Immigrants Make America Great Quotes

Our country, our people, and our laws have to be our top priority.

As I write this, we are in an especially divisive era in American politics. There are questions about who holds power, who abuses it, who profits from it, and at what cost to our democracy. It is a time of questions about what makes us American, of shifting identities, inclusion and exclusion, protest, civil and human rights, the strength of our compassion versus the weakness of our fears, and the seductive lure of a mythic "great" past that never was versus the need for the consciousness and responsibility necessary if we are truly to live up to the rich promise of "We the People." We are a country built by immigrants, dreams, daring, and opportunity. We are a country built by the horrors of slavery and genocide, the injustice of racism and exclusion. These realities exist side by side. It is our past and present. The future is unwritten. This is a book about ghosts. For we live in a haunted house.

If you have laws that you don't enforce, then you don't have laws. This leads to lawlessness.

I want good people to come here from all over the world, but I want them to do so legally. We can expedite the process, we can reward achievement and excellemce, but we have to respect the legal process. And those people who take advantage of the system and come here illegally should never enjoy the benefits of being a resident--or citizen--of this nation. So I am against any path to citizenship for undocumented workers or anyone else who is in this country illegaly. They should--and need to--go home and get in line.

I would also like to acknowledge all the immigrants who have risked their lives to come to this country, and the children of those immigrants. You are what make America great.

I once heard of a class teacher who’d punish every student wearing a blue shirt whenever a student wearing blue shirt had committed a mistake. I thought that was pretty bad. I then heard of a class teacher who’d punish every student wearing a blue shirt whenever someone in blue shirt committed a mistake somewhere else. Clearly, the worst is not a reality.

I don’t want to stop legal immigration to this country. In fact, I would like to reform and increase immigration in some important ways. Our current immigration laws are upside down—they make it tough on the people we need to have here, and easy for the people we don’t want here. This country is a magnet for many of the smartest, hardest-working people born in other countries, yet we make it difficult for these bright people who follow the laws to settle here.

Hitler’s Nazi mob didn’t think of themselves as the bad guys. They thought of themselves as the victims of evil foreigners. Just like Trump’s MAGA mob.

In 2016, into this tangle of worry and anger, came a showman who made big promises. A man who swore he would drain the swamp, then surrounded himself with the lobbyists and billionaires who run the swamp and feed off government favors. A man who talked the talk of populism but offered the very worst of trickle-down economics. A man who said he knew how the corrupt system worked because he had worked it for himself many times. A man who vowed to make America great again and followed up with attacks on immigrants, minorities, and women. A man who was always on the hunt for his next big con.

I think distance also helps me gain an certain critical perspective that's essential for good writing. It makes it possible to be more truthful in my writing, to speak some harsh truths. And being an immigrant in America, always having this outsider-rinsider thing going on, is such great training for being a writer. Because that's what writers are - outsiders wanting to get on the inside and insiders longing to burst out.

I want good people to come here from all over the world, but I want them to do so legally. We can expedite the process, we can reward achievement and excellence, but we have to respect the legal process. And those people who take advantage of the system and come here illegally should never enjoy the benefits of being a resident--or citizen--of this nation. So I am against any path to citizenship for undocumented workers or anyone else who is in this country illegaly. They should--and need to--go home and get in line.

It is important for our white citizens always to remember that the Negroes alone of all our immigrants came to America against their will by the special compelling invitation of the whites; that the institution of slavery was introduced, expanded and maintained by the United States by the white people and for their own benefit; and they likewise created the conditions that followed emancipation. Our Negro problem, therefore, is not of the Negro’s making. No group in our population is less responsible for its existence. But every group is responsible for its continuance.…

Some people cannot afford to believe that this country isn’t that bad, that as Hillary Clinton said, “America is great because America is good.” America hasn’t always been good. And the greatness, the power and wealth that white people have been afforded, did in fact, as Trump dog whistles with his “Make America Great Again” slogan, come from centuries of killing or otherwise exploiting and subjugating Native Americans, black people, poor people, women, immigrants. It is actually quite difficult to be good, to clean up the dirty laundry rather than let it accumulate on the floor. Everyone would like to believe that they would have been a stop on the Underground Railroad or hidden a Jewish family in their attic. No one wants to believe they’d have been the slave owner or a part of the crowd that gathered to watch the lynchings because it was something to do, or even the person who didn’t go, but didn’t do anything to stop it either.

My brother went to Harvard seven years after arriving in the States with no English. I won the Pulitzer Prize. We could be put on a poster touting how refugees make America great. And we do. But it shouldn’t take this kind of success to be welcomed. Even if refugees, undocumented immigrants, and legal immigrants are not all potential billionaires, that is no reason to exclude them.

Most whites in America have a consciousness of race that is very different from that of minorities. They do not attach much importance to the fact that they are white, and they view race as an illegitimate reason for decision-making of any kind. Many whites have made a genuine effort to transcend race and to see people as individuals. They often fail, but their professed goal is color-blindness. Some whites have gone well beyond color-blindness and see their race as uniquely guilty and without moral standing. Neither the goal of color-blindness nor a negative view of their own race has any parallel in the thinking of non-whites. Most whites also believe that racial equality, integration, and “diversity” flow naturally from the republican, anti-monarchical principles of the American Revolution. They may know that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves but they believe that the man who wrote “all men are created equal” had a vision of the egalitarian, heterogeneous society in which we now live. They are wrong. Earlier generations of white Americans had a strong racial consciousness. Current assumptions about race are a dramatic reversal of the views not only of the Founding Fathers but of the great majority of Americans up until the 1950s and 1960s. Change on this scale is rare in any society, and the past views of whites are worth investigating for the perspective they provide on current views. It is possible to summarize the racial views that prevailed in this country until a few decades ago as follows: White Americans believed race was a fundamental aspect of individual and group identity. They believed people of different races differed in temperament, ability, and the kind of societies they built. They wanted America to be peopled by Europeans, and thought only people of European stock could maintain the civilization they valued. They therefore considered immigration of non-whites a threat to whites and to their civilization. It was common to regard the presence of non-whites as a burden, and to argue that if they could not be removed from the country they should be separated from whites socially and politically. Whites were strongly opposed to miscegenation, which they called “amalgamation.” Many injustices were committed in defense of these views, and many of the things prominent Americans of the past said ring harshly on contemporary ears. And yet the sentiment behind them—a sense of racial solidarity—is not very different from the sentiments we find among many non-whites today.

His son wanted to be a firefighter, but didn't get the job. Mr. Neck is convinced that this is some kind of reverse discrimination. He says we should close our borders so that real Americans can get the jobs they deserve. The job test said that I would be a good fire fighter. I wonder if I could take a job away from Mr. Neck's son. Mr. Neck writes on the board again: "DEBATE: America should have closed her borders in 1900." That strikes a nerve. Several nerves. I can see kids counting backward on their fingers, trying to figure out when their grandparents or great-grandparents were born, when they came to America, if they would have made the Neck Cut. When they figure out they would have been stuck in a country that hated them, or a place with no schools, or a place with no future, their hands shoot up. They beg to differ with Mr. Neck's learned opinion. ... The arguments jump back and forth across the room. A few suck-ups quickly figure out which side Mr. Neck is squatting on, so they fight to throw out the 'foreigners.' Anyone whose family immigrated in the last century has a story to tell about how hard their relatives have worked, the contributions they make to the country, the taxes they pay. A member of the Archery Club tries to say that we are all foreigners and we should give the country back to the Native Americans, but she's buried under disagreement. Mr. Neck enjoys the noise, until one kid challenges him directly. Brave Kid: "Maybe your son didn't get that job because he's not good enough. Or he's lazy. Or the other guy was better than him, no matter what his skin color. I think the white people who have been here for two hundred years are the ones pulling down the country. They don't know how to work - they've had it too easy." The pro-immigration forces erupt in applause and hooting. Mr. Neck: "You watch your mouth, mister. You are talking about my son. I don't want to hear any more from you. That's enough debate - get your books out.

When the time comes, & I hope it comes soon, to bury this era of moral rot & the defiling of our communal, social, & democratic norms, the perfect epitaph for the gravestone of this age of unreason should be Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley's already infamous quote: "I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing... as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.” Grassley's vision of America, quite frankly, is one I do not recognize. I thought the heart of this great nation was not limited to the ranks of the plutocrats who are whisked through life in chauffeured cars & private jets, whose often inherited riches are passed along to children, many of whom no sacrifice or service is asked. I do not begrudge wealth, but it must come with a humility that money never is completely free of luck. And more importantly, wealth can never be a measure of worth. I have seen the waitress working the overnight shift at a diner to give her children a better life, & yes maybe even take them to a movie once in awhile - and in her, I see America. I have seen the public school teachers spending extra time with students who need help & who get no extra pay for their efforts, & in them I see America. I have seen parents sitting around kitchen tables with stacks of pressing bills & wondering if they can afford a Christmas gift for their children, & in them I see America. I have seen the young diplomat in a distant foreign capital & the young soldier in a battlefield foxhole, & in them I see America. I have seen the brilliant graduates of the best law schools who forgo the riches of a corporate firm for the often thankless slog of a district attorney or public defender's office, & in them I see America. I have seen the librarian reshelving books, the firefighter, police officer, & paramedic in service in trying times, the social worker helping the elderly & infirm, the youth sports coaches, the PTA presidents, & in them I see America. I have seen the immigrants working a cash register at a gas station or trimming hedges in the frost of an early fall morning, or driving a cab through rush hour traffic to make better lives for their families, & in them I see America. I have seen the science students unlocking the mysteries of life late at night in university laboratories for little or no pay, & in them I see America. I have seen the families struggling with a cancer diagnosis, or dementia in a parent or spouse. Amid the struggles of mortality & dignity, in them I see America. These, & so many other Americans, have every bit as much claim to a government working for them as the lobbyists & moneyed classes. And yet, the power brokers in Washington today seem deaf to these voices. It is a national disgrace of historic proportions. And finally, what is so wrong about those who must worry about the cost of a drink with friends, or a date, or a little entertainment, to rephrase Senator Grassley's demeaning phrasings? Those who can't afford not to worry about food, shelter, healthcare, education for their children, & all the other costs of modern life, surely they too deserve to be able to spend some of their “darn pennies” on the simple joys of life. Never mind that almost every reputable economist has called this tax bill a sham of handouts for the rich at the expense of the vast majority of Americans & the future economic health of this nation. Never mind that it is filled with loopholes written by lobbyists. Never mind that the wealthiest already speak with the loudest voices in Washington, & always have. Grassley’s comments open a window to the soul of the current national Republican Party & it it is not pretty. This is not a view of America that I think President Ronald Reagan let alone President Dwight Eisenhower or Teddy Roosevelt would have recognized. This is unadulterated cynicism & a version of top-down class warfare run amok. ~Facebook 12/4/17

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.

The great masses, he wrote in Mein Kampf, “will more easily fall victims to a great lie than to a small one, since they themselves perhaps also lie sometimes in little things, but would certainly still be too much ashamed of too great lies. Thus, such an untruth will not at all enter their heads, and therefore they will be unable to believe in the possibility of the enormous impudence of the most infamous distortion in others.” Hitler’s lies spread misinformation that was favorable to Germany and unfavorable to us and our allies, and sowed dissension among the American public not just about the war effort but about our own basic system of government. His very well-funded propaganda mission in the United States was twofold: to try to keep the United States from getting into World War II, and also to soften us up, to mess with us, to make us less effective as a country, by finding and exploiting what the Germans called “kernels of disturbance” in the United States. The German propaganda operation in America, according to the first U.S. academic study on the topic, identified these kernels of disturbance as “racial controversies, economic inequalities, petty jealousies in public life,” and “differences of opinion which divide political parties and minority groups.” Even the “frustrated ambitions of discarded politicians.” Germany’s agents were tasked with finding these fissures in American society and then prying them further apart, exploiting them to make Americans hate and suspect each other, and maybe even wish for a new kind of country altogether. A partisan, bickering, demoralized America, the Nazis believed, would be incapable of mounting a successful war effort in Europe. It might even soften us up for an eventual takeover. Hitler was counting above all on racism and religious bigotry to carry the day in the United States, and to set the stage for global domination. “The wholesome aversion for the Negroes and the colored races in general, including the Jews, the existence of popular justice [lynching]…scholars who have studied immigration and gained an insight, by means of intelligence tests, into the inequality of the races—all these strains are an assurance that the sound elements of the United States will one day awaken as they have awakened in Germany,” Hitler said.

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.

The Democratic Party leadership has gone out of its way to develop programs (sanctuary cities. DACA, and the like) to attract Latino votes, literally at the expense of opportunities for African Americans.

Reducing illegal immigration helps to prevent long-term multigenerational poverty among African Americans.

The RAISE ACT helps to curb incentives for illegal immigration and protects black workers.

The Trump administration's willingness to put in place strong measures to curb illegal immigration despite the media and political backlash actually helps black Americans.

would also like to acknowledge all the immigrants who have risked their lives to come to this country, and the children of those immigrants. You are what make America great.

Consider this data on the distribution of wealth: • Since 2015, the richest 1 percent has owned more wealth than the rest of the planet owns.11 • Eight men own the same amount of wealth as do the poorest half of the world. • The incomes of the poorest 10 percent of people increased by less than three dollars a year between 1988 and 2011, while the incomes of the richest 1 percent increased 182 times as much. • In Bloomberg’s daily ranking of the world’s five hundred richest people, the world’s wealthiest three (Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Jeff Bezos), all white American men, have total net worths of $85 billion, $79 billion, and $73 billion, respectively.12 By comparison, the 2015 gross domestic product of Sri Lanka was $82 billion; Luxembourg $58 billion; and Iceland, $16 billion.13 • Of the world’s ten richest people, nine are white men.14 • In 2015–2016, the world’s ten biggest corporations together had revenue greater than that of the government revenues of 180 countries combined. • In the US, over the last thirty years, the growth in the incomes of the bottom 50 percent has been zero, whereas incomes of the top 1 percent have grown by 300 percent. The call to Make America Great Again worked powerfully in service of the racial manipulation of white people, diverting blame away from the white elite and toward various peoples of color—for example, undocumented workers, immigrants, and the Chinese—for the current conditions of the white working class.

History helps explain why the financial crisis was so much more beneficial to right-wing populists than to their left-wing counterparts. ‘Jail the bankers!’ no doubt has its appeal as a slogan, but blaming economic hardships and disappointments on immigrants and foreigners would seem to be a more politically potent strategy. Likewise, while ‘Regulate Wall Street More Tightly Again!’ resonates with some voters, ‘Make America Great Again’ resonates with more. There have been many financial crises in the Western world since the first era of globalization in the late nineteenth century. In most cases, right-wing populists have been the political beneficiaries.33

It is important for our white citizens always to remember that the Negroes alone of all our immigrants came to America against their will by the special compelling invitation of the whites; that the institution of slavery was introduced, expanded and maintained by the United States by the white people and for their own benefit; and they likewise created the conditions that followed emancipation. Our Negro problem, therefore, is not of the Negro’s making. No group in our population is less responsible for its existence. But every group is responsible for its continuance.… Both races need to understand that their rights and duties are mutual and equal and their interests in the common good are identical.… There is no help or healing in appraising past responsibilities or in present apportioning of praise or blame. The past is of value only as it aids in understanding the present; and an understanding of the facts of the problem—a magnanimous understanding by both races—is the first step toward its solution.

Even those on the left talk about how immigrants make America great. They point to photographs of happy refugees turned good citizens, listing their contributions, as if that is the price of existing in the same country, on the same earth.

There were unknown tongues and aromas drifting out of the beer gardens and delicatessens. There were Germans, Poles, Slavs, Hungarians, Irish, Italians, Greeks, and Russians who had come here, as Ida Mae and her husband had, willing to work their way up from the bottom and make a life for themselves in a freer place than the one they had left. Before World War I, Milwaukee had not extended itself to the laboring caste of the South, nor had it needed to, with the continuing supply of European immigrants to work its factories. But, as in the rest of the industrial North, the number of Europeans immigrating to Milwaukee plummeted from 22,508 in the first decade of the twentieth century to a mere 451 during all of the 1920s because of the war. Factories that had never before considered colored labor came to see the advantages of colored workers from the South, even if some of the so-called advantages were themselves steeped in stereotype. “They are superior to foreign labor because they readily understand what you try to tell them,” one employer reported. “Loyalty, willingness, cheerfulness. Quicker, huskier, and can stand more heat than other workmen.” Most colored migrants were funneled into the lowest-paying, least wanted jobs in the harshest industries—iron and steel foundries and slaughtering and meatpacking. They “only did the dirty work,” a colored steelworker said of his early days in Milwaukee, “jobs that even Poles didn’t want.

America was a segregated workforce, and in many cases, that segregation contained a cultural element. A great many of our instructors were first-generation immigrants. These were the people who knew how to take care of themselves, how to survive on very little and work with what they had. These were the people who tended small gardens in their backyards, who repaired their own homes, who kept their appliances running for as long as mechanically possible. It was crucial that these people teach the rest of us to break from our comfortable, disposable consumer lifestyle even though their labor had allowed us to maintain that lifestyle in the first place. Yes, there was racism, but there was also classism. You’re a high-powered corporate attorney. You’ve spent most of your life reviewing contracts, brokering deals, talking on the phone. That’s what you’re good at, that’s what made you rich and what allowed you to hire a plumber to fix your toilet, which allowed you to keep talking on the phone. The more work you do, the more money you make, the more peons you hire to free you up to make more money. That’s the way the world works. But one day it doesn’t.

the Jewish Agency and they had agreed to allocate from the next immigrant ship twenty-four Moroccans to Kibbutz Makor for work at the dig. “They’ll be pretty rough diamonds,” Eliav warned. “No English. No education.” “If they speak Arabic I can handle them,” Tabari assured the leaders, and two nights later the team went to greet the large ship that plied monotonously back and forth across the Mediterranean hauling Jewish immigrants to Israel. “Before we go aboard,” Eliav summarized, “I’ve got to warn you again that these aren’t the handsome young immigrants that you accept in America, Cullinane. These are the dregs of the world, but in two years we’ll make first-class citizens of them.” Cullinane said he knew, but if he had realized how intellectually unprepared he was for the cargo of this ship, he would have stayed at the tell and allowed Tabari to choose the new hands. For the ship that came to Israel that night brought with it not the kind of people that a nation would consciously select, not the clean nor the healthy nor the educated. From Tunisia came a pitiful family of four, stricken with glaucoma and the effects of malnutrition. From Bulgaria came three old women so broken they were no longer of use to anyone; the communists had allowed them to escape, for they had no money to buy bread nor skills to earn it nor teeth to eat it with. From France came not high school graduates with productive years ahead of them, but two tragic couples, old and abandoned by their children, with only the empty days to look forward to, not hope. And from the shores of Morocco, outcast by towns in which they had lived for countless generations, came frightened, dirty, pathetic Jews, illiterate, often crippled with disease and vacant-eyed. “Jesus Christ!” Cullinane whispered. “Are these the newcomers?” He was decent enough not to worry about himself first—although he was appalled at the prospect of trying to dig with such assistance—but he did worry about Israel. How can a nation build itself strong with such material? he asked himself. It was a shocking experience, one that cut to the heart of his sensibilities: My great-grandfather must have looked like this when he came half-starved from Ireland. He thought of the scrawny Italians that had come to New York and the Chinese to San Francisco, and he began to develop that sense of companionship with Israel that comes very slowly to a Gentile: it was building itself of the same human material that America was developed upon; and suddenly he felt a little weak. Why were these people seeking a new home coming to Israel and not to America? Where had the American dream faltered? And he saw that Israel was right; it was taking people—any people—as America had once done; so that in fifty years the bright new ideas of the world would come probably from Israel and no longer from a tired America.

In light of fierce contemporary struggles over the ethnic make-up of America, anxieties about foreign subversion and mounting unemployment, it was no surprise that already in the autumn of 1920 Congress was actively discussing a ‘genuine 100 percent American immigration law’.50 Within weeks of his inauguration Harding approved a law that cut immigration from 805,228 in 1920 to 309,556 in 1921–2. Immigration from southern and eastern Europe and Asia was reduced to a trickle. In 1924 the cap was further lowered to 150,000 entrants per year. For centuries the New World had stood open to adventurous settlers. The damming up of transatlantic immigration marked the most decisive break between the liberal modernity of the nineteenth century and the increasing centrality of nation-state regulation in the twentieth century.

We have to make America strong again and make America great again,” Trump told the CPAC crowd. “Because when it comes to immigration, you know that the 11 million illegals, if given the right to vote . . . every one of those 11 million people will be voting Democratic.” Republicans who supported immigration reform, Trump warned, were “on a suicide mission.

Because in America there is a naive belief that we are all rugged individuals and can make it on our own, stock market and banking regulations became nonexistent. Consequently, on October 24, 1929, the New York Stock Market crashed, ushering in the “Great Depression.” It became a human tragedy that could have and should have been prevented! Well, not everyone was dancing anymore. The vast middle class was struggling; coal miners were still digging for the dirty black energy, deep within the earth and only getting black lung disease for their efforts. Farmers worked long hours to sow and harvest uncertain crops and the new immigrants just off the boat, worked for very small returns in the many unregulated sweatshops.

The term “melting pot” came into general usage after it was used as a metaphor describing a fusion of nationalities, cultures and ethnicities in the United States. The term was first used in the 1908 play entitled “The Melting Pot”, where the immigrant protagonist declared: “Understand that America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming! A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American.

Americans across the worldview spectrum succumb to their basest survival instincts under such circumstances. So, it seems, do people the world over. Europe, like the United States, recently has seen the rise of right-wing populist leaders railing against immigration, European integration, and open borders. And sure enough, the same four parenting questions that reveal so much about Americans’ political preferences also explain a lot about what is happening on the other side of the Atlantic. Worldview was central to the Brexit vote in Britain. It is also central to support for right-wing parties like France’s National Front and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party. The same is happening in places as diverse as Hungary, Poland, Austria, and Denmark. Whether the influx of immigrants is objectively more like a trickle or a torrent, citizens of all these places perceive a flood pouring into their countries with the potential to change their culture, a dynamic that heightens the appeal of any leader who promises to Make (insert country name) Great Again.

If an immigrant's daughter can become the vice-president of our United States, then the day is not far that even an immigrant can become the president - of course it'll require further amendments to the constitution, but that day our sweet land of liberty will truly be an advanced nation on earth.

there is no context in which my ego, if not fastidiously monitored, won’t run amok. It is extremely difficult to put aside a lifetime’s conditioning. The only way I can stay drug free is one day at a time, with vigilance, humility, and support. My tendency is still, after eleven years, to drift towards oblivion. My appetite for attention too can only be positively directed with great care. Look out your window, turn on your TV, see which values are being promoted, which aspects of humanity are being celebrated. The alarm bells of fear and desire are everywhere; these powerful primal tools, designed to aid survival in a world unrecognizable to modern civilized humans, are relentlessly jangled. A facet of our unevolved nature—comparable to that which still craves sugar and fat, a relic from the days when it was scarce—is being pricked and jabbed and buzzed every time we see a billboard bikini or a Coca-Cola floozy. Our saber-toothed terrors and mammoth anxieties are being dragged up and strung out by shrill transmissions about immigrants, junkies, pit bulls, and cancer. Once I sat in that kundalini class, in white robes, cross-legged, with pan-piped serenity caressing the congregation as we meditated as one, and all I was really thinking about was if I should buy a gun. I was in America after all and you are allowed a gun. Have you ever held a Glock 38? It feels so cool in your hand. Even the word makes you feel tough. “Glock.” Tupac had one; Eminem loves them—I want one. Never mind all this hippie-dippie, yin–yang, Ramadan, green-juice bullshit; I want a gat, like Tupac. Of course, I think things like that; the messages that are broadcast on that frequency move fast and stick hard. Look at the state of the world. I didn’t buy one, though; my mum had to remind me that I’m a peace-loving lad and that if I had a gun in the house, the person most at risk would be me. The kundalini techniques worked: They advanced my mind, they tuned me in. How much more powerful these techniques would be if supported by a culture of spiritual evolution, not one of self-fortification.

to produce. As John Adams wrote, “Property monopolized or in the Possession of a few is a Curse to Mankind. We should preserve not an Absolute Equality.—this is unnecessary, but preserve all from extreme Poverty, and all others from extravagant Riches.”1 Here are ten steps that I think might help put us more on the course intended by the Revolutionary generation, to help us move beyond where we are stuck and instead toward what we ought to be: 1. Don’t panic Did the founders anticipate a Donald Trump? I would say yes. As James Madison wrote in the most prominent of his contributions to the Federalist Papers, “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.”2 Just after Aaron Burr nearly became president, Jefferson wrote that “bad men will sometimes get in, & with such an immense patronage, may make great progress in corrupting the public mind & principles. This is a subject with which wisdom & patriotism should be occupied.”3 Fortunately the founders built a durable system, one that often in recent years has stymied Trump. He has tried to introduce a retrogressive personal form of rule, but repeatedly has run into a Constitution built instead to foster the rule of law.4 Over the last several years we have seen Madison’s checks and balances operate robustly. Madison designed a structure that could accommodate people acting unethically and venally. Again, our national political gridlock sometimes is not a bug but a feature. It shows our system is working. The key task is to do our best to make sure the machinery of the system works. This begins with ensuring that eligible citizens are able to vote. This ballot box is the basic building block of our system. We should appreciate how strong and flexible our Constitution is. It is all too easy, as one watches the follies and failings of humanity, to conclude that we live in a particularly wicked time. In a poll taken just as I was writing the first part of this book, the majority of Americans surveyed said they think they are living at the lowest point in American history.5 So it is instructive to be reminded that Jefferson held similar beliefs about his own era. He wrote that there were “three epochs in history signalized by the total extinction of national morality.” The first two were in ancient times, following the deaths of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, he thought, and the third was his own age.6 As an aside, Trump’s attacks on immigrants might raise a few eyebrows among the founders. Seven of the thirty-nine people who signed the Constitution were themselves born abroad, most notably Hamilton and James Wilson.7

Eight years ago, Mexicans picked almost all of the crops in this great valley,” Jack said. “They came across the border, moved into these fields, and picked the crops and moved on. February for peas in Nipomo. June for apricots in Santa Clara. Grapes in August in Fresno, and September here for cotton. They came, they picked, and they returned home for the winter. Invisible to the locals at every stage. Until the Crash of ’29 broke the system and made Californians afraid for their jobs. They feared who Americans always fear: the outsider. So the state cracked down on illegal immigrants and called the Mexicans criminals and deported them. By ’31, the majority of them were gone or in hiding. It would have been a catastrophe for the agriculture business, but then…”—Jack held out his arms—“the Dust Bowl. The drought. The Great Depression. Millions lost their jobs and their homes. You came west, needing jobs, just wanting to put food on your tables and feed your families. You took the Mexicans’ places in the fields. Now, your people make up ninety percent of the pickers. But you don’t want to be unseen, do you? You came to live here, to put down roots, to be Californians.” “We’re Americans!” someone yelled from the crowd. “We got every right to be here!” “Rights,” Jack said, looking out at them. “They matter in America, don’t they?

Just about the only serious argument anyone tries to make in favor of diversity echoes Jonathan Alger, a lawyer who has argued before the Supreme Court in favor of racial preferences: “Corporations have to compete internationally,” he says, and “cross-cultural competency is a key skill in the work force.” This argument assumes that people get along best with people like themselves, that Koreans, for example, can do business most effectively with other Koreans. Presumably, if the United States has a large population of Koreans they will be a bridge between Korea and the United States. For that to work, however, Korean-Americans should not fully assimilate because if they do, they will lose the qualities that make them an asset. America should give up the ideal of Americanization that, in a few generations, made Englishmen, Dutchmen, Germans, Swedes, the Irish, and all other Europeans essentially indistinguishable. Do we really want to give up the idea of assimilation? Or should only racial minorities give up on assimilation? More to the point, is a diverse population really an advantage in trade or international affairs? Japan is one of the most racially homogeneous nations. It would be hard to find a country that so clearly practices the opposite of American-style diversity, but it is one of the most successful trading nations on earth. If diversity were a key advantage, Brazil, Indonesia, Sudan, Malaysia, and Lebanon would be world leaders in trade. Other great trading nations—Taiwan, Korea and China—are, if anything, even more closed and exclusionist than Japan. Germany is likewise a successful trading nation, but its trade surpluses cannot be attributed to cultural or racial diversity. Only since the 1960s has it had a large non-German minority of Turks who came as guest workers, and there is no evidence that Turks have helped Germany become more of a world presence or even a better trade partner with Turkey. The world’s consumers care about price and quality, not the race or nationality of the factory worker. American corporations boast about workforces that “look like America,” but they are often beaten in their own market by companies whose workforces look like Yokohama or Shanghai. If we really took seriously the idea that “cross-cultural competence” was crucially important, we would adjust the mix of immigrants accordingly. We might question the wisdom of Haitian immigration, for example, since Haiti is a small, poor country that is never likely to be an important trade partner. And do 32 million Mexican-Americans help our trade relations with the world—or even with Mexico? Canada is our number-one trading partner. Should we therefore encourage immigration from Canada? No one ever talks about immigration in these terms because at some level everyone understands that diversity has nothing to do with trade or influence in the world. The “cross-cultural competence” argument is artificial.

The language used by the forty-fifth president of the United States offers a clear example of how this sort of racist language and thinking works. Long before he became president, Donald Trump liked to say, “Laziness is a trait in Blacks.” When he decided to run for president, his plan for making America great again: defaming Latinx immigrants as mostly criminals and rapists and demanding billions for a border wall to block them. He promised “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Once he became president, he routinely called his Black critics “stupid.” He claimed immigrants from Haiti “all have AIDS,” while praising White supremacists as “very fine people” in the summer of 2017.

The call to Make America Great Again worked powerfully in service of the racial manipulation of white people, diverting blame away from the white elite and toward various peoples of color—for example, undocumented workers, immigrants, and the Chinese—for the current conditions of the white working class.

Consider this data on the distribution of wealth: • Since 2015, the richest 1 percent has owned more wealth than the rest of the planet owns.11 • Eight men own the same amount of wealth as do the poorest half of the world. • The incomes of the poorest 10 percent of people increased by less than three dollars a year between 1988 and 2011, while the incomes of the richest 1 percent increased 182 times as much. • In Bloomberg’s daily ranking of the world’s five hundred richest people, the world’s wealthiest three (Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Jeff Bezos), all white American men, have total net worths of $85 billion, $79 billion, and $73 billion, respectively.12 By comparison, the 2015 gross domestic product of Sri Lanka was $82 billion; Luxembourg $58 billion; and Iceland, $16 billion.13 • Of the world’s ten richest people, nine are white men.14 • In 2015–2016, the world’s ten biggest corporations together had revenue greater than that of the government revenues of 180 countries combined. • In the US, over the last thirty years, the growth in the incomes of the bottom 50 percent has been zero, whereas incomes of the top 1 percent have grown by 300 percent. The call to Make America Great Again worked powerfully in service of the racial manipulation of white people, diverting blame away from the white elite and toward various peoples of color—for example, undocumented workers, immigrants, and the Chinese—for the current conditions of the white working class. The

Terrorists who manifested their destiny on stolen land, are banning immigrants!

Why America Exists When oppression became unbearable, America was born - when discrimination turned extreme, America was born - when rigidity became intolerable, America was born. America was born of an unbending desire for freedom - America was born of a drive for self-correction - America was born of an urge for progression. Yes we did many mistakes in the process, even committed horrible atrocities - we drove people off their lands to build a new world for our children - and nothing that we can do today can mend those atrocities of yesterday, but what we can do is to make a promise to ourselves to never repeat those atrocities of our ancestors no more. It's time we become the new Americans - Americans with more accountability than recklessness - Americans with more curiosity than rigidity - Americans with more acceptability than prejudice - Americans with more inclusivity than discrimination. There is no our America and their America, there's only one America - the United States of America. You see, ours is not just the United States of America, ours is the United States of Assimilation. And we must practice this principle to the letter and spirit everyday of our lives. For example, we of all people cannot in right mind deny shelter to those seeking refuge, especially when we are both sociologically and economically capable of doing so. Whoever comes to these shores of liberty, in the hope of life, freedom and happiness, automatically becomes an American, by measure of the same determination and will that made our founding fathers set foot on Plymouth Rock escaping British bigotry, snobbery and barbarism. Our very country is founded by immigrants. America was built by refugees, and as such, if this land can't be a refuge for the subjugated and persecuted, then it is an insult on our very existence as the great land of the free and brave.

person.” Nobody came to Slote’s flat on Sunday evening. The front page of the Zurich Tageblatt, lying on his desk Monday morning, had a spread of Japanese photographs about the Singapore victory, furnished by the German news service: the surrender ceremony, the hordes of British troops sitting on the earth in a prison compound, the celebration in Tokyo. The story about Father Martin was so short that Slote almost missed it, but there it was at the bottom of the page. The truck driver, who claimed that his brakes had failed, was being held for questioning. The priest was dead, crushed. 19 A Jew’s Journey (excerpt from Aaron Jastrow’s manuscript) APRIL 23, 1942. American bombers have raided Tokyo! My pulse races as it once did when, an immigrant in love with everything American, infected with baseball fever, I saw Babe Ruth hit a home run. For me America is the Babe Ruth of the nations. I unashamedly confess it. And the Babe has come out of his slump and “hit one over the fence”! Strange, how Allied airplane bombs infallibly fall on churches, schools, and hospitals; what a triumph of military imprecision! If Berlin radio speaks the truth—and why should Germans lie, pray?—the RAF has by now flattened nearly all institutions of worship, learning, and healing in Germany, while unerringly missing all other targets. Now we are told that Tokyo was unscathed in the raid except for a great number of schools, hospitals, and temples demolished by the barbarous Americans. Most extraordinary. My niece calls this “Doolittle raid” (an intrepid Army Air Corps colonel of that name led the attack) just a stunt, a token bombing. It will make no difference to the war; so she says. What she did, when the news came through on the BBC, was to entrust her baby to the cook, rush down to the Excelsior Hotel where our fellow journalists are housed, and there get joyously drunk with them. They are drunk nearly all the time, but I have not seen Natalie inebriated in years. I must say that when her chief local admirer, a banal-minded Associated Press reporter, brought her back, she was full of amusing raillery, though scarcely able to walk straight. Her mood was so gay, in fact, that I was tempted to disclose then and there the grave secret I have been harboring for two weeks, not even entrusting it to these pages. But I refrained. She has suffered enough on my account. Time enough to reveal