The half-Syrian Steve Jobs, seriously?

The nation-state being a sturdy imaginary creation, we can't help but think of Steve Jobs, now that there's been a regime change in Syria. Lest we forget, Jobs' biological father Abdulfattah Jandali came from a wealthy family in Homs. At the University of Wisconsin, he met Joanne Schieble, an American of Swiss-German descent, and the rest is biology. If Jandali and Schieble had moved to post-independence Syria - it freed itself from French rule in 1946, the year the couple got married - would the individual who went on to become Steve Jobs after being born in 1955 in San Francisco, and adopted by Paul Jobs (of German descent) and Clara Hagopian (of Armenian descent), be the Steve Jobs we all know?

Syria in the 1950s went through a series of political upheavals that clearly never stopped. While British street artist Banksy famously created a spray mural in Calais - the French town that became a symbol of Europe's migration crisis in 2015 - depicting Jobs as a Syrian refugee, the truth is Jandali was as much a 'refugee' as Frederick Trump, the incoming US president's grandfather who moved from Germany to the US. But Jobs' half-Syrian roots tells us two things: in the nature vs nurture debate, nurture wins. And that we should all strive to move to a place where we attain our potential. Patriotism can be a balm only if we don't succeed.