because Boeing is a company founded in a society that believes in merit, talent, inclusiveness, and competition. Succeeding in America—either as an individual or as a company—is based on the notion that you are competing against the best ideas and the most talented individuals, regardless of what they believe or where they were born.
That's the American brand.
And that brand has worked really well for us.
That brand is the reason why a nation with 5 percent of the global population can be the world's biggest innovation engine. The words on the Statue of Liberty welcoming immigrants to America through a "Golden Door" weren't just a poetic metaphor.
They were an economic prophesy.
Our belief in an open, welcoming, competitive society is our gold mine. It's what has made our businesses innovative and our economy strong.
Donald Trump is destroying America's brand as a beacon for the talent. Over the weekend Trump informed the world the United States is no longer a welcoming nation, that our government no longer believes in the concept of individual merit and worthiness, and instead finds specific groups of people and religions wholly unworthy of the opportunity to earn the title "American."