The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
America welcomes its future immigrants
My grandfather emigrated from Canada as a young man, to America, sometime around 1915. His family had fled Czarist Russia, and made their way to Canada via Istanbul, a journey fraught with intrigue and difficulty.
Once settled, Arthur went to school, learned English and graduated High School near Toronto. When it came time to make his own life, America was the logical place to go.
He came here with a suitcase, and when he retired, he had built a business that employed dozens, paid taxes, and fed the behemoth of American industry. Along the way, he bought cars, got a mortgage, educated his children and became an American citizen.
He was not alone. It is not a cliché to say America was built on immigrants, that our strength as a nation came from the diversity of peoples that came from somewhere else and embraced the ideals and responsibilities of American citizenship — including hard work and participation in our society.
When it came time to defeat Nazi Germany and fascism, it was the sons of Jews and Italians and Swedes, Irishmen and Anglos and African-Americans who fought and died to protect not only America, but democracy and freedom.
Now we have a new generation of immigrants from other parts of the world seeking the same opportunity and better lives and equally willing to work for it. If many of them are here illegally, that is a challenge we must find a way to meet.
America has largely welcomed its immigrants — not always, and not perfectly, but we have gotten stronger and better for all the many people who came here. The dynamo of economic success that was America in the last century was built and sustained on the backs of one generation or another of those same people.
Today, no less, the produce in our grocery stores, the milk from Vermont or the folded sheets at the Marriot we stay in come from the arms and sweat of immigrants who belong to America in every way but their status as citizens. If we are smart, we will find a way extend the full American dream to them, too.
And what of those who, as the poem inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty says, come to us “tempest-tossed,” fleeing the bombs and terror of war and dictatorship? Shouldn’t we extend the same “lamp beside the golden door” that sheltered others like them before?
Much has been said of “identity politics” lately, which is perhaps a backhanded way of asking that most important of questions — what does it mean to be an American citizen? Does it mean we get to exclude and shout down others or is it a responsibility to remember our roots and welcome them? Do we share in the bounty of America or withhold it?
The world is a big and scary place, and of course America must protect itself and look out for its best interests. But we also belong to a larger citizenry, one that goes beyond borders. We share a commonality of values and aspirations with the wider world and that is an “identity” we must remember, too.
My grandfather’s Jewish name was Avidje Enushevski, and in 1915 America, he was almost as “foreign” or “alien” an ethnicity as today’s Muslim refugees, and yet this country welcomed him and only good has followed that.
We must continue to saying “yes” to our destiny as the place so many want to come to, and if we do it right, we will continue our growth as a nation. Our identity comes from our ideals, not our ethnicity, and all those who have reinvented themselves and America through them.