Immigration policy should concern every Armenian
Immigration matters to the Armenian community because most of us are here due to immigration. Our families came to the United States to escape hardship, war or instability and to build better lives. That is why current immigration policies should concern us.
Today, the U.S. immigration system is slow and difficult to navigate. People wait years for legal status or asylum. Families are often separated during this process, and many immigrants live in fear even after building lives here. These problems affect workers, students and entire communities.
For Armenians coming from unstable regions, delays and uncertainty can mean real danger. A system that takes years to respond fails the people it is meant to protect. Immigration policy should be fair, clear and focused on keeping families together.
Congress has the power to fix this. Lawmakers should speed up immigration processing, reduce backlogs and create realistic legal pathways for people who already live and work in the United States.
Ignoring the problem only makes it worse. This issue is not abstract for Armenians. It is personal. Immigration reform deserves serious attention, and our leaders need to act.
Nare Hovsepyan
Glendale, Calif.
The problem is that Armenians who are for example from Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Iran, Palestine, Turkey or Jordan, who are citizens of these poor, problematic, unstable and mostly conflict-ridden Muslim countries, are not distinguished from the other citizens of these countries as “Christians” (despite Trump’s rallying cry about “helping” “persecuted Christians”) and are not regarded as “persecuted”, and hence why they have such a difficult time with the immigration process in the United States.
The Trump government is very “selective” and discriminates immigrants according to their backgrounds and appearance. I bet if Armenians were “Nordic looking” and “Protestant” like the Afrikaners, they would have been designated as “persecuted” and all the doors would have been opened to them. The Trump government prefers “Nordic looking” immigrants. Trump even acknowledged that. He called African countries as “s***hole countries” in 2018, and in addition called Muslim, Latin American and developing countries as “s***hole countries” in 2025. He doubled down on 10 December 2025 and said “And we had a meeting, and I say, ‘Why is it we only take people from s***hole countries,’ right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden? Just a few? Let’s have a few from from Denmark. Do you mind sending us a few people? Send us some nice people. Do you mind? But we always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.”
Armenians and other “non-Westerners” who want to immigrate to the United States, or who are already living in the United States and are dealing with immigration hurdles, will have a rough time for not meeting Trump’s “criterias” and “ideals” of belonging to the “Nordic race” and for not being “Protestant”.
Source: https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-reveals-countries-immigrants-11185842