Becoming American: Why Immigration Is Good for Our Nation's Future (21 page)

I go back to my tasks, while the plane personnel continue their typical loading sequences. Trying to hurry before we are asked to turn off our electronic devices, I email approval of my budget report for the Center for Global Business Studies at Penn State University, hoping that my funds will not be cut again this year.

I download the board report detailing the investigation by Medicare and the Justice Department in order to go through it in more detail and to catch up on all the attachments prepared for board member review. After starting in on all the legal jargon, I quickly decide to put it aside to go over it once I get home. Somehow I will have to fit this into the already jammed-pack summer I have ahead of me.

This year I won’t be taking a vacation, as my sixteen-year-old twins, John and Anna, need my help in improving their 1800 SAT scores if they ever hope to get into a decent school. Compared to when I was growing up, it is becoming more and more difficult to motivate them. When I was in high school, I attended regular classes in American schools overseas and then spent my summers repeating the same topics in school in Iran with the students who had flunked that year. I had to endure twelve months out of the year schooling, and they resent that they have me tutoring them in math for an hour each day while a professional tutor comes to the house every morning to go over the English portion of the SATs. Obviously, this is not what their friends are doing over their summer.

Pulling out from my bag the current draft pages of an upcoming presentation, I feel my new neighbor surreptitiously glancing over at my printouts. The title, “America and the Iranian Political Reform Movement—delivered before Congress and the House Foreign Affairs Committee,” printed in bold at the top of each page, must have caught his eye, as he breathes out an, “Oh.”

As I glance up at him, he says, “What an interesting topic. Are you from Iran?”

I put the page down, realizing this is going to be the start of a conversation, and say, “Yes, I was born there, but have lived most of my life here in the States. Where are you from?”

“Beirut, Lebanon,” he replies.

“Oh, I went to an English teaching boarding school in Beirut; I think in 1960, 61, I was in 8th and 9th grade. I have very fond memories of Lebanon.” As it turns out, I went to International College, a preparatory high school for the American University of Beirut, and so did he.

His face lights up as he replies, “So do you speak Arabic?”

“No, not really. I can only understand just a little bit. Besides, I wouldn’t suggest that we start speaking in Arabic together on an airplane!” I say with a conspiratorial smile.

He laughs knowingly and glances briefly past me to the two young women who apparently have not given up hope of some kind of connection.

I shift the conversation back to more mundane topics and ask, “So do you live here in the U.S. now or . . .?”

“Yes, I am a student at Stanford.”

“What are you studying?”

“Petroleum Engineering. I was just in Ohio doing some on-site research for my PhD thesis in shale oil and gas.”

I practically turn in my seat. “Really? I did my thesis on the evolution of OPEC strategy when I was at Harvard Business School. And now I do a lot of executive education for Saudi Aramco.”

With my experience in the oil industry and his background in the shale oil and gas industry, we start discussing the potential of oil imports to the United States being displaced by domestic unconventional shale oil and gas production. It is a hot topic right now, and I am pleased to find someone with real insight to bounce ideas off.

Meanwhile, as our conversation turns to the vagaries of oil and natural gas production, its history and future, the flight attendant comes by with offers of our choice of beverages. It soon becomes clear that this man is a highly sought-after expert in his field, as he tells me about the global competition in evaluating the many shale oil and gas reservoirs.

“So what are your plans for after graduation?” I ask, impressed with his knowledge and experience.

“Well, I would ultimately like to stay in the U.S. and continue to work in the industry, but I am not sure if I will be able to get a work visa to allow me to stay. I do have two offers in Australia, where it is easier to get a visa, but that would be my fallback position.”

Our plane has landed, but I am still intrigued by this man. “I am Fariborz, by the way,” I say, holding out my hand.

“Mohammed,” he replies.

The two women across the aisle must have given up hope now that I have been monopolizing his attention, and so they quietly exit the plane.

I have a connecting flight to make in two hours to State College, and I ask Mohammed if this is his final destination.

“No, I’m catching a plane back to San Francisco.”

Finding out that his flight leaves thirty minutes after mine, I ask him if he would like to grab a cup of coffee with me.

“I would really like that, however,” and here he breaks eye contact, “I must say
Asr
[afternoon prayers] when we land. Would you mind? We could meet after I am finished?”

“Of course, that is fine.” This could be interesting, I think to myself.

Placing both of our carryons beneath the table, we settle in with our black coffees.

I begin by asking, “So if you already have two job offers in Australia, why would your first choice be to stay in the U.S.?”

“Well I do have a one-year job offer here in the U.S., but I am concerned that at the end of that year, without the assurance of an H-1 visa, that I will be exactly in the same place I am right now. Also, it has always been my dream to live in America. That is one of the reasons I came here to get my PhD, along with hoping it would lead to a job so I could stay. There are many more opportunities here than in Australia. Even though I know that I have two really good offers there, along with knowing that I would be able to get a visa, I just feel that it is in America where I can make the biggest career moves. Also, I have come to appreciate a lot of the American culture . . . okay, so not everything, but I have made some really good friends here in university and in the local Lebanese community . . . I feel like I have adapted well here in the U.S.—I shaved my beard so that I wouldn’t stand out as much on campus and have made a few American friends in my program. Unlike my roommate who has refused to shave, I think I can still practice my religion and be a good ‘American.’”

“You are . . . Shiite?” I hazard, based upon his Lebanese background.

“Yes.”

I tread tenderly, “Did you feel like your beard had been a problem . . .?”

“Well, I thought about it after another Muslim student decided to shave his beard last year. It was much easier for him to fit in with the other American researchers in his program after he shaved it off. He still practices his religion though.”

“I understand,” I replied with a nod.

I never saw Mohammad again, and I’m not sure where he ended up going after he graduated, but if it is Australia, or any other country besides the United States, that would be disappointing to me and a shame for the United States as a whole.

15

Prejudice Exists, But So What?

A
lthough the United States is a nation built by immigrants, throughout its history, its people have often held prejudice against the newcomer. Despite the time period, there remains at least one group of people that becomes the target of discrimination.

European immigrants to the United States never faced the extreme prejudice that people of other nonwhite races experienced—from the anti-Asian laws of the 1800s to the Jim Crow laws designed to deny basic freedoms to African Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

One group that faced brutal treatment because of geopolitical events was the more than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans whose freedom, rights, and property were stripped from them by order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, marking the United States’ entry into World War II. The United States also went to war that year against Germany and Italy, but other than requiring them to recite a loyalty oath, the government never felt the need to intern German and Italian Americans.

It was only decades later, in 1988, through an act of Congress signed by President Ronald Reagan, that the government apologized for this dark and disturbing chapter in American history. Meanwhile, although thousands of Jews had been admitted into the United States under the combined German-Austrian quota from 1938 to 1941, the United States did not pursue an organized and specific rescue policy for Jewish victims of Nazi Germany until early 1944.

While some American activists sincerely intended to assist refugees, serious obstacles to any relaxation of U.S. immigration quotas included public opposition to immigration during a time of economic depression, xenophobia, and anti-Semitic feelings in both the general public and among some government officials. Once the United States entered World War II, the State Department practiced stricter immigration policies out of fear that refugees could be blackmailed into working as agents for Germany.

Upon graduation from Yale with a PhD in 1884, Norwegian Thorstein Veblen was unable to obtain an academic job, partly due to prejudice against Norwegians and partly because most universities considered him insufficiently educated in Christianity, as most academics at the time held divinity degrees. He went on to be one of the founders of The New School and coined the phrase
conspicuous consumption
.

In his 1919 work, “The Intellectual Pre-Eminence of Jews in Modern Europe,” his position was that many Jews were caught between two worlds, detached from traditional Judaism and Jewish communal life, yet accepted grudgingly (if at all) by their host societies. Their marginality made them skeptical of conventional ideas and stimulated creativity that led to intellectual eminence and, often, economic success. Other social scientists have generalized Veblen’s approach, linking marginality to creativity for immigrants, pariah groups, and groups that accept society’s goals but are blocked from reaching them through conventional means. 

Immigration restrictions were still in effect in the United States after the war, and legislation to expedite the admission of Jewish displaced persons (DPs) was slow in coming. In 1948, following intense lobbying by the American Jewish community, Congress passed legislation to admit four hundred thousand DPs to the United States. Nearly eighty thousand of these, or about 20 percent, were Jewish DPs. By 1952, some 137,450 Jewish refugees (including close to one hundred thousand DPs) had settled in the United States. The amended 1948 law was a turning point in American immigration policy and established a precedent for later refugee crises.

The 1960s brought a significant shift in U.S. immigration policy that had previously served white Europeans predominantly. Under the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, countries such as Japan and China had strict quotas systems, whereas immigrants from northern and western European countries were allowed to make up 85 percent of all immigrants.
¹
President Kennedy, in setting out to overhaul the law in 1963, called it “nearly intolerable.”

“The law was just unbelievable in its clarity of racism,” said Stephen Klineberg, a sociologist at Rice University. “It declared that Northern Europeans are a superior subspecies of the white race. The Nordics were superior to the Alpines, who in turn were superior to the Mediterraneans, and all of them were superior to the Jews and the Asians.”
²

Benjamin Franklin in “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.,” 1751

Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion. 

The 1960s were also a time of great ideological shifts within society. During this decade, young people began to revolt against the conservative norms of the time, creating a counterculture that sparked a social revolution throughout much of the Western world. It began as a reaction against the conservatism and social conformity of the 1950s and the U.S. government’s extensive military intervention in Vietnam.

The civil rights movement occurring at the same time includes noted legislation and organized efforts to abolish public and private acts of racial discrimination against African Americans and other disadvantaged groups. So within this context, Congress passed the revamped policy after Kennedy’s assassination. As President Johnson signed the Immigration and Naturalization Act in 1965, he declared it would “not reshape the structure of our daily lives or add importantly to either our wealth or our power.” But he could not have been more wrong because the unintended consequence of the law, as is often the case with laws, was to significantly change America’s demographics. This was due to two provisions: One gave priority to family reunification; the other gave preference to professionals with skills in short supply in the United States.