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."