I’m an immigrant. I’ve lived on three continents, in several countries. I chose to make this one home.
That choice was driven by what I believe makes this country special.
Not perfect. Special, I said.
It’s this. You can pick up a human being from any place in the world and drop them here. It doesn’t matter how rich they are, what color their skin is, or what gods (if any) they worship. Within two generations, three at most, their descendants will have woven themselves into the fabric of America.
I’m not saying this will happen in each and every case, but it will for the vast majority. We do a better job at it than any other country I know of. Other countries simply can’t make it happen. Most don’t even try.
The law took effect on June 30th, 1968.
America wasn’t always like this. Forming a more perfect union took work. It took the concerted effort of Civil Rights activists, Immigration activists, Faith Leaders, Congressional Representatives, Senators and people of good will across America to change our racist immigration laws. It required transforming the American political system. This system had been in place for decades, it had created Chinese exclusion act of 1882 which did exactly what it's name suggests. It had sought to fix the racial make-up of America with the National Origins Formula of 1921. It was a system that had had led the United States to refuse to take in significant numbers of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution, missing a chance to save millions. Public opinion was 70% opposed to Jewish immigration.
What I see happening in this country under the Trump administration, is a concerted attempt to undermine an integrating, diverse society. They want to turn back the clock to a point where the US systematically privileged a racial, ethnic and religious majority and systematically discriminated against all others.
A crucial part of their reactionary effort is to halt all non-white immigration to the country, just as it was 50 years ago, when only Europeans could “legally” immigrate. It took decades to chip away at the system and the erroneous beliefs that propped it up. At the culmination of this effort, on a sunny day in October 1965, at the base of the Statue of Liberty, in a text-book example of political showmanship, President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed this act.
As he signed the bill, LBJ made a speech worth reading. In it he said:
This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or our power. — www.lbjlibrary.org/...
He was wrong, of course. The bill was revolutionary, as so many great steps forward in America have been. The bill did reshape the structure of our daily lives. It is why you can find taquerias and General Tso’s chicken in any town across America. It’s why tens of millions of Americans go to yoga classes. It is why billions of people use Google (Sergey Brin landed here a refugee). It increased American wealth immensely. It has immeasurably enhanced American soft power. It did not merely affect, it transformed the lives of tens of millions of people.
In our righteous celebration of the other great civil rights bills passed in the 1960s, we sometimes neglect the Immigration Rights Act of 1965. We should not. Every other one of the great civil rights bills of the 1960s is a promise made to ourselves, the Immigration Rights Act is a promise and a beacon to the world.
Just as the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964/1968 are, the Immigration Rights Act has been the object of right-wing ire ever since it was passed. Reactionary forces have waged a fifty-year long battle to undo the victories of the Civil Rights Era and return us to a system of unreconstructed discrimination in every sphere of life. Their efforts have culminated in the election of a president who says he doesn’t want “people from 'shithole countries' coming here”.
I’ll leave it to the son of a man from one of those countries to answer this jibe.
Barack Obama: You know, this whole anti-immigrant sentiment in our politics right now is contrary to who we are. Unless you are a native American, your family came from someplace else. And although we are a nation of laws and we want people to follow the law, and I have been pushing Congress to make sure we have strong borders and we are keeping everybody moving through the legal processes, don't pretend that somehow 100 years ago the process was smooth and strict. That is not how it worked. There are a bunch of folks who came here from all over Europe, all throughout Asia, all throughout Central America, and certainly who came from Africa. It was not some orderly process where all the rules applied and everything was strict, and, 'I came the right way.'— obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/…
Barack Obama: The Irish, who left behind a land of famine; the Germans, who fled persecution; the Scandinavians, who arrived eager to pioneer out west; the Polish; the Russians; the Italians; the Chinese; the Japanese; the West Indians; the huddled masses who came through Ellis Island on one coast and Angel Island on the other -- (cheers, applause) -- you know, all those folks, before they were us, they were them. (Laughter.)
And when each new wave of immigrants arrived, they faced resistance from those who were already here. They faced hardship. They faced racism. They faced ridicule. But over time, as they went about their daily lives, as they earned a living, as they raised a family, as they built a community, as their kids went to school here, they did their part to build the nation. They were the Einsteins and the Carnegies, but they were also the millions of women and men whose names history may not remember but whose actions helped make us who we are, who built this country hand by hand, brick by brick. (Cheers, applause.)
They all came here knowing that what makes somebody an American is not just blood or birth but allegiance to our founding principles and the faith in the idea that anyone from anywhere can write the next great chapter of our story. — www.nytimes.com/...
The Immigration Rights Act of 1965 re-wrote the policy of family reunification. As he signed the bill, LBJ said:
The fairness of this standard is so self-evident that we may well wonder that it has not always been applied. Yet the fact is that for over four decades the immigration policy of the United States has been twisted and has been distorted by the harsh injustice of the national origins quota system.
Under that system the ability of new immigrants to come to America depended upon the country of their birth. Only 3 countries were allowed to supply 70 percent of all the immigrants.
Families were kept apart because a husband or a wife or a child had been born in the wrong place.
Men of needed skill and talent were denied entrance because they came from southern or eastern Europe or from one of the developing continents.
This system violated the basic principle of American democracy--the principle that values and rewards each man on the basis of his merit as a man.
It has been un-American in the highest sense, because it has been untrue to the faith that brought thousands to these shores even before we were a country.
Today, with my signature, this system is abolished.
I appeal to all of you, to join the protests this Saturday, June 30th, wherever you are across these United States, to ensure that system stays abolished.
PS. My novel, City of Lost Love Songs is now available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble