Becoming American: Why Immigration Is Good for Our Nation's Future (10 page)

7. “Nation Digest,”
Washington Post
, February 10, 2010,
http://articles.washington post.com/2010-02-10/world/36891238_1_illegal-immigrants-gallbladder-immigration-advocates
(accessed July 2013).

8. Sara Murray, “Fewer Mexicans Head to U.S. as Home Exerts More Pull,”
Wall Street Journal
, June 21, 2013,
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324069104578529522746064526.html
(accessed July 24, 2013).

9. Douglas S. Massey, “International Migration at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century: The Role of the State,”
Population and Development Review
25 (1999): 303, 307.

10. Jorge Durand, Douglas S. Massey, and René M. Zenteno, “Mexican Immigration to the United States: Continuities and Changes,”
Latin American Research Review
36, no. 1 (2001): 107, 109.

11. Michael S. Malone,
The Big Score: The Billion Dollar Story of Silicon Valley
(New York: Doubleday, 1985).

12. AnnaLee Saxenian,
Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).

13. MIT Political Science, “Alumni Spotlight: AnnaLee Saxenian, PhD, 1989—A View of the Valley,”
http://web.mit.edu/polisci/news/2012/alumni-saxenian -feature.html
(accessed August 29, 2013).

7

How Did He Get Here: Zbigniew Brzezinski

A
few decades before Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski was born, at the turn of the twentieth century, thousands upon thousands of Poles left Poland. Many headed for America because of imperial repression, land shortages, and chronic unemployment. Many of the immigrants were known as
za chlebem
(“for-bread”) immigrants because they did not intend to stay abroad and only hoped to make some money before returning to the land they knew and loved. Nonetheless, many ended up staying in America but remained faithful to their Polish language and culture. The Library of Congress estimates that by the 1920s, more than two million Poles had immigrated to the United States.
¹

A decade after the end of World War I, Zbigniew Brzezinski was born in 1928 in Warsaw, Poland. His father was a diplomat posted to Germany from 1931 to 1935 and then to the Soviet Union from 1936 to 1938. Brzezinski thus spent some of his earliest years witnessing the rise of the Nazis as well as Stalin’s Great Purge.

The family moved to Canada in 1938, the result of a new diplomatic posting. In the meantime, Poland was invaded by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, with the eventual allocation of Poland to the Soviet Union by the Allies in 1945. With this decision, the family could not safely return to their home country, and so they decided to remain in Montreal, Canada.

The Second World War had a profound effect on Dr. Brzezinski. In fact, in an interview, he said, “The extraordinary violence that was perpetrated against Poland did affect my perception of the world and made me much more sensitive to the fact that a great deal of world politics is a fundamental struggle.”
²

Dr. Brzezinski obtained his master’s degree from McGill University in 1950, with a thesis focusing on the various nationalities within the Soviet Union. His plan for doing further studies in Great Britain in preparation for a diplomatic career in Canada fell through on a technicality. Brzezinski then attended Harvard University to work on a doctorate, focusing on the Soviet Union and the relationship between the October Revolution, Vladimir Lenin’s state, and the actions of Joseph Stalin. He later collaborated with Carl J. Friedrich to develop the concept of totalitarianism as a way to more accurately and powerfully characterize and criticize the Soviets in 1956.

Of his life spent in the Polish community in Canada, he says, “I admired the dedication and the determination of the first generation of Polish immigrants who struggled against adversity to shape for themselves a better life abroad and who in the process retained their links with Poland.”

It is important to place his statement within a greater historical context. After Poland became part of the Soviet Bloc in 1945, Poland’s migration policies became isolationist and remained so until the collapse of communism in 1989. Consequently, passport and exit-visa policies became tight, and it was difficult for Polish citizens to leave the country. Those who made it out were only granted permission to leave temporarily and had to return by a predetermined date. Some took advantage of this system and left Poland to try to build a better life for themselves abroad. However, those who did so knew that they would never be able to return to Poland again. It truly took great dedication and determination to leave.
³

Inspired by what he saw, Dr. Brzezinski became a U.S. citizen in 1958. Despite years of residence in Canada and the presence of family members there, he decided to immigrate to the United States because he felt he could make a greater difference in America.

I felt that America had the greater capacity for influencing world affairs for the good, and thus helping to fashion a more just international system that would therefore also help Poland.
⁴

In 1960, Brzezinski moved to New York City to teach at Columbia University, where he went on to head the Institute on Communist Affairs. He remained at Columbia until 1989, but in the meantime he started a parallel political career.

He was an advisor to the John F. Kennedy 1960 U.S. presidential campaign, urging a nonantagonistic policy toward Eastern European governments. Seeing the Soviet Union as having entered a period of stagnation, both economic and political, Brzezinski correctly predicted the future breakup of the Soviet Union along lines of nationality (expanding on his master’s thesis).

In regard to his personal life, he married Czech-American sculptor Emilie Benes, and in 1963, his first son, Ian, was born. His second son, Mark, was born in 1965. And his last child, a daughter, Mika, was born in 1967.

Meanwhile, in 1964, he supported Lyndon Johnson’s presidential campaign, the Great Society, and civil rights policies, and he saw Soviet leadership as having been purged of any creativity following the ousting of Khrushchev.

Brzezinski continued to support engagement with Eastern European governments while warning against De Gaulle’s vision of a “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals.” He also supported the Vietnam War. From 1966 to 1968, he served as a member of the Policy Planning Council of the U.S. Department of State (President Johnson’s October 7, 1966, “Bridge Building” speech was a product of his influence).

Events in Czechoslovakia further reinforced his criticisms of the right’s aggressive stance toward Eastern European governments. His service to the Johnson administration and his fact-finding trip to Vietnam made him an enemy of the New Left, despite his advocacy of deescalation of the United States’ involvement in the war.

Brzezinski called for a pan-European conference, an idea that would eventually find fruition in 1973 as the Conference for Security and Co-operation in Europe.

In his 1970 book,
Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era
, he argued that a coordinated policy among developed nations was necessary to counter global instability erupting from increasing economic inequality. Out of this thesis, he cofounded with David Rockefeller the Trilateral Commission and served as its director from 1973 to 1976. The Trilateral Commission is a group of prominent political and business leaders and academics primarily from North America, the European Union, and Asia. Its purpose is to strengthen relations among the three most industrially advanced regions of the capitalist world. The Commission helps countries “fulfill their shared leadership responsibilities in the wider international system.”
⁵
Brzezinski selected Georgia governor Jimmy Carter as a member.

Upon becoming president in 1977, Carter chose Dr. Brzezinski for the position of National Security Adviser. Brzezinski credits Henry Kissinger as having paved the way for an immigrant to attain a cabinet-level position within the U.S. government.

Henry Kissinger was born in Germany under the name Heinz Alfred Kissinger. He served as National Security Advisor as well as Secretary of State for presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973. 

As Carter’s National Security Advisor, Brzezinski encouraged the president to engage the People’s Republic of China beginning in 1978. He personally traveled to Beijing to lay the groundwork for the normalization of U.S.–People’s Republic of China relations and developed a strong relationship with Deng Xiaoping, who led China after Mao Zedong’s death. The United States and China established official diplomatic relations on January 1, 1978. By this point, China was already a third pole of power besides the Soviet Union and the United States. The new relationship between the United States and China was instrumental in the Cold War, for it brought China to the side of the United States. Scientific, technological, and cultural interchange, as well as trade relations also resulted from the diplomatic relations.

For all of the world-changing ideas Brzezinski set in motion, he never forgot his roots. Brzezinski made a visit to Poland in 1977, and of his visit he says, “There was a shift in the definition of my identity. I realized that I was no longer a Pole, but an American of Polish descent. Subsequent visits deepened my sense of cultural and historical attachment to Poland, as well as a heightening of my awareness—the way I understood it—of my being an American of Polish descent.”
⁶

Some cultures are more resilient, while others assimilate more easily. The Polish culture is a resilient one. Since the beginning of Polish immigration to America, many immigrants moved into Polish communities that preserved Polish culture and heritage. Newspapers, social clubs, and radio and television stations were created to help keep the Polish language alive in a foreign country.
⁷
Thus, the concept of identity for an immigrant is an interesting one. In America, Brzezinski is Polish, but in Poland, Brzezinski is American.

Polish-language newspapers in the United States have been present for as long as Poles have been immigrating to America. Polish weekly newspapers were especially popular in the early 1900s, when they created a feeling of unity among immigrants as well as reinforced the responsibilities of citizenship and kept immigrants up to date on world affairs. In the early part of the nineteenth century, popular newspapers such as Chicago’s  
Dziennik Zwiazkowy
(meaning “Alliance Daily” in Polish) kept Poles informed on workers’ rights and other labor movements, while Philadelphia’s
Gwiazda
(meaning “Star” in Polish) reached a large portion of the Polish American community.

Brzezinski, however, eventually came to understand the immigrant identity and remarked that “the element of conflicting duality that may have existed gradually receded.”
⁸

By the 1980s, Brzezinski argued that the general crisis of the Soviet Union foreshadowed communism’s end. In 1981, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his role in the normalization of U.S.-China relations and for his contributions to the human rights and national security policies of the United States.

As a scholar, he has developed his thoughts over the years, fashioning fundamental theories on international relations and geostrategy. During the 1950s, he worked on the theory of totalitarianism. His thoughts in the 1960s focused on a wider Western understanding of disunity in the Soviet Bloc, and he developed the thesis of intensified degeneration of the Soviet Union. During the 1970s, he propounded the proposition that the Soviet system was incapable of evolving beyond the industrial phase into the “technetronic” age.

He is currently a professor of American Foreign Policy at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and a counselor and trustee of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, both located in Washington, D.C.

His younger brother, Lech Brzezinski, continues to live in Montreal, where he works as the head of a large engineering company. Lech’s wife, Wanda (also from Poland), has a medical practice. Lech and Wanda’s oldest child, Matthew, a newspaper reporter, spent two years in Poland and has been a reporter for the
Wall Street Journal
. He has written some controversial and interesting articles as well as a book on the Wild West of capitalism in post–Soviet Russia.