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Congress Member Elect Yassamin Ansari Success's Story [1]

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Date: 2025-01-01

Congratulations Democratic Congress Member-Elect Yassamin Ansari!--She’s Part of the U.S’s “Salad Bowl”-- January 1, 2025

America has often been called a “melting pot” where millions of immigrants of different races, ethnicities, and religions have “melted” into the dominant white, culture, mainly composed of earlier WASP, White Anglo Saxon Protestant arrivals. People of WASP background trace their ancestors to those who originally came here from Northern Europe and the British Isles. The term “melting pot” was first popularized in a play by British author Israel Zangwill in 1908, during the high tide of the Ellis Island immigration of Southern and Eastern European immigrants to this country. This group included Italians, Greeks, and people from Europe’s Baltic and Hungarian regions as well as East European Jews, Polish, and other Slavic Catholics. In 1959, Pulitzer Prize winning author and history professor Carl Degler, who taught at Vassar College and Stanford University, argued that rather than being called a “melting pot,” America should be described as a “salad bowl” because these different cultures mixed together and retained their unique characteristics. Immigrants to America did not completely assimilate as the older “melting pot” metaphor seemed to indicate (wiki). Most Americans today, except for the bigoted xenophobic crowd, understand that these prior groups made great contributions to our country in many fields. Now, of course, far too many people, some of them descendants of the previous immigrant groups mentioned, are hostile to Hispanic, especially Mexican immigration, as well as people who have come from the Middle East, and Eastern Asia. Many of them have come like the previous groups did to seek better economic opportunity and/or to flee regimes that are persecuting them for ethnic, political, and religious reasons. Anti-immigration sentiment against the latest arrivals was, as we well know, a key reason that Demagogue Donald won the 2024 election and a major theme that he has repeatedly pushed since he first ran for office in the 2016 election. However, we have many recent immigrants and their descendants of whom we can be proud of. One of them, Yassamin Ansari, won election to the U.S. House of Representatives in AZ in November, 2024, while Demagogue Donald was attacking immigrants and carrying that state by a 5.5% margin (nytimes.com, 12/05/24). Ansari is the first Iranian American elected to public office in the Grand Canyon State. Meet Rep.-elect Ansari.

Seattle, Washington native Yassamin Ansari (32) is the daughter of parents who immigrated to the U.S. from Iran (azcentral.com, Kavaler, T., 4/04/23, Siddiqui, Daniya, 8/16/23, highschool.latimes.com). Her parents represent the American Dream. While her father Bijan studied in the U.S., the brutal Iranian theocratic regime took over and killed some of his family members. He could not return home. He worked as a civil engineer in WA State for 17 years and later earned an MBA. He taught himself finance and started his own company (yassaminansari/status). When Yassamin Ansari is sworn into office in January, 2025, she will represent the AZ 3rd Congressional District (CD). The recently reconfigured AZ 3rd CD,drawn by a five-member independent commission, includes most of southern, western, and downtown Phoenix, along with a southern portion of the city of Glendale (wiki, Cohen & Cook Political Almanac 2024). The AZ 3rd is 64% Hispanic, with most of its immigrants originating in Mexico. It has the lowest median income in the state (Cohen & Cook 2022). Politically, this is the most Democratic district in the Grand Canyon State. In 2020, Biden won here 73%-25%, or with a 48% margin (Cohen & Cook 2022). The most recent Cook PVI (Partisan Voting Index) gave the 3rd CD a “Blue” D+24 score.

In high school, Ansari organized with the Arizona Democratic Party in support of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and worked with her mother to tutor Somali refugees (Siddiqui, D., 8/16/23, highschool.latimes.com). She graduated from Stanford University with a Bachelor’s in international relations ( forbes.com/profile ). While at Stanford, Ansari interned for former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Fifield, J., azcentral.com/story , 3/05/21). After graduating college, Ansari was selected for The John Gardner Fellowship Program and worked in the office of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Kimoon (Fifield, azcentral.com, 3/05/21). She became a senior policy advisor with Ban Kimoon where she spent a year working on the Paris Agreement dealing with the environment. She later worked in the same role with Ban Kimoon’s U.N. successor, Antonio Guterres ( forbes.com/profile ). In 2016, Ansari started working towards a Master’s degree in international relations and politics at St. John’s College in Cambridge, England which she successfully earned (Thompson, C., 6/15/21, grist.org/fix/policy ). She became involved in promoting climate action, in helping to plan the Climate Action 2016 Summit, the Global Climate Action Summit, and the U.N’s first Youth Climate Summit (Wu, J., cronkitenews.azpbs.org, 3/23/23, grist.org/grist-50/2019 ).

Ansari ran in the November, 2020 election for the Phoenix 7th City Council District that had been vacated by the previous council member. As one of the top two of the five contenders, Ansari continued to the runoff election and won it on March 9, 2021. She took office as a council member on April 19, 2021 (Fifield & Taros, 2/11/21, azcentral.com, KTAR.com, 3/08/21, Estes, C., 4/19/21, kjzz.org).She was the youngest person elected to the Phoenix City Council (wiki).

While serving on the Phoenix City Council, Ansari created an Office of Heat Response and Mitigation. That office pushed planting trees, reducing pavement heat absorption, and distributing resources including water (Loewe, E., grist.org, 1/24/23, Astor, M., nytimes.com, 7/01/22). Ansari developed a plan to promote using electric vehicles. She advocated for Phoenix to purchase hydrogen fuel cell and battery electric public buses (Rivera, S., KTAR.com, 8/19/22). She attended the 2021 U.N. Climate Conference with Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, now AZ Senator-elect Ruben Gallego’s ex-wife. Ansari went to the U.N. 2022 Climate Change Conference (cronkitenews.azpbs.org, 3/23/23, Syed, Z., azcentral.com, 10/31/21, Alam, A.,1/07/22, cronkitenews.azpbs.org). She additionally served as vice-mayor of Phoenix (Ansari Biography).

Ansari announced her candidacy for AZ’s 3rd CD on April 4, 2023 and resigned from the City Council on 3/28/24 to focus on her campaign (Hahne, G., 3/18/24, kjzz.org, yourvalley.net/phoenix-independent , 4/24/23). She was running to take the open seat left when Democrat Rep. Ruben Gallego successfully ran for the U.S. Senate seat that Kyrsten Sinema declined to run for again. In the Democratic primary, her major rival was Raquel Teran (Duda, J., axios.com, 8/29/23). Ansari won the primary by just 39 votes. Ansari pushed for climate action and sustainability efforts (Wu, 3/23/23, cronkitenews.azpbs.org). She supported unions and LGBTQ rights (whitehouse.gov, 2/10/23, Estes, KJZZ, 10/21/21). She also backed temporary and affordable housing to help Phoenix’s homeless (Lum, J., fox10phoenix.com, 5/25/22). Ansari was endorsed by the pro-Israel advocacy group Democratic Majority for Israel (Kassel, M., 6/20/24, jewishinsider.com). Her primary opponent Teran was considered hostile to Israel. While in the state legislature, Teran voted against a bill to track crimes related to anti-Semitism and against a bill that would have made more of an effort to protect AZ’s Jews from being targeted for their faith (4/02/22arizonadailyindependent.com). Teran voted “NO” on a bill to protect first responders from deliberate attack and boost death benefits for those killed in the line of duty (arizonadailyindependent.com, 4/02/22). In the 2024 November general election, Ansari clobbered MAGA-endorsed Jeff Zink 70.9%-26.6%, a 44.3% margin (nytimes.com, 11/25/24).

After the Nov., 2024 election, Ansari was elected Democratic freshman class president (KTAR/cp, 11/21/24, O’Sullivan, S.). Ansari will be an up-and-coming legislator on Capitol Hill. America receives, despite what Demagogue Donald and his MAGA gang believe, the best people from many nations who want to contribute their utmost to our country. These hard-working immigrants pass that belief on to their children, including Ansari. Once again, congratulations Congress Member-Elect Yassamin Ansari!

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/1/1/2294679/-Congress-Member-Elect-Yassamin-Ansari-Success-s-Story?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web

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