Here’s an SAT-kind question:

IMMIGRATION :: AMERICA

____________ :: FAITH

What exactly is immigration to America? Is this question even worth asking? Yesterday, as I was working at home at recording translations of Walt Whitman’s work into Russian (this is also the kind of work, besides cleaning and landscaping, that is performed by immigrants), I was listening to the Independence Day programs on the radio, Ellis Island Oral History project among them. Interspersed with inspiring music, actors and actresses read testimony from actual immigrants who’d gone through the Ellis Island processing facility. All stories were read with the same, vaguely Eastern European accent (rolled r’s, hard t’s, the works) and all stories were the same. After a long difficult trip on a boat, the newly arrived glimpsed the Statue of Liberty and had their hearts lifted. No one asked them anything. Some had a chalk mark put on their backs—and turned away. The unwanted ones were marked. The others were not marked. They were not different. There were not really others once they left the island and dissolved in the Manhattan crowds. This was 1920s and 30s. People stepped off on the American soil and became American. The will to get here was enough; they were anointed American.

When similar people undertake an arduous journey today through the desert, not as long, but just as drenching and nerve-racking as the old one taken on a boat, they also step into a big city and disappear.

But now there’s talk of amnesty. Not anointment, baptism, not
induction and recognition, but forgiveness, dispensation of a sin,
attained through the process of confession. What a hundred years before
was an act of bravery and sacrifice, worthy of recognition, is today an
act of infringement and trespassing, deserving of punishment and
forgiveness. Yet, your law-makers could not be tempted even with the
higher moral ground that comes with an act of forgiveness and
conciliation.

Perhaps because it also requires responsibility. When left in legal
limbo, immigrants belong to the shadows— the underground economy,
desert towns, night crossings. Except those 115,175 of us who applied
for naturalization last month. We are patient. We wait for months and
years, wade through the red-tape created by indecision and too many
changes in laws, we stand by as the debate doesn’t lead to anything,
until, one day, we get the vote and take the responsibility for our
brethren — that same responsibility that no one else wanted.

Perhaps, the future is break-away. Perhaps, in the future, America
is new. Not baptizing or condemning depending on the times, but
re-interpreting and reinventing itself, breaking old walls and filling
old moats for the sake of a taller, more dazzling, living, breathing
city on the hill.