Who belongs in America? Zohran Mamdani’s openness, J D Vance’s fear-mongering tell the story of a divided nation

On September 15, 2001, four days after airplanes crashed into the World Trade Centre in New York City and the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, a 52-year-old Sikh man, a gas station owner, was shot dead all the way on the other side of the country in Mesa, Arizona. Balbir Singh Sodhi, who had moved from India to the US in the 1980s, is believed to be the first casualty of the post-9/11 backlash; later that day, Waqar Hasan, a Pakistani-origin convenience store owner in Dallas, Texas, was shot and killed in his store by self-proclaimed neo-Nazi Mark Anthony Stroman, while Frank Roque, the man who murdered Sodhi, fired his gun at a Lebanese clerk in another gas station and again into the home of an Afghan family, missing both times. Roque was caught the next day, but Stroman would claim two m