Becoming American: Why Immigration Is Good for Our Nation's Future (8 page)

She finished her degree early by going to summer school, and she began interviewing for jobs in the Washington, D.C., area. However, it was also during this time that the Iranian hostage crisis was going on, making it difficult for her to find a job in the politically charged city. She decided to set her sights on an industry and a city that would be less discriminatory based upon her ethnicity. Thus, she obtained a job with Morgan Guaranty Trust, the company name JPMorgan went by until the 1980s, in New York City, where she was a financial analyst responsible for banks around the world. She eventually worked her way up to become a vice president at JPMorgan.

Meanwhile, I had started Intrados, and in 1988, I called upon Margaret to help out this rapidly growing, fledgling company. She came on as president and was immediately immersed in training all the highest-level government officials from developing countries. We had named the company
Intrados
, “the underlying support of an arch.” Just as an intrados is the underlying support of an arch, our company became the underlying support of many government projects of developing countries.

At this time, no other company would pay attention to this previously untapped (and soon to be immensely important) market segment. The caliber of individuals who came through our programs soon would read as the who’s who of the future. When these individuals went on to privatize a company, they approached the major U.S. funding source, USAID, and specifically requested that Intrados be included in the project.

It became clear to Margaret that there was another potentially untapped market where privatization was occurring, which was in setting up capital markets for these countries. The initial projected trading volume for the capital markets of developing countries was so low that Wall Street and the World Bank were barely aware of the possibilities.

Intrados, under Margaret’s leadership, went on to forge a path in not only privatization but also in setting up stock exchanges, in equipping Central Banks to handle the trades, and in establishing depositories for funds in a number of countries around the world. With a home office of fourteen people, Intrados bid on and won its first U.S. government contract for the privatization and setting up of capital markets in the former states of the Soviet Union. The contract was worth $12 million and grew the company to two hundred employees.

Margaret was amazed by how immense the opportunities were and was proud the company was pioneering into a new frontier. Taking advantage of the opportunities, Intrados went on to develop the stock exchange and trading system for Romania, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and the eight member countries of the Eastern Caribbean.

All of this was no small feat, as in some places it was even necessary to set new telephone lines in order to handle the clearance and settlement transactions. Now it was time for NASDAQ to be a subcontractor to Intrados in this Wild West scenario. In Romania, during a meeting with Ion Iliescu, the head of state, he declared he wanted a trade to occur before the end of his term, which was in six months! The day the first trade was to occur, Margaret recalls having her staff on standby in sneakers, ready to run like old-time traders on Wall Street, if the electronic system should fail. Thankfully, all went according to plan, and the first registered trade occurred between the ambassador and the head of state.

According to a 2012 report from The Partnership for a New American Economy, immigrant-owned business owners in America make less than native-born business owners on average ($49,779 vs. $62,695). However, there were a few exceptions to this finding. For example, Iranian immigrants who start businesses make $83,555 a year on average. 
¹

The rewards for all this hard work were much more than monetary. While having been successful at JPMorgan, Margaret had been disheartened by having to sell the riskiest of derivatives, but at Intrados she was helping birth new capital markets around the world. The feeling of being part of something so big was heady.

Margaret says she owes a lot of success to the fact that when these officials from developing countries were looking for assistance and partners from the United States, they looked favorably on her being an immigrant to America. These officials viewed her as one of them, for she could understand from where they came. She was someone who did not ignore or dismiss them, someone who understood them, and someone who believed enough in their potential to invest time and resources.

Margaret typifies the immigrant as a person of the world, a global citizen. And being a global citizen can be advantageous personally but also on a broader level. As Madeleine F. Green, a Senior Fellow at the National Association of Foreign Student Advisors (NAFSA) and the International Association of Universities, explained, global citizenship requires that one be self-aware, and “self-awareness enables students to identify with the universalities of the human experience, thus increasing their identification with fellow human beings and their sense of responsibility toward them.”
²
This, in turn, often translates into global citizens seeking out participation in their various communities in order to fulfill that sense of responsibility. Because of these traits, which many immigrants already possess, global citizens are inherently valuable to their country at large. Governments and businesses can make use of their communication skills, thereby strengthening relations with foreigners and increasing productivity.

NOTES

1. Robert W. Fairlie,
Open for Business: How Immigrants Are Driving Small Business Creation in the United States
(Princeton, NJ: The Partnership for a New American Economy, 2012), 1–40.

2. Kris Olds, “Global Citizenship—What Are We Talking About and Why Does It Matter?”
Inside Higher Ed.com
, March 11, 2012,
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/globalhighered/global-citizenship-%E2%80%93-what-are-we-talking-about-and-why-does-it-matter
(accessed August 14, 2013).

6

Why Do They Come?

T
he inscription on the interior pedestal of the Statue of Liberty reads:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

—“The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus
¹

Mass migrations are seldom random. Shocks to the cultural and natural ecology create the potential for mass migration as a way to adapt to a crisis. Great economic transformations, wars, violence, and environmental cataclysms create crises in countries of origin, which then set off mass migrations. Three factors in particular drive migration trends: family reunification, search for work, and humanitarian refuge. These factors also parallel this country’s national immigration policy.

Between 1881 and 1924, 2,800,000 Jews emigrated from Europe to the United States, 94 percent of them from Eastern Europe, and some 97 percent of these remained on the eastern seaboard. By 1925, one of every three New Yorkers was a Jew. 
²

A century ago, the Industrial Revolution served as a catalyst for immigration. Today, an increasingly global economy serves much the same role. The global production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services stimulates migration because where capital flows, immigrants tend to follow. Labor markets in globally coordinated economies are reliant on foreign workers in both the knowledge-intensive sector and in the more labor-intensive sector.

Just as most of today’s American forebearers came to the United States at the turn of the last century in search of economic opportunity and a better life for their children, immigrants continue to do the same today.

Despite what advertisement men on Madison Avenue have tried to peddle, there is no single American Dream, but many. In post–World War II, the dream for many who struggled through the Great Depression and fought the bloodiest war in history was a home with a plot of land; for others, it was higher education. Both these dreams were realized thanks to a prosperous economy and the GI Bill, which paid for former soldiers to go to college.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the dream was grander than property ownership and a sheepskin. It was equal rights for African Americans and other minorities in a nation still trying to break with its slave-trading past and pre-enlightened thinking.

The winds of ignorance and intolerance still buffet America today, but within the last thirty years, more Americans, particularly the younger generations, have come to embrace diversity, viewing it as America’s strength, not its weakness.

Nowadays, the best friend of my own twin children is a combination of black and Japanese. When I was their age, we were required in Louisiana schools to memorize the taxonomy of race. I am chagrined to remember that 100 percent black was known as “Negro,” one-half as “Mulatto,” one-fourth as “Quadroon,” one-eighth as “Octoroon,” and those that could pass as black but presented themselves as white were “Passe Blanc.” These were the days when 1/32 of black blood classified you as black. Remembering about this calls to mind Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, in which he hopes his children will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Perhaps in a similar way, another grand dream is the one sought for more than two centuries by immigrants. No matter what country they leave behind, which continent they sail from or fly out of, the immigrant sees America as a beacon of tolerance and promise, of hope and opportunity—as a nation governed by ideals and values far greater than those of their homeland.

This beacon only grew brighter as the United States succeeded in World War II, showed an unprecedented generosity toward former enemies as well as allies through aid and rebuilding programs such as the Marshall Plan, and produced a dynamic economy that remains unparalleled in history.

The United States remains one of the world’s premier magnets for immigrants today. There are currently forty-two million immigrants in the United States—representing one in seven American residents and one in six workers.
³
Due to changing economies and laws, the makeup of today’s immigrants looks significantly different from the makeup of immigrants fifty years ago. In 1960, three-quarters of immigrants in the United States came from Europe. Today, half come from Latin America and a quarter come from Asia. In 2010, the United States accounted for roughly 27 percent of the world’s permanent immigration flows and 23 percent of temporary labor migration (with Russia and Germany, numbers two and three, respectively, trailing far behind).
⁴
The demand for U.S. visas dramatically exceeds the supply.
⁵

Immigrant Composition in the United States

U.S. Census Bureau Economics and Statistics Administration,
America’s Foreign Born in the Last 50 Years
,
http://www.census.gov/how/infographics/foreign_born.html
(accessed October 22, 2013).