We were a deeply divided nation four years ago. We are a deeply divided nation now. But as I wrote over on Medium this morning, “looking past the election, there are things we know to be true, and people that give us a sense of what will be.”

Like so many immigrants, Rutilia Ornelas applied for citizenship this year — after 20 years as a permanent resident in the U.S. — for the sole purpose of casting her ballot in yesterday’s election. “She didn’t hear back about her application for months. … But on Monday, she broke free from the bureaucratic limbo. After 20 years as a permanent resident, she took her oath as an American citizen at a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Milwaukee,” Michelle Ye Hee Lee reports for The Washington Post. Said Rutilia, who came to the U.S. from Mexico 44 years ago: “I feel proud that now my vote counts. I feel positive that it’s going to lead to something better, and is going to benefit us.”

As Carla Hinton notes in The Oklahoman, “gaining the right to vote is one of the main reasons most immigrants want to attain citizenship.” Sara Palomino, a Mexican native from Edmond, Oklahoma, said of voting for the first time: “I feel so proud. It was a long journey to become a citizen and voting, it is the cherry on top.” 

Perhaps Amy Zhang, who became a U.S. citizen in March and voted for the first time this year, said it best in The Atlantic: “New and old citizens alike must make this country live up to its ideals. This election, my first, I am voting with that responsibility in mind.”

This morning, the election results are unclear. But regardless of what the week brings, I’m feeling so proud of and happy for folks like Rutilia, Sara and Amy who exercised their right to vote in the U.S. for the first time. Such a milestone should not be overlooked, no matter the results.

Welcome to Noorani’s Notes. If you have a story to share from your own community, please send it to me at [email protected].

ETHICAL FASHION – Archel Bernard is a Georgia Tech graduate from a Liberian refugee family. She’s also the owner and founder of Bombchel, “an ethical fashion brand offering contemporary West African clothing and merchandise made in Liberia” which employs an all-female staff of Ebola survivors at its factory in Liberia and refugees in its Atlanta store, Summer Evans reports for WABE. In an interview with Lois Reitzes, host of WABE’s “City Lights,” Bernard shared her inspiration for the business: “I opened the Bombchel Factory in 2016 so that I could hire and train women from backgrounds of poverty who wanted to work in fashion, but maybe didn’t feel like they could … I want us to normalize working around refugees, shopping with immigrants, people of color. I feel like we don’t really know everybody’s background, and I think the more we know, the more we can understand.”

‘BARSA WALA BARSAKH’ – An estimated 150 migrants from West and Central Africa are thought to have died after a boat headed to Spain’s Canary Islands was shipwrecked off the coast of Senegal last week, Mady Camara and Ruth Maclean report for The New York Times. This formerly popular maritime route around northwest Africa has seen a resurgence in recent months as other routes through the Sahara and across the Mediterranean proved dangerous. In the first nine months of 2020 alone, more than 6,000 migrants have arrived in the Canary Islands, located off the coast of Morocco. “This route to Spain is so dangerous that it has long been known as ‘Barsa wala Barsakh,’ which means ‘Barcelona or die’ in Wolof, Senegal’s most widely-spoken language,” Camara and Maclean report.

‘ANXIOUS AND CONFUSED’ – Following the news of U.S. officials’ expulsion of Central American migrant children to Mexico, several Central Americans “have come forward saying they were anxious and confused after their children and young relatives were sent without any adult to accompany them into a country that is not their own,” The New York Times’ Caitlin Dickerson reports. Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez, a U.S. history Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University, reminds us in an op-ed for TIME that while it feels novel and shocking, this practice isn’t new in the U.S.: “[T]his is not the first time undocumented children have had to endure prolonged family separation, lone deportation or relegation to the foster care system,” she writes. “In 1979, when 340,00 [sic] immigrants were arrested at the border, more than 8,000 were children and 600 of them served as witnesses. In the late 1980s, the government incarcerated about 5,000 children a year and used 900 as witnesses in a single year. … The full repercussions of draconian immigration policies might not be conspicuous to the public until the damage to families has long been done.”

Thanks for reading,

Ali