Immigrants Are a Gift to America

On America's birthday, consider what makes us special and who we want to be.

Photo by Luke Stackpoole on Unsplash

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It feels odd to discuss America as a place of safety, opportunity, and promise when Fourth of July revelers were just gunned down in yet another mass shooting, coming on the heels of other recent mass shootings at graduation parties, an elementary school, a hospital, and a supermarket. And yet: For the world’s refugees, immigrants, and asylum-seekers, America has long been a place of safety, opportunity, and promise.

That is, until Trump. And now, still, even with Joe Biden in office, America has reneged on its promise to be a safe haven. America has become less open, less welcoming, less decent.

We are losing even the vision of who we could be.

While the Biden administration has raised the cap on the number of refugees the US is willing to welcome, they haven’t done nearly enough to actually welcome those refugees — to shore up the resettlement organizations that were gutted during the Trump administration; to make sure that at least some of the one million refugees worldwide are able to get out of their frozen lives in refugee settlements, get on a plane, land on US soil, and get off of military bases and into their new lives. Last year, the Biden administration pledged to resettle 62,500 refugees. It actually resettled only 11, 411 — and that’s despite the massive refugee crisis it created in Afghanistan with its speedy pull-out and total lack of planning for what to do with the many people whose lives were put at risk when they were left behind.

In 2021, Biden resettled fewer refugees than Donald Trump in any year of Trump’s xenophobic presidency.

Now, a second refugee crisis in Ukraine has only heightened the need. But this year, too, is shaping up to have appallingly low resettlement numbers.

At the same time, the Biden administration has kept some of Trump’s harshest immigration rules in place — including, perhaps most shamefully, leaving asylum-seekers fleeing extreme violence to languish in Mexico, where many live in fetid camps awaiting a safe haven north that may never come.

When Donald Trump implemented his “Muslim ban” and a series of other anti-immigrant measures, good Americans flocked to airports to help those sliding in before the deadline, and to protest against his far-right vision of America as an exclusionary, xenophobic state. When we learned about his family separation policy, we were rightly outraged at its cruelty and inhumanity.

Joe Biden is not Donald Trump. But Joe Biden is also not implementing the vision of America that liberals and progressives were demanding in the days of righteous airport protests and understandable tear-shedding over so-called “tender-age” shelters.

The America we aspire to be shouldn’t change just because a less-awful guy is in office.

The truth is that many of the greatest things about the US, from our most dynamic cities to our most revolutionary innovations, are thanks to immigrants. Immigrants to the US give back far more than they receive. But even if they didn’t, Americans need to decide who we are. And we are, by any objective measure, a nation of immigrants: 98 percent of us descended from newcomers to this nation, myself included. Our nation character is stronger when we understand that we are a place of plenty, and that we have so much to give and share. We are a better place when we are a welcoming and generous place.

Right now, America’s doors are mostly shut. And because a Democrat is in office and because there are so many other bad things happening and so much to do, liberals and progressives aren’t exactly demanding that they be flung open.

But we can do several things at once. We can knit together our desire for a freer, safer, fairer country with our vision of a more welcoming, kinder country.

We can be good, if we want to be. We can be kind, if we choose to be. And we can welcome more refugees and immigrants — to be good and kind, yes, but also to create a better, stronger, more interesting, and more dynamic country for all of us.

xx Jill

This is the free weekly edition of this newsletter. If you’re enjoying it, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. This work is 100% supported by readers like you.