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 19^th 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-19^th 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 14^th 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 19^th or 20^th 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 19^th and early 20^th 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 19^th and early 20^th 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 19^th and early 20^th 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."

ILLEGITIMUM NON CARBORUNDUM

For most of my life, I have had a love-hate relationship with Harvard.

In 1974, I applied for admission to Harvard College and was rejected.

In 1978, I applied for admission to Harvard Law School and, after being put on a waiting list, was rejected there as well. 

It was a simple case of unrequited love . . .

Times two.

In the spring of that year, months before Harvard's rejection, my application to Yale Law School was accepted. 

Truth be told, Yale was always my first choice. Its classes were smaller and, in my opinion at least, it was more focused on the contribution its trained lawyers could later make to public service and public policy.

But still . . .

I was that rare Yale Law student Harvard Law had turned down.

I could flatter myself knowing Yale's smaller entering class made admission there more difficult than at its Cambridge competitor. And when I shared the good news of Yale's "yes" with a priest who had taught me in high school and had become one of my best friends, I heartily endorsed his less than religious  response . . .

Which was . . .

 "F--k Harvard". 

In truth, of course, none of this mattered.  

Harvard, long accustomed to the jealousy expressed by those it turned down, went happily about its business of being America's premier institution of higher learning. Because the list of those of us rejected exceeded by orders of magnitude the fortunate few accepted, that exercise called for an enormous amount of fortitude. Especially on the football field, where those rooting against the Crimson inevitably included many more than those who were simply for the other team. In that respect, Harvard resembled the New York Yankees. 

They were in a league of their own . . .

Despised by the multitudes not on their team. 

Harvard had an answer for all this. The answer was in the first three words of its fight song. And, being Harvard, the answer was in Latin.

Illegitimum Non Carborundum. 

Or . . . 

Don't let the bastards get you down.

Over the years, most of us haters, myself included, have made peace with our adolescent disappointment. Admiration has replaced jealousy.  We tip our hats to Harvard's renowned excellence, its Nobel laureates, its cutting-edge science, the medical miracles it regularly creates with that science, the advanced technologies and new businesses it births, the worldwide leaders it produces. When we see Harvard on a resume, we want that excellence to be part of our own enterprises, public or private. 

If our kids are there . . .

We brag about it.

We regularly travel to (some of us even live in) Boston. The city itself has become a technological hub thanks in large part to its institutions of higher learning, none more central to that status than Harvard. We don't avoid the Coop or the Yard, and among Democrats, we don't keep score. Clinton's — neither Bill’s nor Hillary’s— Yale Law degree does not trump Obama's from Harvard. Or vice versa.  We love them all. We revel in the fact that all were smart enough to get their respective degree.  We like that they are smart. Even very smart.  Even smarter than many of us. We reject the anti-elitism some have for the Ivy League, an anti-elitism many of its GOP graduates hypocritically enflame just to get votes.

Some adolescents, however, have not moved on. 

One of them is now the President of the United States.

Most of the indefensible illegality, trauma, tragedy and stupidity of Trump’s second term was unfortunately predictable. He either told us explicitly what he’d do, as in the case of his mindless tariffs (against allies and enemies alike) and disgusting assaults on immigrants and birthright citizenship, or pretty clearly hinted at what he’d do, as in the case of his J6 pardons and Munich-like sacrifice of Ukraine. Even his Cabinet of suck-ups, loyalty oaths, shakedowns, self-dealing and contempt for the rule of law, aided and abetted by  the Supreme Court's asinine criminal immunity decision and a supine GOP, were more than foreseeable, each in its own way the natural result of a pathological dishonesty and insecure narcissism that demands fealty and praise above all else, ignores reality and makes accountability and personal responsibility impossible.

But . . . 

Could any of us have foreseen the utter idiocy of his now months-long effort to destroy one of American pluralism’s crown jewels  — its universities in general and Harvard in particular?

As with most things Trump, the current attack on Harvard has its genesis in a lie.  And like most of Trump's lies, this one rests upon a patina of fact, distorted into an exaggerated and demonstrably false reality, which is then endlessly repeated, idiotically defended and never amended, any and all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

The lie is that Harvard is a bastion of anti-semitism.

In a May 23 "guest essay" in The New York Times, Harvard Professor (and one of its foremost critics) Dr. Steven Pinker observed that "alleged antisemitism" is "the most painful indictment of Harvard" to date. 

He explained that this anti-semitism is "not the old money WASP snobbery of Oliver Barrett III", but rather "a spillover of anti-Zionist zealotry." In the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, he noted, it took the form of "anti-Israeli protests that . . . disrupted classes, ceremonies and everyday campus life", "gratuitously injected pro-Palestinian activism into courses or university programming", and "many Jewish students . . . being ostracized or demonized by their peers." 

Dr. Pinker conceded this  was a "genuine" problem" that had to be "considered with a modicum of discernment." It was, however, by no means evidence that Harvard itself had become " a bastion of rampant anti-Jew hatred". The false and -- given the obvious facts on the ground -- stupid statement by 34 students holding Israel "entirely responsible" for Hamas's massacre had itself been met with an open letter of rebuttal signed by 400 Harvard faculty members, and last September a new group, Harvard Faculty for Israel, was formed specifically designed to support Israeli students on campus.  450 Harvard faculty immediately joined.

Pinker himself is Jewish and noted, "for what it's worth", that in his two decades at Harvard, he had "experienced no anti-semitism . . . nor [had] other prominent Jewish faculty members." Though "a few" of Harvard's more than "400 initiatives, centers and programs, which are distinct from its academic departments", had been captured by "activists lecturers", the university itself "offers more than 60 courses with Jewish themes" and on its own decided to exercise "greater professorial and decanal oversight over those distinct offerings", long before Trump's current assault

Similarly, on issues like "viewpoint diversity", he explained, Harvard is "far from a 'radical left institution'". The "majority of faculty . . . locate themselves to the right of 'very liberal', and they include dozens of prominent conservatives." And for all the focus on so-called "woke" courses on subjects like "heteronormativity, intersectionality, systemic racism and late-stage capitalism", those offerings "make-up at most 3% of the 5,000 courses in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences . . . and 6% of its larger General Education Courses".  

All of which was also true long before Trump decided to threaten and destroy the entire school.

Threaten and destroy, however, is exactly what he has done.

Only January 29, Trump issued an executive order highlighting discrimination against Jewish students at American universities and colleges in the wake of the October 7, 2023 attack. A week later, DOJ created a multi-agency task force to combat anti-semitism and three weeks after that (on February 29) it sent Harvard's president a letter claiming it was "aware of allegations that" Harvard "may have failed to protect Jewish students and faculty members from unlawful discrimination." On March 10, in yet another letter, the federal Department of Education's (DOE) Office of Civil Rights informed the university that it was being investigated for violation of the Civil Rights Act "relating to anti-semitic harassment and discrimination". 

The March 10 letter expressly linked DOE's investigation to Harvard's receipt of "enormous public investments funded by US taxpayers" and on March 31, the General Services Administration (GSA) told Harvard it was reviewing all federal contracts and grants, including those with  "greater than $8.7 billion of multi-year grant commitments", and "reserves the right to terminate for convenience any contracts it has with [Harvard] at any time during the period of performance." Two days later, it sent Harvard an email and an attached letter from lawyers at DOE and the Department of Health and Human Service (DHS) setting forth "the immediate next steps . . . necessary for Harvard University's continued financial relationship with the United States government."  In this letter, and apparently for the first time, it added demands that, in addition to preventing anti-semitism and punishing those who had discriminated against Jews, Harvard "cease all [admission and hiring] preferences based on race, color , or national origin," and move to "shutter" DEI programs and improve "viewpoint diversity". 

On April 11, GSA, along with DOE and DHS's attorneys, sent Harvard yet another letter.

This letter was a bombshell.

It literally demanded that Harvard agree to turn over the formation and content of its curriculum; its admission practices (including admission practices regarding international students) ; the hiring, firing and supervision of its faculty; and the enforcement of its student disciplinary processes to the federal government. The turnover was to take the form of certified commitments by the university to generic reforms supervised by monitors acceptable to the government and then subject to federal audits to insure compliance.  

For example, on so-called "viewpoint diversity" it required that Harvard "commission an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith, to audit the student body, faculty, staff and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse. This audit shall begin no later than the summer of 2025 and shall proceed on a department-by-department, field-by-field, or teaching-unit-by-teaching-unit basis as appropriate." Any "department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty . . . who will provide viewpoint diversity; every teaching unit found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by admitting a critical mass of students who will provide viewpoint diversity."  

Among others, the letter also required that Harvard "reform its recruitment, screening, and admissions of international students to prevent admitting students hostile to American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence" and that it "report to federal authorities . . . any foreign students, including those on visas and with green cards, who commit a conduct violation." 

On April 14, Harvard rejected the government's demands. 

In a letter doing so, it noted that the government had "disregard[ed]" the policy and programmatic changes Harvard had implemented "over the past 15 months" to "address bias", "promote ideological diversity and civil discourse", "combat hate" and "impose meaningful discipline for those who violate university policies". Instead, it explained, the government's demands "contra[vene] the First Amendment, invade university freedoms long recognized by the Supreme Court" and "circumvent Harvard's statutory rights by requiring unsupported and disruptive remedies for alleged harms that the government has not proven through mandatory processes established by Congress and required by law."  

"No less objectionable," it continued, " is the condition  . . . that Harvard accede to these terms or risk the loss of billions of dollars in federal funding critical to vital research and innovation that has saved and improved lives and allowed Harvard to play a central role in making our country's scientific, medical and other research communities the standard-bearers for the world."

It concluded: "The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish is constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be overtaken by the federal government."

Since the exchange of these letters, the Trump Administration has followed through on its threats to freeze, cut or end federal funding for Harvard and otherwise cripple the institution's financial foundation. 

On April 14, mere hours after Harvard rejected its April 11 demands, Trump froze $2.2 billion in multi-year grants to Harvard and $60 million in multi-year contracts. 

On April 15, Trump floated the idea of Harvard losing its tax-exempt status and shortly thereafter the IRS began planning to do so. 

On April 16, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) threatened to revoke Harvard's certification to participate in the Student and Exchange Visa Program (SEVP). 

On April 21, Harvard sued the Trump administration, claiming Trump's funding threats violate the First Amendment and are also "arbitrary and capricious". Two days later, it  asked the Court to fast track its challenge, explaining that the freeze threatened critical research and "chilled Harvard's exercise of its First Amendment rights." Five days after that, the Court set July 21 as the date for oral argument.

On May 2, Trump repeated his threat to revoke Harvard's tax-exempt status.

On May 5, the administration announced it was cutting off all new federal research grants to Harvard.

On May 13, the government's Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism froze an additional $450 million.

On May 15, the Department of Energy issued a notice terminating $89 million in funding from its Office of Science and Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.

On May 22, DHS made good on its April 16 threat and in fact revoked Harvard's certification to participate in the Student and Exchange Visa Program (SEVP). This effectively knee-capped Harvard's ability to admit foreign students, the vast majority of whom pay the full cost of their education and thus help subsidize grants and aid to domestic students.  27% of Harvard's entire student body are foreign nationals.  The majority of them are in the university's graduate programs. 40% of Harvard's Medical School students, for example, are foreigners.  

On May 23, Harvard sued to stop DHS from revoking the SEVP certification. Within four hours of the suit being filed, the court issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) doing so.

On May 27, two senior Trump officials claimed GSA was about to cancel another $100 million in contracts to Harvard.

On June 2, Harvard filed a motion for summary judgment in the funding case. In its motion papers, it provided evidence that cuts to grants from the Defense Department were made on orders from the Secretary of Defense over official objections that Harvard was the "top performing team" and the cuts posed "grave and immediate harm to national security."

On June 4, Trump issued a proclamation suspending international visas for new students at Harvard.

On June 5, Harvard sued to block that proclamation and later that day the federal court in Boston issued a temporary restraining order doing so.

In his "guest essay" deriding what he labelled as Trump's "Harvard Derangement Syndrome", Dr. Pinker explained that "Contrary to a widespread misunderstanding, a federal grant is not alms to the university, nor may the executive branch dangle it to force grantees to  do whatever it wants. It is a fee for a service -- namely, a research project that the government decides (after fierce competitive review) would benefit the country. The grant pays for the people and equipment needed to carry out the research, which would  not be done otherwise."

The impact of Trump's assault, therefore, cannot be gainsaid.  

46% of  Harvard's budget for its School of Public Health comes from federal funding for research and federal reimbursements. According to the school's Dean, that "funding has enabled breakthrough research on deadly diseases from cancer to Alzheimer's to stroke to HIV" and its "faculty's research into environmental pollutants, occupational hazards, and the relationship between diet and health have shaped policies and programs that protect the health of every American -- and so many others around the world." 

The cuts also killed research at the Sinclair Labs at Harvard Medical School. That lab studies aging and treatment for Alzheimer's, multiple sclerosis, cancer, infertility and immune disorders. Its founder, David Sinclair, explained that "The loss of funding not only halts ongoing experiments that cannot simply be restarted, but also jeopardizes the contributions of international scholars who are integral to the lab's operation and the wealth of the US."

"For all its foibles," as Dr. Pinker explained, "Harvard (together with other universities) has made the world a better place, significantly so. Fifty-two faculty members have won Nobel prizes, and more than 5,800 patents are held by Harvard. Its researchers invented baking powder, the first organ transplant, the programmable computer, the defibrillator, the syphilis test and oral rehydration . . . They developed the theory of nuclear stability that has saved the world from Armageddon . . . Ongoing research . . .  includes methane-tracking satellites, robotic catheters, next-generation batteries and wearable robotics for stroke victims."

"Federal grants," he continued, "are supporting research in metastasis, tumor suppression, radiation and chemotherapy in children, multi-drug resistant infections, pandemic prevention, dementia, anesthesia, toxin reduction in firefighting and the military, the physiological effects of spaceflight and battlefield wounded care."

Other than write this piece, protest and oppose Trump's idiocy, there is little I can do.

But the little I can do includes this:

Each year I send modest donations to my high school, college and law school.

This year I will send all that money to Harvard.

As Dr. Pinker puts it: 

"To cripple the institutions that acquire and transmit knowledge is a tragic blunder and a crime against future generations."

Today, Harvard is the front-line in the fight against that crime. 

So I stand with it.

And you should too.

Illegitimum Non Carborundum.