Child Of Immigrants Quotes

In a way, he supposed, it was inevitable for immigrants to become child versions of themselves, stripped of their verbal fluency and, with it, a layer of their competence and maturity.

As a child of immigrant parents, as a woman of color in a white society and as a woman in a patriarchal society, what is personal to me IS political.

I do not see that it is necessary for any people to prove to another that they build cathedrals or pyramids before they can be entitled to peace and safety.

Why should people in one part of the globe have developed collectivist cultures, while others went individualist? The United States is the individualism poster child for at least two reasons. First there's immigration. Currently, 12 percent of Americans are immigrants, another 12 percent are children of immigrants, and everyone else except for the 0.9 percent pure Native Americans descend from people who emigrated within the last five hundred years. And who were the immigrants? Those in the settled world who were cranks, malcontents, restless, heretical, black sheep, hyperactive, hypomanic, misanthropic, itchy, unconventional, yearning to be rich, yearning to be out of their damn boring repressive little hamlet, yearning. Couple that with the second reason - for the majority of its colonial and independent history, America has had a moving frontier luring those whose extreme prickly optimism made merely booking passage to the New World insufficiently novel - and you've got America the individualistic. Why has East Asia provided textbook examples of collectivism? The key is how culture is shaped by the way people traditionally made a living, which in turn is shaped by ecology. And in East Asia it's all about rice. Rice, which was domesticated there roughly ten thousand years ago, requires massive amounts of communal work. Not just backbreaking planting and harvesting, which are done in rotation because the entire village is needed to harvest each family's rice. The United States was not without labor-intensive agriculture historically. But rather than solving that with collectivism, it solved it withe slavery.

Inevitably, though, there will always be a significant part of the past which can neither be burnt nor banished to the soothing limbo of forgetfulness— myself. I was and still am that same ship which carried me to the new shore, the same vessel containing all the memories and dreams of the child in the brick house with the toy tea set. I am the shore I left behind as well as the home I return to every evening. The voyage cannot proceed without me.

In life, we all have a cross to bear and a unique story to tell. We just hope that someone will take the time to listen.

As it is, I guess I find "Jack and Diane" a little disgusting. As a child of immigrant professionals, I can't help but notice the wasteful frivolity of it all. Why are these kids not at home doing their homework? Why aren't they setting the table for dinner or helping out around the house? Who allows their kids to hang out in parking lots? Isn't that loitering? I wish there was a song called "Nguyen & Ari," a little ditty about a hardworking Vietnamese girl who helps her parents with the franchised Holiday Inn they run, and does homework in the lobby, and Ari, a hardworking Jewish boy who does volunteer work at his grandmother's old-age home, and they meet after school at Princeton Review. They help each other study for the SATs and different AP courses, and then, after months of studying, and mountains of flashcards, they kiss chastely upon hearing the news that they both got into their top college choices. This is a song teens need to inadvertently memorize. Now that's a song I'd request at Johnny Rockets!

There is another viewpoint that must be stated without equivocation: if Muslims want to immigrate to open and developed societies in order to better themselves, then it is they who must expect to do the adapting. We no longer allow Jews to run separate Orthodox courts in their communities, or permit Mormons to practice polygamy or racial discrimination or child marriage. That is the price of “inclusion,” and a very reasonable one.

Between 1990 and 2005, a new prison opened in the United States every ten days. Prison growth and the resulting “prison-industrial complex”—the business interests that capitalize on prison construction—made imprisonment so profitable that millions of dollars were spent lobbying state legislators to keep expanding the use of incarceration to respond to just about any problem. Incarceration became the answer to everything—health care problems like drug addiction, poverty that had led someone to write a bad check, child behavioral disorders, managing the mentally disabled poor, even immigration issues generated responses from legislators that involved sending people to prison. Never before had so much lobbying money been spent to expand America’s prison population, block sentencing reforms, create new crime categories, and sustain the fear and anger that fuel mass incarceration than during the last twenty-five years in the United States.

HOME no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark you only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well your neighbors running faster than you breath bloody in their throats the boy you went to school with who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory is holding a gun bigger than his body you only leave home when home won’t let you stay. no one leaves home unless home chases you fire under feet hot blood in your belly it’s not something you ever thought of doing until the blade burnt threats into your neck and even then you carried the anthem under your breath only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets sobbing as each mouthful of paper made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back. you have to understand, that no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land no one burns their palms under trains beneath carriages no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled means something more than journey. no one crawls under fences no one wants to be beaten pitied no one chooses refugee camps or strip searches where your body is left aching or prison, because prison is safer than a city of fire and one prison guard in the night is better than a truckload of men who look like your father no one could take it no one could stomach it no one skin would be tough enough the go home blacks refugees dirty immigrants asylum seekers sucking our country dry niggers with their hands out they smell strange savage messed up their country and now they want to mess ours up how do the words the dirty looks roll off your backs maybe because the blow is softer than a limb torn off or the words are more tender than fourteen men between your legs or the insults are easier to swallow than rubble than bone than your child body in pieces. i want to go home, but home is the mouth of a shark home is the barrel of the gun and no one would leave home unless home chased you to the shore unless home told you to quicken your legs leave your clothes behind crawl through the desert wade through the oceans drown save be hunger beg forget pride your survival is more important no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear saying- leave, run away from me now i dont know what i’ve become but i know that anywhere is safer than here

Blame or credit, does not belong to the child alone. Parents, those who raised the child, must be given equal credit, or blame. That does not change, when the child is one, twenty or ninety years old.

As it is, I guess I find “Jack & Diane” a little disgusting. As a child of immigrant professionals, I can’t help but notice the wasteful frivolity of it all. Why are these kids not home doing their homework? Why aren’t they setting the table for dinner or helping out around the house? Who allows their kids to hang out in parking lots? Isn’t that loitering?

When you were the child of immigrants, you weren't just you; your success was also your parents' your cousins', your relatives' still struggling for life in Haiti or India, wishing they were you. It was your job, your preordained celestial existence or whatever, to make the most of it.

I hope they have children who can take care of them,” I respond. What I mean to say is: I hope they have a child like me. I hope everyone has a child like me. If I reach every child of immigrants at an early age, I can make sure every child becomes me. And if they don’t, I can be everyone’s child.

He knew what his father thought: that immigration, so often presented as a heroic act, could just as easily be the opposite; that it was cowardice that led many to America; fear marked the journey, not bravery; a cockroachy desire to scuttle to where you never saw poverty, not really, never had to suffer a tug to your conscience; where you never heard the demands of servants, beggars, bankrupt relatives, and where your generosity would never be openly claimed; where by merely looking after your wife-child-dog-yard you could feel virtuous. Experience the relief of being an unknown transplant to the locals and hide the perspective granted by journey. Ohio was the first place he loved, for there at last he had been able to acquire poise --

When you name your child after a grotesque gigantic creature known for slaughtering hundreds of innocents for the sole purpose of entertainment (okay so they were illegal immigrants who entered his realm) you must have a slight idea how that would turn out.

But inside loss there can be gain, too,like the small silver spider Bela had discovered one dewy morning, curled asleep at the center of a rose.

My family is not running a marathon. We're running a relay. My parents have gotten me this far. Everything I do is to get us further. I carry their hopes along with my own.

And I thought, y’know, I mean…this is crazy. I mean, the only thing that determines what country you belong to is where you happened to be born? What is a country, anyway? It’s not, y’know, “purple mountain’s majesty” or “fruited plains,” whatever the hell that means. I mean, America isn’t a place, it’s an ideal. It could happen in the Sahara Desert and still be America. For that matter, I’m the child of immigrants. My father’s lived and worked in this country for the past three decades. And he’s somehow more or less American than some redneck who uses Osama bin Laden for toilet paper? How the hell do you measure something like that?

Luz cleared her throat. “I’ve always said, ‘Getting a foothold in a country that doesn’t want you is daunting, but determination and good manners can go a long way.’ So, be careful. Gays are outsiders too . . . just like us.” Luz smiled. “But, life in the shadows isn’t so bad.” “You don’t have a Green Card?” Zoe asked. “No. And I’m not attracted to men. But I’ll never be Mexican again. I’m a child of free enterprise, wandering through an international marketplace. I may only work in a nail salon, but at least I’m part of America’s circus of self-invention.

I was asked to talk to a roomful of undergraduates in a university in a beautiful coastal valley. I talked about place, about the way we often talk about love of place, but seldom how places love us back, of what they give us. They give us continuity, something to return to, and offer familiarity that allows some portion of our lives to remain collected and coherent. They give us an expansive scale in which our troubles are set into context, in which the largeness of the world is a balm to loss, trouble, and ugliness. And distant places give us refuge in territories where our own histories aren't so deeply entrenched and we can imagine other stories, other selves, or just drink up quiet and respite. The bigness of the world is redemption. Despair compresses you into a small space, and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground. To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest. Being able to travel in both ways matters, and sometimes the way back into the heart of the question begins by going outward and beyond. This is the expansiveness that comes literally in a landscape or that tugs you out of yourself in a story..... I told the student that they were at an age when they might begin to choose the places that would sustain them the rest of their lives, that places were much more reliable than human beings, and often much longer-lasting, and I asked each of them where they felt at home. They answered, each of them, down the rows, for an hour, the immigrants who had never stayed anywhere long or left a familiar world behind, the teenagers who'd left the home they'd spent their whole lives in for the first time, the ones who loved or missed familiar landscapes and the ones who had not yet noticed them. I found books and places before I found friends and mentors, and they gave me a lot, if not quite what a human being would. As a child, I spun outward in trouble, for in that inside-out world [of my family], everywhere but home was safe. Happily, the oaks were there, the hills, the creeks, the groves, the birds, the old dairy and horse ranches, the rock outcroppings, the open space inviting me to leap out of the personal into the embrace of the nonhuman world.

You will not find Jesus in heaven, reclining on a cloud. He isn’t in church on Sunday morning, sitting in the pews. He isn’t locked away in the Vatican or held hostage by a denominational seminary. Rather, Jesus is sitting in the Emergency Room, an uninsured, undocumented immigrant needing healing. He is behind bars, so far from his parole date he can’t think that far into the future. He is homeless, evicted from his apartment, waiting in line at the shelter for a bed and a cup of soup. He is the poor child living in government housing with lice in his hair, the stripes of abuse on his body and a growl in his stomach. He is an old forgotten woman in a roach infested apartment who no one thinks of anymore. He is a refugee in Sudan, living in squalor. He is the abused and molested child who falsely feels responsible for the evil that is perpetrated against her. He is the young woman who hates herself for the decisions she has made, decisions that have imperiled her life, but did the best she could, torn between impossible choices. Jesus is anyone without power, ability or the means to help themselves, and he beckons us to come to him; not on a do-gooding crusade, but in solidarity and embrace.

During the late 1910s and early ’20s, immigrant workers at the Ford automotive plant in Dearborn, Michigan, were given free, compulsory “Americanization” classes. In addition to English lessons, there were lectures on work habits, personal hygiene, and table manners. The first sentence they memorized was “I am a good American.

Better have an immigrant without papers, than a child without parents.

The many Asian-American success stories have forced developmental psychologists to revise their theories about proper parenting. They used to warn against the “authoritarian” style, in which parents set rigid goals and enforced strict rules without much overt concern for the child’s feelings. Parents were advised to adopt a different style, called “authoritative,” in which they still set limits but gave more autonomy and paid more attention to the child’s desires. This warmer, more nurturing style was supposed to produce well-adjusted, selfconfident children who would do better academically and socially than those from authoritarian homes. But then, as Ruth Chao and other psychologists studied Asian-American families, they noticed that many of the parents set quite strict rules and goals. These immigrants, and often their children, too, considered their style of parenting to be a form of devotion, not oppression. Chinese-American parents were determined to instill self-control by following the Confucian concepts of chiao shun, which means “to train,” and guan, which means both “to govern” and “to love.” These parents might have seemed cold and rigid by American standards, but their children were flourishing both in and out of school. The

Filth, filth, filth, from morning to night. I know they're poor but they could wash. Water is free and soap is cheap. Just look at that arm, nurse.' The nurse looked and clucked in horror. Francie stood there with the hot flamepoints of shame burning her face. The doctor was a Harvard man, interning at the neighborhood hospital. Once a week, he was obliged to put in a few hours at one of the free clinics. He was going into a smart practice in Boston when his internship was over. Adopting the phraseology of the neighborhood, he referred to his Brooklyn internship as going through Purgatory, when he wrote to his socially prominent fiancee in Boston. The nurse was as Williamsburg girl... The child of poor Polish immigrants, she had been ambitious, worked days in a sweatshop and gone to school at night. Somehow she had gotten her training... She didn't want anyone to know she had come from the slums. After the doctor's outburst, Francie stood hanging her head. She was a dirty girl. That's what the doctor meant. He was talking more quietly now asking the nurse how that kind of people could survive; that it would be a better world if they were all sterilized and couldn't breed anymore. Did that mean he wanted her to die? Would he do something to make her die because her hands and arms were dirty from the mud pies? She looked at the nurse... She thought the nurse might say something like: Maybe this little girl's mother works and didn't have time to wash her good this morning,' or, 'You know how it is, Doctor, children will play in the dirt.' But what the nurse actuallly said was, 'I know, Isn't it terrible? I sympathize with you, Doctor. There is no excuse for these people living in filth.' A person who pulls himself up from a low environment via the bootstrap route has two choices. Having risen above his environment, he can forget it; or, he can rise above it and never forget it and keep compassion and understanding in his heart for those he has left behind him in the cruel upclimb. The nurse had chosen the forgetting way. Yet, as she stood there, she knew that years later she would be haunted by the sorrow in the face of that starveling child and that she would wish bitterly that she had said a comforting word then and done something towards the saving of her immortal soul. She had the knowledge that she was small but she lacked the courage to be otherwise. When the needle jabbed, Francie never felt it. The waves of hurt started by the doctor's words were racking her body and drove out all other feeling. While the nurse was expertly tying a strip of gauze around her arm and the doctor was putting his instrument in the sterilizer and taking out a fresh needle, Francie spoke up. My brother is next. His arm is just as dirty as mine so don't be suprised. And you don't have to tell him. You told me.' They stared at this bit of humanity who had become so strangely articulate. Francie's voice went ragged with a sob. 'You don't have to tell him. Besides it won't do no godd. He's a boy and he don't care if he is dirty.'... As the door closed, she heard the doctor's suprised voice. I had no idea she'd understand what I was saying.' She heard the nurse say, 'Oh, well,' on a sighing note.

Most émigrés arrived at Ellis Island in New York, invariably confused and exhausted from an unpleasant and dangerous voyage. Health inspectors checked every immigrant, and while the inspections were not particularly rigid, people were routinely refused entry. Often it was a child, leaving the mother with a sort of Sophie’s choice—whether to go back to Europe with the rejected son or daughter or stay with her husband and other children.

Does anyone ever want to leave their home? The fresh fruit that drops from their backyard? The neighbors who wiped their snot? Does anyone ever want to believe they won't come back? To the dog that sniffs their heel, to the bed that holds the echo of their body? Is there relief in pretending it is temporary, that one day it will be safe? That I will once again wave to the kind school bus driver; that I'll hold Carline's baby before he grows, having never known me? They have no palm trees in New York City, no leaves to shade me, to brush against my cheeks like my mother's hands. There is no one over there, alive or buried, who held me as a child, who cradled me close, who fed me from their table, who wiped my knees when I fell & scraped them. Here, despite the bad & ugly, is my home. & now I wish that I could stay. Does anyone ever want to leave the place they love?

When we call someone "stranger," we "other" them. When we call someone "refugee" or "immigrant," we forget that we too were strangers in the land of Egypt. That Jesus, our Lord and God, when he was but a child, lived as a refugee too.

The effect of being violently driven from home, and that home being despoiled .... it can go on and on like sea-surf against rocks. On and on within a man or a woman, or within a child as it grows up somewhere else, never sat home, only away.

Shortly before the United States entered World War II, I received an invitation to come to the American Consulate in Vienna to pick up my immigration visa. My old parents were overjoyed because they expected that I would soon be allowed to leave Austria. I suddenly hesitated, however. The question beset me: could I really afford to leave my parents alone to face their fate, to be sent, sooner or later, to a concentration camp, or even to a so-called extermination camp? Where did my responsibility lie? Should I foster my brain child, logotherapy, by emigrating to fertile soil where I could write my books? Or should I concentrate on my duties as a real child, the child of my parents who had to do whatever he could to protect them?

When I was 10, a man who worked with my father called for him on the house phone. When I answered he said, ‘Oh, I must have the wrong number. How can a child that speaks like you have a dad that speaks with that ridiculous foreign mess?’ The mess was not that my father pronounces ‘hatred’ to sound like ‘hatriot’. Rather, that there is a whiteness that exists to be so tone-deaf it cannot make out our words, nor our lamp-fixtures, gods, nor our names –where all are as good as the dog-whistle without the Labrador.

During the late 1910s and early ’20s, immigrant workers at the Ford automotive plant in Dearborn, Michigan, were given free, compulsory “Americanization” classes. In addition to English lessons, there were lectures on work habits, personal hygiene, and table manners. The first sentence they memorized was “I am a good American.” During their graduation ceremony they gathered next to a gigantic wooden pot, which their teachers stirred with ten-foot ladles. The students walked through a door into the pot, wearing traditional costumes from their countries of origin and singing songs in their native languages. A few minutes later, the door in the pot opened, and the students walked out again, wearing suits and ties, waving American flags, and singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.

In the past, one would have been arrested for wanting to leave. Now that nobody was stopping us from emigrating, we were no longer welcome on the other side. The only thing that had changed was the color of the police uniforms. We risked being arrested not in the name of our own government but in the name of other states, those same governments who had urged us to break free. The West had spent decades criticizing the East for its closed borders, funding campaigns to demand freedom of movement, condemning the immorality of states committed to restricting the right to exit. Our exiles used to be received as heroes. Now they were treated as criminals. Perhaps freedom of movement had never really mattered. It was easy to defend it when someone else was doing the dirty work of imprisonment. But what value does the right to exit have if there is no right to enter? Were borders and walls reprehensible only when they served to keep people in, as opposed to keeping them out? The border guards, the patrol boats, the detention and repression of immigrants that were pioneered in southern Europe for the first time in those years [1990s] would become standard practice over the coming decades. The West, initially unprepared for the arrival of thousands of people wanting a different future, would soon perfect a system for excluding the most vulnerable and attracting the more skilled, all the while defending borders to "protect our way of life." And yet, those who sought to emigrate did so because they were attracted to that way of life. Far from posing a threat to the system, they were its most ardent supporters.

I've come to think that there's an age beyond which it is impossible to lift a child from the pervading marinade of an original country, pat them down with a paper napkin and then deep-fry them in another country, another language like hot oil scalding the first language away.

Why did you come to the United States?' That's the first question on the intake questionnaire for unaccompanied child migrants. The questionnaire is used in the federal immigration court in New York City where I started working as a volunteer interpreter in 2015. My task there is a simple one: I interview children, following the intake questionnaire, and then translate their stories from Spanish to English. But nothing is ever that simple. I hear words, spoken in the mouths of children, threaded in complex narratives. They are delivered with hesitance, sometimes distrust, always with fear. I have to transform them into written words, succinct sentences, and barren terms. The children's stories are always shuffled, stuttered, always shattered beyond the repair of a narrative order. The problem with trying to tell their story is that it has no beginning, no middle, and no end.

Being indebted is to be cautious, inhibited, and to never speak out of turn. It is to lead a life constrained by choices that are never your own. The man or woman who feels comfortable holding court at a dinner party will speak in long sentences, with heightened dramatic pauses, assured that no one will interject while they’re mid-thought, whereas I, who am grateful to be invited, speak quickly in clipped compressed bursts, so that I can get a word in before I’m interrupted. If the indebted Asian immigrant thinks they owe their life to America, the child thinks they owe their livelihood to their parents for their suffering. The indebted Asian American is therefore the ideal neoliberal subject. I accept that the burden of history is solely on my shoulders; that it’s up to me to earn back reparations for the losses my parents incurred, and to do so, I must, without complaint, prove myself in the workforce.

The European immigrants who emerged from the Ford Motor Company melting pot came to the United States because they hoped to assimilate into mainstream American society. The Hmong came to the United States for the same reason they had left China in the nineteenth century: because they were trying to resist assimilation.

To forbid analogies makes the Holocaust irrelevant to future generations. If an American child can identify with Anne Frank, an American child might ask what it is like for immigrant children to be separated from their parents. To forbid analogies is to forbid learning, and to forbid empathizing. That, sadly, is the point.

As a family they still flew the flight of the immigrant rocket, the upward, unbroken immigrant trajectory from slave-driven great-grandfather to self-driven grandfather to self-confident, accomplished, independent father to the highest high flier of them all, the fourth-generation child for whom America was to be heaven itself. No wonder he couldn’t shut up.

This is the real work of woman of color feminism: to resist acquiescence to fatality and guilt, to become warriors of conscience and action who resist death in all its myriad manifestations: poverty, cultural assimilation, child abuse, motherless mothering, gentrification, mental illness, welfare cuts, the prison system, racial profiling, immigrant and queer bashing, invasion and imperialism at home and at war. To fight any kind of war, Kahente Horn-Miller writes. "The Biggest single requirement is fighting spirit." I thought much of this as I read Colonize This! since this collection appears in print at a time of escalating world-wide war--In Colombia, Afghanistan, Palestine. But is there ever a time of no-war for women of color? Is there ever a time when our home (our body, our land of origin) is not subject to violent occupation, violent invasion? If I retain any image to hold the heart-intention of this book, it is found in what Horn-Miller calls the necessity of the war dance. This book is one rite of passage, one ceremony of preparedness on the road to consciousness, on the "the war path of greater empowerment.

As children, the siblings believed Saul could answer any question they wished to know. But Klara and Simon grew to dislike his answers. They disdained his routine of work and Torah study, his uniform of gabardine slacks and trench and walking hat. Now, Klara has more sympathy for him. Saul came from immigrants, and Klara suspects he lived in fear of losing the life he’d been given. She understands, too, the loneliness of parenting, which is the loneliness of memory—to know that she connects a future unknowable to her parents with a past unknowable to her child. Ruby will come to Klara with questions. What will Klara tell her, with frantic and unheard insistence? To Ruby, Klara’s past will seem like a story, Saul and Simon no more than her mother’s ghosts

Angie was a border crosser, a wetback, a worker in the immigrant sweatshop they call this city. On days like this I understand her like a woman instead of a child. Everybody thought she was a whore. She wasn’t. She tried to step across the border of who she was and who she might be. They wouldn’t let her. She didn’t believe it herself so she stepped across into a whole other country.

In just a few decades, Minnesota has gone from being approximately 99 percent German, Dutch, Finnish, Danish, and Polish to 20 percent African immigrant,7 including at least one hundred thousand Somalis.8 And that’s not counting the Somalis who have recently left the country to fight with al Qaeda and ISIS. One hundred thousand is just an estimate. We don’t know precisely how many Somalis the federal government has brought in as “refugees” because the government won’t tell us. The public can’t be trusted with the truth. Since becoming more multicultural, Minnesota has turned into a hotbed of credit card skimming, human trafficking, and smash-and-grab robberies.9 Mosques have popped up all over the state—as have child prostitutes and machete attacks. Welfare consumption in Minnesota has more than doubled on account of the newcomers—only half of whom have jobs. Those Somalis who do have jobs earn an average of $21,000 a year, compared with $46,000 for the average Minnesotan. (Consider yourself lucky, Minnesota: In Sweden, only 20 percent of Somalis have jobs.) Eighty percent of Somalis in Minnesota live at or below the poverty line. Nearly 70 percent have not graduated from high school, compared with only 8.4 percent of non-Somali Minnesotans.10

Racial tensions had long been simmering when, in 1863, Irish immigrants in Manhattan mounted one of the most violent anti-Black insurrections in American history. Angered by a law drafting them to fight in the Civil War—ostensibly to free slaves who might then take their jobs—rioters filled the streets, lynching Black people and burning down the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue as 233 children escaped out the back.

If the indebted Asian immigrant thinks they owe their life to America, the child thinks they owe their livelihood to their parents for their suffering. The indebted Asian American is therefore the ideal neoliberal subject. I accept that the burden of history is solely on my shoulders; that it’s up to me to earn back reparations for the losses my parents incurred, and to do so, I must, without complaint, prove myself in the workforce.

As Karl Rossmann, a poor boy of sixteen who had been packed off to America by his parents because a servant girl had seduced him and got herself with child by him, stood on the liner slowly entering the harbour of New York, a sudden burst of sunshine seemed to illumine the Statue of Liberty, so that he saw it in a new light, although he had sighted it long before. The arm with the sword rose up as if newly stretched aloft, and round the figure blew the free winds of heaven.

ROBERT IGER. Succeeded Eisner as Disney CEO in 2005. JONATHAN “JONY” IVE. Chief designer at Apple, became Jobs’s partner and confidant. ABDULFATTAH “JOHN” JANDALI. Syrian-born graduate student in Wisconsin who became biological father of Jobs and Mona Simpson, later a food and beverage manager at the Boomtown casino near Reno. CLARA HAGOPIAN JOBS. Daughter of Armenian immigrants, married Paul Jobs in 1946; they adopted Steve soon after his birth in 1955. ERIN JOBS. Middle child of Laurene Powell and

Incarceration became the answer to everything—health care problems like drug addiction, poverty that had led someone to write a bad check, child behavioral disorders, managing the mentally disabled poor, even immigration issues generated responses from legislators that involved sending people to prison. Never before had so much lobbying money been spent to expand America’s prison population, block sentencing reforms, create new crime categories, and sustain the fear and anger that fuel mass incarceration than during the last twenty-five years in the United States. When

It is now July 2015, the midpoint of a summer that feels like no other in Supreme’s memory. Two weeks earlier, a white supremacist had gunned down nine Black worshippers at a historic church in Charleston. The country seems ripe for another civil war, with a cohort of white Americans defending their Confederate flags while Black activists mount a movement that has enshrined Eric Garner’s name. In Texas public schools, new social studies textbooks have minimized the role of slavery in the Civil War, while a geography book depicts slaves as “workers” who came by way of “immigration” from Africa.

In the case of a blindingly false allegation of rape against Duke lacrosse players, reporters pursued details about the accused men like starved bloodhounds. We were told the men’s grades, their classes, their professors’ impressions of them, the value of their parents’ homes, their private e-mails, their every encounter with the police—and on and on.8 But a child rapist named “Salvador Aleman Cruz” needs a Spanish translator in court and flees to Mexico after raping at least five little girls—and both the government and media say, Oh yeah, we don’t know his immigration status. Why do you ask?

Getting good grades and being accepted to a respectable four-year college topped my priority list. My focus on school was a side effect of battling stage-four ICGC, also known as immigrant child guilt complex. This is a chronic disorder that affects only children of immigrants, who experience a constant gnawing guilt for the multitude of sacrifices their parents made to bring them to the United States. There is no cure for ICGC, but treatments include making your mom and dad proud. I knew as a teen that my parents had gone to great lengths to give me a better life, and killing my brain cells didn't seem like the most thoughtful way to return the favor.

Calvin Coolidge in 1924 had signed into law radical restrictions on immigration, but not before publishing a stinging little essay in Good Housekeeping magazine titled “Whose Country Is This?” Immigration restrictions, Coolidge wrote under the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, were a necessary first step in walling off white America from “the vicious, the weak of body, the shiftless or the improvident.” These types, he implied, could be identified by nationality and skin color. “There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons,” Coolidge wrote. “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend…. The unassimilated alien child menaces our children.

The behavior “anchor baby” refers to is the fraud of illegal aliens giving birth at U.S. hospitals, thus anchoring an entire extended family to the United States by virtue of the child’s auto-citizenship. There’s no logical reason for the whole family to come here, but we get wails of You’re trying to separate us from our American citizen child! No one ever considers the possibility that the family could also stay together by going back to their own country. This is the way immigration law is abused with “family reunification” policies, also known as “chain migration”—or as the Times would put it, “a derisive term” to describe remote villages relocating to America on the basis of a single villager’s U.S. citizenship.

On a Sunday this January, probably of whatever year it is when you read this (at least as long as I’m living), I will probably be preaching somewhere in a church on “Sanctity of Human Life Sunday.” Here’s a confession: I hate it. Don’t get me wrong. I love to preach the Bible. And I love to talk about the image of God and the protection of all human life. I hate this Sunday not because of what we have to say, but that we have to say it at all. The idea of aborting an unborn child or abusing a born child or starving an elderly person or torturing an enemy combatant or screaming at an immigrant family, these ought all to be so self-evidently wrong that a “Sanctity of Human Life Sunday” ought to be as unnecessary as a “Reality of Gravity Sunday.” We shouldn’t have to say that parents shouldn’t abort their children, or their fathers shouldn’t abandon the mothers of their babies, or that no human life is worthless regardless of age, skin color, disability, or economic status. Part of my thinking here is, I hope, a sign of God’s grace, a groaning by the Spirit at this world of abortion clinics and torture chambers (Rom. 8:22–23). But part of it is my own inability to see the spiritual combat zone that the world is, and has been from Eden onward. This dark present reality didn’t begin with the antebellum South or with the modern warfare state, and it certainly didn’t begin with the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. Human dignity is about the kingdom of God, and that means that in every place and every culture human dignity is contested.

Those working in slaughterhouses, for example, are often underpaid and overworked, lack insurance, and are required to use dangerous equipment without adequate training. Turnover and rates of injury for jobs in anymal industries are among the highest in the United States. Slaughterhouse employees are almost always poor, they are often immigrants, and they are inevitably viewed by their employers as expendable. Moreover, if we would not like to kill pigs, hens, or cattle all day long, then we should not make food choices that require others to do so. Our dietary choices determine where others work. Will our poorest laborers work in fields of green or in buildings of blood? Fieldwork is difficult, but I worked in the fields as a child, and I am very glad that I never worked in a slaughterhouse.

The reader may ask me why I did not try to escape what was in store for me after Hitler had occupied Austria. Let me answer by recalling the following story. Shortly before the United States entered World War II, I received an invitation to come to the American Consulate in Vienna to pick up my immigration visa. My old parents were overjoyed because they expected that I would soon be allowed to leave Austria. I suddenly hesitated, however. The question beset me: could I really afford to leave my parents alone to face their fate, to be sent, sooner or later, to a concentration camp, or even to a so-called extermination camp? Where did my responsibility lie? Should I foster my brain child, logotherapy, by emigrating to fertile soil where I could write my books? Or should I concentrate on my duties as a real child, the child of my parents who had to do whatever he could to protect them? I pondered the problem this way and that but could not arrive at a solution; this was the type of dilemma that made one wish for “a hint from Heaven,” as the phrase goes. It was then that I noticed a piece of marble lying on a table at home. When I asked my father about it, he explained that he had found it on the site where the National Socialists had burned down the largest Viennese synagogue. He had taken the piece home because it was a part of the tablets on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed. One gilded Hebrew letter was engraved on the piece; my father explained that this letter stood for one of the Commandments. Eagerly I asked, “Which one is it?” He answered, “Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land.” At that moment I decided to stay with my father and my mother upon the land, and to let the American visa lapse.

G. Stanley Hall, a creature of his times, believed strongly that adolescence was determined – a fixed feature of human development that could be explained and accounted for in scientific fashion. To make his case, he relied on Haeckel's faulty recapitulation idea, Lombroso's faulty phrenology-inspired theories of crime, a plethora of anecdotes and one-sided interpretations of data. Given the issues, theories, standards and data-handling methods of his day, he did a superb job. But when you take away the shoddy theories, put the anecdotes in their place, and look for alternate explanations of the data, the bronze statue tumbles hard. I have no doubt that many of the street teens of Hall's time were suffering or insufferable, but it's a serious mistake to develop a timeless, universal theory of human nature around the peculiarities of the people of one's own time and place.

By the late 20th century, the idea that parents can harm their children by abusing and neglecting them (which is true) grew into the idea that parents can mold their children’s intelligence, personalities, social skills, and mental disorders (which is not). Why not? Consider the fact that children of immigrants end up with the accent, values, and norms of their peers, not of their parents. That tells us that children are socialized in their peer group rather than in their families: it takes a village to raise a child. And studies of adopted children have found that they end up with personalities and IQ scores that are correlated with those of their biological siblings but uncorrelated with those of their adopted siblings. That tells us that adult personality and intelligence are shaped by genes, and also by chance (since the correlations are far from perfect, even among identical twins), but are not shaped by parents, at least not by anything they do with all their children.

The immigrant's resourcefulness requires an exhaustion of possibilities. You may master tenses and forms, grammatical rules, what passes for style. And yet, consequently, you may struggle to hold a conversation with your grandparents. It's possible they secretly wanted this to happen - a measure of generational progress. The child has learned to speak for himself, but to talk back as well. You write well, not good. The devoted student also internalizes a relationship to the language itself, one in which you remain conscious of your distance from the source, from who draws on this language to mine their authentic self, because you've been led to believe such a thing matters. A simple pronoun of "I" or "we," a first-person perspective, all of it seemed mysterious. We could never write in a way that assumed anyone knew where we were coming from. There was nothing interesting about our context. Neither Black nor white, just boring to everyone on the outside. Where do you even begin explaining yourself?

For many citizens, libraries are the one place where the information they need to be engaged in civic life is truly available for free, requiring nothing more than the time to walk into a branch. The reading room of a public library is the place where a daily newspaper, a weekly newsmagazine, and a documentary film are all available for free. In many communities, the library's public lecture room is the only place to hear candidates for office comparing points of view or visiting professors explaining their work on climate change, immigration or job creation. That same room is often the only place where a child from a family without a lot of money can go to see a dramatic reading or a production of a Shakespeare play. (Another of these simple realities in most communities is that a big part of public librarians job is to figure out how to host the community's homeless in a safe and fair manner.) Democracies can work only if all citizens have access to information and culture that can help them make good choices, whether at the voting booth or in other aspects of public life.

The word adult implies that all the people who've attained legal majority make up a coherent category, but we are travelers who change and traverse a changing country as we go. The road is tattered and elastic. Childhood fades gradually in some ways, never ends in others; adulthood arrives in small, irregular installments if it arrives; and every person is on her own schedule, or rather there is none for the many transitions. When you leave home, if you had one, when you start out on your own, you're someone who was a child for most of her life, though even what it means to be a child is ill-defined. Some people have others who will tend and fund and sometimes confine them all their lives, some people are gradually weaned, some of us are cut off abruptly and fend for ourselves, some always did. Still, out on your own, you're a new immigrant to the nation of adults, and the customs are strange: you're learning to hold together all the pieces of a life, figure out what that life is going to be and who is going to be part of it, and what you will do with your self-determination.

Although Mollie’s disappearance created a stir in the Digbys’ neighborhood, it did not immediately warrant unusual notice in New Orleans as a whole. Hundreds of children went missing in the city every year. Most were later found and returned to their parents. In a metropolis plagued by crime and violence, moreover, Mollie’s disappearance was just one of many unsavory events that day. On that same Thursday, a boy stabbed his friend in the head in a dispute over a ball game. A jewel thief robbed a posh Garden District home. Two toughs fought a gory knife battle on St. Claude Avenue. A drowned child was found floating in the Mississippi River. A prostitute in the Tremé neighborhood stole $30 from a customer. Someone poisoned two family dogs. And two women in a saloon bloodied one another with broken ale bottles as they fought over a lover. Because crime was so common, most incidents received little attention. If a crime occurred in a poor district, on the docks, or in one of the infamous concert saloons, or if its victim was an immigrant or black person, it seldom warranted more than a sentence or two in the “City Intelligence” columns of the dailies. 5

no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark you only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well your neighbors running faster than you breath bloody in their throats the boy you went to school with who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory is holding a gun bigger than his body you only leave home when home won’t let you stay. no one leaves home unless home chases you fire under feet hot blood in your belly it’s not something you ever thought of doing until the blade burnt threats into your neck and even then you carried the anthem under your breath only tearing up your passport in an airport toilet sobbing as each mouthful of paper made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back. you have to understand, that no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land no one burns their palms under trains beneath carriages no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled means something more than journey. no one crawls under fences no one wants to be beaten pitied no one chooses refugee camps or strip searches where your body is left aching or prison, because prison is safer than a city of fire and one prison guard in the night is better than a truckload of men who look like your father no one could take it no one could stomach it no one skin would be tough enough the go home blacks refugees dirty immigrants asylum seekers sucking our country dry niggers with their hands out they smell strange savage messed up their country and now they want to mess ours up how do the words the dirty looks roll off your backs maybe because the blow is softer than a limb torn off or the words are more tender than fourteen men between your legs or the insults are easier to swallow than rubble than bone than your child body in pieces. i want to go home, but home is the mouth of a shark home is the barrel of the gun and no one would leave home unless home chased you to the shore unless home told you to quicken your legs leave your clothes behind crawl through the desert wade through the oceans drown save be hunger beg forget pride your survival is more important no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear saying- leave, run away from me now i dont know what i’ve become but i know that anywhere is safer than here

By the late 20th century, the idea that parents can harm their children by abusing and neglecting them (which is true) grew into the idea that parents can mold their children’s intelligence, personalities, social skills, and mental disorders (which is not). Why not? Consider the fact that children of immigrants end up with the accent, values, and norms of their peers, not of their parents. That tells us that children are socialized in their peer group rather than in their families: it takes a village to raise a child. And studies of adopted children have found that they end up with personalities and IQ scores that are correlated with those of their biological siblings but uncorrelated with those of their adopted siblings. That tells us that adult personality and intelligence are shaped by genes, and also by chance (since the correlations are far from perfect, even among identical twins), but are not shaped by parents, at least not by anything they do with all their children. Despite these refutations, the Nurture Assumption developed a stranglehold on professional opinion, and mothers have been advised to turn themselves into round-the-clock parenting machines, charged with stimulating, socializing, and developing the characters of the little blank slates in their care.

Except then a local high school journalism class decided to investigate the story. Not having attended Columbia Journalism School, the young scribes were unaware of the prohibition on committing journalism that reflects poorly on Third World immigrants. Thanks to the teenagers’ reporting, it was discovered that Reddy had become a multimillionaire by using H-1B visas to bring in slave labor from his native India. Dozens of Indian slaves were working in his buildings and at his restaurant. Apparently, some of those “brainy” high-tech workers America so desperately needs include busboys and janitors. And concubines. The pubescent girls Reddy brought in on H-1B visas were not his nieces: They were his concubines, purchased from their parents in India when they were twelve years old. The sixty-four-year-old Reddy flew the girls to America so he could have sex with them—often several of them at once. (We can only hope this is not why Mark Zuckerberg is so keen on H-1B visas.) The third roommate—the crying girl—had escaped the carbon monoxide poisoning only because she had been at Reddy’s house having sex with him, which, judging by the looks of him, might be worse than death. As soon as a translator other than Reddy was found, she admitted that “the primary purpose for her to enter the U.S. was to continue to have sex with Reddy.” The day her roommates arrived from India, she was forced to watch as the old, balding immigrant had sex with both underage girls at once.3 She also said her dead roommate had been pregnant with Reddy’s child. That could not be confirmed by the court because Reddy had already cremated the girl, in the Hindu tradition—even though her parents were Christian. In all, Reddy had brought seven underage girls to the United States for sex—smuggled in by his brother and sister-in-law, who lied to immigration authorities by posing as the girls’ parents.4 Reddy’s “high-tech” workers were just doing the slavery Americans won’t do. No really—we’ve tried getting American slaves! We’ve advertised for slaves at all the local high schools and didn’t get a single taker. We even posted flyers at the grade schools, asking for prepubescent girls to have sex with Reddy. Nothing. Not even on Craigslist. Reddy’s slaves and concubines were considered “untouchables” in India, treated as “subhuman”—“so low that they are not even considered part of Hinduism’s caste system,” as the Los Angeles Times explained. To put it in layman’s terms, in India they’re considered lower than a Kardashian. According to the Indian American magazine India Currents: “Modern slavery is on display every day in India: children forced to beg, young girls recruited into brothels, and men in debt bondage toiling away in agricultural fields.” More than half of the estimated 20.9 million slaves worldwide live in Asia.5 Thanks to American immigration policies, slavery is making a comeback in the United States! A San Francisco couple “active in the Indian community” bought a slave from a New Delhi recruiter to clean house for them, took away her passport when she arrived, and refused to let her call her family or leave their home.6 In New York, Indian immigrants Varsha and Mahender Sabhnani were convicted in 2006 of bringing in two Indonesian illegal aliens as slaves to be domestics in their Long Island, New York, home.7 In addition to helping reintroduce slavery to America, Reddy sends millions of dollars out of the country in order to build monuments to himself in India. “The more money Reddy made in the States,” the Los Angeles Times chirped, “the more good he seemed to do in his hometown.” That’s great for India, but what is America getting out of this model immigrant? Slavery: Check. Sickening caste system: Check. Purchasing twelve-year-old girls for sex: Check. Draining millions of dollars from the American economy: Check. Smuggling half-dead sex slaves out of his slums in rolled-up carpets right under the nose of the Berkeley police: Priceless.

We ought to recognize the darkness of the culture of death when it shows up in our own voices. I am startled when I hear those who claim the name of Christ, and who loudly profess to be pro-life, speaking of immigrants with disdain as “those people” who are “draining our health care and welfare resources.” Can we not see the same dehumanizing strategies at work in the abortion-rights activism that speaks of the “product of conception” and the angry nativism that calls the child of an immigrant mother an “anchor baby”? At root, this is a failure to see who we are. We are united to a Christ who was himself a sojourner, fleeing political oppression (Matt. 2:13–23), and our ancestors in Israel were themselves a migrant people (Exod. 1:1–14; 1 Chron. 16:19; Acts. 7:6). Moreover, our God sees the plight of the fatherless and the blood of the innocent, but he also tells us that because he loves the sojourner and cares for him so should we, “for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” (Deut. 10:18–19). We might disagree on the basis of prudence about what specific policies should be in place to balance border security with compassion for the immigrants among us, but a pro-life people have no option to respond with loathing or disgust at persons made in the image of God. We might or might not be natural-born Americans, but we are, all of us, immigrants to the kingdom of God (Eph. 2:12–14). Whatever our disagreements on immigration as policy, we must not disagree on whether immigrants are persons. No matter how important the United States of America is, there will come a day when the United States will no longer exist. But the sons and daughters of God will be revealed. Some of them are undocumented farm-workers and elementary-school janitors now. They will be kings and queens then. They are our brothers and sisters forever. We need to stand up against bigotry and harassment and exploitation, even when such could be politically profitable to those who stand with us on other issues. The image of God cannot be bartered away, at the abortion clinic counter or anywhere else.

The attachment voids experienced by immigrant children are profound. The hardworking parents are focused on supporting their families economically and, unfamiliar with the language and customs of their new society, they are not able to orient their children with authority or confidence. Peers are often the only people available for such children to latch on to. Thrust into a peer-oriented culture, immigrant families may quickly disintegrate. The gulf between child and parent can widen to the point that becomes unbridgeable. Parents of these children lose their dignity, their power, and their lead. Peers ultimately replace parents and gangs increasingly replace families. Again, immigration or the necessary relocation of people displaced by war or economic misery is not the problem. Transplanted to peer-driven North American society, traditional cultures succumb. We fail our immigrants because of our own societal failure to preserve the child-parent relationship. In some parts of the country one still sees families, often from Asia, join together in multigenerational groups for outings. Parents, grandparents, and even frail great-grandparents mingle, laugh, and socialize with their children and their children's offspring. Sadly, one sees this only among relatively recent immigrants. As youth become incorporated into North American society, their connections with their elders fade. They distance themselves from their families. Their icons become the artificially created and hypersexualized figures mass-marketed by Hollywood and the U.S. music industry. They rapidly become alienated from the cultures that have sustained their ancestors for generation after generation. As we observe the rapid dissolution of immigrant families under the influence of the peer-oriented society, we witness, as if on fast-forward video, the cultural meltdown we ourselves have suffered in the past half century. It would be encouraging to believe that other parts of the world will successfully resist the trend toward peer orientation. The opposite is likely to be the case as the global economy exerts its corrosive influences on traditional cultures on other continents. Problems of teenage alienation are now widely encountered in countries that have most closely followed upon the American model — Britain, Australia, and Japan. We may predict similar patterns elsewhere to result from economic changes and massive population shifts. For example, stress-related disorders are proliferating among Russian children. According to a report in the New York Times, since the collapse of the Soviet Union a little over a decade ago, nearly a third of Russia's estimated 143 million people — about 45 million — have changed residences. Peer orientation threatens to become one of the least welcome of all American cultural exports.

told my people that I wanted only the best, whatever it took, wherever they came from, whatever it cost. We assembled thirty people, the brightest cybersecurity minds we have. A few are on loan, pursuant to strict confidentiality agreements, from the private sector—software companies, telecommunications giants, cybersecurity firms, military contractors. Two are former hackers themselves, one of them currently serving a thirteen-year sentence in a federal penitentiary. Most are from various agencies of the federal government—Homeland Security, CIA, FBI, NSA. Half our team is devoted to threat mitigation—how to limit the damage to our systems and infrastructure after the virus hits. But right now, I’m concerned with the other half, the threat-response team that Devin and Casey are running. They’re devoted to stopping the virus, something they’ve been unable to do for the last two weeks. “Good morning, Mr. President,” says Devin Wittmer. He comes from NSA. After graduating from Berkeley, he started designing cyberdefense software for clients like Apple before the NSA recruited him away. He has developed federal cybersecurity assessment tools to help industries and governments understand their preparedness against cyberattacks. When the major health-care systems in France were hit with a ransomware virus three years ago, we lent them Devin, who was able to locate and disable it. Nobody in America, I’ve been assured, is better at finding holes in cyberdefense systems or at plugging them. “Mr. President,” says Casey Alvarez. Casey is the daughter of Mexican immigrants who settled in Arizona to start a family and built up a fleet of grocery stores in the Southwest along the way. Casey showed no interest in the business, taking quickly to computers and wanting to join law enforcement. When she was a grad student at Penn, she got turned down for a position at the Department of Justice. So Casey got on her computer and managed to do what state and federal authorities had been unable to do for years—she hacked into an underground child-pornography website and disclosed the identities of all the website’s patrons, basically gift-wrapping a federal prosecution for Justice and shutting down an operation that was believed to be the largest purveyor of kiddie porn in the country. DOJ hired her on the spot, and she stayed there until she went to work for the CIA. She’s been most recently deployed in the Middle East with US Central Command, where she intercepts, decodes, and disrupts cybercommunications among terrorist groups. I’ve been assured that these two are, by far, the best we have. And they are about to meet the person who, so far, has been better. There is a hint of reverence in their expressions as I introduce them to Augie. The Sons of Jihad is the all-star team of cyberterrorists, mythical figures in that world. But I sense some competitive fire, too, which will be a good thing.

Needless to say, what whites now think and say about race has undergone a revolution. In fact, it would be hard to find other opinions broadly held by Americans that have changed so radically. What whites are now expected to think about race can be summarized as follows: Race is an insignificant matter and not a valid criterion for any purpose—except perhaps for redressing wrongs done to non-whites. The races are equal in every respect and are therefore interchangeable. It thus makes no difference if a neighborhood or nation becomes non-white or if white children marry outside their race. Whites have no valid group interests, so it is illegitimate for them to attempt to organize as whites. Given the past crimes of whites, any expression of racial pride is wrong. The displacement of whites by non-whites through immigration will strengthen the United States. These are matters on which there is little ground for disagreement; anyone who holds differing views is not merely mistaken but morally suspect. By these standards, of course, most of the great men of America’s past are morally suspect, and many Americans are embarrassed to discover what our traditional heroes actually said. Some people deliberately conceal this part of our history. For example, the Jefferson Memorial has the following quotation from the third president inscribed on the marble interior: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people [the Negroes] shall be free.” Jefferson did not end those words with a period, but with a semicolon, after which he wrote: “nor is it less certain that the two races equally free, cannot live under the same government.” The Jefferson Memorial was completed in 1942. A more contemporary approach to the past is to bring out all the facts and then repudiate historical figures. This is what author Conor Cruise O’Brien did in a 1996 cover story for The Atlantic Monthly. After detailing Jefferson’s views, he concluded: “It follows that there can be no room for a cult of Thomas Jefferson in the civil religion of an effectively multiracial America . . . . Once the facts are known, Jefferson is of necessity abhorrent to people who would not be in America at all if he could have had his way.” Columnist Richard Grenier likened Jefferson to Nazi SS and Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler, and called for the demolition of the Jefferson Memorial “stone by stone.” It is all very well to wax indignant over Jefferson’s views 170 years after his death, but if we expel Jefferson from the pantheon where do we stop? Clearly Lincoln must go, so his memorial must come down too. Washington owned slaves, so his monument is next. If we repudiate Jefferson, we do not just change the skyline of the nation’s capital, we repudiate practically our entire history. This, in effect, is what some people wish to do. American colonists and Victorian Englishmen saw the expansion of their race as an inspiring triumph. Now it is cause for shame. “The white race is the cancer of human history,” wrote Susan Sontag. The wealth of America used to be attributed to courage, hard work, and even divine providence. Now, it is common to describe it as stolen property. Robin Morgan, a former child actor and feminist, has written, “My white skin disgusts me. My passport disgusts me. They are the marks of an insufferable privilege bought at the price of others’ agony.

Early on it is clear that Addie has a rebellious streak, joining the library group and running away to Rockport Lodge. Is Addie right to disobey her parents? Where does she get her courage? 2. Addie’s mother refuses to see Celia’s death as anything but an accident, and Addie comments that “whenever I heard my mother’s version of what happened, I felt sick to my stomach.” Did Celia commit suicide? How might the guilt that Addie feels differ from the guilt her mother feels? 3. When Addie tries on pants for the first time, she feels emotionally as well as physically liberated, and confesses that she would like to go to college (page 108). How does the social significance of clothing and hairstyle differ for Addie, Gussie, and Filomena in the book? 4. Diamant fills her narrative with a number of historical events and figures, from the psychological effects of World War I and the pandemic outbreak of influenza in 1918 to child labor laws to the cultural impact of Betty Friedan. How do real-life people and events affect how we read Addie’s fictional story? 5. Gussie is one of the most forward-thinking characters in the novel; however, despite her law degree she has trouble finding a job as an attorney because “no one would hire a lady lawyer.” What other limitations do Addie and her friends face in the workforce? What limitations do women and minorities face today? 6. After distancing herself from Ernie when he suffers a nervous episode brought on by combat stress, Addie sees a community of war veterans come forward to assist him (page 155). What does the remorse that Addie later feels suggest about the challenges American soldiers face as they reintegrate into society? Do you think soldiers today face similar challenges? 7. Addie notices that the Rockport locals seem related to one another, and the cook Mrs. Morse confides in her sister that, although she is usually suspicious of immigrant boarders, “some of them are nicer than Americans.” How does tolerance of the immigrant population vary between city and town in the novel? For whom might Mrs. Morse reserve the term Americans? 8. Addie is initially drawn to Tessa Thorndike because she is a Boston Brahmin who isn’t afraid to poke fun at her own class on the women’s page of the newspaper. What strengths and weaknesses does Tessa’s character represent for educated women of the time? How does Addie’s description of Tessa bring her reliability into question? 9. Addie’s parents frequently admonish her for being ungrateful, but Addie feels she has earned her freedom to move into a boardinghouse when her parents move to Roxbury, in part because she contributed to the family income (page 185). How does the Baum family’s move to Roxbury show the ways Betty and Addie think differently from their parents about household roles? Why does their father take such offense at Herman Levine’s offer to house the family? 10. The last meaningful conversation between Addie and her mother turns out to be an apology her mother meant for Celia, and for a moment during her mother’s funeral Addie thinks, “She won’t be able to make me feel like there’s something wrong with me anymore.” Does Addie find any closure from her mother’s death? 11. Filomena draws a distinction between love and marriage when she spends time catching up with Addie before her wedding, but Addie disagrees with the assertion that “you only get one great love in a lifetime.” In what ways do the different romantic experiences of each woman inform the ideas each has about love? 12. Filomena and Addie share a deep friendship. Addie tells Ada that “sometimes friends grow apart. . . . But sometimes, it doesn’t matter how far apart you live or how little you talk—it’s still there.” What qualities do you think friends must share in order to have that kind of connection? Discuss your relationship with a best friend. Enhance

Advance Praise for THE GREAT NEW ORLEANS KIDNAPPING CASE: RACE, LAW, AND JUSTICE IN THE RECONSTRUCTION ERA "Michael Ross' The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case has all the elements one might expect from a legal thriller set in nineteenth-century New Orleans. Child abduction and voodoo. 'Quadroons.' A national headline-grabbing trial. Plus an intrepid creole detective.... A terrific job of sleuthing and storytelling, right through to the stunning epilogue." --Lawrence N. Powell, author of The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans "When little Mollie Digby went missing from her New Orleans home in the summer of 1870, her disappearance became a national sensation. In his compelling new book Michael Ross brings Mollie back. Read The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case for the extraordinary story it tells--and the complex world it reveals." --Kevin Boyle, author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age "Michael Ross's account of the 1870 New Orleans kidnapping of a white baby by two African-American women is a gripping narrative of one of the most sensational trials of the post-Civil War South. Even as he draws his readers into an engrossing mystery and detective story, Ross skillfully illuminates some of the most fundamental conflicts of race and class in New Orleans and the region." --Dan T. Carter, University of South Carolina "The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case is a masterwork of narration, with twists, turns, cliff-hangers, and an impeccable level of telling detail about a fascinating cast of characters. The reader comes away from this immersive experience with a deeper and sadder understanding of the possibilities and limits of Reconstruction." --Stephen Berry, author of House of Abraham: Lincoln and The Todds, a Family Divided by War "The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case is such a great read that it is easy to forget that the book is a work of history, not fiction. Who kidnapped Mollie Digby? The book, however, is compelling because it is great history. As Ross explores the mystery of Digby's disappearance, he reconstructs the lives not just of the Irish immigrant parents of Mollie Digby and the women of color accused of her kidnapping, but also the broad range of New Orleanians who became involved in the case. The kidnapping thus serves as a lens on the possibilities and uncertainties of Reconstruction, which take on new meanings because of Ross's skillful research and masterful storytelling." --Laura F. Edwards, Duke University

There are many facets to the decline in fairness and opportunity in American life. Perhaps the worst are the conditions now imposed upon young children born into the underclass and subjected to the recent evolution of the educational system. They are related, and they reinforce each other; their combined result is to condemn tens of millions of children, particularly those born into the new underclass, to a life of hardship and unfairness. For any young child whose parents don’t have money, or who is the child of a migrant agricultural worker and/or an illegal immigrant, prenatal care, nursery, day care, after school, school nutrition, and foster-care systems are nothing short of appalling. And then comes school itself. The “American dream”, stated simply, is that no matter how poor or humble your origins—even if you never knew your parents—you have a shot at a decent life. America’s promise is that anyone willing to work hard can do better over time, and have at least a reasonable life for themselves and their own children. You could expect to do better than your parents, and even be able to help them as they grew old. More than ever before, the key to such a dream is a good education. The rise of information technology, and the opening of Asian economies, means that only a small portion of America’s population can make a good living through unskilled or manual labour. But instead of elevating the educational system and the opportunities it should provide, American politicians, and those who follow their lead around the globe, have been going in exactly the wrong direction. As a result, we are developing not a new class system, but, without exaggeration, a new caste system—a society in which the circumstances of your birth determine your entire life. As a result, the dream of opportunity is dying. Increasingly, the most important determinant of a child’s life prospects—future income, wealth, educational level, even health and life expectancy—is totally arbitrary and unfair. It’s also very simple. A child’s future is increasingly determined by his or her parents’ wealth, not by his or her intelligence or energy. To be sure, there are a number of reasons for this. Income is correlated with many other things, and it’s therefore difficult to isolate the impact of individual factors. Children in poor households are more likely to grow up in single-parent versus two-parent households, exposed to drugs and alcohol, with one or both parents in prison, with their immigration status questionable, and more likely to have problems with diet and obesity. Culture and race play a role: Asian children have far higher school graduation rates, test scores, and grades than all other groups, including whites, in the US; Latinos, the lowest.

•from taking a course or reading a book on world religions, to developing a friendship with a Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist person, to moving to a city in North Africa or South Asia in hopes of being a witness for Christ there •from becoming an advocate for immigrant rights, to getting involved in the diplomatic corps, to becoming a lawyer at the United Nations dedicated to getting countries to abide by the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights •from going on a short-term mission trip to reach children in a poor barrio, to supporting a child for forty dollars a month through World Vision or Compassion International, to becoming a social worker dedicated to serving children •from learning a language, to learning about people who don't have the Bible in their mother tongue, to becoming a linguist who translates the Bible •from dedicating thirty minutes per day to pray for the nations of the world, to building crosscultural friendships, to going to serve in a multicultural organization •from studying business at a university, to learning about microfinance, to engaging in business partnerships designed to create jobs for the poorer populations of the world •from taking a stand for an issue (advocating for free-trade coffee, opposing blood diamonds, opposing the manufacturing of "conflict minerals" for cell phones), to becoming an advocate for the people affected, to becoming an executive with a multinational corporation who brings the Christian value of dignity for the people affected by these issues You get the point. These are not issues that will be solved by a generous check. These are issues that can take our lifetimes.

The child with Down syndrome on the fifth row from the back in your church, he’s not a “ministry project.” He’s a future king of the universe. The immigrant woman who scrubs toilets every day on hands and knees, and can barely speak enough English to sing along with your praise choruses, she’s not a problem to be solved. She’s a future queen of the cosmos, a joint-heir with Christ.

Instead of a government that seizes your e-mails and your cell phones, imagine a federal government that protected the privacy rights of every American. Instead of a federal government that seeks to dictate school curriculum through Common Core imagine repealing every word of Common Core. Imagine embracing school choice as the civil rights issue of the next generation that every single child, regardless of race, regardless of ethnicity, regardless of wealth or ZIP Code, every child in America has the right to a quality education. And

As a believer and a child of the King, to consider casting a vote for someone or for something that would go against what God would vote for ought to be out of the question. Knowing God’s viewpoint on important issues—whether it is immigration, taxation, racial disparity, abortion, social justice, or even simply partisan politics—should be one of your primary concerns as you head into any voting season.

These “undocumented workers” from south of the border may have come here illegally, but they have long ago integrated themselves into their communities. Once here, they obey the laws. They pay taxes. Many of their sons and daughters serve in the military. They make up the majority of the workforce in several key industries: agricultural workers, child care, kitchen help in restaurants, housecleaning, maid service in hotels, and more. I’ve seen the great contribution they’ve made to their communities in California. Like generations of immigrants before them, they have become American citizens by choice, not by birth. They are, in effect, already citizens in every respect but one. It’s now important to make it official, as Ronald Reagan did, and grant them citizenship—or at least a path to citizenship—in order to save families from the fear of being torn apart by federal agents. Of

The kids separated from their parents suffer the same trauma as the victims of human trafficking, therefore the administration that conducts such savagery in the name of immigration law must face the same legal consequence as human traffickers do, and if law fails to hold them accountable, the people must do it.

I was born and raised in a communist country where all religion's were forbitten. when I immigrated to the USA I told my husband now,. I want to get married in church because I don't want my children to grow up with out faith like I did! We went to Albanian church and got married but 1st we had to be baptized so on December 8, 1991 I converted to Christianity and got married, that very the same nigh I see God & Jesus on my dream! I see my self I was dropped on the side of the cross road of my childhood neighborhood ( Rusi Katolik) Shkoder, Albania! I'm standingh up on the and look around me it was raining and poring and the rain splashing down on ground, and catching on fire. I see people runging and hear them skreaming but around me was s sunshine spotlight. I hear a very firm voice come from up saying "My child tell your people in your languages stop screaming, and start praying" I tried to resist His order, and God said "DO AS YOU BEEN TOLD MY CHILD" with an very firm voice, and orderly voice. I can hear my self telling people "Moss bertit por lutu, mos bertit por lutu" (Don't scream, and start praying, don't scream start praying). I can hear people praying. The rain stopped and a bright sun come out. I hear God telling me "Well done my child" as I'm leaving going west Jesus showed up on the sky with his arms wide open. He have an light olive skin, light brawn shine waive hair , coming down to his both side of his chest. he have crystal watery blue eyes color, and pinkish lips, he smile at me and I see his pearly bright teeth. I wake up went to balcony to see if that was real or dream because it felt so real! since then I never felt the same, I felt a big burden was lifted out of my chest!

Pak Yoo was a different person in English than in Korean. In a way, he supposed, it was inevitable for immigrants to become child versions of themselves, stripped of their verbal fluency and, with it, a layer of their competence and maturity. Before moving to America, he'd prepared himself for the difficulties he knew he'd experience: the logical awkwardness of translating his thoughts before speaking, the intellectual taxation of figuring out words from context, the physical challenge of shaping his tongue into unfamiliar positions to make sounds that didn't exist in Korean. But what he hadn't known, hadn't expected, was that this linguistic uncertainty would extend beyond speech and, like a virus, infect other parts: his thinking, demeanor, his very personality itself. In Korean, he was an authoritative man, educated and worthy of respect. In English, he was a deaf, mute idiot, unsure, nervous, and inept. A bah-bo.

Christ makes clear that Christianity is not a path to more comforts, higher status, or greater ease in this world..Here are the days when holding fasting to the gospel, actually believing the Bible, and putting it into practice will mean risking your reputation, sacrificing your social status, disagreeing with your closest family and friends, jeopardizing your economic security and earthly stability, giving away your possessions, leaving behind the accolades of the world, and..potentially losing your life..it is not possible to love the poor and live in unabated luxury..authentic tolerance doesn't mask truth but magnifies it, showing us how to love and serve one another in view of our differences..we spend the majority of our time sitting as spectators in services that cater to our comforts. Even in our giving to the church, we spend the majority of our money on places for us to meet, professionals to do the ministry, and programs designed around us and our kids..Jesus' main point is not that going to a funeral is wrong, but that his Kingdom will not take second place to anyone or anything else..Even more important than honoring the dead was proclaiming the Kingdom to those who were dying..Jesus knew that as great as people's earthly needs were, their eternal need was far greater..the ultimate priority of his coming was not to relieve suffering..his ultimate priority in coming to the world was to sever the root of suffering: sin itself..He came not just to give the poor drinking water for their bodies but to give people living water for their souls. He came not just to give orphans and widows a family now but to give them a family forever. He came not just to free girls from slavery to sex but to free them from slavery to sin. He came not just to make equality possible on earth but to make eternity possible in heaven..If all we do is meet people's physical needs while ignoring their spiritual need, we miss the entire point..We testify with our lips what we attest with our lives..giving a cup of water to the poor is not contingent upon that person's confession of faith in Christ..it is in addressing eternal suffering that we are most effective in alleviating earthly suffering..This commission is not just a general command to make disciples among as many people as possible. Instead, it is a specific command to make disciples among every people group in the world..Jesus has not given us a commission to consider; he has given us a command to obey..it seems that Jesus knows as soon as this man returns to his family, the lure to stay will be strong..It is not uncommon for the lure of family love to lead to faithless living..Following Jesus doesn't just entail sacrificial abandonment of our lives; it requires supreme affection from our hearts..I can slowly let indecision become inaction..delayed obedience becomes disobedience..If I'm walking by a lake and see a child drowning, I don't stop and ponder what I should do. Nor do I just stand there praying about what action to take. I do something..My purpose in putting these realities before us is not to cause us to collapse under their weight. To be certain, God alone is able to bear these global burdens..proclaim the gospel not under a utopian illusion that you or I or anyone or everyone together can rid this world of pain and suffering. That responsibility belongs to the resurrected Christ.

Runaway costs are crushing the American medical system. Hispanics are the group least likely to have medical insurance, with 30.7 percent uninsured. Ten point eight percent of whites and 19.1 percent of blacks are without insurance. Illegal immigrants rarely have insurance, but hospitals cannot turn them away. In 1985, Congress passed the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, which requires hospitals to treat all emergency patients, without regard to legal status or ability to pay. Anyone who can stagger within 250 yards of a hospital—a distance established through litigation—is entitled to “emergency care,” which is defined so broadly that hospital emergency rooms have become free clinics. Emergency-room care is the most expensive kind. Childbirth is an emergency, and hospitals must keep mother and child until both can be discharged. If the mother is indigent the hospital pays for treatment, even if there are expensive complications. Any child born in the United States is considered a US citizen, so thousands of indigent illegal immigrants make a point of having “anchor babies” at public expense. The new American qualifies for all forms of welfare, and at age 21 can sponsor his parents for American citizenship. In 2006 in California, an estimated 100,000 illegal immigrant mothers had babies at public expense, and accounted for about one in five births. The costs were estimated at $400 million per year, and in the state as a whole, half of all Medi-Cal (state welfare) births were to illegal immigrant mothers. In 2003, 70 percent of the babies born in San Joaquin General Hospital in Stockton were anchor babies. In Los Angeles and other cities with heavy gang activity, hospitals must deal with “dump and run” patients—criminals wounded in shootouts who are rolled out of speeding cars by fellow gang members. Illegal-immigrant patients often show up without papers of any kind, and doctors have no idea whom they are treating. Mexican hospitals routinely turn away uninsured Mexicans, and if the US border is not far, may tell the ambulance driver to head for the nearest American hospital. “It’s a phenomenon we noticed some time ago, one that has expanded very rapidly,” said a federal law enforcement officer.

If we could all see racial or religious differences from the eyes of a child.

Bill Clinton - “We are a nation of immigrants. But we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it.” Chuck Schumer - “People who enter the US without our permission are illegal aliens.” Obama - “We simply cannot allow people into the U.S. undocumented.” Hillary - “Just because your child gets across the border, that doesn’t mean the child gets to stay.

I read somewhere that a lot of kids of immigrants grow up quickly and are given more responsibility than other kids. Their parents tend to depend on them, mostly because the kids can speak the language better and can act as a conduit to mainstream American society. The child becomes the parent, and the parent, the child.

This mostly restrictionist trend reached an important pivot in 2012. Three major developments prompted this change in direction and momentum. First, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its Arizona v. United States opinion, delivering its most consequential decision on the limits of state authority in immigration in three decades. Rejecting several provisions of Arizona's controversial omnibus immigration enforcement bill, SB 1070, the opinion nevertheless still left open possibilities for state and local involvement. Second, President Barack Obama, against the backdrop of a stalemate in comprehensive immigration reform (CIR) in Congress and contentious debates over the role of the federal executive in immigration enforcement, instituted the Deferred Action for Child Arrivals (DACA) program, providing administrative relief and a form of lawful presence to hundreds of thousands of undocumented youth. Finally, Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate whose platform supported laws like Arizona's and called them a model for the rest of the country, lost his bid for the White House with especially steep losses among Latinos and immigrant voters. After these events in 2012, restrictive legislation at the state level waned in frequency, and a growing number of states began to pass laws aimed at the integration of unauthorized immigrants. As this book goes to press, this integrationist trend is still continuing.

Jan was born in a small town outside of Kiev, Ukraine. He was an only child. His mother was a housewife, his father a construction manager. When Koum was sixteen, he and his mother immigrated to Mountain View, California, mainly to escape the anti-semitic environment of their homeland. Unfortunately, Jan’s father never made the trip. He got stuck in the Ukraine, where he eventually died years later. His mother swept the floors of a grocery store to make ends meet, but she was soon diagnosed with cancer. They barely survived off her disability insurance. It certainly wasn’t the most glamorous childhood, but he made it through. After college, Jan applied to work at Yahoo as an infrastructure engineer. He spent nine years building his skills at Yahoo, and then applied to work at Facebook. Unfortunately, he was rejected. In 2009, Jan bought an iPhone and realized there was an opportunity to build something on top of Apple’s burgeoning mobile platform. He began building an app that could send status updates between devices. It didn’t do very well at first, but then Apple released push notifications. All of the sudden, people started getting pinged when statuses were updated. And then people began pinging back and forth. Jan realized he had inadvertently created a messaging service. The app continued to grow, but Jan kept quiet. He didn’t care about headlines or marketing buzz. He just wanted to build something valuable, and do it well. By early 2011, his app had reached the top twenty in the U.S. app store. Two years later, in 2013, the app had 200 million users. And then it happened: In 2014, Jan’s company, WhatsApp, was acquired by Facebook―the company who had rejected him years earlier―for $19 billion. I’m not telling this story to insinuate that you should go build a billion-dollar company. The remarkable part of the story isn’t the payday, but the relentless hustle Jan demonstrated throughout his entire life. After surviving a tumultuous childhood, he practiced his craft and built iteratively. When had had a product that was working, he stayed quiet, which takes extreme discipline. More often than not, hustling isn’t fast or showy. Most of the time it’s slow and unglamorous―until it’s not. 

The right to life is the foundation of every other right, which makes intentionally killing an unborn child, or encouraging, enabling, or deliberately tolerating such a killing, a uniquely vile act. Saying this, of course, absolves no one from working to help the poor, the immigrant, and the homeless. Quite the opposite. If we call ourselves Christians, we have duties on a whole range of urgent social concerns. But sexuality-related issues are not a separate, idiosyncratic corner of Catholic thought.

The perfect Queen of the SJWs – and she would be a queen, never a king – would be a mixed-race lesbian Swedish immigrant who was abused as a child by a conservative white Republican politician and kept as a sex slave by neo-Nazis with Confederate-flag tattoos prior to writing a bestselling novel about a fictionalized version of her terrible experiences, appearing on Oprah, and starring on a science fiction TV show popular with white nerds. The

None of the store's balloons seemed right. They offered birthday wishes, congrats on a new baby, but nothing to celebrate the reunion of a mother and child after a government-engineered separation. Then Laurie spotted some early-bird Valentine's balloons. They were red, heart-shaped, and printed with the simple words Te quiero. I love you.

Arriving in the North, Martha became a migrant among immigrants, still a child, already twice removed from the ancestry she was taught to call her own.

Flowers wanted to make it clear to the justices that he stood before them a strong defender of segregation. He came not to topple its walls, but to make them stronger, to make the “privilege” of segregation available to every American child.

we need to understand that some misconceptions about science are the result not of a knowledge deficit but of belief resistance, and to devise ways to short-circuit these processes. That belief resistance—and this is a critically important point—is largely coming from adults. This is why education is political in the first place, and why the children of scientists are the most likely to become scientists—an effect that is slowly striating society into knowledge haves and have-nots. Beyond scientist parents, the other major predictor of a child’s success in science is having immigrant parents. Fully 70 percent of the finalists in the 2011 Intel Science Talent Search were the children of immigrants

On May 14, 1912—eight months after his stepmother’s awful death—Andrew Kehoe, then forty years old, took a wife. Her full name was Ellen Agnes Price—“Nellie” to everyone who knew her. Born in 1875, she came from a family of proud Irish Catholic immigrants, whose most prominent member was her uncle Lawrence. A Civil War hero who had fought at Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg, Lawrence had grown up in Michigan, returned to his home state after the war, and purchased a wilderness tract in Bath Township, which he eventually transformed into a flourishing 320-acre farm. In 1880, he turned his phenomenal energies to mercantile pursuits, successfully engaging in the grocery, lumber, dry goods, and hardware businesses before becoming a pioneer in the nascent automobile industry as founder and president of the Lansing Auto Body Company. In addition to his myriad enterprises, he served as Lansing’s chief of police and superintendent of public works, did a four-year term as a member of the city council, headed the Lansing Business Men’s Association, and ran as the Democratic candidate for the US Senate in 1916.1 Among his eight siblings was his younger brother, Patrick. Born in Ireland in 1848, Patrick had been brought to America as an infant and spent most of his life in Michigan. Financially beholden to his wealthy older brother, he worked as a farmhand on Lawrence’s spread in Bath before becoming an employee of the Auto Body Company. His marriage to the former Mary Ann Wilson had produced a son, William, and six daughters, among them his firstborn child, Nellie, the future Mrs. Andrew Kehoe.2

If the indebted Asian immigrant thinks they owe their life to America, the child thinks they owe their livelihood to their parents for their suffering. The indebted Asian American is therefore the ideal neoliberal subject. I accept that the burden of history is solely on my shoulders; that it’s up to me to earn back reparations for the losses my parents incurred, and to do so, I must, without complaint, prove myself in the workforce. -- To truly feel gratitude is to sprawl out into the light of the present. It is happiness, I think. To be indebted is to fixate on the future. I tense up after good fortune has landed on my lap like a bag of tiny excitable lapdogs. But whose are these? Not mine, surely! I treat good fortune not as a gift but a loan that I will have to pay back in weekly installments of bad luck. I bet I’m like this because I was raised wrong—browbeaten to perform compulsory gratitude. Thank you for sacrificing your life for me! In return, I will sacrifice my life for you!

Utanga refugee camp was their home for four years. When Ilhan turned twelve, a Lutheran church sponsored her family to go to the United States. Ilhan arrived in Arlington, Virginia, in possession of two English phrases: “Hello” and “Shut up.” Her classmates yanked at her hijab, stuck chewing gum to it, and bombarded her with questions like, “Do you have hair? Do you have a pet monkey? Does it feel good to wear shoes for the first time?” Every day, the girl who had survived armed militias and a refugee camp was reminded that she was different. “This is the first time I realized the stigma that I carried as an immigrant and a refugee, and a Muslim person who was visibly Muslim, with a headscarf,” she told The New Yorker. “And that my blackness was a source of tension.” But as the kids bullied her, Ilhan remembered her grandfather telling her as a child: “Everything is temporary.” His words gave her courage.

Among Korean Americans, many of whom were Christian and from middle- to upper-class backgrounds as a result of status-filtering immigration laws, a child out of wedlock, a missing father, seemed to be particularly embarrassing when family success represented all that you had in this country far away from home.

If the indebted Asian immigrant thinks they owe their life to America, the child thinks they owe their livelihood to their parents for their suffering. The indebted Asian American is therefore the ideal neoliberal subject.

A snapshot memory, circa 1955: I'm draped over Dad's shoulder, bouncing along in time with his stride. It's a hot day and we're strolling through a fairground. Beside us, Verna clings to Mom's hand. A cob of corn has slipped from my sweaty clutches, and I'm shrieking at full lung capacity to have it retrieved. Bobbing over Dad's shoulder, I can see that tasty morsel - sticky with grit, no doubt - receding into the distance, and I'm furious. My parents, facing the other direction, are oblivious to my rising howls of protest. Big sister ignores me. Curious onlookers wander by, but I'm not at all self-conscious. I want that cob of corn, and I want it now! Nothing else matters... I learned soon enough that my parents would never react to my verbal outbursts unless they were facing me. If they couldn't see my face, it didn't count. I'm not sure when that realization dawned, but I know it was early. I recall, as a small child, running into another room to tug on Mom's arm. I knew instinctively that shouting would be useless. From my infancy, the deaf-hearing dynamic shaped every part of our mother-child communication. Specifics elude me; I only knew that I understood her, and she understood me. Most likely, we used a blend of speaking, signs, and gestures. If I had to describe it, I'd call it mother-talk, that intimate connection that happens between mothers and their offspring. You know how they just understand each other? Well, that's how it was, with us. Excerpt from Patricia Conrad's Gentle into the Darkness, p. 68