Immigrants Benefit Their Host Country While Seeking Better Lives

Forbes

a day ago

Refugee mature woman protesting in the street
getty
Pakistan, Peru, Macedonia, Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuela, Albania, Ecuador, Bulgaria, Jamaica, Ukraine, India, Philippines, El Salvador. Korea, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Poland.
Keep the names of those 18 countries in mind as I tell you this back story.
Two weeks ago, I fell and broke my hip. If you've never broken a hip, let me give you a piece of advice. Don't.
Anyway, after a luxury limo trip (translation: ambulance) to the ER that night and hip replacement surgery the next day, I was transported to a rehabilitation facility for what would turn out to be two weeks of intensive, rigorous therapy. This rehabilitation institute has a well-deserved reputation for being the best of the best, elite in their service and outcomes. It's where you want to be if you have to be where you don't want to be.
I'll be going home in two days and I'm confident all will be well. Which leads us to why I write today.
And here it is. It was those 18 countries from which people who cared for me came to the United States. They were doctors, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, nurses, aides, imaging techs, phlebotomists, physical therapists, occupational therapists, dieticians, food service workers, and transport personnel. They treated me, fed me, held me, dressed me, cleaned me, and encouraged me.
And they were immigrants, all doing their jobs so well and with such love, honor, and gratitude that it was plain to see why and how this institute is so very good at what they do. Perhaps they were not quite the destitute people to which Emma Lazarus referred in her immortal poem The New Colossus.
Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries sheWith silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,I lift my lamp beside the golden door!'
But I'll bet some were.
And while they all came here for a better life – the most commonly-recited mantra of the immigrant and, at the same time, the one most resented by anti-immigrants – in the process, they made my life better, too, especially in these last two dynamic weeks. That's what you call a fine example of symbiosis: interaction between two parties that works to the advantage of both. I assume you know this verse of Lazarus' poem is on a tablet held by the Statue of Liberty, for all to see. It is the most generous invitation ever extended on this earth, and my father accepted it in 1929, my mother's parents about 35 years earlier, Albert Einstein in 1933. And so did the people of this story.
Yet anti-immigrant sentiment and action continues to proliferate around the world, and one just crossed my desk, sent by an associate who monitors these things. Said the author, 'America should take that poem off the Statue of Liberty but keep Lady Liberty.' That sentiment is not new.
While the poem was heralded by John F. Kennedy in his book book A Nation of Immigrants (1958), it got quite the opposite reaction in 2019, during the first Trump administration. Ken Cuccinelli, Trump's acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, revised a line from the poem in support of the administration's 'public charge rule' which would have rejected would-be immigrants who lacked the wherewithal to support themselves. Cuccinelli suggested rewriting the caveat as, "Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet, and who will not become a public charge." He later suggested that the "huddled masses" should be European, and he downplayed the poem as "not actually part of the original Statue of Liberty." The Trump administration rule was later blocked by a federal appeals court.
Perhaps a two-week stay in a hospital or rehab facility – with plenty of time to watch and think – would answer this big question: Tell me again; what, exactly, is wrong with immigration?