Daily Interesting News

As the world battles to conform to the Trump wonder, I'm helped to remember a man who may have come nearer than most to comprehending it all.

Letters from a more dignified America

Englishman Alistair Cooke, it can decently be stated, comprehended America superior to anything any outsider ever has. For a long time until his passing in 2004, a large number of audience members around the globe tuned into his week after week BBC 'Letter from America', dependably a thoughtful and savvy discourse on pretty much every possible part of American life. He knew and blended with the 'colossal and the great' and talked about a considerable lot of them in his communicates.

In any case, he likewise held forward on subjects as different as fear mongering, baseball, the changing seasons and intriguing yet little-known human intrigue stories, regularly about exceptionally standard individuals.

The one steady during that time was that in the wake of tuning in to a Letter, one left away with a more profound gratefulness and comprehension of the best and the most noticeably awful of the United States.

As Trump harassed and boasted his way to the Oval Office and particularly in the previous couple of weeks as he's approached amassing his Cabinet, I reviewed two of Cooke's Letters. They sparkle a light on two mammoths of American open life; men who committed their lives to the administration of their nation, yet disregarded self-advancement and never needed acknowledgment or reward. The two letters are present day anecdotes that outline the temperances of affability, character and self-destruction; attributes in frantically short supply at this moment, and practically non-existent in the White House.

One was a commendation to Eugene Rostow, Cooke's most seasoned companion in America. Cooke quickly depicts Rostow's numerous accomplishments and arrangements, which included administration in the State Department and the Lend Lease program amid World War II, Dean of Yale Law School, Under Secretary of State to President Johnson and President Reagan's Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

Cooke then conveys his punchline with this story:

Be that as it may, it's not governmental issues, his character is the thing that I wish to end on.

In a Kennedy year – it was, I'll always remember, 1962 – Gene came to remain with us on Long Island however at the week's end he had business around the local area, as I had, and I drove him back to New York to remain the night.

We arrived late evening, dialed down, down for a drink.

The phone rang. I accepted the call.

A voice stated: 'Is Professor Rostow there?'

'He is.'

'This is the White House. The President wishes to address him.'

After what authors call a sudden begin I gave once again.

Furthermore, this was my end of the concise exchange that I listened.

'Yes sir, Mr President. Well thank you and the same. Uhu, uhu, yes, yes I know obviously, obviously everyone knew, uhu, well ah - I comprehend sir, thank all of you the same.'

A brilliant, quick laugh, and he hung up.

He returned to the couch, he sat down and we went ahead with our happy discussion.

I didn't think his business with the President was any business of mine.

We sallied off to supper, returned for a nightcap and sooner or later, looking both chipper and naughty, he stated: 'You may ponder what went ahead with the President. On the off chance that you can remain quiet about it for a period.'

Furthermore, I said something like: 'For a lifetime.'

To comprehend Kennedy's part in the trade I need to attract a little foundation.

A popular Justice, one Felix Frankfurter, had chosen to resign from the Supreme Court.

He was a Jew and however there is no run, throughout the previous 50 years or so there has been a coupling custom that there must be one Jew, since Thurmond Marshall one dark, since Sandra Day O'Connor, one lady.

Kennedy had offered the coming opportunity to a previous legislative head of Connecticut, a Jew – and everyone knew he'd had the offer however for individual reasons he discreetly turned it down.

Advancing quickly oblivious foundation Dean Acheson went to Kennedy's guide – Gene Rostow must be the man.

Kennedy thought it over. After all Gene was a Jew from Connecticut. Kennedy decided and put the call.

What's more, here, this is the short discourse to which Gene Rostow reacted with his standard pleasantness, toward the end even with a laugh.

'Quality, I have an issue. I offered Frankfurter's seat to Abe Ribicoff however the Governor needed to turn it down.'

'Yes, yes as everyone knew. That is the issue.'

'Well you were straight up there as most qualified yet I'm anxious I chose that two Jews from Connecticut is one too much. It's going to Goldberg of Illinois. I'm sad.'

'Well I comprehend sir. Much obliged to you nonetheless.' Chuckle.

Quality never to me or anybody I knew ever inhaled a specify of this shocking frustration in his life.

In any case, here in the room I talk from, in a moment or two, I saw surprisingly and supplicated it could never happen again, a lifetime's desire broken in a minute, with a laugh.

Eugene Victor Rostow, a dear man, passed on last Monday week matured 89.

The second of Alistair Cooke's Letters from America I need to highlight respects General George Marshall. It was communicate in 1959.

Cooke says of Marshall that 'most Americans were ready to credit the reports of his prominence however it was something they needed to accept based on previous experience; for General George Catlett Marshall, of all the immense figures of our time, was the minimum "brilliant", the slightest amazing in an easygoing meeting and the minimum compensating to gatherers of tales'. To press the point, Cooke says that 'he was constantly awkward when anybody said the colossal Plan that bears his name. He assumed no praise for it, and he was about right. For it was initially brought about by subordinates in the State Department and seized on by Under Secretary Dean Acheson'.

After a concise recitation of the many highlights of Marshall's profession, Cooke finished with another "character" punchline:

In the mid 1950s, a recognized, a noble, American magazine distributer bullied Marshall to see him on what he depicted as a genuine expert mission.

He was welcome to the General's late spring home in Virginia. After a courteous lunch, the General, the distributer and the third man resigned to the review.

The distributer had come to request that the General compose his war diaries. They would be serialized in the magazine and a national daily paper and the settlement for the book distribution would be great looking without a doubt.

The General in a split second rejected because his own actual sentiment of a few wartime choices had contrasted from the President's. To promote the distinction now would leave Roosevelt's guard implicit and would infer that many lives may have been spared. Also, any genuine record may annoy the living men included and hurt the dowager and group of the late President.

The distributer argued for two hours. 'We have had,' he stated, 'the individual confirmations of Eisenhower, Bradley, Churchill, Stimson, James Byrnes, Montgomery is coming up and Alanbrooke, but then there is one yawning crevice.'

The General was unyielding. Finally, the distributer stated: 'General, I will put it hanging in the balance. I will disclose to you how basic we feel it to have you fill that hole, regardless of whether with two hundred thousand words or ten thousand. I am set up to offer you $1 million after charges for that original copy.'

General Marshall was faintly humiliated, yet very formed. 'However, sir,' he stated, 'you don't appear to get it. I am not keen on $1 million.'

There are, without question, contemporary Rostows and Marshalls in the US serving their nation discreetly and honestly.

Obviously, as of late resigned previous senior authorities are not obliged to remain calm, and a couple have called Trump on his contortions and actuality free arrangement proclamations in calm, contemplated contentions in the daily papers Trump says he doesn't read yet condemns voluntarily. What's more, in the previous few days, in the wake of Trump's end of the week "tapping" tweets, more have joined the ensemble.

Would that this pattern proceeds, not simply to get out Trump when he masks, however to remind the American individuals, and the world, of the ethics that genuinely made America extraordinary.

Americans Aren’t Filing Their Taxes This Year

 Almost six million returns are missing, and there’s only five weeks left. What’s going on?

Americans Aren’t Filing Their Taxes This Year

Are a huge number of Americans only neglecting to document their duties this year?

More than part of the way through the 2017 documenting season, the U.S. Interior Revenue Service detailed getting 5.7 million less individual returns than at a practically identical point a year ago. That is a 8.5 percent drop.

Impose experts frequently examine charge seasons a similar way live entertainers discuss gatherings of people. Every one is distinctive, they say, with its own inclination, mood, and political undercurrents.

The vibe for 2017? Moderate and slow.

There are a few conceivable clarifications for why citizens aren't recording.

Hypothesis No. 1: Plain Old Procrastination

"Clients holding up longer to record their profits is a pattern we have watched throughout the previous four years, despite the fact that it's more articulated for the current year," said Sanjay Baskaran, leader of online assessment preparer TaxAct.

An ever increasing number of individuals who used to record in January and February are holding up until the latest possible time. A year ago, IRS information on April 15—the conventional expense due date—demonstrated individual filings running 5.8 percent behind the earlier year. In any case, the due date was April 18 in 2016, which gave citizens an extra three days to document. In the week taking after April 15, an incredible 12 million assessment forms came in, and filings wound up 1.7 percent higher than in the earlier year.

Hypothesis No. 2: You-Know-Who

The political talk of President Donald Trump might panic a few citizens. With the Republican promising to take action against illicit movement, undocumented migrants might be reluctant to make a paper trail with the administration by asserting expense discounts.

John Hewitt, administrator and CEO of Liberty Tax, brought the likelihood up in a call with examiners March 8. Undocumented workers regularly utilize singular citizen recognizable proof numbers (ITINs) as opposed to Social Security numbers to document. "Those ITIN filers are documenting at a lessened level this year," Hewitt said. They're "most likely dreadful of the Trump activities."

Your cheat sheet on life, in one week by week email.

Get our week by week Game Plan pamphlet.

Enter your email

Join

It's additionally conceivable that the general political air could influence documenting. The Trump organization is implementing the medical coverage order contrastingly this assessment season, while Congress moves rapidly to gut the Affordable Care Act, and Trump has guaranteed huge tax breaks. Albeit no assessment code changes would influence what you right now owe, Julie Miller, a representative for TurboTax proprietor Intuit Inc., theorized that "there could simply be perplexity, or [people are] sitting tight for the tidy to settle."

Hypothesis No. 3: Delayed Refunds

With an end goal to take action against misrepresentation, Congress passed the PATH Act 1 , which requires the IRS to expand investigation of certain assessment credits frequently guaranteed by low-pay family units. Thus, the office cautioned it wouldn't issue discounts this year until Feb. 15 for the a huge number of profits asserting the earned salary assess credit or the extra kid impose credit.

That deferral could be a major component influencing a large number of citizens who haven't recorded yet, a few examiners and assessment organization administrators said. While issues with undocumented outsider returns might be a "periphery element," the PATH demonstration is the principle explanation behind the deferral, said Piper Jaffray expert George Tong.

"A considerable measure of early season filers need their cash and need their cash quick," Tong said. On the off chance that filings are deferred, "it tosses a torque into purchaser conduct." Liberty's Hewitt appeared to concur that the discount postponements are a bigger issue. "The PATH Act has made a huge change in the business," he said.

Hypothesis No. 4: Confused Taxpayers

The PATH Act influences citizens guaranteeing the earned pay and extra kid impose credits–about 27 million individuals asserted the EITC last year–but different citizens may wrongly think the manage changes influence them, sowing perplexity. "Many individuals expected this was the holding of discounts until [mid-February] for everybody," said Michael Millman of Millman Research Associates.

H&R Block Chief Executive Officer Bill Cobb refered to this "vulnerability" as a figure deferred filings. "Citizens who commonly document in January and early February have all the earmarks of being less roused to record immediately, given that their discounts might be postponed," Cobb said in an income approach March 7.

Postpone all you need—until April 18, that is, the point at which you're recording is expected—yet you'll pay for that stalling: Tax prep organizations rebuff late filers by climbing their costs as the duty due date approaches.

Heydar Aliyev Prospekti, a broad avenue in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, connects the airport to the city. The road is meant to highlight Baku’s recent modernization, and it is lined with sleek new buildings. The Heydar Aliyev Center, an undulating wave of concrete and glass, was designed by Zaha Hadid. The state oil company is housed in a twisting glass tower, and the headquarters of the state water company looks like a giant water droplet. “It’s like Potemkin,” my translator told me. “It’s only the buildings right next to the road.” Behind the gleaming structures stand decaying Soviet-era apartment blocks, with clothes hanging out of windows and wallboards exposed by fallen brickwork.

DONALD TRUMP’S WORST DEAL

As you approach the city center, a tower at the end of the avenue looms in front of you. Thirty-three stories high and curved to resemble a sail, the building was clearly inspired by the Burj Al Arab Hotel, in Dubai, but it is boxier and less elegant. When I visited Baku, in December, five enormous white letters glowed at the top of the tower: T-R-U-M-P.

The building, a five-star hotel and residence called the Trump International Hotel & Tower Baku, has never opened, though from the road it looks ready to welcome the public. Reaching the property is surprisingly difficult; the tower stands amid a welter of on-ramps, off-ramps, and overpasses. During the nine days I was in town, I went to the site half a dozen times, and on each occasion I had a comical exchange with a taxi-driver who had no idea which combination of turns would lead to the building’s entrance.

The more time I spent in the neighborhood, the more I wondered how the hotel could have been imagined as a viable business. The development was conceived, in 2008, as a high-end apartment building. In 2012, after Donald Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, signed multiple contracts with the Azerbaijani developers behind the project, plans were made to transform the tower into an “ultra-luxury property.” According to a Trump Organization press release, a hotel with “expansive guest rooms” would occupy the first thirteen floors; higher stories would feature residences with “spectacular views of the city and Caspian Sea.” For an expensive hotel, the Trump Tower Baku is in an oddly unglamorous location: the underdeveloped eastern end of downtown, which is dominated by train tracks and is miles from the main business district, on the west side of the city. Across the street from the hotel is a discount shopping center; the area is filled with narrow, dingy shops and hookah bars. Other hotels nearby are low-budget options: at the AYF Palace, most rooms are forty-two dollars a night. There are no upscale restaurants or shops. Any guests of the Trump Tower Baku would likely feel marooned.

The timing of the project was also curious. By 2014, when the Trump Organization publicly announced that it was helping to turn the tower into a hotel, a construction boom in Baku had ended, and the occupancy rate for luxury hotels in the city hovered around thirty-five per cent. Jan deRoos, of Cornell University, who is an expert in hotel finance, told me that the developer of a five-star hotel typically must demonstrate that the project will maintain an average occupancy rate of at least sixty per cent for ten years. There is a long-term master plan to develop the area around the Trump Tower Baku, but if it is implemented the hotel will be surrounded for years by noisy construction projects, making it even less appealing to travellers desiring a luxurious experience—especially considering that there are many established hotels on the city’s seaside promenade. There, an executive from ExxonMobil or the Israeli cell-phone industry can stay at the Four Seasons, which occupies a limestone building that evokes a French colonial palace, or at the J. W. Marriott Abershon Baku, which has an outdoor terrace overlooking the water. Tiffany, Ralph Lauren, and Armani are among the dozens of companies that have boutiques along the promenade.

A former top official in Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Tourism says that, when he learned of the Trump hotel project, he asked himself, “Why would someone put a luxury hotel there? Nobody who can afford to stay there would want to be in that neighborhood.”

The Azerbaijanis behind the project were close relatives of Ziya Mammadov, the Transportation Minister and one of the country’s wealthiest and most powerful oligarchs. According to the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index, Azerbaijan is among the most corrupt nations in the world. Its President, Ilham Aliyev, the son of the former President Heydar Aliyev, recently appointed his wife to be Vice-President. Ziya Mammadov became the Transportation Minister in 2002, around the time that the regime began receiving enormous profits from government-owned oil reserves in the Caspian Sea. At the time of the hotel deal, Mammadov, a career government official, had a salary of about twelve thousand dollars, but he was a billionaire.

The Trump Tower Baku originally had a construction budget of a hundred and ninety-five million dollars, but it went through multiple revisions, and the cost ended up being much higher. The tower was designed by a local architect, and in its original incarnation it had an ungainly roof that suggested the spikes of a crown. A London-based architecture firm, Mixity, redesigned the building, softening its edges and eliminating the ornamental roof. By the time the Trump team officially joined the project, in May, 2012, many condominium residences had already been completed; at the insistence of Trump Organization staffers, most of the building’s interior was gutted and rebuilt, and several elevators were added.

After Donald Trump became a candidate for President, in 2015, Mother Jones, the Associated Press, the Washington Post, and other publications ran articles that raised questions about his involvement in the Baku project. These reports cited a series of cables sent from the U.S. Embassy in Azerbaijan in 2009 and 2010, which were made public by WikiLeaks. In one of the cables, a U.S. diplomat described Ziya Mammadov as “notoriously corrupt even for Azerbaijan.” The Trump Organization’s chief legal officer, Alan Garten, told reporters that the Baku hotel project raised no ethical issues for Donald Trump, because his company had never engaged directly with Mammadov.

Cartoon
ShareTweetBuy a cartoon
According to Garten, Trump played a passive role in the development of the property: he was “merely a licensor” who allowed his famous name to be used by a company headed by Ziya Mammadov’s son, Anar, a young entrepreneur. It’s not clear how much money Trump made from the licensing agreement, although in his limited public filings he has reported receiving $2.8 million. (The Trump Organization shared documents that showed an additional payment of two and a half million dollars, in 2012, but declined to disclose any other payments.) Trump also had signed a contract to manage the hotel once it opened, for an undisclosed fee tied to the hotel’s performance. The Washington Post published Garten’s description of the deal, and reported that Donald Trump had “invested virtually no money in the project while selling the rights to use his name and holding the contract to manage the property.”

A month after Trump was elected President, Garten announced that the Trump Organization had severed its ties with the hotel project, describing the decision to CNN as little more than “housecleaning.” I was in Baku at the time, and it had become clear that the Trump Organization’s story of the hotel was incomplete and inaccurate. Trump’s company had made the deal not just with Anar Mammadov but also with Ziya’s brother Elton—an influential member of the Azerbaijani parliament. Elton signed the contracts, and in an interview he confirmed that he founded Baku XXI Century, the company that owns the Trump Tower Baku. When he was asked who owns Baku XXI Century, he called it a “commercial secret” but added that he “controlled all its operations” until 2015, when he cut ties to the company. Elton denied having used his political position for profit.

An Azerbaijani lawyer who worked on the project revealed to me that the Trump Organization had not just licensed the family name; it also had signed a technical-services agreement in which it promised to help its partner meet Trump design standards. Technical-services agreements are often nominal addenda to licensing deals. Major hospitality brands compile exhaustive specifications for licensed hotels, and tend to approve design elements remotely; a foreign site is visited only occasionally. But in the case of Trump Tower Baku the oversight appears to have been extensive. The Azerbaijani lawyer told me, “We were always following their instructions. We were in constant contact with the Trump Organization. They approved the smallest details.” He said that Trump staff visited Baku at least monthly to give the go-ahead for the next round of work orders. Trump designers went to Turkey to vet the furniture and fabrics acquired there. The hotel’s main designer, Pierre Baillargeon, and several contractors told me that they had visited the Trump Organization headquarters, in New York, to secure approval for their plans.

Ivanka Trump was the most senior Trump Organization official on the Baku project. In October, 2014, she visited the city to tour the site and offer advice. An executive at Mace, the London-based construction firm that oversaw the tower’s conversion to a hotel, met with Ivanka in Baku and New York. He told me, “She had very strong feelings, not just about the design but about the back of the hotel—landscaping, everything.” The Azerbaijani lawyer said, “Ivanka personally approved everything.” A subcontractor noted that Ivanka’s team was particular about wood panelling: it chose an expensive Macassar ebony, from Indonesia, for the ceiling of the lobby. The ballroom doors were to be made of book-matched panels of walnut. On her Web site, Ivanka posted a photograph of herself wearing a hard hat inside the half-completed hotel. A caption reads, “Ivanka has overseen the development of Trump International Hotel & Tower Baku since its inception, and she recently returned from a trip to the fascinating city in Azerbaijan to check in on the project’s progress.” (Ivanka Trump declined requests to discuss the Baku project.)

Jan deRoos, the Cornell professor, developed branded-hotel properties before entering academia. He told me that the degree of the Trump Organization’s involvement in the Baku property was atypical. “That’s very, very intense,” he said.

The sustained back-and-forth between the Trump Organization and the Mammadovs has legal significance. If parties involved in the Trump Tower Baku project participated in any illegal financial conduct, and if the Trump Organization exerted a degree of control over the project, the company could be vulnerable to criminal prosecution. Tom Fox, a Houston lawyer who specializes in anti-corruption compliance, said, “It’s a problem if you’re making a profit off of someone else’s corrupt conduct.” Moreover, recent case law has established that licensors take on a greater legal burden when they assume roles normally reserved for developers. The Trump Organization’s unusually deep engagement with Baku XXI Century suggests that it had the opportunity and the responsibility to monitor it for corruption.

Before signing a deal with a foreign partner, American companies, including major hotel chains, conduct risk assessments and background checks that take a close look at the country, the prospective partner, and the people involved. Countless accounting and law firms perform this service, as do many specialized investigation companies; a baseline report normally costs between ten thousand and twenty-five thousand dollars. A senior executive at one of the largest American hotel chains, who asked for anonymity because he feared reprisal from the Trump Administration, said, “We wouldn’t look at due diligence as a burden. There certainly is a cost to doing it, especially in higher-risk places. But it’s as much an investment in the protection of that brand. It’s money well spent.”

Alan Garten told me that the Trump Organization had commissioned a risk assessment for the Baku deal, but declined to name the company that had performed it. The Washington Post article on the Baku project reported that, according to Garten, the Trump Organization had undertaken “extensive due diligence” before making the hotel deal and had not discovered “any red flags.”

But the Mammadov family, in addition to its reputation for corruption, has a troubling connection that any proper risk assessment should have unearthed: for years, it has been financially entangled with an Iranian family tied to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the ideologically driven military force. In 2008, the year that the tower was announced, Ziya Mammadov, in his role as Transportation Minister, awarded a series of multimillion-dollar contracts to Azarpassillo, an Iranian construction company. Keyumars Darvishi, its chairman, fought in the Iran-Iraq War. After the war, he became the head of Raman, an Iranian construction firm that is controlled by the Revolutionary Guard. The U.S. government has regularly accused the Guard of criminal activity, including drug trafficking, sponsoring terrorism abroad, and money laundering. Reuters recently reported that the Trump Administration was poised to officially condemn the Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization.

I asked Garten how deeply the Trump Organization had looked into the Mammadov family’s political connections. Had it been concerned that Elton Mammadov, as a sitting member of parliament, might exploit his power to benefit the project? How much money had Ziya Mammadov invested in Elton’s company? Garten noted that he didn’t oversee the due-diligence process. “The people who did are no longer at the company,” he said. “I can’t tell you what was done in this situation.” He would not identify the former employees. When I asked him to provide documentation of due diligence, he said that he couldn’t share it with me, because “it’s confidential and privileged.”

A 2014 Instagram post of Ivanka Trump at the Baku tower.
A 2014 Instagram post of Ivanka Trump at the Baku tower.
Photo Illustration by The New Yorker
No evidence has surfaced showing that Donald Trump, or any of his employees involved in the Baku deal, actively participated in bribery, money laundering, or other illegal behavior. But the Trump Organization may have broken the law in its work with the Mammadov family. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, passed in 1977, forbade American companies from participating in a scheme to reward a foreign government official in exchange for material benefit or preferential treatment. The law even made it a crime for an American company to unknowingly benefit from a partner’s corruption if it could have discovered illicit activity but avoided doing so. This closed what was known as the “head in the sand” loophole.

As a result, American companies must examine potential foreign partners very carefully before making deals with them. I recently spoke with Alexandra Wrage, who runs Trace International, a consortium of three hundred corporations that do business overseas. Trace helps these firms avoid violating the F.C.P.A., and it has a division that can be hired by individual clients to assess potential foreign partners. To comply with the law, Wrage noted, an American company must remain vigilant even after a contract is signed, monitoring its foreign partner to be sure that nobody involved is engaging in bribery or other improprieties.

Wrage pointed out that corrupt government leaders often use their children or their siblings to distance themselves from illicit projects. Such an official creates a company in the relative’s name which appears to be independent but is controlled by the official. To lessen the likelihood of an F.C.P.A. violation when working with a company that is owned by a child or a sibling of a government minister, Wrage told me, “you’d need to show that the child has real expertise, real ability to do the work.” Otherwise, Wrage said, “the assumption is that they are a partner entirely because of their ability to use their parent’s power.” Before Elton Mammadov became a member of parliament, in 2000, he was a maintenance engineer who had no experience in real-estate development. When the Trump Organization joined the Baku project, it barred a Mammadov-owned company from doing construction work, because it was deemed incompetent.

Wrage said that a U.S. company looking to make a deal with a foreign partner should be confident that the partner has a reasonable likelihood of making a profit from the venture. If the project seems almost guaranteed to lose money, it could well be a bribery scheme or some other criminal operation. The partner also should uphold modern accounting standards.

“It’s simple,” she said. “Will money flow through this business because it offers a compelling product at a decent price, or will the money come because of an illicit relationship with someone who uses their power?”

Wrage told me that, in 2009, an American entrepreneur was successfully prosecuted for his part in a corruption conspiracy in Azerbaijan. Frederic Bourke, the co-founder of Dooney & Bourke, the handbag company, had invested in a project in which a foreign partner paid bribes to Azerbaijani government officials and their family members. Bourke was sentenced to a year in prison for violating the F.C.P.A.; he appealed the conviction, claiming ignorance of the corruption. Two years later, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld the conviction, saying that, regardless of whether he had known about the bribes, “the testimony at trial demonstrated that Bourke was aware of how pervasive corruption was in Azerbaijan.” The F.C.P.A., they said, also criminalized “conscious avoidance”—a deliberate effort to remain in the dark about any transgressions a foreign partner might be involved in. After Bourke’s conviction, Wrage said, U.S. companies were well aware of the dangers of making careless deals in Azerbaijan.

Even a cursory look at the Mammadovs suggests that they are not ideal partners for an American business. Four years before the Trump Organization announced the Baku deal, WikiLeaks released the U.S. diplomatic cables indicating that the family was corrupt; one cable mentioned the Mammadovs’ link to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. In 2013, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project investigated the Mammadov family’s corruption and published well-documented exposés. Six months before the hotel announcement, Foreign Policy ran an article titled “The Corleones of the Caspian,” which suggested that the Mammadovs had exploited Ziya’s position as Transportation Minister to make their fortunes.

The Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty investigation revealed that Baku XXI Century, the company controlled by Elton, had at least two other stakeholders. One of them was a company called zqan, an acronym for the family members of the Transportation Minister: Ziya Mammadov; Qanira, his wife; Anar, his son; and Nigar, his daughter. Anar is the official head of zqan. Another stakeholder in Baku XXI Century was the Baghlan Group, a company run by an Azerbaijani businessman who is known to be close to Ziya Mammadov.

Baku XXI Century, zqan, and Baghlan have so many overlapping interests that they often seem to operate as a single concern. According to the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty investigation, the companies all prospered largely through contracts with the Transportation Ministry. The Trump Tower Baku complex was built partly on land controlled by the ministry. A Baghlan subsidiary received a contract from the ministry to import a thousand London-style cabs to Baku. Soon afterward, ministry inspectors began preventing competing taxi services from parking in the city center or at subway stops. Another new rule required all taxi owners to pay taxes and license fees at the Bank of Azerbaijan, a private entity that at the time was owned jointly by Anar Mammadov and Baghlan.

DONALD TRUMP’S WORST DEAL

Anar’s net worth has been estimated at a billion dollars, but he is not a self-made man. According to the Associated Press, zqan was founded in 2000, when he was in his late teens. He began studying in England that year, and remained there until 2005; during that period, the company that he ostensibly ran experienced explosive growth. Trump Organization officials, as well as others familiar with the Baku project, told me that during the tower’s construction Anar was barely involved, and was often travelling abroad. (He flies on a Gulfstream G450 private jet.) An American who did business in Azerbaijan told me, “It’s common knowledge there that Ziya Mammadov controls zqan.”

One of the cables sent in 2010 by the U.S. Embassy in Baku noted that, “with so much of the nation’s oil wealth being poured into road construction,” the Mammadovs had become disproportionately powerful in Azerbaijan. Another cable suggested that Ziya controlled zqan, the country’s “largest commercial development company.” This cable described Ziya as being the object of “many allegations from Azerbaijani contacts of creative corrupt practices.”

Much of the land occupied by the Trump Tower Baku complex was once packed with houses. In 2011, residents received letters from the local government authority informing them that their homes were to be demolished to make way for a project of crucial government significance. Thirty families were evicted. One resident, Minaye Azizova, told me that the government gave her eighteen thousand dollars in compensation for a home that, by her estimation, was worth five times as much. After she discovered that her home had been condemned so that Baku XXI Century could build a luxury tower, she sued the government.

Cartoon
“Turns out the sound of the squeaky toy was coming from inside the house.”
ShareTweetBuy a cartoon
Construction of the building began in 2008. I have spoken with more than a dozen contractors who worked on it. Some of them described behavior that seemed nakedly corrupt. Frank McDonald, an Englishman who has had a long career doing construction jobs in developing countries, performed extensive work on the building’s interior. He told me that his firm was always paid in cash, and that he witnessed other contractors being paid in the same way. At the offices of Anar Mammadov’s company, he said, “they would give us a giant pile of cash,” adding, “I got a hundred and eighty thousand dollars one time, which I fit into my laptop bag, and two hundred thousand dollars another time.” Once, a colleague of his picked up a payment of two million dollars. “He needed to bring a big duffelbag,” McDonald recalled. The Azerbaijani lawyer confirmed that some contractors on the Baku tower were paid in cash.

Two people who worked on the Trump Tower Baku told me that bribes were paid. Much of the graft was routine: Azerbaijani tax officials, government inspectors, and customs officers showed up occasionally to pick up envelopes of cash.

The executive at Mace, the construction firm, told me that the Mammadovs handled payments and all interactions with the Azerbaijani government. “Were people bribed?” he said. “I don’t know. Maybe. We didn’t check.” (A spokesman for Mace said that the firm was “not involved” in any corruption.)

Pierre Baillargeon, the architect whom the Mammadovs hired to alter the tower’s original design, is a Canadian who runs a studio in London. He has often worked in parts of the world known for corruption, including Sudan and Syria, and has done several projects in Azerbaijan. In a phone interview, Baillargeon said that he knew nothing about corruption and was “just a designer.” I asked him why he thought the hotel had been built in such an inhospitable part of Baku. “Every project has detractors,” he said. When I asked him if he had seen large payments being made in cash, he hung up. (He did not respond to later calls.)

Alan Garten, the Trump Organization lawyer, did not deny that there was corruption involved in the project. “I’m not going to sit here and defend the Mammadovs,” he said. But, from a legal standpoint, he argued, the Trump Organization was blameless. In his opinion, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act doesn’t apply to the Baku deal, even if corruption occurred. “We didn’t own it,” he said of the hotel. “We had no equity. We didn’t control the project. The flow of funds is in the wrong direction.” He added, “We did not pay any money to anyone. Therefore, it could not be a violation of the F.C.P.A.”

“No, that’s just wrong,” Jessica Tillipman, an assistant dean at George Washington University Law School, who specializes in the F.C.P.A., said. “You can’t go into business deals in Azerbaijan assuming that you are immune from the F.C.P.A.” She added, “Nor can you escape liability by looking the other way. The entire Baku deal is a giant red flag—the direct involvement of foreign government officials and their relatives in Azerbaijan with ties to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Corruption warning signs are rarely more obvious.”

Tillipman explained that the F.C.P.A. defines corruption as “the payment of money or anything of value” to a foreign official. Last year, JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay two hundred and sixty-four million dollars to settle charges that it had violated the F.C.P.A.; the bank had given jobs and internships to relatives and friends of government officials in Asia. Tillipman, along with several other F.C.P.A. experts, told me that the Trump Organization had clearly provided things of value in the Baku deal: its famous brand, its command of the luxury market, its extensive technical advice.

In May, 2012, the month the Baku deal was finalized, the F.C.P.A. was evidently on Donald Trump’s mind. In a phone-in appearance on CNBC, he expressed frustration with the law. “Every other country goes into these places and they do what they have to do,” he said. “It’s a horrible law and it should be changed.” If American companies refused to give bribes, he said, “you’ll do business nowhere.” He continued, “There is one answer—go to your room, close the door, go to sleep, and don’t do any deals, because that’s the only way. The only way you’re going to do it is the other way.”

It is unclear how the Trump Administration plans to approach F.C.P.A. enforcement. Jay Clayton, Trump’s choice to run the Securities and Exchange Commission, co-authored a paper in 2011 arguing that American companies were at a severe disadvantage because of the U.S. government’s “singular strategy of zealous enforcement.” But Jeff Sessions, the new Attorney General, told the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearings that he will continue to uphold the F.C.P.A.

After 9/11, prosecuting financial corruption acquired new political importance. The C.I.A. and other intelligence services came to believe that preventing illicit money from flowing through the global financial system was a necessary tactic in preventing future terrorist attacks, and the U.S. led an international effort to enforce financial transparency. Banks and other financial entities were required to vet their clients aggressively and to report any suspicious activity. Prosecutions for money laundering, bribery, and other financial crimes rose significantly. In 2000, the government launched three prosecutions under the F.C.P.A. Last year, it initiated fifty-four.

Investigators of financial fraud like to say that government corruption, money laundering, and other illicit behavior often form a “nexus” with even more troubling activity, such as financing terrorism and developing weapons of mass destruction. This appears to be true in the Baku deal. As the Mammadovs were preparing to build the tower, the family patriarch, Ziya, was cementing his financial relationship with the Darvishis, the Iranian family with ties to the country’s Revolutionary Guard.

At least three Darvishis—the brothers Habil, Kamal, and Keyumars—appear to be associates of the Guard. In Farsi press accounts, Habil, who runs the Tehran Metro Company, is referred to as a sardar, a term for a senior officer in the Revolutionary Guard. A cable sent on March 6, 2009, from the U.S. Embassy in Baku described Kamal as having formerly run “an alleged Revolutionary Guard-controlled business in Iran.” The company, called Nasr, developed and acquired instruments, guidance systems, and specialty metals needed to build ballistic missiles. In 2007, Nasr was sanctioned by the U.S. for its role in Iran’s effort to develop nuclear missiles.

The cable said that Kamal and Keyumars were frequent visitors to Azerbaijan; Kamal had recently established “a close business relationship/friendship” with Ziya Mammadov, and, with Mammadov’s assistance, had been awarded “at least eight major road construction and rehabilitation contracts, including contracts for construction of the Baku-Iranian Astara highway.” (Keyumars also seems to have been involved in these deals.) The cable added, “We assume Mammedov [sic] is a silent partner in these contracts.”

Cartoon
“Does the No. 1 stop here and does that go to Penn Station and can I get a train there to Philadelphia and then how do I get to Walnut Street?”
JANUARY 10, 2011
ShareTweetBuy a cartoon
Iran has two militaries. The Iranian Army is a conventional force whose mission is to protect the country. The Revolutionary Guard is an independent force of about a hundred and fifty thousand soldiers, whose duty is to protect the country’s Islamic system and to preserve the power of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Revolutionary Guard has its own air force and navy, and it has a unit known as the Quds Force, which the United States has identified as a major supporter of Hezbollah and other international terrorist groups. The Guard has developed a shadow economy within Iran to fund its activities and expand its power. It controls all official border crossings and runs several unofficial ports, solely for its own use. The Revolutionary Guard smuggles into the country everything from consumer goods blocked by sanctions to drugs. It also owns seemingly legitimate companies in construction, energy, telecommunications, auto manufacturing, and banking. According to the United States Institute of Peace, the Guard is linked “to dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of companies that appear to be private in nature but are run by [Revolutionary Guard] veterans.”

J. Matthew McInnis, an Iran expert at the American Enterprise Institute, who served as a consultant to Michael Flynn when Flynn was the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told me that owners of Revolutionary Guard-related businesses often become rich. But there is a catch: from time to time, they should expect to be asked to serve the needs of the Guard. “When the Revolutionary Guard says, ‘We need to move some illicit stuff,’ or ‘We need new parts for our missiles,’ they reach out to these guys,” McInnis explained. “It’s a soft network that can do all sorts of things that are very hard to trace.”

Keyumars Darvishi once ran Raman, a construction firm that is owned by the Islamic Revolution Mostazafan Foundation. According to the United Nations, the foundation is a major financial arm of the Revolutionary Guard. Keyumars left Raman to run Azarpassillo, the putatively independent construction company that received multiple road contracts in Azerbaijan. According to Azarpassillo’s Web site, it was incorporated in 2008. In recent years, Keyumars has also served as the acting director of the Tehran Metro Company, filling in for his brother Habil.

Mehrzad Boroujerdi, a political scientist at Syracuse University, who studies the political, economic, and military élite of Iran, said, “It looks like Azarpassillo is a front organization for the Revolutionary Guard.” He found it inconceivable that Keyumars Darvishi, after working for years in a company controlled by the Revolutionary Guard, would quit, raise large amounts of capital on his own, and then become the head of a fully independent company that competed against Revolutionary Guard fronts for contracts. Khatam Al-Anbia, an Iranian construction giant that is controlled by the Guard and is under U.S. sanctions, has subcontracted Azarpassillo on at least two major infrastructure projects in Iran. The Tehran Metro Company is also involved in both projects. McInnis told me, “If you see a connection with Khatam Al-Anbia, you would assume the connections to the Revolutionary Guard are there. The suspicion of Azarpassillo being a front company is certainly worth investigating. It would fit a normal pattern.”

Alan Garten told me that the Trump Organization checks to see if potential Trump partners are on “watch lists and sanctions lists,” and that the company knew nothing of Ziya Mammadov’s relationship to the Darvishis until 2015, when it learned that “certain principals associated with the developer may have had some association with some problematic entities.” And yet, by that point, the U.S. Embassy cables had been online for four years. Garten insisted that the Trump Organization still has no idea if the association between the Mammadovs and the Darvishis is real, or if it’s simply an allegation “spread by the media.” I recently spoke with Allison Melia, who until 2015 was one of the C.I.A.’s lead analysts of Iran’s economy; she now works for the Crumpton Group, a strategic advisory firm whose services include conducting due diligence for companies. She told me that her team could have compiled a dossier on the Mammadovs and their connection to the Revolutionary Guard in “a couple of days.” She said that any reputable investigative firm conducting a risk assessment would have advised a U.S. company to avoid a deal with a family connected to the Revolutionary Guard.

The U.S. has imposed various sanctions on Iran since the Islamic Revolution, in 1979. In recent years, U.S. and international efforts have focussed on isolating Iran from the global financial system, in order to prevent it from funding terrorist groups and contributing to worldwide instability. In 2015, the U.N., spurred by the Obama Administration, reached an agreement with Iran, and lifted some sanctions in return for a slowdown of the country’s nuclear program. However, according to the Congressional Research Service, many sanctions against Iran remain in effect, because of the country’s “support for terrorism, its human-rights abuses, its interference in specified countries in the region, and its missile and advanced-conventional-weapons programs.” In December, 2015, the U.S. House of Representatives imposed additional sanctions on the Revolutionary Guard and its associated businesses.

American companies must insure that they are not receiving funds that originated with any sanctioned entity. Ignorance is not a defense, especially if there is ample warning that a foreign partner could have a link to such an entity. Most firms, upon hearing of even a slight chance of Iranian involvement, conduct due diligence that is much more extensive than what is typical for F.C.P.A. compliance. Erich Ferrari, an attorney who specializes in sanctions-related legal cases, said that before the Trump Organization cashed any checks it should have been certain of “the source of the funds”—“not only the bank it was remitted from but how the Mammadovs actually earned the money they paid.” He said of the Baku deal, “It takes a lot to shock a lawyer, but I’ve had very few clients do so little due diligence.”

The nexus between the Mammadovs and the Darvishis suggests both opportunism and desperation. Ziya Mammadov is sixty-four, and in recent years the family’s position in Azerbaijan has begun to weaken. President Aliyev has systematically isolated, and then fired, longtime members of the regime in order to make way for his own cronies. From 2008 to 2014, Ziya Mammadov, perhaps fearing his ejection from political office, vastly increased his personal wealth.

During the same period, mounting international sanctions made it far more difficult for Iran to sell oil abroad, receive foreign funds, and import products. International banks became increasingly reluctant to accept funds from businesses owned by the Revolutionary Guard, severely limiting its ability to support allies such as Hezbollah and the Syrian government. At a moment when Iran was struggling to find ways to send money outside the country, Keyumars Darvishi joined Azarpassillo and began making one deal after another in Azerbaijan.

Ziya Mammadov apparently had complete discretion with regard to Azarpassillo’s projects. On April 6, 2007, Anne Derse, then the U.S. Ambassador to Azerbaijan, wrote in a cable that Charles Redman, at the time a senior vice-president for the American construction firm Bechtel, had recently met with Ziya Mammadov. Redman was looking for business, and knew that Azerbaijan was planning several major new roads. Bechtel could build them, he said, at an average cost of six million dollars per kilometre. Mammadov complained to him that this was too expensive. Bechtel ended up building nothing. Instead, much of the roadwork was done by Azarpassillo—at a much higher cost. According to a 2012 report by Azerbaijan’s Center for Economic and Social Development, an independent think tank, road construction during Mammadov’s tenure was “the most expensive in the world,” costing an average of eighteen million dollars per kilometre. (Derse declined to comment; Redman did not respond to e-mails.)

Cartoon
JULY 20, 2015
ShareTweetBuy a cartoon
The available evidence strongly suggests that Ziya Mammadov conspired with an agent of the Revolutionary Guard to make overpriced deals that would enrich them both while allowing them to flout prohibitions against money laundering and to circumvent sanctions against Iran. Based on Ziya Mammadov’s past, it seems reasonable to assume that his main motive was profit. Like most Azerbaijanis, he is a secular Shiite Muslim, and he has no known ties to hard-line factions in Iran. Why did the Darvishis want to work with the Mammadovs? It might have caught their attention that the Mammadovs had their own private bank—one that had unfettered access to the global financial system.

While Azarpassillo was making deals with the Transportation Ministry, the Mammadovs were investing heavily in a series of large construction projects. Money launderers love construction projects. They attract legitimate funds from governments and private investors, and they require frequent payouts to legitimate subcontractors: cement factories, lumberyards, glass manufacturers, craftsmen. In the Trump Tower Baku project, money was going in and out of the U.S., the United Kingdom, Turkey, Romania, the United Arab Emirates, and several other countries. With such projects, it can be exceedingly difficult to detect the spread of illicit funds.

At the same time, the Mammadovs’ money was flowing through holding companies in offshore banking centers. According to leaked documents in the Panama Papers, companies controlled by the family have opened accounts in such places as the Bahamas, the British Virgin Islands, and Panama. The shell companies that list Mammadovs as beneficiaries or officers have bland names such as Trans-European Leasing Group and 1st Rate Investment, and many of them are owned by other shell companies.

In 2009, a year after Baku XXI Century began building the tower, the company opened the Baku International Bus Terminal, an enormous station that includes a shopping mall and a hotel. During this period, the Mammadov family also began building a hotel, a golf course, and a spa in the mountains north of Baku.

Meanwhile, the Mammadovs spent lavishly on themselves. Ziya built a mansion in one of the most expensive neighborhoods of Baku, and, on the beach, a villa whose walls are decorated to resemble ancient Egyptian bas-reliefs. Elton’s son, Aynar, became famous for having a collection of expensive cars, including a Ferrari, a Maserati, and a Lamborghini. Anar began using the Gulfstream G450, which typically costs forty-one million dollars, and bought a seven-bedroom home in London. He also spent millions of dollars on an effort to promote Azerbaijan in Washington, D.C., hosting galas for members of Congress and other powerful figures. A former associate of the Trump Organization told me that in 2012, on one of Anar’s trips to America, he visited Trump Tower, in New York, to meet with Donald Trump and company executives. (The Trump Organization would not confirm the visit.) Around this time, the contracts for the Baku project were issued.

Between 2004 and 2014, Mammadov family businesses spent more than half a billion dollars on large construction projects. They also poured money into a major construction-materials company, an insurance firm, and a new headquarters. It’s not clear how the Mammadovs funded such enormous investments while spending so much on themselves. They may have received loans, or secretly owned profitable businesses that supported the flurry of spending. Another explanation is that some of the investment money came from the Revolutionary Guard, through Azarpassillo.

Calls and e-mails to Azarpassillo, the Iranian Mission to the U.N., and the Azerbaijani government were not returned. Ziya and Anar Mammadov did not respond to requests for comment. Donald Trump has not addressed the Baku deal since becoming President. A Department of Justice spokesperson would not comment on the possibility of its investigating the Trump Tower Baku deal. The White House declined to comment.

If, as Alan Garten told me, the Trump Organization learned in 2015 about “the possibility” that the Mammadovs had ties to the Revolutionary Guard, it is striking that the company did not end the Baku deal until December, 2016. During this period, Garten told me, the Trump Organization never asked its Azerbaijani partners about the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, but it did send several default notices for late payments.

Throughout the Presidential campaign, Trump was in business with someone that his company knew was likely a partner with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. In a March, 2016, speech before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Trump said that his “No. 1 priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran.” Calling Iran the “biggest sponsor of terrorism around the world,” he promised, “We will work to dismantle that reach—believe me, believe me.” In the speech, Trump lamented that Iran had been allowed to develop new long-range ballistic missiles. According to Iran Watch, an organization that monitors Iran’s military capabilities, much of the technology to make the missiles was provided by Nasr, the company once run by Kamal Darvishi.

I asked Garten why the Trump Organization hadn’t cancelled the Baku contract in 2015. He said that there was “no rush,” because “the project had already stalled and was showing no signs of moving forward.” The Azerbaijani lawyer who worked on the project has seen the hotel’s interior, and told me that it is almost finished. In an interview with the magazine Baku, published in April, 2015, Ivanka Trump said that she was eager to enjoy the hotel’s “huge spa area,” and promised that the hotel would open “in June.”

Moreover, Garten said, the Trump Organization had signed binding contracts with the Mammadovs and couldn’t simply abandon its agreements. But Jessica Tillipman, the law-school assistant dean, told me, “You can’t violate sanctions just because you have a contract with someone.” According to Erich Ferrari, the lawyer who specializes in sanctions, companies that learn of a possible sanctions violation typically commission a “look-back” investigation that “reviews all payments you received, to make sure they didn’t originate with a sanctioned entity.” He added, “All the big four accounting companies do them routinely.” The Trump Organization did not commission a look-back.

The Baku deal appears to be the second time that the Trump Organization has turned a blind eye to U.S. efforts to sanction Iran. In 1998, when Donald Trump purchased the General Motors Building, in Manhattan, he inherited as a tenant Iran’s Bank Melli. The following year, the Treasury Department listed Bank Melli as an institution that was “owned or controlled” by the government of Iran and that was covered by U.S. sanctions. (The department later labelled Bank Melli one of the primary financial institutions through which Iran was funnelling money to finance terrorism and to develop weapons of mass destruction.) The Trump Organization kept Bank Melli as a tenant for four more years before terminating the lease.

Cartoon
“He says he loves me, but he still uses his first wife’s birthday as his password.”
JANUARY 30, 2012
ShareTweetBuy a cartoon
The Baku project is hardly the only instance in which the Trump Organization has been associated with a controversial deal. The Trump Taj Mahal casino, which opened in Atlantic City in 1990, was repeatedly fined for violating anti-money-laundering laws, up until its collapse, late last year. According to ProPublica, Trump projects in India, Uruguay, Georgia, Indonesia, and the Philippines have involved government officials or people with close ties to powerful political figures. A few years ago, the Trump Organization abandoned a project in Beijing after its Chinese partner became embroiled in a corruption scandal. In December, the Trump Organization withdrew from a hotel project in Rio de Janeiro after it was revealed to be part of a major bribery investigation. Ricardo Ayres, a Brazilian state legislator, told Bloomberg, “It’s curious that the Trumps didn’t seem to know that their biggest deal in Brazil was bankrolled by shady investors.” But, given the Trump Organization’s track record, it seems reasonable to ask whether one of the things it was selling to foreign partners was a willingness to ignore signs of corruption.

To this day, the Trump Organization has not provided satisfying answers to the most basic questions about the Baku deal: who owns Baku XXI Century, the company with which they signed the contracts; the origin of the funds with which Baku XXI Century paid the Trump Organization; whether the Mammadovs used their political power to benefit themselves and the Trump Organization; and whether the Mammadovs used money obtained from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard to fund the Trump Tower Baku.

At one point, Garten allowed me to review the Trump Organization’s original contract with the Mammadovs. It authorizes the company to order an independent audit of Baku XXI Century’s financial records at any time—a provision likely included to insure that the Mammadovs didn’t hide profits that were supposed to be shared with the Trump Organization. Such an audit could well have exposed illicit activity. Garten refused to say if an audit had been conducted.

In dealing with the Mammadovs, the Trump Organization seems to have taken them entirely at their word. Garten pointed me to a provision in one contract in which Anar Mammadov represented himself as the sole owner of Baku XXI Century. Given that Elton Mammadov told me that he controlled the company, and that its ownership was a “commercial secret,” what proof did the Trump Organization have that Anar’s claim was true? Garten could not say.

Garten has been the company’s chief legal officer only since January. His predecessor was Jason Greenblatt, whose name appeared on the contract I reviewed. Greenblatt was in charge of the Trump Organization’s due diligence and contracting work. He is now employed at the White House, as the President’s special representative for international negotiations. He did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

In recent months, American officials have expressed concern that Trump Administration figures might be blackmailed by foreign entities. U.S. law-enforcement investigators and congressional staffers have probed claims that Russian government officials possess compromising information about President Trump, which might be used to blackmail him. (The President maintains that there is no such information.) In January, the Department of Justice informed the White House that Michael Flynn—then the national-security adviser—was vulnerable to being blackmailed by the Russians because he had lied about having spoken with the Russian Ambassador. Flynn subsequently resigned.

In Azerbaijan, the power and the influence of the Mammadovs has declined sharply. Elton lost his seat in parliament in 2015. In February, Ziya was abruptly removed from his ministry. Anar has settled in London, an associate of his told me, and is living on a fraction of his former wealth. Meanwhile, in Iran, government officials are likely facing additional sanctions on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. If the Mammadovs or powerful Iranians have evidence that the Trump Organization broke laws, they might be tempted to exploit it.

The best way to determine if a crime was committed in the Baku deal would be a federal investigation, which could use the power of subpoena and international legal tools to obtain access to the contracts, the due diligence, internal e-mails, and financial documents. The Department of Justice routinely sends investigators to other countries to pursue possible F.C.P.A. and sanctions violations.

Senator Sherrod Brown, of Ohio, who is the ranking Democratic member of the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, said, in an e-mail, that a federal investigation was warranted: “The Trump Organization’s Baku project shows the lack of ‘extreme vetting’ Mr. Trump applied to his own business dealings in corruption-plagued regimes around the globe. . . . Congress—and the Trump Administration itself—has a duty to examine whether the President or his family is exposed to terrorist financing, sanctions, money laundering, and other imprudent associations through their business holdings and connections.”

More than a dozen lawyers with experience in F.C.P.A. prosecution expressed surprise at the Trump Organization’s seemingly lax approach to vetting its foreign partners. But, when I asked a former Trump Organization executive if the Baku deal had seemed unusual, he laughed. “No deal there seems unusual, as long as a check is attached,” he said.

The Making of a Mexican-American Dream

Despite the rhetoric and hate crimes, Mexican immigrants are poised to reframe American culture, if white people would only let them.

I met Vianney Bernabé in the buffet line at the Fiesta Inn during the Fulbright orientation in Mexico City. I was struggling to contain my toddler, who was a hydra-like mess of limbs fighting to race freely up and down the corridor. “She’s beautiful,” Vianney said, and we started chatting. Vianney’s English is quintessential California: lots of “likes” and drawn out “yeahs” and “killed its,” with big vowels and sentences that curl at their ends into question-like realizations. She is petite, with a tensile, restless energy. Her wavy black hair is often corralled in a low ponytail, and her features are chiseled: fine cheekbones, fine collarbones, delicately contoured fingers. They are the features of a violinist, which she has been since she was eight years old.
As we inched closer to the tubs of chilaquiles, she began telling me her story, and a familiar space opened between us: a territory de aquí y allá, a shared experience of having family on both sides of the border. We started talking by phone every Monday night, after she’d finished her 12-hour day of commuting and work at a security firm as part of the Fulbright Binational Business Program. Her family here in Mexico, she explained, thought of her as American: a deserter of her home country, wealthy and privileged, a gringa come to strut around with all the gringa’s carefree assumptions of power. Meanwhile, in the United States, Vianney’s parents clung to the lowest rungs of a racialized U.S. labor and power hierarchy, having worked for three decades to give their children better lives. She and her sisters had grown up in some of the most marginalized neighborhoods in Los Angeles, struggling against failing schools, crime, racism, and poverty.
Vianney had come to Mexico City expecting to embrace her past and to be embraced as a long-lost daughter. Instead, like many second-generation Mexican Americans who return to Mexico, she wound up being confronted with her Americanness. “I have never had turkey at Thanksgiving. I grew up listening to cumbia, but on the other hand my education was from the United States,” she told me. Our conversations were full of this vexed ping-ponging between Mexicanness, Americanness, and Mexican Americanness, an ineffable cultural zone inhabited by more and more Americans, including my own Mexican-American husband and daughter.

This story appears in the March/April 2017 issue of Pacific Standard. Buy a single-copy issue or subscribe to the magazine now.
For Vianney and the other seven million second-generation Hispanics in the U.S., most of them Mexican Americans, this quest to define identity and establish belonging has significant ramifications. As a Pew Research Center demographic survey put it, “The kinds of adults these young Latinos become will help shape the kind of society America becomes in the 21st century.”
What these young Latinos become will be determined not only by their own struggles and achievements, but also by the willingness of many Americans to rethink their fundamental conceptions of Americanness, to recognize the dangerous fiction of an essential, unchanging America defined solely by white culture.
Vianney was born at the UCLA Medical Center approximately 10 months after her family arrived in L.A., and was followed 15 months later by a younger sister and four years later by another. They lived in Mid-City, a neighborhood where they were surrounded by other immigrant families.
Her parents had left Mexico City when her mother was 25, her dad was 31, and her older sisters were eight and nine. Vianney’s mother had become an orphan at 17 and a mother of two by the time she was 18. She’d struggled to go to university, but was tyrannized by her father-in-law. “Why are you going to school?” he’d ask. “You have daughters, you should be cooking.” She pushed Vianney’s father to take the family to L.A., because his seasonal work wasn’t enough to support them and it was hard to imagine their daughters getting ahead in the vice-grip of Mexican machismo.
Vianney’s parents didn’t miss Mexico. “Even though we were poor in Los Angeles, they had food in the fridge,” she said. “They always had milk. That was their thing. They always had milk, and meat.”
From an early age it was clear that Vianney was unique. “My mom set me up to be the one to understand things,” she said. She has carried this weight her whole life; it hung from our conversations like an anchor. Her parents are undocumented. Her father had a drinking problem and would regularly come home and beat his wife and children. Vianney would run to her younger sisters’ room and try to shield them from the sound of his violent retching.

A younger Vianney Bernabé. (Photo: Terence Patrick)
She found her refuge in music. When she was eight she started playing violin, and by the time she was 10 her music teacher declared, “You’re going to be great one day.”
“I was the roughest of kids in the hood,” Vianney told me. I struggled to imagine this; it seemed as likely as a university professor declaring she’d once been a pro wrestler. Vianney exuded warmth, professionalism, the pluckiness of the straight-A student. But as a 13-year-old she’d rebelled hard. She drank, tried drugs. She was on the verge of flunking out of school. She was angry, and she repressed this anger as best she could until one day at school she got in a fight with another girl.
“That anger was crazy,” she said. “I felt like I could’ve done some serious damage if there wasn’t anyone there to break us up.” The police were called, and the incident likely would have ended there if Vianney hadn’t kept raging. She couldn’t stop. The anger had been uncorked.
She was sent to the police station, and then, per her parents’ acquiescence, to a detention center, where she caught a glimpse of her potential future: pregnant 15-year-olds, 16-year-olds who’d overdosed on meth. But also a sense of community, of shared differentness. It was the first time race as a social issue registered for Vianney. Why, she wondered in the courtroom, are there no white people here? Later, after the Fulbright orientation, she’d echo this sentiment to me: “I just looked around the room and thought, Why are there no people of color here?”
Thirteen was the year Vianney leaned over the edge of the abyss, and 13 marked the beginning of her rise. Her mother enrolled her at the Harmony Project, an L.A. non-profit that offers students from low-income communities musical instruments, classes, community support, and field trips to cultural events. Vianney trained at Harmony for five years. When she turned 15, at the urging of her music teacher, she applied to the elite Music Academy at the Colburn School in downtown L.A. To her shock, she was accepted with a 50 percent scholarship.
Soon she was competing at summer camps across the country. She won scholarships to the Interlochen Center for the Arts and CalArts. Meanwhile, her family struggled to pay tuition. “My mom had to make payments of $100, and the work she had to do to make those payments was crazy,” she told me. Eventually, seeing the progress she was making, the Harmony Project offered to pay the other half of Vianney’s tuition.
“For a while,” she told me, “I really wanted to be white. I wanted to dress like them, and talk like them, and look like them, and be friends with them. I remember praying to God one night, Let me be like them.”
The Music Academy at Colburn is a highly competitive pre-college program, and Vianney said most of the top musicians there were white. They came from elite private schools. She immediately understood how different her experience had been from theirs. “I was taking Honors Literature and I struggled,” she told me. “I mean, a lot. In private school they teach other stuff, because these kids walked into Honors Lit and they killed it.”
She started reading the newspaper every day, studying all the vocabulary she didn’t know. “It became like a mission,” she told me, “to just push myself, push myself, push myself.” In 2008, during her sophomore year, she read the phrase “religious crusade” and understood what it meant, and in that moment it dawned on her that her work was paying off. In 2009, the Harmony Project won a Coming Up Taller award from the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, and Vianney was selected to be part of a small delegation that would travel to Washington, D.C., for the presentation. She attended the awards ceremony — presided over by Michelle Obama — met the violinist Joshua Bell, and went sightseeing around the capital for three days.
In Washington, looking at the stately architecture and the well-dressed people walking the streets with a sense of purpose, she was struck by the gulf between the world she had grown up in and this world of privilege, wealth, and status that was largely white, and that white people seemed to own so lightly. On that trip, she decided she wanted to become a lawyer in order to help struggling minorities succeed in a society where opportunity was so unevenly distributed. She applied and was accepted to California State University–Chico, and she turned down a music scholarship at California State University–Northridge in order to go.
At Chico, Vianney was one of only two Hispanic students in her seven-story dorm. “For a while,” she told me, “I really wanted to be white. I wanted to dress like them, and talk like them, and look like them, and be friends with them. I remember praying to God one night, Let me be like them.” It took studying abroad in Santiago, Chile, for Vianney to let go of this need to fit in. It was there that she stopped trying to make herself seem white and started to embrace her Latina heritage.
For many European immigrants who came to the U.S. during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the gradual shedding of ethnicity in order to fit into Anglo-Protestant white culture was essential to success and advancement. As one mid-century Italian American put it, “We were becoming Americans by learning how to be ashamed of our parents.” For many second-generation Mexican Americans today, the opposite is true: They are becoming Americans by seeking out and embracing their ancestral cultures, learning how to be proud of their parents. Their understanding of what it means to be an American derives not so much from the symbols and institutions of mainstream white culture but from a powerful sense of in-betweenness. For them, Americanness is less a sweeping mythology to which they must submit and more a framework for seeing, thinking, blending, reinventing. Their experience grows out of distinct demographic, social, and economic conditions, and their unique take on identity has challenged longstanding ways of thinking about assimilation.

Vianney Bernabé. (Photo: Terence Patrick)
Classic assimilation theory arose out of the Chicago School of urban sociology in the 1920s. European immigration had peaked around the turn of the century, and students under the direction of sociologist Robert E. Park scattered into Chicago’s immigrant neighborhoods to study the relationships of ethnic minorities to their new society. Park and his students developed the “straight-line” model of assimilation, which describes immigrant groups as moving closer to the cultural mainstream via successive and irreversible phases until being completely absorbed. Unlike his successors, however, Park did not see assimilation as the total usurping of an ethnic minority by a dominant majority. Rather, he described “a process of interpenetration and fusion in which persons and groups acquire the memories, sentiments, and attitudes of other persons and groups and, by sharing their experience and history, are incorporated with them in a common cultural life.”
This nuanced notion of assimilation as fusion was largely neglected in favor of emphasis on the dissolution of ethnic, racial, and cultural difference into an Anglo, Protestant, white “core culture,” a theory most saliently represented in sociologist Milton Gordon’s canonical 1964 book Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion and National Origins. Gordon’s assumptions still form the basis of popular conceptions of the immigrant experience and the American dream. According to Gordon, assimilation depended first upon acculturation: the immigrant group’s willingness and ability to learn English, and to adopt white, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon, middle-class customs, after which point its members would gradually be allowed into white, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon, middle-class clubs and institutions, and would ultimately identify with and marry into the dominant group. In this theory there is no mutuality, no fusion. Assimilation is a one-way train to the cookie-cutter suburbs of Kansas, Applebee’s, Kmart, and the NFL. Gordon admitted a modest influence of ethnic minorities on cuisine, architecture, and place names, but the sizzlin’ pepper-jack quesadilla was largely the extent of the exchange. To adherents of this view, the “core culture” is stolid and unchanging; it exists beyond reach of minority groups, and cannot be influenced by their beliefs, traditions, and lifestyles. The incorporation of immigrants into white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant culture is seen as progressive, complete, and irrevocable, a gradual, generational act of erasure.
Finding the American Dream in El Salvador

For the families of El Salvadoran immigrants, staying behind in their home countries can lead to a different sort of…
psmag.com
In the 1990s, a new surge of assimilation studies challenged the straight-line paradigm. In their 2008 book Generations of Exclusion: Mexican-Americans, Assimilation, and Race, sociologists Edward Telles and Vilma Ortiz suggested that Mexican Americans were not actually assimilating into a white mainstream but rather into “the lower rungs of a racialized order.” At the University of California–Los Angeles, where Telles and Ortiz were professors, a vast 1965 survey of Mexican Americans was discovered on a dusty bookshelf, and Telles and Ortiz managed to find and follow up with the majority of respondents, generating an analysis of 35 years of assimilation. They concluded that, while second-generation Mexican Americans made significant leaps ahead of their parents in education, income, and occupational status, progress tended to stop there, and third- and fourth-generation immigrants either stagnated or sank back into poverty. Telles and Ortiz explained this halted assimilation largely in terms of education, particularly public schooling, which they called “the single greatest institutional culprit for the persistent low status of U.S.-born Mexican Americans.” Segregated schools, poor public education, and stereotyping all disproportionately affected Latinos, evidence of a pattern of racialization with which European immigrants did not have to contend.
Drawing on the results of a 15-year longitudinal study on second-generation youth conducted from 1991 to 2006, sociologists Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut expounded on the theory of “segmented assimilation,” which has superseded Gordon’s as the predominant thinking in the field. Portes and Rumbaut argued that, while a majority of second-generation immigrants would assimilate into the social, cultural, and economic mainstream, a sizable minority might instead experience “downward assimilation.” Frustrated by insurmountable racial prejudice, lacking strong parental support and community, and finding themselves marooned between their traditional family culture and that of the U.S., they could be drawn into an underclass defined by gangs, drugs, and incarceration.
Another impediment to assimilation identified by Portes and Rumbaut was the “hourglass” U.S. labor market, with competitive professional jobs that demand higher education at the top, low-wage jobs for unskilled workers at the bottom, and few opportunities in between. While early-20th-century European immigrants benefited from strong unions and well-paying, unskilled industrial jobs that allowed them entry into the middle class, many contemporary Mexican immigrants must either make a massive leap in education from one generation to the next or toil in low-wage work that barely allows for subsistence. U.S. corporations eagerly employ Mexican workers at barely a living wage, while taxpayers balk at providing these workers social services, quality schools, and even the basic security of legal status.

“These were my roommates in Chile. If you’re up on this wall, then you’ve made it in my life,” Bernabé says. She is the middle child of five and lives with her father, sister, and niece in Los Angeles, California. (Photo: Terence Patrick)
Despite all these obstacles, in 2013 the college enrollment rate for Hispanic high school graduates actually surpassed that of whites (49 percent compared to 47 percent). However, Hispanic students — lacking the financial security, cultural know-how, and familial support enjoyed by the majority of white students — are only half as likely as their white counterparts to complete their degrees. Those who do have made a phenomenal leap in status and achievement, prompting a 2014 University of California–Irvine/UCLA study to label them the most successful immigrants in America.
Vianney spent her final year at Chico seeking a way to get to Mexico, having come to the realization that going there and meeting her family was “the only way I can really accept myself, who I am, where I come from.” She became curious about the drafting of contracts like the North American Free Trade Agreement, which had devastating effects on Mexican agriculture and had sent her family and millions of other Mexicans fleeing northward. “I wanted to know how contracts are made, how business is run,” she said, and this interest led her to the Fulbright Binational Business Program. The application was daunting, and Vianney didn’t believe she was talented enough to make the cut. She mentioned her hesitancy in passing to a professor, who was appalled at her reticence and insisted she apply.
Still, she wasn’t sure. “I told my dad, ‘Dad, I don’t have any skills, no one’s going to want me,’ and my dad said, ‘Tu diles que sí sabes, tu sí sabes, a huevo sabes.’”
Any conversation about Mexican immigrants in the U.S. must acknowledge that it’s absurd to talk about many of them as immigrants at all.
Months later, when she learned she’d won the fellowship, her father was conflicted. “You know,” he said, “everyone in Mexico tries to go to the United States, and you’re the only one trying to go back.” Reluctantly, he called his brother in Mexico City and arranged for her to stay with him.
Vianney’s first memory of Mexico is of her and her uncles sitting across the table from one another in silence. She had moved into a divided house. Her aunt and cousin lived under the same roof as her uncles but avoided all contact with them, cooking in their own small kitchen, staying in their own rooms in a silent boycott of the men’s old-school machismo. Vianney tried to make peace, but found herself highly restricted: a curfew, no keys to the house, no social life. Work was a two-hour commute through dense traffic. She lasted a month before finding her own apartment in the Hipódromo neighborhood, where she felt infinitely lighter.
But still, Mexico City weighed on her. She had long, grating days of commuting and work, and her colleagues seemed to be playing mind games with her, inviting her for drinks and then spreading rumors, changing meeting times and events at the last minute, making fun of her accent. She was younger than many workers but above them in the hierarchy, and this put her in the strange position of being resented for her privilege, even though she’d spent much of her life working hard to overcome being underprivileged, and was seen by many in her own country as a pariah. To her colleagues in Mexico she was a gringa, even though she wasn’t white or blonde or rich or gallivanting across Latin America with a backpack. She grew furious when a man she was seeing was hours late to a date; she was irritated when he didn’t help her with the dishes. She asked him to get tested for HIV. She told him about The Communist Manifesto.
“Por qué? Eres tan loca, gringa!” he said to her.
Meanwhile, Vianney began seeing her parents differently.
“I’m like, Oh my god, I get it,” she told me in December, the middle of our Fulbright year. “Like the education my dad received at home. As a young kid, when I would get whipped by him, I’d cry and cry and cry to my mom like, Why did you marry him, he’s a monster. I understand that now. He grew up seeing that — violence, and drugs, and alcohol — and his father was more machista than him.”
She called her dad regularly and they found a new closeness talking about Mexico City’s culture. Whereas the typical study-abroad student might call home and gush over newly discovered exoticisms to the amazement and delight of her parents, Vianney’s dad knew it all firsthand. She’d bemoan the sorry state of street dogs and he’d say yep, yep, yep. She’d marvel at the thousands of taco stands and he’d say yep, yep, yep. She’d worry about how many Mexicans have gastritis and he’d say yep, yep, yep.
The True Cost of Mass Deportations Is Worse Than You Think

It’s American taxpayers who will bear the economic burdens of Trump’s immigration enforcement plans.
psmag.com
Small moments of understanding and connection bloomed amid the confusion and the frustration. Mexico began to grow on her, and, as it did, she grew more confident in herself. For New Year’s, she took a trip with a group of friends to Chacahua, a remote beach town in the state of Oaxaca. As she stood on the beach one night, a Mexican woman she’d just met turned to her and said, “You’re Mexican, huh.” And Vianney, having learned by then the proper response, said, “Yeah, but I’m from Los Angeles,” and the woman said, “Yeah, but you’re Mexican.” She recounted this with both pride and bemusement; it came right at the moment when she no longer needed to hear it.
Any conversation about Mexican immigrants in the U.S. must acknowledge that it’s absurd to talk about many of them as immigrants at all. The first sizable population of Mexicans was here when the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, requiring Mexico to cede more than half of its territory to the U.S. At the time, Mexicans living in what is now Arizona, California, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, Nevada, and Utah automatically became American citizens. The concept of an American culture defined by middle- and upper-class white people demands and perpetuates cultural amnesia.
“Forget the French Revolution,” wrote Richard Rodriguez. “Forget the Dutch; forget Spain, obviously; forget the Massachusetts Indians who rescued the Puritans from winter; forget the African slaves who created the wealth of a young nation.” Yet many Americans would have us believe that this culture has persisted, largely unchanged, since the earliest days of settlement, absorbing immigrants into its cloak of Anglo-Saxon whiteness like water into a sponge. Those who do not allow themselves to be absorbed have long been persecuted or exterminated, their histories expunged from the cultural record. To understand the challenges faced by second-generation Mexican Americans, it is necessary to understand the pervasiveness of this fiction of an essential national identity based on the norms of white privilege, and the prevalence of the fear of brownness and differentness that underlies it.

Bernabé rehearsing at the Inner City Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles. (Photo: Terence Patrick)
Second-generation Mexican Americans are confronted with this myth early in their lives, and must make a choice whether to believe it — to attempt to behave in accordance with mythical whiteness — or to assert a different kind of belonging based not on the willful denial of difference but the acceptance and celebration of it. According to Portes and Rumbaut, the deciding factor in whether second-generation immigrants achieve success is whether they are able to adopt U.S. cultural and social norms while simultaneously honoring and preserving the traditional cultures of their families. In academic circles, this is known as selective acculturation. It is a notion similar to multiculturalism, although more substantive in practice: The goal isn’t for Mexican culture to be a colorful sequence of parades and piñatas adorning the stolid, white, Protestant, Anglo mainstream, but rather to be a reservoir of deeper meaning for immigrants, offering them a foothold of purpose, history, and connection as they interact with often hostile and predominantly white institutions. Selective acculturation, which includes fluent bilingualism and the reinforcement of ethnic identity, could be a cushion against a nihilistic descent into the anarchic, deadly belonging of gangs or drugs.
It is not often discussed today, but the European immigrants who arrived between 1890 and 1920 also experienced a backlash, and in 1924 the U.S. passed a law stipulating that the maximum annual number of immigrants who could be admitted to the U.S. from any given country was 2 percent of the number of immigrants from that country living in the U.S. in 1890. This was strategic. In 1890, the immigration boom had not yet begun. The numbers from which the law drew its quotas were very small, and this had the effect of essentially cutting off immigration from 1924 until 1965, when the Immigration and Nationality Act finally lifted the national-origin quotas. Turn-of-the-century European immigrants therefore had roughly 40 years to assimilate without any new waves of immigrants refreshing ties to their home countries or reinforcing ethnic enclaves. The experience of Mexican immigrants today is fundamentally different.
Vianney embodies two fundamental American traditions: the dream of triumphing over adversity to achieve success, and its nightmare shadow of xenophobia, fear, and hatred.
Ever since the U.S. annexed part of Mexico, new immigrants have mixed with the second, third, fourth, fifth, and further generations. These successive waves of immigration have affected Mexican Americans in ways that don’t necessarily fit any existing models. Whereas ethnicity became an optional trait for European immigrants of the second generation and beyond, the constant arrival of new immigrants from Mexico and the brutish treatment they often receive from the U.S. media serve to strengthen Mexican-American identity, constantly reinforcing the ties of second-, third-, and fourth-generation immigrants with their ancestral cultures and also with the plight of struggling newcomers. The racist cultural positioning of anyone with certain ethnic features as Mexican and as potentially “illegal” (most notably embodied in Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070) makes shedding ethnic identity nearly impossible even for third- and fourth-generation immigrants. The nearly 2,000-mile border the U.S. shares with Mexico complicates their ability to entirely disconnect from their pasts. And rapid-fire advances in communication and transportation facilitate increasingly transnational lives.
All of these factors render it both extremely difficult and increasingly undesirable for second-generation Latinos to blend into a white cultural mainstream. The conflicted Americanness they carry with them — even when in Mexico — is not an Americanness those so accustomed to proclaiming the country’s greatness would recognize or understand. It stretches the limits of my own understanding even when I am part of a bilingual and bicultural family. It is an Americanness that sees the U.S. as a unique cultural and social space of possibility, of becoming, of fusion and malleability, and simultaneously as a space where historical violence and erasures must be constantly acknowledged and confronted. It is an Americanness based less on a mythical, traditional foundation than on constant re-invention, the twinning and fusing of seemingly opposed forces: resistance and celebration, hope and skepticism, inclusive patriotism and ethnic pride. It is an Americanness that, by valuing inquisitiveness and adaptability, has the potential to heal social rifts and transform the nation.
In Mexico, Vianney did not experience the innate sense of rightness and belonging that she’d expected to feel, the country like a key unlocking her true identity. Instead, she experienced a growing confidence in her own abilities. She had overcome a racialized and rigged economic system in the U.S., and now she was navigating her family’s culture with dignity, curiosity, and confidence. It was not easy. Her metaphors for her daily life in Mexico were often a troubled mix of jungle exploration and war: “It’s like going into a river at night,” she told me, “without really knowing how deep it is, how cold it is, but if I don’t throw myself in there and put a bulletproof vest on so people don’t shoot my ideas down, I’m never going to make it to the other side.”
She swam, in her bulletproof vest, in the dark and the cold, as she always had. She is a swimmer.

Bernabé looks at photographs of her family placed high on the walls in the Los Angeles home she’s been in since the age of 10. (Photo: Terence Patrick)
This is the difference between Vianney and me, between Vianney and most of the people I grew up with, who never even knew there was a river, much less what it meant to cross. Vianney embodies two fundamental American traditions: the dream of triumphing over adversity to achieve success, and its nightmare shadow of xenophobia, fear, and hatred.
Mexico gave Vianney what the United States could not: the ability to believe in herself. It did this not by granting her unequivocal acceptance or answering the persistent questions of belonging posed in the U.S., but by forcing her to come to terms with her ambivalence. It allowed her to acknowledge that she was American, but an American for whom Americanness did not mean unquestioning assimilation into white institutions, but solidarity with the many people excluded from these institutions. It granted her a new faith in herself in spite of the hatred and oppression. It familiarized her with in-betweenness, a state deeply and violently resisted in the U.S., where patriotism is feverish and flavorless, where you are with us or against us, where, at this moment in time, simply speaking Spanish or wearing a hijab is enough to elicit righteous white rage.
Undoubtedly the success of future generations of immigrants is dependent on education and immigration reform. It is equally dependent, however, on a shift in the way we talk about immigrants — no longer depicting them as “illegals,” as a problem to be solved, as a threatening underclass. It depends on the willingness of white Americans to break down the monolith of white cultural myths and assumptions, to be seen as well as to see. It depends on a new appreciation of straddling cultures and worlds, and an increasing awareness of the erasures and exclusions that have been as much a part of American identity as the stories every U.S. kindergartner learns in school.

Bernabé and her violin, which she has been playing since she was eight years old. (Photo: Terence Patrick)
This requires humility, and an acceptance of the fact that many privileged white Americans have inherited an Americanness that is an illusion and a scam. I think of Vianney’s mother counting money at the kitchen table, and I think of growing up in the suburbs without ever questioning whether I would go to college or how. I think of calling my dad from Lima, Peru, so that he could wire me money after I’d been robbed; of how much of an adventure it was to be alone and penniless in South America. I never earned my Americanness. I inherited it, which might be the most un-American condition of all. Vianney, and the rising class of second-generation immigrants of which she is a part, earn it, in spite of the rhetoric of hateful rejection and the practical, concrete obstacles in their way. And many are not even sure whether what they have earned — access to this society and its institutions — is really all that dreamy, especially if it is built on the systematic oppression of people like them.
By the end of her year in Mexico, Vianney’s experience of the corporate world had soured her on the idea of law school. “In that type of profession, you have to look out for you,” she told me. Instead, she wanted to teach music to minority kids, kids struggling with poverty, kids who, like her, were likely to be labeled delinquent, and abandoned. She wanted to “just give it to them real, no sugar-coating: Your chances of making it if you don’t work really hard are low.” She wanted to increase those chances.
“Growing up in Los Angeles, in the hood,” Vianney told me, “you’re not really taught to, you know, be the best.” But at the end of our year in Mexico she said to me, with real conviction, “I know that I’m good enough. I can be certain that I’m good enough. I can finally say that.”
The United States has long drawn much of its unique energy, creativity, innovation, and potential from Americans’ enduring love for somewhere else.
She returned to the United States in August of 2016, when the message being blared to Latinos was precisely the opposite: Not only were they not good enough, they were rapists, drug dealers, “bad hombres.” Vianney, with her hard-won confidence in herself, and her renewed commitment to help those left out of American progress, came home to the feverish chanting of Build the wall! Donald Trump’s victory in November — despite his losing the popular vote by a historic margin — has legitimized and strengthened a vision of the United States in which only white people belong and have ever belonged. The most popular, foundational myth of the United States as the land of freedom for the world’s oppressed has been eclipsed by the ever-present but thinly buried myth of white dominance and superiority.
How Two Philadelphia Chefs Are Pushing for Immigration Reform — Starting in the Kitchen

Husband-and-wife team Cristina Martinez and Ben Miller are moving beyond barbacoa to fight for the undocumented workers…
psmag.com
Yet as people of color and immigrants supplant whites as the majority over the next 30 years, white Americans will need to accept and embrace the fact that a fundamental part of American identity is multicultural consciousness. They will need to make peace with the notion that the United States has long drawn much of its unique energy, creativity, innovation, and potential from Americans’ enduring love for somewhere else.
To Trump and his supporters, Americanness is not an aspirational quality, earned through hard work and a respect for diversity and equality, but an innate characteristic residing in a glorified past and possessed only by whites. Their America does not include people like Vianney. Nor does it include my daughter, who proudly says things like “I want otra manzana please!” and who is equally at home amid the fireworks and brass bands of a Mexican street fair and the hushed propriety of a U.S. lecture hall.
This most recent triumph of virulent nativist populism could end up squandering the potential of a generation that has a unique capacity to heal social rifts, fight poverty, and transform America, a capacity born not from a simplified knee-jerk patriotism for pledges and flags, but from the creative friction between cultures, identities, and feelings of belonging. At a moment when Hispanics make up nearly one-fifth of the U.S. population, second-generation Latino immigrants should be a source of great hope for our nation. Their in-betweenness can be a bridge to a more creative and compassionate and just world. I pray that white Americans don’t burn it down.