My Family’s Immigrant Story — And All of Ours’
Pennsylvania Welcoming Center Remarks Dennis Clark/Solas Award March 2, 2017
Our nation is embroiled in a great debate about immigration. It’s not just about politics or policy. Not just about law, economics, and national security. It’s about people. Not a faceless mass to be demonized or feared. It’s about people I know and love.
I am the grandson of an immigrant. I am the son of an immigrant. And I am the husband of an immigrant. They — and all immigrants — came here seeking a better life. Like all immigrants, they helped make America a better country and worked to keep alive the American Dream.
My widowed grandmother brought her four sons from Cuba to Philadelphia during the Great Depression. Two of them served in the Army during World War II. One became an architect in San Francisco; another an engineer in Dallas. My favorite uncle, Uncle Gus — a boyhood hero of mine — ran a business in the Philadelphia suburbs, a gas station. And my father became a corporate executive in New York. All of them raised great families, voted and paid their taxes. And all of them were immigrants, yet each of them would tell you they were first and foremost, proud Americans.
The tradition in this country of welcoming immigrants has shaped our national character. It has made us vibrant, open-minded and adaptable. It has made us naturally entrepreneurial. Many of us still believe that the genius of this country is the way it has embraced immigrants, like my family from the Caribbean, and, over the centuries, untold others, from Ireland or Italy or Eastern Europe, India or Asia, Lebanon or Nigeria or Sudan.
To preserve that sustainable competitive advantage as a country, we need to speak out. We all need to. Find your own voice, but speak. And when you do, think about your family’s immigrant story.
My father had an immigrant’s drive. As a boy, I remember he woke up early every day and came home late every night. He never forgot his origins nor was he ashamed of them, but he adapted and assimilated, and he worked hard so that he could be an American success.
And as hard as my father worked to assimilate, my mother worked particularly hard to ensure we never forgot where we came from. I am the proud and grateful sum of both my parents.
But I wonder, especially in this current climate, how can we continue to build American success stories?
At Knight Foundation, we support informed and engaged communities. It’s a simple but eloquent concept that comes straight from our founder, Jack Knight, who believed that the purpose of his newspapers was to inform and illuminate the minds of their readers so that, in his own words, “the people might determine their own true interests” and shape their own futures.
That’s why we support the Welcoming Center for New Pennsylvanians. A few weeks ago, I was talking with Peter Gonzales, the Welcoming Center’s President and CEO, about civic engagement and how to promote citizenship among immigrants who hold green cards. We identified three barriers to citizenship for them: cost, information, and trust.
First, the application costs to become a citizen can be prohibitive. Second, many people don’t know how the system works, and, third, still others just don’t trust officialdom of any kind.
Gonzales and his Welcoming Center team came up with a pilot program for a coordinated approach to address all three barriers, focused just on Philadelphians.
Knight Foundation is funding that pilot program with a special grant of $250,000. If the pilot works, the model might be applied anywhere, and help tens or even hundreds of thousands of Green Card-holders to become citizens — citizens who can vote, and fully engage in their American communities.
A couple of years ago, I had the privilege of attending the reopening of the U.S. Embassy in Cuba. As a boy, my father lived not too far from where our Embassy is in Havana. At the ceremony, I sat in the tropical sun and listened to the secretary of state speak in both English and Spanish. Cuban crowds cheered the raising of Old Glory and the U.S. Marine Corps band played “You’re a Grand Old Flag.”
A few months later, I was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, an honorary society started by John Adams that counts among its early members George Washington, an immigrant named Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, the son of an immigrant, and many, many others, including, years later, another immigrant named Albert Einstein.
On that night of my induction into the Academy, I wondered whether my Cuban grandmother and my father could have imagined that his choices as a teenager, scared but eager for opportunity, would lead their son back to Havana 85 years later as an honored American guest?
Could my father, or my Puerto Rican mother, have imagined that their openness to opportunity and their ambition for a better life, would put their son in charge of Jack Knight’s fortune, to be used for good in the world? Could they have imagined that one day their son would become a fellow of an Academy founded by the second president of the United States?
It feels like common sense to me that, as we think about policy and decide on immigration laws, we should not go against our nature.
We are a nation of immigrants. We are a nation of strivers. We are here because we chose to be, and because this country welcomed us. And the amazing power of immigration has been that striving people from all over the world, who couldn’t have advanced in their home countries because of birth or politics or religion or society, could come here and shape their own futures.
That makes us Americans. That is the tradition we uphold, and the legacy for the next generation.
