On MSNBC, Gold Star Parents Khizr And Ghazala Khan Share Their Immigration Story, And Love Of America
Khizr Khan: “I Just Have Such A Soft Place In My Heart Whenever I See United States Flag”
Written by Media Matters Staff
Published
From the August 1 edition of MSNBC's Hardball:
CHRIS MATTHEWS (HOST): I want to give people a sense of you and your family in coming to America as immigrants. We’ll say later on tonight, my grandmother and grandparents were immigrants and they had three sons fighting in the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Corps. Let me ask you about yours. When you first came to this country in 1980, what was it like to be -- to come in this country from Pakistan, where you grew up, and to become an American? What was that like, sir?
KHIZR KHAN: It was literally same story. We shared the same story with the rest of the immigrants, came empty-handed. We rented a $200 apartment, one bedroom apartment with the family and started the life but we were looking forward to the goodness of the country and the values, and the reception that we received where Ghazala and I lived, and she made friends.
[…]
KHAN: I just have such a soft place in my heart whenever I see United States flag. It means so much to me and I can tell you the reason, and whenever I see these ceremonies and the expressions of the people's faces, it reminds me when we first came to this country with hope and with belief that we will make it, it will get better henceforth, we are at a place where things get better. And with that hope in the ceremony, I was just beside myself that what is about to happen, I'm going to get the rights that no other country grants to its immigrants except this good nation.
MATTHEWS: Ghazala, do you remember all that?
GHAZALA KHAN: I do.
MATTHEWS: How about the Constitution? Because it's such an issue now about learning, these are requirements to become a naturalized citizen.
KHAN: Yeah. They had to ask me some questions and I had read this, at that time it's 20, 25 years ago, and I had good answers for asking people --
MATTHEWS: Do you think you're better than Trump at this, do you think? You think you know more than he does?
KHAN: Yeah. Much better, I think. I think that's why I clear it the first time and became citizen.
MATTHEWS: When you pulled out that Constitution the other night and said here, read it, basically, to Trump, did that remind you of the fact you had to learn it?
KHAN: Of course. Of course. Read it page to page. That was not the plan to pull out the Constitution.
MATTHEWS: You have it there?
KHAN: What I –
MATTHEWS: Where did you get that, by the way?
KHAN: look, look at the condition.
MATTHEWS: It’s all marked up.
KHAN: It's marked up because I read it. And this 14th amendment, equal protection of law, is my favorite part of the Bill of Rights.
MATTHEWS: It means your children get all the rights of somebody who has been here 20 generations.
KHAN: Exactly. I did not realize up until I was in the cab to the convention that I had this in my pocket. We talked, I was to say that when you read the Constitution, look for the word liberty and equal protection of law. So I'm putting my coat on and I touched this and here it is. So I said if I pull it like this, it will be this. So I had to place it in this form so when I pull it, it comes like this. We practiced.
Previously: