Why Immigrants Make Great Citizens

It’s imperative to keep this in mind when discussing much-needed immigration reform

It makes my blood boil when I hear the President of the United States use words like “rapists,” “animals” and “criminals” to refer to immigrants, documented or not, and when he calls some places they come from “shitholes”.

Yes, the US immigration system may be broken, but it’s not any immigrant’s fault. Immigrants are regular people, and, like most people, most are good. Like in any large group, a tiny fraction of them may be criminals, even rapists. None are animals.

There’s absolutely no need to demonize immigrants to convey that the US immigration system must be overhauled to account for the economic and security needs of the country. The only reason for using this dehumanizing language is to promote division, fear, hate and blame — a strategy that exploits our darkest human tendency to view and treat whole groups of human beings as less human.

Contrary to what people like the President would want Americans to believe, immigrants make wonderful citizens and this recognition should figure strongly in any debate on immigration reform.

Immigrants bring new ways of approaching life and doing things. A dynamic society benefits from the infusion of ideas and cultural novelty immigrants bring.

For instance, scientists and policymakers have long wondered about the so-called Hispanic Paradox — basically, the fact that Hispanics, have, on average, a longer life expectancy than demographically wealthier non-Hispanic Whites, even though lower socioeconomic status is strongly associated with worse health outcomes. Is it the food or lifestyle? Lower rates of smoking? Genetics? Is it the physical environment these immigrants grew up in? Is it social cohesiveness?

Whatever the exact combination of factors may be, it’s a paradox worth deciphering and learning from.

Immigrants also tend to be highly invested in their new country. They took risks and sacrificed much to get there. Also, too many of them know what it’s like to lose their homeland, and understand well that it can happen anywhere. They certainly don’t want it to happen to their new country and to them all over again. This is why they tend to be involved in the political process.

There’s absolutely no need to demonize immigrants to convey that the US immigration system must be overhauled to account for the economic and security needs of the country.

But it is the special emotional attachment immigrants all over the world often form with their new country that makes them uniquely loyal citizens. It happens both to those who migrate with proper documents and some money in their pockets as well as to those who arrive undocumented and poor.

Consider these individuals from Venezuela, my country of birth. You could replace the names of countries with, say, Mexico, Argentina and the United States and the attachment phenomenon would be equivalent.

Gloria arrived in Venezuela from Cartagena, Colombia in the late 1960s. She arrived in desperate conditions: undocumented, penniless and illiterate, leaving two children in Colombia. (Just imagine how hard this must have been!)

Gloria began to work for my parents as a maid when I was around 5 years old. She eventually found a partner in Caracas and had three children. Her partner, a roofer, and Gloria worked extremely hard and made Venezuela their home. About 18 years ago, she finally became a proud Venezuelan citizen.

Because Venezuela’s political system and economy have unraveled, millions of Venezuelans have emigrated, many to Colombia. Not Gloria. She loves her adopted home with a special kind of love unmatched by most native-born citizens. Her youngest son and several grandchildren have left, but Gloria won’t.

My parents-in-law, Franco and Graziella, also immigrated to Venezuela in the 1960s. They came from Italy and were not escaping hunger or violence, just seeking a better life. Franco worked in the distribution department of a major Venezuelan newspaper for 37 years. Graziella made wedding and party gowns. They, too, grew to love Caracas with all their hearts.

My father-in-law passed away 12 years ago, in Caracas. I tell you, every time I was in his company he found a way to interject, more than once, the comment, “There’s no other place like Venezuela.”

At 80, Graziella is a healthy, regal, joyful woman. Her daughter has begged and begged for her to move to Panama with her but Graziella refuses. Her heart is in her home in Caracas. I don’t know what it would take for her to want to leave — maybe bombs or a locust plague.

This love that I speak of seems to develop more readily among first-generation adult immigrants.

My father moved to Caracas when he was a young child. His father, I hear, was an entrepreneurial workaholic who established the rendering industry in Venezuela. He died young but I surmise he’d have been like Gloria and my in-laws. He wouldn’t have left.

My father’s a different story. He left Venezuela and became a US citizen a few years ago. All his children, including me, have also left. This love that I speak of seems to develop more readily among first-generation adult immigrants, but not always.

I came to the US in 2000 with my husband and young children. Once, on a trip back to Caracas, I was at a shopping center with my oldest son, Diego, (who has autism & intellectual, when, all of sudden, he stopped and said one of the most insightful things I’d ever heard him say, “We don’t belong here. We belong in the United States.”

It is every living being’s nature to seek to preserve its life. We are no different. Unique to us humans, however, is our quest for what Maslow calls self-actualization, our higher need for personal growth.

We humans, then, migrate to survive and to seek growth opportunities, not only for ourselves but for our loved ones too. An extreme example of the former would be migrants escaping civil war in Syria. A good example of the latter is Jane Goodall migrating to the Congo to fulfill her lifelong dream of going to Africa to study chimpanzees.

No wonder humans have colonized all corners of the planet.

The fact that most immigrants have moved to a new country out of the human need for survival and growth is what sets them apart from their native-born countrymen and women. It’s also what leads them to develop a special connection to the country where they’ve found a new way to belong.

Trump is wrong: Immigrants make great citizens.