If you have been reading the news, you know all about Trump’s midnight executive order banning Muslims from certain countries from the United States. One of those countries is Syria:
Syrian ban
The state department said the three-month ban in the directive applied to Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen - all Muslim-majority nations.
Al Jazeera's Dorsa Jabbari, reporting from Tehran, said: "[Iranians] are shocked and astonished that this has taken place. There's more than one million Iranians living in the US. A lot of them have extended family, or their children, or their parents still in Iran."
If you were asked who the most famous Syrian-American was, you might think it was some entertainer or chef. That would be incorrect. The most famous Syrian-American is a bit more famous than that:
Steve Jobs's biological father, Abdulfattah "John" Jandali (b. 1931), was born into a Muslim household and grew up in Homs, Syria.[12] Jandali is the son of a self-made millionaire who did not go to college and a mother who was a traditional housewife.[12] While an undergraduate at the American University of Beirut, he was a student activist and spent time in jail for his political activities.[12] Although Jandali initially wanted to study law, he eventually decided to study economics and political science.[12] He pursued a PhD in the latter subject at the University of Wisconsin, where he met Joanne Carole Schieble, a Catholic of Swiss and German descent, who grew up on a farm in Wisconsin.[11][12][13] As a doctoral candidate, Jandali was a teaching assistant for a course Schieble was taking, although both were the same age.[14] Mona Simpson(Jobs's biological sister), notes that her maternal grandparents were not happy that their daughter was dating Jandali: "it wasn't that he was Middle-Eastern so much as that he was a Muslim. But there are a lot of Arabs in Michigan and Wisconsin. So it's not that unusual."[14] Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs's official biographer, additionally states that Schieble's father "threatened to cut Joanne off completely" if she continued the relationship.[11]
Schieble became pregnant in 1954 when she and Jandali spent the summer with his family in Homs, Syria. Jandali has stated that he "was very much in love with Joanne ... but sadly, her father was a tyrant, and forbade her to marry me, as I was from Syria. And so she told me she wanted to give the baby up for adoption."[16] Jobs told his official biographer that Schieble's father was dying at the time, Schieble did not want to aggravate him, and both felt that at 23 they were too young to marry.[11] In addition, as there was a strong stigma against bearing a child out of wedlock and raising it as a single mother, and as abortions were illegal and dangerous, adoption was the only option women had in the United States in 1954.
The story is a very sad one; the young woman went to San Francisco to give up her baby despite having a loving partner. Although in this modern era this might seem unusual, in 1954 young women did not cross their parents and having a child out of wedlock was something so awful that it could ruin a woman’s reputation for life.
It is not too far-fetched to imagine an alternate universe where Steve grew up with his biological parents, one of whom would be a green card carrying Syrian. This family would now be banned from entering the United States, for the crime of being Syrian.