‘Unskilled’ people made this country
hey’re also not people that would easily assimilate into the United States . . . fourth-, fifth-, sixth-grade educations are kind of the norm. They don’t speak English . . . . They don’t integrate well, they don’t have skills.” — John Kelly, White House chief of staff, May 11.
I’m betting the 13-year-old I’m thinking of, who arrived in 1848, wouldn’t pass muster with Kelly.
This particular young person arrived with his parents, who were desperate to start a new life. Technological change had wiped out their old jobs as weavers back home, and they landed here with little in the way of worldly wealth.
Their 13-year-old son didn’t have much schooling, had no identifiable skills, and had to enter the workforce in a menial job as soon as the family arrived in America. Coming from Scotland, he at least spoke English but, by Kelly’s standards, he wasn’t a good person to admit to the U.S.
That “undesirable,” unskilled boy was named Andrew Carnegie — a man who would go on to become, at the height of his wealth ($372 billion in today’s dollars), the fifth-richest man in human history.
Human potential is a tricky thing that’s hard to measure. Despite decades of trying to “get it right,” standardized tests still don’t accurately measure intelligence for everyone. Innumerable successful people rise to the top despite modest beginnings and without fancy degrees, thanks to a combination of native intelligence, hard work and grit — the same qualities Carnegie had.
Those qualities are just as much in supply in today’s immigrants as they were in those of yesteryear. Witness stories like that of Jan Koum. Born in Ukraine in 1976, Koum came here with his mom at age 16 in 1992.
The Koum family had it tough, relying at first on public assistance programs like food stamps to survive in the new land. Like Carnegie, Koum worked hard and persevered, going on to create the messaging platform WhatsApp, which he sold to Facebook in 2014 for $22 billion. He signed the sale agreement on the door of the office from which he’d once received public assistance.
In fact, a 2015 Harvard University study found that today’s immigrants assimilate into American society as fast as, if not faster than, previous generations did. Despite Kelly’s assertion to the contrary, most come here with adequate English skills: Only one in 10 speak English poorly or not at all. They hold down jobs at higher rates than native-born Americans and commit fewer crimes. And yes, all this is true for undocumented, not just documented, immigrants.
True, they may not all grow up to be Jan Koum or Andrew Carnegie, but they tend to be just as (if not more) likely to become contributing members of society as native-born Americans are.
Making policy based on misinformation is dangerous. Indeed, how many future Carnegies and Koums would we miss each year if we made blanket judgments that immigrants of a certain type are unskilled, and we never give them an opportunity to succeed? We’ll never know.
In December 1783, George Washington gave an address that espoused his vision for America as “open to receive not only the opulent and respectable stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions.”
Washington was not simply making a statement about American benevolence, but about his ambitions for the country. To fulfill its destiny, the U.S. would welcome people of all kinds, including those that Kelly and others now go out of their way to portray as unskilled and consequently undesirable.
None of the residents we feature at the building on the Lower East Side that serves as the centerpiece of the Tenement Museum, where I work, ever achieved the level of success of Andrew Carnegie or Jan Koum. Many arrived without much in the way of formal education or identifiable skills. Still, they built new lives for themselves, and — in the process — helped build the nation we treasure today.
Perhaps they didn’t look like much on the surface to folks like Kelly, but that’s the thing with human beings. If we start making policy based on rigid and superficial assessments, we will be the ones who lose out.