Immigration in the United States is a controversial
issue just as it is in most other countries
of the world.
Many other of not just first-world countries,
like Japan, Australia, Western Europe are
wrestling with immigration, but many developing
countries.
When I was last in Indonesia, Malaysia, Indonesia's
neighbor, is having a problem with Indonesians
migrating into Malaysia because the standard
of living in Malaysia is higher than in Indonesia.
And South Africa, an African country, is having
issues with immigration with neighboring poorer
African countries such as Zimbabwe sending
immigrants into South Africa.
So immigration in the United States the fact
is every American without exception, is an
immigrant.
Native Americans immigrated 13,000 years ago,
and everybody else has immigrated within the
last 400 years.
My father immigrated at the age of 2 in 1904.
My mother's parents immigrated around 1890.
Most Americans are immigrants.
If you look at the contribution of immigrants,
if you ask yourself, do a thought experiment:
take the citizens of any country in the world
out there, take the citizens of Poland or
Russia and divide them into two sets.
Suppose you had a mechanism for dividing every
citizen of Poland into either two categories.
One category are those people who are healthy,
ambitious, willing to take risks, willing
to try new ways, young, strong.
And the other category consists of those people
who are weak, unwilling to take risks, unwilling
to experiment, wanting to carry on in their
old ways.
In effect, dividing a country into those two
groups is what's accomplished by the decision
to emigrate.
The decision to emigrate is made by people
who are healthy, strong, willing to undertake
risks, and face the unknown.
And those who don't emigrate, on the average,
lack those qualities.
But willing to take risks and experiment,
those are essential qualities for innovating.
And the United States is a country of innovation.
It's therefore, no surprise that the great
majority of American Nobel Prize winners are
either first-generation immigrants or the
children of first-generation immigrants.
So immigration has made a strong contribution
to the history of the United States.
But it's controversial because whenever you
get a batch of people who are there and then
another batch people coming who are different
the Vietnamese of the 1970s, etc. they are
different and there are likely to be prejudices.
There have been prejudices against immigrants
throughout American history, beginning with
the first non-British immigrants, the Irish
and the Germans.
And eventually, that settled down.
Then the prejudice against the Eastern Europeans,
the Japanese and Europeans of the late 1800s,
and then the prejudice against the Vietnamese.
So it's unsurprising that immigration is an
issue in the United States today, but reflect
on our history.
Students of immigration say that the United
States has benefited more from immigration
than any other country in the world, and that
for the United States, a higher percentage
of our immigrants are highly trained, skilled
people who contribute to our economy than
the immigrants into any other country in the
world.
Yes, it's a problem for us.
But we are better off than any other country
with that problem.
