GIVE US YOUR HUDDLED MASSES YEARNING TO BE M.V.P.

Tonight, the Milwaukee Bucks will begin playing the Toronto Raptors for the right to represent the Eastern Conference in the league title series.  This year, the representative of the eastern conference will come from a fresh-water coast.

The first star among the Bucks is formerly stateless person Giannis Antetokounmpo, and his story provokes The Ringer's Danny Chau to contemplate currently stateless people attempting to make a go of things in Milwaukee.

I find myself thinking about how Giannis has become a much-needed symbol for people in the city who have no idea he exists. Giannis is on a fast track to becoming one of the most popular athletes in the world, but he was once an undocumented child living on the periphery of Greek society. He was a stateless person who made a home in Milwaukee. I want to meet the refugees in the city trying to do the same.

These refugees don't necessarily have a jump shot, nor do they in some cases understand what "Fear the Deer" is about.

The Rohingya, an ethnic and religious minority of Myanmar with roots in the country since the eighth century, have for decades faced one of the starkest refugee crises in the world. They are a stateless people who, by law, receive no recognition from Myanmar as citizens, and face constant persecution that has veered toward genocide. Wisconsin’s number of incoming refugees has plummeted, consistent with nationwide trends under the Donald Trump administration, but refugees from Myanmar have accounted for a significant percentage of total arrivals over the past five years. At somewhere more than 2,000, Milwaukee probably has the largest Rohingya refugee population in the U.S.

The tensions between Buddhists and Moslems, or Hindu and Moslems, in southeastern Asia, only come to my attention when something like the recent church bombings in former Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) make the news. They are very real. Read the article for more.

Rohingya refugees might be able to find co-religionists elsewhere in Milwaukee.

I spend my night at Damascus Gate, the city’s first and only Syrian restaurant, for an iftar buffet dinner. Upon entrance, patrons walk past a makeshift bridge leading to a large wooden post. It’s as close to the actual gate of Damascus as you’ll get in Milwaukee. “I didn’t name” the restaurant, says owner Ahmad Nasef. “The refugees named it. They say, ‘When you open that door, to be the gate to Syria. The peaceful gate to Syria.’”

Down the center of the restaurant, just past the gate, is a long table lined with chafing dishes of kabab hindi and stuffed grape leaves, enormous pans of maqlooba with chicken, and aluminum trays of fried kibbeh and spinach pies—all prepared by two Syrian refugees in the kitchen, both of whom had fasted in observance of Ramadan.

“They did not expect the reaction from the American people, because they’re still scared,” Nasef says. “They’ve been scared for like five years in refugee camps. When they came here and found the support from everybody—the customers that came, the love that they’ve shown them—this is priceless.”

I've called attention previously to Milwaukee's Polonia, and prior to that people in Europe and America alike referred to Milwaukee as a German Athens.  Mr Chau's story also calls attention to the importance of people in the United States buying into the aspirations of the refugees, and helping the refugees buy into the country.

[Rohingya center co-director Andrew] Trumbull, himself, is carrying on a family legacy. He is the first cousin (many times removed) of Jonathan Trumbull, a governor of Connecticut before the Revolutionary War, and the first governor to oppose British rule. His third-great-grandfather was Lyman Trumbull, an Illinois senator who coauthored the 13th Amendment, the country’s first civil rights act.

“I think that’s one of the biggest driving factors in my life: What it means to be a citizen,” Trumbull says. “And it might seem strange for other Americans to see this white guy cofounding an organization that supports a Muslim group. You know, typically you’d see birds of a feather in some context. I don’t know if it’s weird or not, but I guess for me personally, the message is: It’s about the equality. It’s about supporting everybody here. When I think about the United States, and what the United States stands for, I’m proud to represent that in the best way that I know how. And it’s in a very similar way that my family has done since before this country became the country it is today.”

Conceived in Liberty, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, and compatible with all creeds, whether the Catholicism of Poland, or the Islam of the Levant or of Southeast Asia.  And willing to cheer for Mr Antetokounmpo and his colleagues, even though he seeks nothing more than a green card for the duration of his basketball career.