A Nation of Immigrants by President John F. Kennedy

Author:President John F. Kennedy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Published: 2016-03-22T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER—THE IMMIGRANT CONTRIBUTION

Oscar Handlin has said, “Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.” In the same sense, we cannot really speak of a particular “immigrant contribution” to America because all Americans have been immigrants or the descendants of immigrants; even the Indians, as mentioned before, migrated to the American continent. We can only speak of people whose roots in America are older or newer. Yet each wave of immigration left its own imprint on American society; each made its distinctive “contribution” to the building of the nation and the evolution of American life. Indeed, if, as some of the older immigrants like to do, we were to restrict the definition of immigrants to the 42 million people who came to the United States after the Declaration of Independence, we would have to conclude that our history and our society would have been vastly different if they all had stayed at home.

As we have seen, people migrated to the United States for a variety of reasons. But nearly all shared two great hopes: the hope for personal freedom and the hope for economic opportunity. In consequence, the impact of immigration has been broadly to confirm the impulses in American life demanding more political liberty and more economic growth.

So, of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence, eighteen were of non-English stock and eight were first-generation immigrants. Two immigrants—the West Indian Alexander Hamilton, who was Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury, and the Swiss Albert Gallatin, who held the same office under Jefferson—established the financial policies of the young republic. A German farmer wrote home from Missouri in 1834,

“If you wish to see our whole family living in...a country where freedom of speech obtains, where no spies are eavesdropping, where no simpletons criticize your every word and seek to detect therein a venom that might endanger the life of the state, the church and the home, in short, if you wish to be really happy and independent, then come here.”

Every ethnic minority, in seeking its own freedom, helped strengthen the fabric of liberty in American life.

Similarly, every aspect of the American economy has profited from the contributions of immigrants. We all know, of course, about the spectacular immigrant successes: the men who came from foreign lands, sought their fortunes in the United States and made striking contributions, industrial and scientific, not only to their chosen country but to the entire world. In 1953 the President’s Commission on Immigration and Naturalization mentioned the following:

Industrialists: Andrew Carnegie (Scot), in the steel industry; John Jacob Astor (German), in the fur trade; Michael Cudahy (Irish), of the meat-packing industry; the Du Ponts (French), of the munitions and chemical industry; Charles L. Fleischmann (Hungarian), of the yeast business; David Sarnoff (Russian), of the radio industry; and William S. Knudsen (Danish), of the auto-mobile industry.

Scientists and inventors: Among those whose genius has benefited the United States are Albert Einstein (German), in physics; Michael Pupin

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