“Why does anyone leave anywhere?” is the compelling title of the first chapter in Ali Velshi’s new book, “Small Acts of Courage: A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy.” The award-winning MSNBC host shares his family's immigration story, which spans from India to South Africa, Kenya, Canada and the U.S., and digs into why so many people around the world decide to pick up and leave their homelands.

As the son of a Palestinian immigrant myself, and especially in contemporary America, where the right so often attacks immigrants with false claims, I connected deeply with what Velshi's family endured. As he explained during our "Salon Talks" conversation, although immigrants come from many different places and their stories are all different, they've come to America for the same reason: the prospect of a better life for themselves and their families.

Velshi, who is particularly known for his background in economic reporting, made clear that our nation still needs immigration, contrary to the stereotypes of conservatives. “Economically, immigrants are an imperative in America," he said, largely because of the "negative birth rate" among native-born U.S. citizens. But Velshi cautioned that America is “developing into this anti-immigrant society,” with the MAGA movement's evident focus on preserving white supremacy taking priority over the needs of economic growth.

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Speaking of the former and perhaps future president, Velshi and I share a concern that too many Americans truly don’t believe that we could lose our democratic republic if Donald Trump returns to the White House. Velshi had recently returned from a reporting trip in the Middle East and said people he spoke with there would love to live in a democracy that offered a greater level of self-determination. In the U.S., far too many of us take this experiment for granted.

The ongoing threat from anti-democratic forces in our nation on the right has led to a kind of epiphany for Velshi, he said: “It's made me realize that the fight for democracy doesn't end. Our grandchildren will still be fighting for democracy, as well they should." Watch my "Salon Talks" conversation with Velshi on YouTube. The transcript that follows has been edited for length and clarity.

Your book resonates with me because I'm the child of an immigrant. You're an immigrant yourself, but so much of your story is about your family, why they came, what they hoped for, what their dreams were. You start out, in the first chapter, with the question of why anyone leaves anywhere. So tell me why your family left India a few generations ago?

There are a lot of things in this book, and different people read it differently, but you locked into the main theme here. It is a universal story of migration, right? Everybody leaves everywhere, historically. That's how it's generally gone. And that's not just OK, it's the way of the world.

In our moment right now, economically, it's an imperative right in America. We're on the wrong side of this whole thing because we have a negative birth rate in America, and we need immigrants. And yet we're developing into this anti-immigrant society. Now I'm telling that story from the other side.

My family have been migrants since the late 1800s. They left India because of drought and went to South Africa, which was, in theory, the promised land. Except it was this deeply racist society, and they wanted to change it for the better. They go to another country for opportunity, then they tell the government of that country, in the process of fighting against racism, that you're not doing this right and you're not treating us properly and you can do better. And these other people in South Africa are saying, "Why don't you all go home if you don't like it here?” Does that sound familiar to you?

People come to this country and they would like us to do better for them and for ourselves. And our attitude is, you're not from here, you're just taking our jobs and doing bad things. So my family gets to South Africa, they become anti-apartheid fighters, which makes them the enemy of the government. Then they leave to go to Kenya, where I was born, thinking that was a real democracy.

They got to Kenya when it was a colony. They got to see the British flag come down, the Kenyan flag go up. Can you imagine being there at the birth of democracy and being able to vote for the first time? Because they were not able to do that [in South Africa] because of the color of their skin. But that dream didn't work out for other reasons. There was an anti-immigrant, anti-Asian sentiment going through East Africa at the time. You'll remember that in Uganda they expelled all the Asians.

So finally my parents get to North America and it is the promised land, right? It's freedom. They jump in with both feet. Basically this is the story of how my family has just fought to be involved in the political and the civil process for so long. That's the moment we're all still in right now.

You and I are having discussions of the sort that my grandfather and my great-grandfather would like to have had, but in apartheid South Africa, that would have been illegal.

You touched on your family’s Indian heritage and time in Kenya. What those places have in common is they were part of the British Empire. They were colonies. My dad was born in what was then Palestine under the British mandate, so it was also colonized in a different way. How did that experience affect your family? You grew up in two former colonies, first Kenya and then Canada, which was also part of the British Empire.

Yeah, it was part of the British Empire and then the British Commonwealth. It's a former colony that didn't throw off the yoke of colonialism. So you don't have mch anti-colonial sentiment in Canada. In fact, the king is still on the money. I grew up thinking the queen was a really nice lady, which she was. But liking the royal family because you think they're nice and sweet does not take away the fact that the British Empire and colonialism was — can we swear on the show or not? — was s**t for everybody involved except the colonials, except the British. There is........

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