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upworthy

Alexis Ohanian

This post, written for Reddit on Jan. 30, 2017, was intended to be an open letter to encourage other American Redditors to share their own or their family's immigration stories. Within nine hours, it had a record score of over 90,000 points and over 25,000 comments. Many of these stories were far more eloquent and moving than my own. You can read them here.

After two weeks abroad, I was looking forward to returning to the U.S., but as I got off the plane at LAX on Sunday, I wasn't sure what country I was coming back to.

President Trump’s recent executive order is not only potentially unconstitutional, but deeply un-American. We are a nation of immigrants, after all. In the tech world, we often talk about a startup’s "unfair advantage" that allows it to beat competitors. Welcoming immigrants and refugees has been our country's unfair advantage, and coming from an immigrant family has been mine as an entrepreneur.

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