Dr. Peter Tsai
“You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Deuteronomy 10:19
A country boy who grew up on a farm in Taiwan went to work in the city. He discovered that his country was very good at manufacturing the technology they learned from elsewhere, but no one could tell him why things were being made the way they were. He wanted to find out if he could make things better, and for that he decided that he would have to come to the U.S. He chose Kansas State University where his thirst for knowledge drove him to accumulate 500 credits in chemistry, engineering and mathematics, though the PhD program only required 90. He took a position at the University of Tennessee where he spent his entire career, retiring last year. His name is Peter Tsai, and under the policies proposed by the Trump administration, he would have been told upon graduation, “Go back home. American jobs are for American citizens.” Fortunately for us, and the world, he stayed. Among the 12 U.S. patents for his inventions is one for the process to make the material used in N95 masks. He is now working harder than before his retirement, devising ways to safely sterilize those masks.
Those who want to make our country “great again” talk about “American ingenuity”. But the thing is, that ingenuity has always been deeply entwined with foreign labor and skills. The enslaved people imported to our shores on whose labor we depended to built much of our nation’s infrastructure and wealth. The German scientists who gave us much of our rocket technology. Even today, the Dragon capsule that recently delivered the astronauts to the space station was the creation of a company founded by an immigrant. And let us not forget that uniquely American holiday, Thanksgiving, celebrating the gift of the Native People to those first foreigners who settled here. Indeed, we who are not of native heritage are the strangers in this land we call America.
The list of “American” inventions created wholly or in part due to immigrants to this country is long. Not only SpaceX but also Tesla is the creation of South Africa-born Elon Musk. Steve Jobs’ father was Abdulfattah Jandali, a Muslim student from Syria studying at the University of Wisconsin. Have you googled anything lately? Try Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, immigrant from Russia. Nothing more American than a pair of Levis, right? Oops, Levi Strauss was a German immigrant. And who hasn’t read something in the Huffington Post? Arianna Huffington is a Greek immigrant to the U.S. Should I receive the Pulitzer Prize for blogs (ha!), that would be thanks to Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian immigrant. The list goes on and on and on.
Consider how we benefit from the work of immigrants in our own lives. Much if not most of the food we eat was harvested or processed by immigrants. The service industry, especially hotels, is heavily dependent on immigrants. This past week I had a new roof placed on my house. All of the very hard working crew were Spanish speaking immigrants. My physician is an immigrant from Asia. The mechanic who has serviced my vehicles for the past 29 years came here from India. These are people who have made this a better country.
What makes this country great, if anything does, is precisely that we are a nation of immigrants united not by a racial identity, cultural origins or even a common language. We are united, or at least should be, by a commitment to a certain ideal as expressed by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence and enshrined especially in the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution. Those ideals, especially the notion that all people are created equal, have even helped us rise above our failures written into law and even the constitution itself, most notably the exclusion of all but property-owning white males in the political process, ironically denying that very principle on which our country was founded.
Denigrating immigrants is based in that same notion of white supremacy that has been imbedded so deep in our culture we do not even see it most of the time. (The book I am currently reading by Keeanaga-Yamahtta Taylor, “Race for Profit”, lays out how the real estate industry systemically undermined black home ownership long after the practice of redlining ended, and still does to this day.) The attempt by the Trump administration to undo DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) is especially disturbing and morally indefensible. These innocent immigrants brought to this country by their parents years ago, raised and educated in this country, now face possible deportations to countries of which most have no or little memory.
Long before DACA was created by the Obama administration, I remember the first time I learned of their plight. I was asked to sit on a panel along with our mayor and other community leaders to receive testimony from these “dreamers”. I’ll never forget the one young woman, then a senior in high school, telling us through her tears of the shock she received when talking to her high school counselor that unlike all of her friends, she was not eligible to receive financial aid to attend college due to her undocumented status. Nor could she get a green card to look for work. And this at a time when Donald J. Trump was just beginning to fire people on a reality TV show.
The colossal lie sold to the American public in the last election was that immigrants coming from Mexico were largely “criminals, drug dealers, rapists.” The hard data suggests the opposite. In fact those immigrants, both documented and undocumented, are more religious than the American public, have very strong commitments to family values and are less likely to commit a crime than native-born U.S. citizens. In his June 27 column in the New York Times, Oregon born and raised Nicholas Kristof calls them “models of civil society”, noting that Latino families in northwest Oregon “have seemed more resilient because of their greater ‘social capital’— bonds of family, home region or church.” The result? They tend to live longer, have fewer suicides, fewer deaths from drugs and alcohol and commit fewer crimes than the rest of the population. A 2017 study by the Cato Institute found that undocumented immigrants are 44% less likely to be incarcerated than U.S. citizens, 69% less likely if they are documented. The Public Policy Institute of California found that U.S. born men are incarcerated at a rate of 2.5 times that of foreign born men. The 2010 Census revealed that 1.6% of immigrant males between the age of 18 and 39 were imprisoned compared to 3.3% of their U.S. born counterparts. It is not a surprise therefore, that as immigration has increased in this country, the crime rates have actually gone down.
“Stranger” in biblical contexts normally refers to foreigners, as in the quote at the beginning of this post. The quotation attributed to Jesus in Matthew 25, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me,” is at the heart of the Jude-Christian ethic. A nation that rejects immigrants is a nation that has abandoned that ethic, and in short, has turned its back on God.
Peter Tsai sums up the attitude most common among immigrants who are grateful for the opportunities that they have received in this country and therefore desire to give back. Told that he could turn his now highly sought after expertise into a personal gold mine, he simply replied, “If I could choose, I would rather save 100 million lives than make 100 million dollars.” Would that such a spirit be embodied by all in our nation today, and especially in our leaders. God bless the immigrants to this country, we need them now more than ever.