Alumni Association Home > Past Issues > 2006 > May-June 2006	Print View

The label that the United States is a nation of immigrants is both true and a simplification. Whether were Americans who landed here last year or are the descendants of the nations founders, we share a tinge of collective guilt for living on land that was, to put it gently, appropriated.

But here we are. For generations, every parcel has been delineated, farmed, developed, fostered, and become the foundation for the hopes and dreams of families and entrepreneurs. We cant undo what's been done. We cant, without economic and humanitarian crises, give the land back or return to wherever we came from. Nor can the United States realistically throw open its doors to anyone and everyone who knocks.

Our nation is far from perfect, and its best viewed as a work in progress, but it is still a beacon. It represents hope and opportunity to millions of desperate and suffering people around the globe. Those of us who have benefited from the fruits of our freedoms, who have found higher education within our grasp, can barely appreciate what our lives would be like if we worked 18 hours a day and still couldn't feed our children, were imprisoned for our religious or political beliefs, or had no rights because of our gender, race, or ethnicity.

I know I had little understanding of such lives when, as a high school student, I was a hotel maid and worked alongside refugees from Laos who were thrilled to be doing a job I despised but knew I could leave at the end of the summer. I earned greater understanding when, as a college student, I tutored a Vietnamese immigrant in English. He mourned leaving his country and his father who was killed in the war and his mother by a stray bullet but he wanted to live. So he came to America and would study computer science when he could master English.

Ill never completely understand where others have come from: the Pakistani friend who cant return home or shell lose her children, who is raising them in America to be good people, she says, her contribution to the world; the friend whose family fled Nicaragua where she suffered unspeakable trauma, who is now a college professor; the immigrants who sit at a computer terminal set up in the Mexican restaurant down the street, tapping into resources to find their futures in the United States.

From the day the first boats landed on the shores of what would become America, immigrants have come seeking something. Decisions are being made about how to deal with immigration, legal and illegal, and I believe it would be wise to acknowledge that immigrants give America as much, or more, as they take.