I am among the “loathsome” refugees who came to this country because my native country expelled me. The Immigration Act of 1924 limited the number of immigrants allowed entry into the United States through a national-origins quota. The quota allowed annual visas to only 2% of the total number of people of each nationality in the United States as of the 1890 national census. It completely excluded immigrants from Asia. This Act was still in effect when my mother and I applied for a visa in 1962, and it was not rescinded until 1972.
Consequently, my mother and I, who left Romania in 1962, were left in the limbo of the immigration waiting list for an entire year. We moved from France to Belgium and to Germany, as our temporary visas in those countries expired. As "dirty" immigrants belonging to the inferior races of Eastern European Jewry, we were subjected at the American Embassy to high-radiation X-rays and other medical exams multiple times. No country in Western Europe gave my mother a work visa, so we barely survived on funds from HIAS. I had known food insecurity in Romania (then a colony of the Stalinist Soviet Union), but I had never experienced hunger until I lived in Paris in 1962.
We were sent to Detroit because my mother had two aunts who had immigrated to the U.S. in the 1920s, and they sponsored us, i.e. they vouched that if we fell through the cracks they would be responsible, so the nation would not have to provide for us through its non-existent safety nets for refugees.
What did we bring to this nation other than a cardboard square stamped “U.N. refugee”? My mother had a Licence (i.e. a degree slightly higher than an M.A.) in French, German, and Romanian language and literature. In Bucharest she had been a top translator of films, plays, and essays, and had taught at a translators' specialized school. She became a high-school teacher of French, German, and Spanish (the latter a language she acquired by going for M.A. courses at night, traveling from a small hamlet in MI to Detroit twice a week, a round trip of at least four hours, after a whole day of teaching). What did I bring to my new nation? I graduated third in my high-school class after having had three years of English. I had such high SAT scores that I was accepted to all the universities to which I applied. I earned scholarships for full tuition for my undergrad and graduate degrees, and at the age of 27 I received my PhD in comparative literature from the University of Michigan. I spent 39 years as a professor of English and Comparative Literature. I am a writer with nine books to my name. I have never failed to pay my taxes and never committed a crime. Since I became a citizen, I've voted in every election.
Ours is not the exceptional immigrant story but rather the usual. Given an opportunity and the illusion of freedom, immigrants use all their energies to succeed in the country that, however reluctantly, let them in.
To hear a former president of the U.S. call immigrants “animals” because of one hideous criminal is to hear the voice of Hitler reach across centuries and an ocean. Mass shootings in this country are in over 90% of cases the work of native-born white males. The former president didn’t refer to the shooter of the Bible-study group that welcomed him in the church in Charleston, S.C., as an animal, nor did he use that dehumanizing term in relation to the killers of many in a Buffalo supermarket or a synagogue in Pittsburgh or a bowling alley in Lewiston, Maine, or in the mass shootings at schools, malls, hospitals, concerts, etc. As president he blocked attempts at sane gun restrictions.
The former president’s hateful rhetoric against women he has abused exacerbates violence against women. According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, “in 2018, domestic violence accounted for 20% of all violent crime. Abusers’ access to firearms increases the risk of intimate partner femicide at least five-fold. When firearms have been used in the most severe abuse incident, the risk increases 41-fold. 65% of all murder-suicides involve an intimate partner; 96% of the victims of these crimes are female.” We may well ask ourselves whether the convicted sexual assaulter of one woman and the foul-mouthed detractor of all women who don’t bend the knee to him has any right to decry others' violence against women. But whatever works at his rallies for bigots against immigrants.
The faithful workers who were filling in potholes on the Baltimore Key Bridge died because they were doing work few native-born Americans have a taste for any longer. A large number of workers who put roofs over our heads, who clean houses, who cook for and serve us in the food industry, who do hard and poisonous "landscape" work, who tend to us in our illness, who pamper those who want their nails and hair styled, who care for children of working parents are immigrants. Over 22% of immigrants are STEM workers—neurosurgeons, engineers, inventors, academics, artists. In 2021 alone immigrants contributed $525.7 billion in taxes. The economic and workforce benefits of immigration bring prosperity to this country. Their cultural contributions, despite the resistance of the willful ignorant, are numberless, from the introduction of new foods and foodways to new locutions to celebrations and dances, not to mention the discoveries and inventions that make this country a leader in many areas of science and medicine.
Anca Vlasopolos, Professor Emerita, Immigrant and American Citizen