IMMIGRANT VOICES –
THEN AND NOW – A BRIEF COMPARATIVE (AND HISTORICAL) STUDY IN PREJUDICE AND
POSSIBILITY
(This is a lecture I gave at Mt. Aloysius College in Cresson, Pennsylvania on March 17, 2016. I have just re-read it and think it still timely. I hope you do as well. Mass deportation is, as Pope Leo XIV reminds us, immoral; even more so as hooded ICE agents and an unchecked president terrorize their targeted immigrant community and that community's supporters. As I argued in 2016, it is also un-American.)
Thank you, Tom
Foley, for that kind introduction.
And
thank you, Mt. Aloysius, for inviting me back.
And – as Cornelius
Patrick McCarthy I’d be remiss if I did not say this – Happy St. Patrick’s Day.
When I first spoke
here more than five years ago, I came away impressed with the irresistible
quality of the place – its striving students, committed faculty, and creative
administration.
But I also came
away with the undeniable fact that Mt. Aloysius is itself an immigrant
story. It was founded by a
group of Irish nuns – the Sisters of Mercy – in 1853, a mere two decades after
the order itself was established in Ireland.
And – like immigration itself – it became and remains a work in
progress.
So it is fitting
that, on St. Patrick’s Day, this oasis of education founded by Irish nuns in
the hills of western Pennsylvania should
be the setting for my thoughts on
America’s immigrant story.
Again, thanks for
having me here. As a rule, the Irish are
fond of their opinions, and even fonder of those willing to listen to them.
I want to begin
with five quotations – five voices on immigration -- and will invite you to
guess when they were uttered and -- if you are really ambitious – by whom:
The first is this
– “Why should the Palatine Boors be
suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their
Language and Manners to the exclusion of ours.
Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of
Aliens?”
Here is the second
-- “What kind of people are these new
citizens? Some are honest men seeking a
home . . . Others will join the hordes . . .
in the coal regions, hive together in hovels, live on refuse, save 90%
of their earnings and work for wages upon which no reasonable laborer could
exist.”
Here is the third
-- “They are brutal, base, cruel
cowards . . . creatures that crawl and eat dirt and poison every community they
infest.”
Here is the fourth
– “I’m surrounded. They are lovely
people, but I just don’t feel at home since the refugees came here in swarms.”
Finally, the fifth
– “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you . . . They’re sending
people that have lots of problems.
They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
I’m sure everyone
recognizes the author of the last statement.
He is the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee for President, especially
given the results two days ago, Donald Trump.
But what about the
other four?
Well, the fourth
comment was uttered by a San Diego resident in the 1980s complaining about her
Indochinese neighbors, refugee immigrants and survivors from the Vietnam War.
The third was made
by a prominent 19th century New York City lawyer and diarist -- a
lawyer described just last week as a “pillar of the city’s Protestant
elite" – and was his take on what he called “lower class Irish,” about whom he
said “England is right.”
The second is from
an editorial in 1891 in the Philadelphia
Inquirer talking about the wave of southern and eastern European immigrants
who came to the country in growing numbers after 1880.
And the first is a
statement made by none other than Benjamin Franklin.
My point in
beginning with these quotations, these voices, is this. While America has undoubtedly been a nation
of immigrants over the course of its multi-century history, it has –
unfortunately -- also been a nation of immigrant haters.
The immigration
story in this country has, historians tell us, proceeded in distinct stages --
from the pre-colonial and revolutionary period where all were immigrants or
their pretty direct descendants; to the
two great immigration “waves” – the first in the mid-19th century,
and the second between roughly 1890 and the 1920s -- that together saw 33 million people come here
in what was and remains, as one author noted, “the . . . greatest migration in
world history”; to the so-called
exclusionary period from 1924 to 1965, where both numerical and, in effect,
racial quotas were imposed limiting the pool of immigrants largely to those
from northern Europe; on up to the
restricted but non-exclusionary period from then until now, which has occasioned
an explosion of Asian and Hispanic immigration.
In all of those stages,
and across ethnic and racial groups, praise for immigration has regularly been
drowned out by prejudice against – indeed, in certain circles, hatred for -- immigrants.
In the 1840s and
1850s, that hate manifest itself in the formation and initial success of the
Know Nothing Party, a political party which wanted to stop Catholics from
voting, increase the naturalization period from five to twenty-one years to
stop immigrants from becoming citizens, and
-- when all else failed – actually kill Catholic voters on election
days.
In the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, anti-immigration hatred found
expression in the Chinese Exclusion Acts, which first limited and then
ultimately ended Asian immigration until those laws were fully rescinded in
1965. It also found expression in New York City election night attacks on
Russian Jews in the 1890s, Jews who themselves were part of the ultimately 2
million refugees from pogroms in Tsarist Russia; in the anti-Asian harassment
visited upon Korean immigrants to California in the early 1900s; in the
lynchings of Italians in the 1890s and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927;
and in the ubiquitous presence of job advertisements throughout the northeast punctuated
with the warning that “No Irish Need Apply”.
No immigrant group
was spared.
In our own day,
hatred emerges in the form of overwrought demands for walls and calls in some
circles to amend the Constitution to repeal the 14th Amendment’s
guarantee of birthright citizenship.
This last effort is a response to the existence of undocumented aliens
whose children were actually born here.
These children are now referred to by some as “anchor babies,” an
invented class of innocents whose misfortune in life was to have parents who
wanted them to live in a better place, and who – in what would decidedly be an
American first – would now be forced to pay for the legal sins of their moms
and dads.
Perhaps most
importantly, these prejudices -- as the
statements I quoted earlier show -- have
been shared by both the august and the average, by both the esteemed and the
unwashed.
In short, it did
not begin with Donald Trump.
Nevertheless, it
is my hope that it end with him.
And so my purpose
today is to advance a strategy that might help us make this so, and to emphasize
why such a strategy is particularly necessary today.
In the case of
certain subjects, and – for those in my generation – I suppose the inner
workings of an I-phone qualify as a good example, it is the true that ignorance
is bliss. That is not the case, however, when it comes to talk about
immigration in America or America’s immigrant voices. The most important thing we must do,
therefore, is lay to rest some of what I would call America’s most enduring
immigration myths.
And the first of
these is that, as a nation of immigrants, we are a “melting pot.”
We are no such
thing.
In fact, it’s a
very bad metaphor. It’s a bad metaphor because it is not factually accurate,
either as a matter of history or culture.
It implies that, at the end of the day, we are all alike, when in fact
we are all different. In implying we are
alike, moreover, it demeans diversity – and all the benefits of diversity – and
allows the world to reject calls for diversity as just another form of
political correctness.
So let’s be clear.
The immigrant
populations who peopled these shores did not melt into some androgynous American
whole.
On the one hand,
immigrants tended to stick together once they got here. They created
ethnically centered support networks to survive, prosper and aid family
members left behind. In nineteenth
century New York City, Boston and Chicago, following the two great waves of
immigration, there were distinct Irish, Italian, German, Polish and
Scandinavian neighborhoods. Each had their own churches, synagogues, meeting
halls, bars, restaurants and -- in some cases – even schools. They ate together, played together, prayed
together and lived together.
All of these
groups sent money home, either to lessen the poverty in Europe from which they
had fled or to book passage for relatives who would join them in the new world.
And English was
not the only language spoken once they got here.
Frankly, it wasn’t
even the only language spoken by the Irish after they arrived. I know that because, as a young child, I sat
beside my grandfather as he spoke to a cousin, and I could not remotely make my
way through that cousin’s Irish brogue.
Today, the same realities
can be found in cities and towns throughout this country that are now home to
Central American, Mexican, Caribbean, Chinese, South Asian (Pakistani and
Indian), Indochinese, Thai and Korean immigrants.
For a year only a
few back, my son worked in Mt. Kisco, NY for a non-profit known as Neighbor’s
Link. The organization exists to place
immigrant day laborers in itinerant jobs throughout the town and larger
area. My son was hired because he had
done all of those jobs and speaks Spanish. He was therefore able to represent all of the
immigrant day laborers looking for jobs, negotiate with the employers, and
insure the workers were paid once those jobs were done.
In working there,
he discovered that the immigrants in that town were largely Guatemalan. In fact, they were largely from one town in
Guatemala and pretty much knew each other before they had even arrived.
In each of these
‘hoods, as it were, native cultures, languages, worship services, foods and
habits are preserved, enhanced, lived and -- ultimately – shared. They aren’t lost or discarded. Before 2000, it was hard to get a Guatemalan
meal in Mt. Kisco, NY. Today, it is hard
to get a bad one there.
So, to put it
simply, the myth of the melting pot distorts reality. We are not a melting pot and never have been.
But the myth also
distorts our goals.
There is almost a
universally held belief in the United
States that assimilation is the sine qua non – the indispensable
goal -- of immigration. It’s asserted to
be what those 33 million who came here between 1820 and 1920 accomplished. They assimilated. And it is what everyone who has come here since
is claimed to have done or told he or she should do.
But what does it
mean to assimilate?
And what are all
those demanding assimilation actually looking for?
Because this is
where the myth of the melting pot does some of its greatest damage.
On the one hand,
assimilation can be taken to be the rough equivalent of learning the common
language and the common laws. These,
frankly, are not onerous demands, nor ones that immigrants resist. In fact, studies show that the overwhelming
majority want to and attempt to become proficient English speakers, and that as
a group they are more law-abiding on average than their non-immigrant
neighbors.
But let’s be
honest.
The call for
assimilation is never just about language or the law. The word itself gives
that away. The dictionary defines
assimilation as “conformity with the customs or attitudes of a group.” To “assimilate” is “to cause to
resemble.” And more often than not,
conformity – resemblance -- is what assimilationists demand.
And the absence of
it is what they vehemently object to.
So, worshiping at
the altar of assimilation, learning English morphs into no bi-lingual education
on the nutty assumption that being bi-lingual or tri-lingual is somehow
un-American in a nation whose motto – e pluribus unum (or,
out of many, one) – is in fact stated in a foreign language.
Or “swarms” of Indochinese
neighbors make a woman in California “feel” like she just isn’t “at home,” even
if they are all “lovely people.”
Or a leading
candidate for President can get away with the demonstrably false claim that Mexican
immigrants are mostly “rapists” and “drug dealers” because they are “not you.”
Or that same
candidate can get away with the equally absurd notion that it is fine to build
a wall on our southern border, thus keeping out the browns, while at the same
time categorically refusing to build one on our northern border, which would
keep out the whites.
That, unfortunately,
is what the melting pot metaphor makes possible. In demanding that we march to the promised
land of assimilation, and in asserting that this is the land to which all our
forebears marched , resemblance -- conformity
with the group – becomes the defining mark of success. Our differences are denied; in fact, they are
buried or melted away. The more
different any would be immigrant is, the less able he or she is to resemble or
conform, the less likely he or she will be able to assimilate, and the more
justified any initial exclusion or denial becomes. In the end, we all need to become white – or
mostly white -- Europeans.
Here at home.
Just like Benjamin
Franklin.
Even if we aren’t.
We need a better
way to think about this.
And I think I may have
one.
In 1991, I met
David Dinkins. He was then the Mayor of
New York City, the first – and to date only – African American Mayor of New
York City. Like all politicians, or at
least most of them, Mayor Dinkins hired speech-writers. (I say “most” because I am certain that the
one other politician I know in this room – Tom Foley – wrote his own speeches,
and for the record, I wrote mine.) In
any case, for a while, I was a Dinkins speechwriter.
In one of the
speeches I wrote for the Mayor, I mentioned the melting pot that was
America. To me at the time, this seemed
a mellifluous turn of phrase that no savy politician would ever red-ink or toss
into the waste basket.
Except that this
is exactly what Mayor Dinkins did.
David Dinkins
didn’t believe in the myth of the melting pot.
America – the
nation of immigrants -- wasn’t a melting pot to him.
It was a quilt, a mosaic. It was stitched together to be full and whole. But it was also resplendent in its multi-colored,
multi-textured pieces, each retaining its separate identity even as it became
part of that whole.
Mayor Dinkins was
right.
You can say many
things about quilts. But you can’t say
the pieces melt into each other. Because
mosaics aren’t uniform and they don’t destroy differences. They highlight them, and celebrate them, and --
sometimes -- even cry about them.
And that is the
true immigrant story here in America today.
But don’t take my
word for it. Instead, listen to some of
today’s immigrant voices.
Because it is the
story, for example, of Trong Nguyen.
Here’s what he said in 1986:
Since I came to
Chicago in 1976, I have been involved in building the Vietnamese
community. Of the 12,000 Vietnamese who
live in this city, more than half live in a fourteen-block area around the
Argyle Street business strip, between Broadway and Sheridan roads. Uptown is called the Ellis Island of Chicago.
Some thirty languages are spoken in the area.
It is also the
story and voice of The New York Times's Helene Cooper, whose mother and sister migrated with her
from war torn Liberia to Knoxville, Tennessee in April 1980. She said:
Being in Knoxville
felt like straddling two worlds. There
was my physical world with the monotony of going to school every day where no
one talked to me . . . Then there was the world in my head, the one in Liberia
[before we left.] That was the world I
cared about, the world that I missed so much . . . That world was filled with people
I knew and people who knew me. It was
filled with a deep-to-the-bones knowledge that I was somebody and I came from
somewhere, a world that . . . my ancestors had built from scratch through blood
and sweat.
And it is the
story and voice of Angela Gomez, an undocumented Mexican immigrant who became a
live-in nanny and maid for a family in Fresno, California, in the 1980s. Here is Angela’s letter to her friend,
Mariana Chavez, in June 1989:
So you want to know what I eat, . . . who I go around
drooling over, . . . who my friends are . . .[W]ell hold onto yourself, Girl,
because here comes the whole boring roll. . .
[O]ne could say that here in Fresno my life revolves
around the radio station, that’s where my best friends work, where I spend
almost all my free time.
We often go out to
eat or sometimes to drink beer (I’ve turned into a regular beer drinker, it
fascinates me above all on hot days like for example 112 or 115 F, imagine how
hot that is if 100 F is like 40 C) (It’s true now like your mom said when I was
in [Mexico], you sweat everywhere here) . . .
Since the [radio] station
is a community organization and not for
profit[,] it receives help from various foundations and organizations,
like for example the California Council of the Arts, . . . but there are others
like the church that organize like peace bodies and send necessities to
organizations .
And then she says
“all right, it isn’t precisely the church, they’re Jesuits.”
The Jesuits, it
turns out, were particularly important to Angela Gomez. In trying to get out of Fresno, she applied
to work for a Jesuit volunteer corps in Massachusetts and, needing a letter of
recommendation, asked for one from a Jesuit priest she knew in Los
Angeles. That priest, however, decided
she should work with his organization in Los Angeles. Here’s how Angela tells the rest of the
story:
Like three days
later [Father Boyle] called me [and asked] why didn’t I work for them, that
they needed a person who would take charge of directing Casa Miguel Pro [a
Catholic homeless shelter operated by the Delores Mission church in LA]. [H]e
offered me a salary . . . [a] car (I’m going . . . nuts learning to drive), [a]
house, food and, medical insurance.
Fucking right, I told him yes (it’s the best offer that I’ve had, it
means that I’m going to be able to save).
It doesn’t matter to him that I don’t have papers, on the contrary they
try to employ undocumented people. How
does that sound, Girl?
Did Angela Gomez
melt in or assimilate? Well, let’s let
her tell her story. In that same letter to
her friend Mariana, she says:
[Y]ou ask me how I
feel. You know what, I’ve noticed a
mountain of change in me, I feel more secure in myself, like being here has
helped me to know myself better, to know what I’m capable of. I’ve also learned to be more aggressive and
not to [waver] in what I actually want.
So,
did she assimilate, conform, resemble, melt?
It doesn’t sound that way to me.
It sounds like she discovered herself.
After laying to
rest the myth of the melting pot, and exposing the related flaws in the
assimilationist project, there are two more equally damaging immigration myths
that must be unearthed and discarded, particularly today.
The first is what
I call our “southern border myth” and the second is what I call the “illegality
myth”.
The southern
border myth is the myth that ignores the origin of our southern boundary, the
line that separates Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California from Mexico, and
then turns that border – or any border for that matter -- into a definition of
nation-hood. And there are at least two
things that should be said about that myth.
The first is that
there was nothing necessary about the United States’ southern border. It is not natural, and nothing makes it essential
to the definition of American nation hood.
In fact, the border is entirely artificial. It was created by an act of war – the
Mexican-American War of 1846 -- that
many at the time, including a Congressman from Illinois named Abraham
Lincoln, thought wholly illegal.
At the time the
war was declared, the United States and Mexico actually disputed the border
between Texas and Mexico, which itself was a dispute left over from Texas’s war
for independence from Mexico ten years earlier.
The Texans thought Texas stopped and Mexico began at the Rio Grande
River, and the Mexicans thought their country ended about 150 kilometers to the
north, at the Nueces River. The dispute
was actually a lot sillier than even that because the Mexicans called the
Nueces River the Rio Grande and thus actually thought their Rio Grande was the boundary they had
agreed to when they settled with the Texans.
In any case, President
Polk in 1845 dispatched troops to the disputed area. The mission of those troops – according to
Ulysses S. Grant, a future president but then a lieutenant in the army and at
the scene – was to, and these are Grant’s words, “provoke [the ] fight” that would allow Polk
to obtain a Congressional declaration of war and seize Mexican territory.
They army did so.
And then President
Polk did so.
During the war,
the United States seized all of what then constituted the Mexican Province of Santa
Fe de Nueva Mexico (that was present day Arizona, New Mexico and parts of
Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma and western Texas).
The US also seized all of the
disputed portion of Texas over which the fight initially began, and all of the Alta
California Province of Mexico (present day California, Nevada and Utah, and
other parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Arizona and New Mexico). When it was over, somewhere between 60,000 to
80,000 Mexican citizens living in these territories were turned into US
citizens.
The second thing
to be said about the “southern border myth” is that the Mexican-American War
was really rooted in that earlier war between Texas and Mexico that ultimately
led to Texas independence in 1836. That
war was effectively about slavery and was a pre-cursor to our Civil War. As more Anglo settlers came to eastern Texas
in the early 1800s, Mexico eventually decided to do two things in 1829 to stop
them. First, and to the economic
detriment of Anglo settlers from our southern states, the Mexican government
ended slavery throughout Mexico – and therefore in Texas as well, which was
then a Mexican province. And second, the Mexican government ended legal
immigration into Texas. This however,
did not stop the Anglos. They just
continued to come into Texas (that is, Mexico) illegally.
The irony of this fact
given our concerns today should not be lost on us or on today’s policy makers. For it is an indisputable fact that Americans
were illegal immigrants into Mexico long before any Mexicans illegally came to
the United States. In addition, the
border between Mexico and the United States did not define either nation. The United States was the United States
before the war, and once settled – and without moving an inch -- the largest
component of US citizens in the seized territories after the war had been
Mexican citizens mere moments before.
So much for the
sanctity of the southern border.
For, in truth,
borders do not make or create nations.
Were that the case, the wall between east and west Berlin put up by the
Communists in 1961 would have created two nations. But it didn’t and eventually it came down.
Nor will a wall
make America a nation or preserve it as one.
Because America was an idea, long before it became a juridical entity or
a defined land mass. That idea is
memorialized in the Declaration of Independence’s self-evident truths –
equality, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness -- and in the
Constitution’s command of equal protection.
Those truths and that command are universal. In other words, they apply to all people,
including immigrants, foreigners and even illegal or undocumented aliens.
Which takes us to
the next immigration myth we need to destroy – the illegality myth.
The illegality
myth is pretty simple. According to it,
the United States is besieged with undocumented aliens who have arrived or
stayed here illegally. Proponents of this
myth assert that the problem is a growing one, that is, that the number of
illegal or undocumented aliens is expanding by leaps and bounds.
Proponents also
claim that the problem at its worst imperils and at its best undermines the
whole notion of an American nation. On
this view, what Trump really means when he says “a nation without borders is
not a nation” is that a nation which cannot keep illegals out is not a nation.
Finally,
proponents of this myth maintain that these undocumented or illegal “visitors”
are literally destroying the middle class.
Again, Trump is the go-to advocate for this position. In his on-line position paper entitled
“Immigration Reform That Will Make America Great Again”, Trump asserts that
“Decades of disastrous . . . immigration policies have destroyed our
middle class . . . The influx of foreign workers holds down salaries, keeps
unemployment high, and makes it difficult for poor and working class Americans
. . . to earn a middle class wage.”
All of these
claims are false.
The first thing
that must be said is this – whatever its extent, the problem of undocumented or
illegal aliens is a relatively recent one.
In fact, it did not really become a problem until after passage of the
immigration reform act in 1965. And this
was not because the Asian and Hispanic immigrants who came thereafter were more
disposed than their 19th or 20th century predecessors to
commit crimes. Rather, it was because
the United States – for the lion’s share of its history – did not restrict
immigration in any meaningful sense. Put
differently, there weren’t illegal aliens in the United States in the 19th
and early 20th century because it wasn’t illegal for most of the
people who wanted to come here to actually do so.
During the two
great immigration waves of the 19th and early 20th
century – the period that saw record numbers of immigrants, 33 million of them
– there were no restrictions on European and western hemispheric immigrants. After the ill, the non-literate (in their own
languages), and prostitutes were excluded, it was more or less the case that
anyone who wanted to come here could do so.
During that same
period, the only categorical restrictions that did exist were restrictions excluding
(and later greatly restricting) Chinese and other Asian immigrants. These restrictions, however, were easily
enforceable and rarely violated, principally because of the long journey across
the Pacific that had to be undertaken by any potential violators.
In effect,
therefore, and to put it bluntly, in the 19th and early 20th
century, the nation’s borders were about as porous as could be during this
period.
Nor was there a
large population of illegal or undocumented immigrants during the so- called restricted
period between 1924 and 1965. On the one
hand, this was because there weren’t sustained conditions leading to
immigration from the south. And on the
other, it was because the United States regularly legalized entry for whole
classes of political refugees.
That is how
increased numbers of Hungarians arrived after the Soviet Union crushed the
Prague Revolt in 1956. And it is how
increased numbers of Cubans were allowed in after the Castro Revolution in 1959. (And the opposite, namely, the refusal to
consider them political refugees fleeing persecution, explains – tragically,
and, it must be said, completely dishonorably – why the country did not take in
many Jews fleeing Germany during World War II.)
The so-called
problem of undocumented or illegal residents, therefore, is more or less a
relatively recent one.
It is also not a
growing problem. Or an economic one. Or one that a wall will end. Or one whose so-called “solution” –
deportation – will not create millions of innocent victims.
In fact, the
opposite is the case.
Here are the
numbers that tell the real story.
First, at the end
of 2014, the last year for which we have data, there were 11.3 million
unauthorized, undocumented or illegal immigrants in the United States. This represented a decline over a period of
seven years from a peak of approximately 12.3 million undocumented immigrants
in 2007. The trend here is downward, all
the rhetoric from the right wing to the contrary notwithstanding. There are also more illegal immigrants
leaving the country now than are coming into it.
Second, since 2008
-- according to demographic experts at the old INS – there have been more
illegal immigrants who entered the country legally and then over-stayed
their visas than there have been who crossed our borders illegally in the first
place. And, regardless of when they
came, within the group of unauthorized
immigrants as a whole, as many as a
third to over forty percent came into the country legally but then overstayed
their visas. These figures are critical because
they underscore the fact that southern border control -- including the much-ballyhooed desire of some to build a wall – will not address a very large share
– perhaps as high as half -- of the
supposed problem.
Third, the group
of more than 11 million undocumented immigrants has approximately 3.8 million children
who were born in the United States and have been raised here. These children are not illegal in any sense
of that word. They are American citizens
entitled to the full protections of the US Constitution and the laws of the
states in which they live. This means
they cannot be deported and, under the laws of the states in which they live,
cannot be removed from their parents’ custody.
Fourth, and also within
the group of approximately 11 million undocumented or unauthorized immigrants, approximately
20% of them are married to either a US citizen or a lawful permanent resident.
Finally, there is
no evidence that illegal immigration has caused a decline in the wages of
American workers. As a general matter,
immigration – including immigration after 1965 -- has been a boon to American
workers; in fact, in 2007, Republican President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) reported
that “immigrants not only help fuel the Nation’s economic growth, but also have
an overall positive effect on the American economy as a whole and on the income
of native-born Americans.”
In that same
report, the CEA estimated that the annual wage gains for US workers due to
immigration alone were $30 billion.
Though only about 5% of the labor force is comprised of unauthorized
immigrants, those immigrants are part of the group responsible for these gains.
They pay taxes and consume goods and
services, and if they were legalized they’d do more of both.
Given all these
numbers, it is quite clear that the nativist, throw-them-all-out impulse
currently in vogue among certain factions of this country is both overwrought
and under-sourced. Immigration itself is
not a problem; illegal immigration – which is declining -- is neither large enough nor consequential
enough to justify the energy being spent on it; and the solution of mass
deportation will create more problems – by making victims of children and
spouses who are citizens or legal residents – than it will ever solve.
Most importantly, the fact that we remain a nation of
immigrants, far from weakening America in the decades ahead, can only make it
stronger and the world safer.
It is imperative
that we appreciate this last point
Especially today.
And it is on this
last point that I want to conclude.
The world is
getting smaller. In a growing number of
places, it is also getting a lot nastier.
Where that nastiness is most evident, the root cause is intolerance,
generally of the religious or ethnic variety.
And at its worst the outcome of that intolerance is terrorism.
The only real
solution to intolerance is diversity. It is the only real solution because only
it creates the actual evidence which renders groundless the fears which fuel
intolerance in the first place. It’s a
lot easier to despise the Muslim you don’t know on the next continent than it
is to despise the Muslim you do know who lives next door.
None of this should
be news to any of us here in the United States.
It should not be news because we have lived the experience of seeing
intolerance dissipate as that immigration mosaic has been stitched together and
diversity has done its job.
A century and a
half ago it was a lot easier to despise the Catholic in Rome you did not know than
it was to despise the Catholic next door you did know. Just as a few decades ago it was a lot easier
for a white American to despise the African American who went to a segregated
school than it was to despise the African American who sat next to him in
school.
If we continue to
welcome immigrants; if we celebrate – rather than suffocate -- the different
traditions and cultures each immigrant group brings to these shores; if we create
paths to citizenship for those caught in an artificial illegality, refusing to accept the false notion that
their work steals my job; and if we reject any litmus test that would ban from
these shores anyone based on their religion, we can extend our commitment to diversity and
create – or, really, re-create -- those
examples of tolerance the rest of the
world now so desperately needs.
In short, we can recognize
immigration as the solution it has always been, not the problem Donald Trump
claims it has now become.
And if we do that,
we can prove America is great.
Again.
Thank you very
much.
Author's Note -- In checking the factual claims in this lecture for accuracy in light of today's numbers, I discovered that not much had changed. Undocumented individuals in the US as a whole comprised roughly 3.4% of the population in 2014 and about 4% in 2025. Their total numbers were 11.3 million in 2014 and 14.8 million in 2025. As in the earlier period, 40% of the undocumented today are those who have over-stayed their visas. Also as in the earlier period, the vast majority live in households where at least one other individual is legal (e.g., a child born in America or a person with temporary or other legal status)
Despite the rhetoric of the current administration, the undocumented also continue to be more law-abiding than the American population as a whole. In addition, an April 2025 study by the Cato Institute reported that "recent peer-reviewed empirical studies have found no link between violent crime and illegal immigration, a negative relationship between the number of illegal immigrants and most types of violent crime, and lower illegal immigrant criminal conviction and arrest rates in Texas, compared to other subpopulations in Texas."
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