America is such an incredibly dynamic place because of immigration. We fundamentally have been a culture that’s been put together from the explosions of other cultures. But it’s hard for us to see. We have blinded ourselves to the reality of what our country is.
they came to these islands and low hills / which lift up from a land where we have / set a lamp with a golden torch / on top, to remind us, here at the door: / entering through it was a promise to leave it / open behind us.
There was always a big party on the night before anyone left for the States. They called it an American wake, because the whole community stayed up to keep the emigrants company through their last night on the island, just as they would have bidden farewell to a soul beginning the long journey toward eternity.
Emigration is easy, but immigration is something else. To flee, yes; but to be accepted?
Uncontrolled migration produces social friction not because many refugees are criminals and terrorists (they aren’t), but because living side by side with strangers requires two precious commodities: goodwill and time. Both are necessary to build trust; neither is as widely available as we would like.
The traveler has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end.
When my parents left Korea with nothing but the clothes on their backs and the considerable wealth they had amassed in the shipping business, they had a dream. They had a dream that one day amid the snowy hilltops of western North Carolina, their son would lose his virginity to a cheerleader in the women’s bathroom of a Waffle House just off the interstate. My parents have sacrificed so much for this dream! And that is why we must journey on. . . . For my parents, and indeed for all immigrants who came to this great nation in the hopes that somehow, some way, their children might have what they themselves could never have: cheerleader sex.
This is crazy. I mean, the only thing that determines what country you belong to is where you happened to be born? What is a country, anyway? It’s not, y’know, “purple mountain majesties” or “fruited plains,” whatever the hell that means. I mean, America isn’t a place, it’s an ideal. It could happen in the Sahara Desert and still be America.
Let him who has not a single speck of migration to blot his family escutcheon cast the first stone. . . . If you didn’t migrate, then your father did, and if your father didn’t need to move from place to place, then it was only because your grandfather before him had no choice but to go, put his old life behind him in search of the bread that his own land denied him.
Does anyone ever talk about why people are crossing? I can promise you it’s not with some grand ambition to come here and ruin everything for the gringo chingaos. People are desperate, man.
This may be the one clear truth of the so-called border issue: Put a poor country next to a rich one and watch which way the traffic flows. Add impediments, the traffic endeavors to flow around them. Eliminate disparity, the traffic stops.
Wasn’t that the real reason for traveling, a reason bigger than poorness and desperation and greed and fury—didn’t they know, low in their bones, that as long as they moved and the land unfurled, that as long as they searched, they would forever be searchers and never quite lost?
Home is not a given and, for many, a hard, sometimes impossible place to find.
They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left.
