3.12.2007++The+True+Americans

The True Americans by Simon Goldstein Immigration policy in today’s America is a mess. And the problem isn’t economic. It’s not political. It’s not about the pragmatic solution to “those people” crossing over “our borders”.

It is a problem of definition. Who is an American? Who gets our privileges, and who gets the shaft? Most politicians today answer this simply: citizens. If you’re a citizen, you’re an American. You deserve to vote. You deserve access to insurance. You deserve the right to get a job. To support a family. To live as a free, autonomous human being.

Thus the problem: the title of “citizen” is the last vestige of aristocracy in America. We have freed the slaves from the plantation owners. We have freed women from domesticity. We have freed 18-21 year olds from a draft without representation. But all of this has operated within a context of aristocracy – that it is through birth that you become an American. That the iron gates of this country shut on those born 90 miles, 9 miles, 9 feet outside our borders. And that for these unlucky peons, a long process of bureaucratic paperwork awaits.

Why? What makes an impoverished family in Mexico fundamentally different from a middle-class family in Texas, besides the plot of land they were born on? The better question is what makes them similar. The ties that bind us together – the single thing that has built America from a straggled collection of colonies to the greatest nation on earth – is a dream. The American dream. That with hard work and determination anyone can rise up from poverty. Into security. Into something better than his past.

If this is what makes a person an American – if this is what has made America what it is today – then it is high time we turn the tables on the “immigration issue”. It is time that we define the “true Americans”. It’s not us. We, who were lucky enough to be born into wealth, into the opportunity of a Stevenson education. We, who (besides the occasional homework assignment) face no great challenge in life, besides how to catch the next episode of Grey’s Anatomy. We, who drink our lives down to the gutter, and smoke our dreams away. Ask yourself – have you risked your life for your privileges?

The true Americans are the immigrants. The poor families from the farmfields of Mexico, from the wastelands of Haiti , from the wartorn jungles of Vietnam. Not the tired, huddling masses. But the brave, the few who risk all for a better future. These are my Americans. These are the few who I respect. That have earned, by merit and not by birth, this country’s greatness.