(no audio) (no audio) (no audio) - Immigration has long been a contentious issue in American politics.

But today's guest says immigrants keep coming to the United States, overcoming obstacles, working for better opportunities for themselves and their families, and all the while buying into the idea of America that binds us all together.

He's legendary journalist, Ray Suarez this week on Story in the Public Square.

(lively music) (lively music) Hello and welcome to the Story in the Public Square, where Storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is Ray Suarez, one of the great journalists of this era.

He hosts the podcast On Shifting Ground and his new book is, "We Are Home: Becoming American in the 21st Century."

He joins us today from Washington, D.C. Ray, congratulations on the book and thanks for being with us today.

- Thanks for having me with you.

- Well, you know the book I said, it's brilliant.

For the audience at home though, who maybe hasn't read it yet, do you want to give us just a quick overview?

- It's basically the story of the modern era of American immigration.

The rules changed significantly in 1965 and people started to come to this country from more places in the world and it changed the country.

It is changing the country.

So there's a quick history of American immigration law, a look at some of the ways the modern era has changed American demographics and then the deeply felt stories of the immigrants themselves, oral histories.

- You know, the question that I kept asking myself as I read the book was, what makes somebody an American?

Clearly you've given some thought to that.

- Well, I would suggest that unlike a lot of countries in the world where there's a very strong consciousness of a shared national identity that comes from shared attachment to the land, shared blood, shared clan, shared heritage, the United States is radically different from those places.

We have no origin story that is part of us all.

So we almost by default, pick an origin story, and you are a part owner of it, whether you arrived the day before yesterday, or your ancestors have been here for 500 years.

It's a remarkable thing really, in the history of the world.

Shared values, shared ideas, shared notions of freedom.

If you sign into those, it doesn't matter what you look like, it doesn't matter how you pray or whether you pray at all, it doesn't matter where your people come from, you can be a part of this thing.

And that's the great American exception.

It has been the great American exception and we tinker with that at our peril.

I guess that's one of the places I land at the end of the book.

- So Ray, what attracts people to the United States in 2024?

- Sometimes it's nothing more complicated than the place where they are becoming increasingly difficult to live in, to prosper, to raise a family, to be safe, to be safe from prosecution and persecution.

So there's that part of it.

There are talented, innovative, elbows out aggressive people that know that the United States offers someone with their skills and talent opportunities that they wouldn't have at home or in a dozen other countries that they might aspire to move to.

So it's a mix.

It's a mix of opportunity, freedom, safety, the possibility of getting away from a place that just is not a good place for your family to be for the long haul.

And having said that, I really have to stress, it is hard to leave the place that you know, the place where you come from, the place where people know you, the place where people love you, the place where you speak the language, the place where you fit in.

To leave all of that to voluntarily pull yourself out of context permanently is a hard thing.

And we don't give people who start over in America nearly enough credit for doing a really tough thing.

- So Ray, that appeal, how does it differ from the appeal historically?

Or does it, has it, has this been a constant theme from the beginning of people coming to this country?

- You know, that refuge has always been part of our story.

Whether you were fleeing the revolutions of 1848 in Europe, whether you were fleeing the Abortive Revolution Ireland in the 1790s, whether you were fleeing radical political change or persecution, if you were a member of a religious minority or ethnic minority, those people have always been part of who comes to America.

What's changed is the map, the United States specifically included excluded, excuse me, the United States specifically excluded people from a big patch of the planet.

So really when you talked about immigration, for much of our early history, you really only meant people from Europe.

You only really meant people, white people as immigrants.

Black people came as property, as chattels, they came in chains, they didn't come voluntarily.

So they're a different story, very much a big part of our history as a country.

But when you talk about immigrants, you really, until very late in this 250 year window, you're talking about white people.

And that's one of the big changes in the modern era.

- You know, Ray, one of the things that the book is, there's an additional subtitle here of the book is an oral history.

And you talk to a lot of recent immigrants to the United States, relatively recent immigrants to the United States.

One of the things that it seems a touch point is that particularly when you're talking to immigrants from Muslim countries, whether they're Muslim or not, the 9/11 experience is a, is sort of a touchstone.

It's, there's a pivot there in the way Americans begin to think about immigration.

It's now even more of a threat than maybe it was seen before.

Can you talk a little bit about what 9/11 meant for those immigrants in the United States?

- Before 1965 and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, there were very few Muslim immigrants in the United States.

Most Muslims, and there were a very small number really in 1965, were black Americans who had converted to Islam from Christian, various Christian denominations.

The number of Muslims who came in from the rest of the world picked up exponentially after 1965.

And many were landed, settled, first and second generation, sometimes even later people.

9/11 was a watershed for them because they heard things from their neighbors and from the big voices in the culture that they had never imagined hearing before.

They knew that they weren't members of a majority religion, but they hadn't been singled out in quite that way before.

More recent immigrants really felt the sting.

If your face, if your accent gave you away as the way you dress, you could be singled out for scorn even if you were trying to escape the same kind of intolerance, the same kind of cruelty that we saw evidenced by Al-Qaeda on that day in 2001.

You know, we don't realize that a lot of the Muslims who have come to the United States over the last 50 years didn't want to live in theocratic states, didn't want to live in confessional states where mosque attendants was noted by your neighbors or noted by the local religious authorities.

They wanted to live in a place and prefer to live in a place where their religion is their business and they practice it as they like and they realize that that's part of the value of the United States and they love being here.

But 9/11 was really one of those cleavage moments.

And then it had its echoes with the Muslim ban during the early days of the Trump administration, where many of those same people who were coming of age in 2001 were now middle aged adults and found that they had to once again protest in support of their own right to be here and the right of people like them to be here.

- You know, so you spent an entire chapter talking about the role of God in this land of ours, and the impact of religion.

What are immigrants doing to the practice of faith in the United States more generally?

- Well, it's really a project that's underway.

We don't know where things are going to land.

Immigrants tend to be more religious than native-born Americans, but we don't know whether over time they're going to become more like their U.S. born neighbors and become increasingly secular.

Right now we're undergoing rapid secularization in the United States.

We are the least affiliated people that we've been in over 200 years.

So will immigrants start to resemble the American profile more broadly, or will they, especially in these early generations, continue to hold fast to the religion that they came with to this country?

It's a fascinating question.

Muslims have been very interesting to watch in their voting habits, in their civic styles, because previous to 2001, a lot of them said, they prefer the Republican party because of its social conservatism.

And they found the trends in the culture to be toxic.

The way women were depicted in popular culture, they found the lyrics on music and popular radio to be a problem.

So they said, you know, who am I as an immigrant, as a religious person?

I think these people are more like me.

But with the trends in the American church, broadly speaking, and the trends in American culture, even in the face of those, 2001 became a watershed moment and Muslims began to more openly favor the Democratic party because of its tolerance, while still having a little bit of a problem with its liberality concerning culture.

So it's, there's a knife edge there when you talk to more conservative Muslims, they realize they're not going to be rousted out of the country by the Democrats, but they're not sure that they like the let it rip attitudes toward the culture either.

So it's a fascinating straddle for them.

- So let's look at modern immigrants from Africa.

What does America's long history of slavery and racism mean to them?

And why do they still come?

So I guess that's two questions for the price of one.

- Well, you know, Wayne, I really wanted to make sure I spent some time talking about black immigrants in this book because we so little talk about the fact that now in 2024, 1 out of every 10 black people living in America is an immigrant.

- Wow.

- This is a new place we've arrived at.

And one out of five, one out of five black people in America is either an immigrant or the child of immigrants.

So coming from our history where black people were brought to this country in chains coming from our history where they spent a century fighting just for civil human rights, the idea that people in other parts of the world would look around the world, see America and say, yeah, that's the place I want to go, is a sort of validating moment, I think.

The fact that America looks good to black people in the Caribbean, in Africa, in Europe, is something that Americans can be proud of.

It's a funny and ambivalent history.

If you sat in a movie theater in Accra, Ghana, or Dakar, Senegal and watched news reels in your local cinema, you saw fire departments turning hoses on student protestors.

You saw citizens dumping food on young college students waiting to be served at Five & Dime counters in the American South.

You saw the death of Martin Luther King, the assassination of Malcolm X.

So there was, there were no illusions about what kind of place America could be for black people.

And at the same time, some of the most famous people in the world were black Americans, whether it's Michael Jordan, Michael Jackson, Joe Louis, Martin King himself.

So many models of excellence, models of outstanding achievement were held up to black people around the world as black Americans.

So you had this funny mix of histories coming down to someone I talked to like Gebril from Senegal, who realized early on he wanted to come to America, he wanted to be an American, and while many of his friends were moving to Senegal's old colonial country, France, he said, no, I don't want to go to France.

I want to go to the United States.

And pointed his education and his ambitions to coming to this country.

- Ray, you also introduced us to a gentleman by the name of Solomon Calbrie, and I hope I pronounced that name right.

He came to the United States from Ethiopia decades ago, and he described his participation in American democracy this way.

"I never miss an election because I remember living in a society where elections just didn't exist."

That's a powerful sentiment and it got me wondering if immigration is perhaps one of the ways in which refreshing the spring of civic virtue in the United States.

Do you have any thoughts about that?

- I think that's a great way to put it.

The appreciation that people have for a system like ours, when they come from a place that's been historically oppressive, is something that reminds us of ideas and practices that become almost transparent to us because they're so ordinary.

People think, oh, I'm busy.

I don't know if I'm going to have a chance to vote.

The people really value voting like Solomon, who you mentioned, they're not like that.

They don't say, oh, I'm so busy, I don't know if I'm going to get to vote.

Because they know what it's like to be in a country where the individual is not valued, the individual is not heard, and certainly doesn't get to register an opinion that can pull down a government.

- So time and time again, the people you write about in this book hearken to the values enshrined in the founding documents of this country, particularly the Declaration of Independence.

What do they find in these documents and particularly in the Declaration of Independence that appeals to them, that they treasure, that they want to live or in a live in a place where those are founding values.

- They treasure the idea.

And again, it's an idea and an ideal because they're not, you know, naive about what life in this country is really like.

They know they can be singled out for disdain or marginalization because of the way they look or the way they sound or where they were born, but they cherish the ideal of all men being created equal, of being endowed with rights that cannot be taken away from them.

And when those rights and privileges of being an American are in trouble, are in danger, are under threat, they feel it more keenly than many native born Americans, for whom it's just in the water and in the air, an assumption, a given in their daily lives.

So Sameer, one of the first people who I talked to at length in the book told me that one of the days he felt most like an American, like he had finally had his ticket punched was when he was taking his kids and going to a protest against the Muslim ban.

He was a guy who always kept his politics quiet, personal, out of the public square.

And now he was standing in a demonstration and holding up signs with his kids and he, it felt like a moment of passage, even though he was, he had been now more than half his life in the United States, these rights, Osama Bahloul and Imam from Tennessee, who became an American citizen, while his mosque was under threat in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, from people who didn't want to give his congregation a permit to build a place of worship specifically because they thought it was a threat to Murfreesboro.

He became steeped in American law, in the Constitution, in the founding documents and came to value them and came to value his Christian neighbors who came to his aid, who he saw as living out those values of equality before the law.

So sometimes it's a revelation, sometimes it's something that you see from afar and want to be part of, but yes, the people who come here to make their lives here often deeply value the civic virtues of the United States.

- So if current trends hold by the middle of the century, thereabouts, Asian immigration will outpace all others.

What accounts for that change or will account for that change, and what does that mean for the immigrant experience and also for America?

I mean that's a dramatic shift if that in fact incurs.

- Well, you know, there probably would have been more Asian immigration to the United States all along, if not for two landmark laws, the Chinese Exclusion Act, which specifically barred immigration and naturalization from Chinese people.

And also the Asiatic Barred Zone Act of 1917, which in effect broadened the map and broadened the number of places from which you were blocked from naturalization.

And I tell several stories in the book about those people.

Through the long arc of history until 1965, it was a tricky thing being, becoming an Asian immigrant to the United States and certainly becoming a citizen during those years.

So in effect, we might have something like a slingshot effect now.

As the world becomes more mobile, as education becomes more widely available and people see the market for talent in the United States favoring them, we're getting more people from South Asia.

You know, if you go to Silicon Valley, a lot of the movers and shakers in the cutting edge development of our new technological life are people from South Asia.

If you go to the West coast and see the hustling new populations of Vietnamese and Chinese and so on, also the end of the Cold War made a lot of this possible and America's welcome to more immigrants.

So a couple of factors all layered on top of each other to change the profile swing the axis in effect away from the Americas, which had been the source of a lot of new Americans to Asia.

And the rate has picked up in such a way that Asian immigration will likely dominate over the next 25 years.

- Ray I, part of me is loathed to do this, but I don't know how we can have a conversation about immigration in the United States in 2024 and not talk about the presidency and now the candidacy again of Donald Trump.

You, this is clearly a one of the subtexts throughout the book, but what did his presidency, what did the rhetoric he used as both a candidate, as a president, now as a candidate, again, what does that mean for immigrants and immigration to the United States?

- Well, I find that the former president is more a symptom rather than a cause.

He's got impeccable instincts.

So he understood some of the unease about decades of high rates of immigration in certain parts of the electorate, and he's leaned very heavily on that rhetoric in his campaigning.

The America he envisions and people who support him on immigration policy envision, is a kind of nostalgia project, thinking back to a time before the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act where America was overwhelmingly white and likely to remain so, overwhelmingly Christian and likely to remain so.

He looks back to a time that a lot of Americans, even if they weren't there to see it themselves, find to be a very attractive place.

And he has been very, very skillful in manipulating people's nostalgia, people's sentiments, people's emotions, even in the face of the fact that as he's campaigning against inflation, if you stop immigration to the United States in a country where American families are not having replacement level numbers of children, you will raise labor costs and you will drive inflation and there will be later labor shortages in key industries.

That's just going to happen if you shut the door.

The racial changes in the United States that have more and more Americans agreeing with the pollsters question, do you find, you feel like a stranger in your own country?

More Americans are agreeing with that phrase, but who's the most likely to agree?

The people in the parts of the country with the fewest immigrants and the most uniformly native born populations.

There's a little bit of an irony there.

The people who live with and among immigrants don't say they feel like strangers in their own country.

It's places like Ozark, Missouri, where I was a couple of months ago on a reporting trip who in large numbers say, you know, I just don't recognize this America anymore.

There's a lot of adjustments coming in the next 25 years as we move toward that slightly different, demographically different America.

But like I say in the book, we can either make this easy or we can make it hard.

And certain Americans seem to be intending to make it hard.

- You know, Ray, we've got about 30 seconds left here.

One of the things that strikes me is that your, so many of the immigrants that you interview are still optimistic about their experience in America, optimistic about the future of America.

With all of the headwinds that immigration and immigrant communities face in the United States, what's at the root of that optimism?

- You know, America doesn't even realize what a great gift it gets every day from the fact that these people are not alienated, not hostile to the United States, not hunkered down and thinking dark thoughts about the future.

They crave acceptance.

They crave being part of us.

They crave being identified as Americans, and that's a great gift to this country.

Even after all the emotional outbursts of the last several years against new Americans.

It's optimism is what drives them here in the first place.

So I think it's no surprise that they remain that way as they continue their American journeys.

- That's a great place for us to leave it.

Ray Suarez, the book is, "We Are Home."

It's brilliant, thank you for being with us today.

Hey, that is all the time we have this week, but if you want to know more about Story in the Public Square, you can find us on social media or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

He's Wayne, I'm Jim asking to join us again next time for More Story in the Public Square.

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