Immigration Amnesia: America Invited Muslims—So Why the Anger Now?

 America is angry. Loudly so. Angry at Muslims. Angry at “Sharia law.” Angry at a threat that, on closer inspection, doesn’t actually exist.

Scroll through social media, campaign posts, or comment sections and the language is unmistakable. Muslims are framed as outsiders who arrived uninvited. Sharia is treated as a foreign legal system waiting to overthrow the Constitution. Deportation is proposed casually, as if millions of people appeared through some collective act of trespass.

But here’s the part missing from the outrage.

Muslims did not arrive in the United States by accident. They were not smuggled in through the back door of history. They were invited—legally, deliberately, and repeatedly—by the American state itself.

That fact alone should slow this conversation down. It rarely does.

For decades, successive U.S. administrations created and expanded immigration pathways. Diversity visa lotteries. Family reunification programs. Student visas. Skilled worker schemes. Refugee resettlement after wars in which the United States itself played a central role. These policies were not hidden. They were debated in Congress, signed by presidents, and defended publicly as part of America’s moral authority and economic strength.

Muslims came through the same systems as countless others before them. Irish, Italians, Jews, Cubans, Vietnamese, Koreans. Different eras, different anxieties, same story. The paperwork was stamped. The visas were issued. The doors were opened.

And now, decades later, the same country looks at the people it welcomed and asks, with rising hostility, “Why are you here?”

That question is not about law. It’s about memory.

The obsession with “Sharia law” reveals this amnesia most clearly. In reality, there is no constitutional mechanism for any religious legal system—Islamic, Christian, Jewish, or otherwise—to override American law. Courts across the United States have been explicit on this point. The Constitution is supreme. Religious practices are protected only insofar as they do not violate civil or criminal law.

Most Muslims in America understand this instinctively. They pay taxes. They go to civil courts. They vote. They argue about school boards and property taxes like everyone else. For the vast majority, religion operates as personal ethics, not a blueprint for seizing the state.

Yet “Sharia” has become something else in political discourse. It is no longer a term with a definable meaning. It is a symbol. A container into which fear, resentment, and cultural anxiety are poured. It stands in for terrorism, patriarchy, foreignness, demographic change, and loss of control. The word does emotional work that facts cannot.

This is why outrage against Sharia persists even when no evidence supports it. The panic is not responding to events. It is being activated.

And outrage of this kind requires forgetting. It requires forgetting who wrote the immigration laws. Forgetting who expanded visa programs. Forgetting who resettled refugees. Forgetting that these decisions were not imposed by immigrants but made by American lawmakers, often with public support or indifference.

Anger, therefore, moves downward. Toward communities with less power. Toward neighbors, not policymakers. It is easier to demand deportation than to admit that a country invited people in and then grew uncomfortable with the consequences of its own choices.

The timing of this anger matters. Muslims have lived in the United States for generations. Mosques did not suddenly appear last year. The Constitution did not quietly change overnight. So why now?

Because the United States is experiencing deeper anxieties. Economic insecurity. Cultural transformation. A sense of global decline. A political culture that thrives on enemies rather than solutions. In such moments, visible minorities become convenient vessels for fear. They are easy to name. Easy to caricature. Easy to blame.

This is also where hypocrisy quietly enters the room.

If religious law were truly the concern, the panic would be evenly distributed. Yet it is not. There is little comparable outrage over religious rhetoric shaping legislation in other contexts. There is no mass movement to “ban Biblical law” despite explicit religious framing in debates over women’s bodies, education, and morality. Familiar faiths are treated as culture. Unfamiliar ones are treated as threats.

The issue, then, is not religious law. It is familiarity. It is power. It is whose traditions feel invisible enough to ignore.

What we are witnessing is not a legal debate about the Constitution. The Constitution is not under siege from Muslims practicing their faith. What we are witnessing is a country arguing with its own past. A country uncomfortable with the long-term implications of policies it once defended. A country rewriting the story so that invitations become invasions and neighbors become enemies.

That kind of rewriting may feel emotionally satisfying, but it comes at a cost. It erodes trust. It distorts reality. And it leaves no room for honest reflection about how nations change.

America does not need to ban a fantasy threat to protect its laws. Its laws are already secure. What it needs is the courage to remember. To remember who opened the doors, why they were opened, and what responsibility comes with that history.

This moment is not a test of Muslim loyalty.

It is a test of American memory.

And memory, it seems, is what is most at risk.