Abraham Hamadeh, the GOP candidate for Arizona attorney general, has said that to know him, you have to know his family.
That makes his campaign pretty confusing.
Hamadeh has defined himself as a candidate who wants to secure the Arizona-Mexico border against illegal crossings. But he is also the son of a father who was in this country illegally when Hamadeh was born.
Court records from 1996 show that it was Abraham Hamadehβs birth in Chicago, in 1991, that likely saved his father from deportation back to Syria. Hamadeh appears to be, in pejorative parlance, an βanchor babyβ whose birth allowed his parents to stay in the country, despite being here illegally, and later become American citizens.
Thatβs fine with me, but is it OK with his supporters β or with him?
Hamadeh, a graduate of the UA law school, probably wouldnβt have won the Republican primary if he werenβt endorsed by Donald Trump on June 14. Hamadeh was just one candidate among six Republicans, some quite qualified, when Trumpβs endorsement elevated him, leading him to win 34% of the Aug. 2 primary vote to second-place finisher Rodney Glassmanβs 24%.
The Donald Trump who made the difference for Hamadeh is, of course, the same Donald Trump who, when president, banned travel and refugees from Syria and pursued eliminating birthright citizenship for people like Hamadeh, the children of people in the country illegally.
This knot of seeming contradictions takes some effort to untangle. But itβs possible to pull a string here, undo a loop there and make some sense of the young candidateβs stands in the context of his personal story.
Overstays vs. border crossings
How, for example, could a man whose parents were in the country illegally when he was born demand that we βpunishβ those crossing the Mexican border today, as Hamadeh has? Would he want the same for his parents back in the day?
Part of the explanation, I suspect, is that some people think of those who overstay their visas as a different class of unauthorized resident. In fact, many times they are of a higher socioeconomic status β they were able, after all, to get a visa to enter the country.
But for decades, people who overstay their visas have also been a large proportion of the unauthorized population of the United States. In fact, in some recent years, more people have overstayed their visas in the USA than have crossed our borders illegally.
Of course, itβs not as visible when a hundred separate visitors from, say, the Philippines, stay past the terms of their six-month visas as when a hundred Venezuelans cross the Mexico border in a group.
In the case of Hamadehβs father, Jamal Hamadah (whose last name is spelled differently from his sonβs), he arrived in New York City on May 28, 1989, with permission to stay six months, till Nov. 27 that year, court documents show. Like millions of other foreign travelers, before and after him, he didnβt leave. Hamadah and his wife stayed, went into the jewelry business in Chicago and had two children who were American citizens by virtue of their birth.
The elder Hamadah was also criminally charged, then had charges dismissed, in an alarming crime: A conspiracy to fire-bomb a Chicago synagogue. I hesitate to mention that arrest, because the charges were dropped, others were convicted of the crime, and Hamadeh the candidate was three years old at the time. But those charges likely led to Hamadahβs later detention for immigration violations, as the Chicago Reader reported in a detailed 1996 story.
In May 1996, Hamadah filed a lawsuit demanding his release in part because he had two U.S. citizen children, one of them the current candidate for attorney general. He eventually won the right to stay.
Asked by the Arizona Republic about the situation, Hamadeh told the Phoenix newspaper in a statement: βmy parents proudly came to the United States LEGALLY in 1989 and were rewarded for waiting in line LEGALLY with U.S. citizenship in 2007 and 2009 by the United States Department of State.β
In truth, his parentsβ experience shows the messy reality of many familiesβ immigration cases, in which people live here in limbo and struggle to avoid deportation. Hamadehβs parents were in the same gray area that millions of people live in who cross the border illegally, or who seek asylum and wait years for a decision to be made.
Syria to America
Now, one might also expect a son of Syrian immigrants to be less solicitous of Trump, who infamously stopped the resettlement of refugees from that countryβs civil war in the United States and banned travel from the country. But of course Hamadehβs family came to the USA 28 years before that happened, in a period of relative stability in Syria, at a midpoint in the 30-year rule of Hafez al-Assad.
Hamadehβs family was not civil war refugees like more recent arrivals here. Beyond that, Syriaβs political system has long been an authoritarian one centered on the wishes of the dictator β now Bashar al-Assad, the son of the previous dictator β and his family. Thatβs not so unlike the Trump form of rule, or at least the one he aspired to.
So, even in a context of Syrian political culture, an alliance with Trump actually makes sense rather than being contradictory to recent events.
But the simplest explanation of all may simply be to ignore Hamadehβs immigrant origins and view him as an American and a Republican who has evolved with the times. Hamadeh donated $250 to Jeff Flakeβs campaign in 2012 and $1,000 in September 2017, when Flake was already hated by much of Arizonaβs GOP base as a βRINOβ β Republican In Name Only.
In 2017, Hamadeh donated in September, shortly before Flake dropped out of the race for re-election β recognizing he could not win the primary β and, crucially, after Flake had published a book that was a sharp critique of Trumpism. Hamadeh still donated generously.
Four years later, Hamadeh was a candidate himself, in an Arizona GOP that had lurched further toward Trump. It probably shouldnβt be surprising that he went where the votes were, demanding harder-line border policies and claiming the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. (It wasnβt.)
Winning Trumpβs endorsement also apparently involved a bit of trickery.
Hamadehβs campaign finance records show that on March 21, 10 days before a quarterly campaign finance reporting deadline, Hamadehβs brother Waseem loaned the campaign $1 million. As a result, Hamadehβs March 31 campaign finance report showed a cash balance of about $1.1 million on March 31.
The campaign paid that $1 million back to Waseem Hamadeh on April 4, but the return of the loan wasnβt reflected until the July 15 campaign finance reports β a month after Abraham Hamadeh had won Trumpβs endorsement. It looks like a clever maneuver, though Hamadeh has insisted it was completely innocent.
Hamadehβs origins aside, he knew where the votes were in the Republican primary and how to win Trumpβs favor.
Ironically, though, his success so far shows what new American families can achieve, even if they spend time in the country illegally, fighting deportation.
