The future of America is as bright or as dark as the future of our immigrants. The battle over the travel ban echoes our history from the founding, slicing deep into the heart of American sympathies: Are refugees and migrants coming ashore to be seen as humble "guests of the nation" or as American as anyone, just for getting through the gate? In the February 9 edition of Open Source, host Christopher Lydon talks with Persian preceptor Sheida Dayani and others about the "who we are" question, between Immigration Nation and Fortress America, traversing all sorts of social, political, and historical terrains. Dayani also reads her poem "The Ordinary Man of this Neighborhood."

A crowd of Harvard affiliates filled Ticknor lounge Monday to hear performances celebrating Middle Eastern people and cultures following President Donald Trump’s executive order that suspended immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries. Read the story in the Harvard Crimson.

The Trump administration’s executive order banning refugees and immigrants from seven majority Muslim nations from entering the United States for at least several months has stirred a hornet’s nest of concern internationally, including at Harvard. Among other actions, Harvard President Drew Faust unveiled a plan for Harvard to appoint a full-time Muslim chaplain, with a search committee to be chaired by Harvard Divinity School Professor and Committee on Middle East Studies faculty member Ousmane Kane. Read more in the Harvard Gazette.

CMES AM candidate Amir H. Mahdavi, who is also a researcher at Brandeis University's Crown Center for Middle East Studies, writes in the Washington Post that, with the recent death of Iran's former president and leading moderate Hashemi Rafsanjani, many are concerned that current President Hassan Rouhani will be overpowered by the conservative religious establishment and a controlling Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. But Mahdavi says that Rouhani may in fact emerge stronger from Rafsanjani's death.

Khaled Fahmy, Shawwaf Visiting Professor of Modern Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard, has been named one of 2016's top 100 Thought Leaders in the Arabic-speaking world by the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute (GDI), an independent think-tank in economics, society, and consumption. Since 2012, GDI has analyzed social networks to identify influential voices in the digital world. This marks the first year that GDI has analyzed the Arabic-speaking internet as well as the English-, German-, Spanish- and Chinese-speaking internet.