The Blood Of Our Nation

(751 words)

“Immigrants are poisoning the blood of our nation!" so says Mr. Trump.

I beg to differ.

First, let me agree that there is a crisis on our southern border. We’ve been dealing with these challenges for decades, but the asylum processing system is not equipped to handle these numbers today and needs to be re-engineered. In the meantime, while respecting the Rule of Law governing refugees seeking asylum, we need the Federal Government in cooperation with the States to get control of the situation in a legal and humane way (e.g., no separating children from their parents at the border).

We have always lived in a survival-seeking world that is constantly on the move. These immigrants are good people for the most part (and certainly the innocent children) who have taken huge risks to escape war, famine, pandemics, disastrous climate changes, and tyrants in their home countries. Every country needs to do its fair share of providing a safe haven for legitimate refugees that come their way. Sure, there are some bad actors embedded among these desperate immigrants, but probably no more than the percentage already hiding in plain sight in one’s hometown. This is just the reality of the human diaspora wherever you find it.

We all learned as kids that America is the "melting pot of the world". We learned about the menace to the world that was Nazi Germany during WWII, followed by the mass exodus of refugees from Europe trying to survive the war. We memorized the famous words from the poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty:

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

We grew up extremely proud of America’s welcoming spirit and the resources we had to integrate immigrants and refugees into American culture. By offering immigrants a chance for a better life built on America’s democratic foundation of economic opportunity and political and religious freedoms, we believed they would pitch in and help champion our democratic values.

I married a woman whose ancestors immigrated from Austria and Czechoslovakia to escape the great World Wars of Europe. I was immediately immersed in an ethnic world that I happily absorbed like a sponge at every birthday, graduation, wedding, reunion, and even funerals. I came to love and respect my new large extended ethnic family, and this is what many American families have been enjoying for decades. If I draw a big box around my extended family on both my wife’s and my side, we have family members of ethnic origins originating from Africa (African American), Austria, China, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, El Salvador, England, France, Ireland, Lithuania, Scotland, South Korea, and Spain. We are a multi-ethnic tapestry, but we are one as a family.

This quote beautifully captures the melting pot metaphor:

America has been called a “melting pot,” but it seems better to call it a “mosaic,” for in it each nation, people or race which has come to its shores has been privileged to keep its individuality, contributing at the same time its share to the unified pattern of a new nation. (K. Baudouin)

Mr. Trump’s incendiary comment about immigrants is an unforgivable insult to all the American people whose indigenous and immigrated ancestors have helped build this country; tended and cared for the land and animals; labored daily in the fields to make plantation owners wealthy while shackled by the institution of slavery; went to war and fought bravely and hundreds of thousands died to protect our nation; built railroads and critical infrastructure for an advanced society and economy; and provided all the daily services that make the American quality of life what it is. Proportional credit is certainly due the white man for his share in building the “American Dream,” but we underestimate how much the Native American and Immigrant contributions are intertwined with that success. They have strengthened our nation by their hard work, strong values, determination, self-reliance, optimism (dreams), gratitude, and patriotism.

The “blood of our nation” never was and never will be one ethnic group. Each time two people from different ethnic groups start a family, their blood lines merge and their cultural backgrounds intertwine to create a new unique story within the evolving mosaic of first Native Americans and Latino-Americans, followed by Caucasians, then African Americans, and Asians. This is our legacy of the great American “melting pot.” In no way has this ever “poisoned the blood of our nation.”

IT IS, the “blood of our nation”: multi-ethnic, resilient, and poison-free.