Ahead of his appearance on Apple Music’s The Message, French Montana sent along a written statement distilling his responsibility as a role model. “Your situation should not determine your success,” it reads. “I’m an immigrant from Morocco who came to the US and put in the work to make success happen for me. My situation does not determine me. I made it out and now my focus is helping other immigrants get access to life-changing opportunities.” The music world knows French as a hitmaking MC, someone whose collaborations with artists like Drake, Rae Sremmurd, and The Weeknd heat up dance floors worldwide. But the man born Karim Kharbouch isn’t all that far removed from a teenaged arrival to The Bronx, New York, from his native Morocco, wanting simply to make good on what he knew as the American dream. “I remember when my aunt was getting me dressed to go to the airport, she was like, ‘You're getting dressed like you going to America.’ I was like, ‘I am,’” French tells The Message host Ebro. “It's like hitting the lottery, but when you watch it as a kid, they only show you the skyline and they show you the big buildings and the penthouses and this and that. You thinking you going to heaven, you know what I'm saying?” French says he immigrated on an I-20 visa, documentation typically reserved for international students attending college in the United States. As a child, he’d had dreams of playing college basketball, but when that didn’t work out, he took to the streets, a path that also happened to give him a perfect backstory for a career as an MC. It would all work out in the end, of course; French even received his American citizenship in 2018. But the MC never forgot his struggles and is dedicated to giving back both in The Bronx and abroad, through programs like the Karim Kharbouch Coding Fellowship and Pencils of Promise. French’s appearance on The Message comes during Arab American Heritage Month, and for his The Message playlist, French compiled songs from artists like Cheb Hasni, Saad Lamjarred, and Abdelaziz Stati, voices he remembers distinctly from before he’d ever set foot on American soil. “These songs was the soundtrack of me growing up as a kid in Morocco,” he says. “This is Moroccan heat.”