The stories about children separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border earlier this summer were a heartbreaking reminder of how terribly broken our immigration system is, and the practice was condemned across the political spectrum. But how to “fix” the system is a process that’s also painfully broken, with Congress unwilling to seriously take up immigration reform, and Federal judges having to take the lead against border-guard actions such as de facto rejection of legitimate asylum seekers, or their indefinite detention, in violation of federal policy and international law.
We’re a very different country from what we were a century ago, when Emma Lazarus’s poem beckoned from the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, “Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”—though, in fact, the invitation was never exactly open-ended. But as we grapple today with how to control our borders in ways that are fair, sensible, and humane, one thing hasn’t changed: we always will be a nation of immigrants and descendants of immigrants. Unless you are 100 percent Native American (and one of those DNA tests can help you figure that out), you or your forebears came from somewhere else, whether laborers, teachers, or firemen—or groundbreakers in science, business, or the arts.
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