Immigration Stories | Jfk Library

TOM PUTNAM:  Good afternoon. I'm Tom Putnam, Director of the John F. Kennedy

Presidential Library and Museum. And on behalf of Heather Campion, CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation, and all of my Library and Foundation colleagues, I thank you for coming; welcome our viewers on C-SPAN; and acknowledge the generous underwriters of the Kennedy Library Forums: lead sponsor Bank of America, the Lowell Institute, the Boston Foundation; and our media sponsors, Boston Globe, Xfinity, and WBUR.  

Of the many memorable moments in my 16 years working at the Library, none compare with the two days when Senator Edward M. Kennedy's body lay in repose in this very hall to allow his friends, colleagues and admirers to pay their last respects before he was buried in Arlington National Cemetery next to his two brothers. We had announced that we would close at midnight the first day and reopen at six a.m. the next. As that initial night wore on, I sensed the staff and security were tiring, and went out the front door around 11:30 p.m. to see how many folks remained in line. 

I've never been so moved in my life. Hundreds, if not thousands of people waited patiently under a summer night's sky. I walked and walked and walked, searching for the end of the line, passing laborers, educators, politicos, and most notably recent immigrants of all generations and ethnicities, many holding sleeping children in their arms. They'd come to pay respect to a man they credited with making their dreams of a new life in an adopted homeland a reality. 

We stayed open through the night.

In his new book, A Nation of Nations: A Great American Immigration Story, Tom Gjelten artfully captures both the personal and political nuances of this history. He traces the journeys of a number of recent immigrants and their families' toils and triumphs in their new homeland. And he charts the political battles and principal figures whose efforts led to the passing of the 1965 Immigrant Act, whose 50^th anniversary we celebrate today. Exactly 50 years ago on October 3, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Act into law at a ceremony in Lady Liberty's shadow.

Of course, Ted Kennedy was not the only member of his family who played a role in this history. President Kennedy had long been a supporter of dropping the quotas that favored immigration from Europe, and in 1962, sent a bill to abolish nationality discrimination in immigration policy, which his youngest brother would later steer into law. 

And years before that, it was their maternal grandfather, Honey Fitz, who faced off with his political nemesis, Henry Cabot Lodge. When Lodge questioned whether Jews or Italians had any right to emigrate to the United States, Fitzgerald allegedly responded, "As much as your father or mine; it was only a difference of a few ships."

Which reminds me of Dave Powers's quip about another Boston Brahmin family politician. Powers said, "He's Irish on his chauffeur's side." [laughter] 

Tom Gjelten is the author of numerous books and an award-winning correspondent for National

Public Radio. In 1986, he became one of NPR's pioneer foreign correspondents, posted in Latin America, Central Europe, and covering wars throughout the globe. After returning from overseas, Mr. Gjelten covered US diplomacy and military affairs from the State Department and the Pentagon, where he was reporting live at the moment it was hit on September 11, 2001.

More recently, he covers the changing religious landscape in America. He's a graduate of the University of Minnesota, and he began his professional career as a public school teacher in Maine. 

We're pleased to welcome back Marcela Garcia as our moderator. Ms. Garcia writes for the Boston Globe's editorial page, where she has been a contributor since 2013, writing editorials, columns and op-extras. She's also a frequent commentator on WGBH Radio and Television, and formerly worked at WNEU, Telemundo Boston, the Boston Business Journal and El Planeta.

Six times a year, the Kennedy Library is honored to serve as the host site for special federal court proceedings in which recent immigrants are naturalized as new citizens. These unique ceremonies remind me of a treasured moment in the history of my family, when the adoptions of our son and daughter, who were born, respectively, in Guatemala and South Korea, were finalized in court and they became citizens of the United States. Perhaps that is why I was so taken by this brief personal passage in Tom Gjelten's book:

When Marta Quintanilla arrived here from El Salvador, she thought life would be easier than it turned out to be. "You have to work hard to live here," she remarked. But after a childhood of poverty and violence, Mr. Gjelten writes, she found security in America. And that was what mattered most. "I come home from work, park my car in the parking lot. I come into my apartment and lock the door. And I see my children sleeping. I can sleep peacefully here and not think somebody is going to come in the night. That's what America has given me."

And that is just one of the many beautiful vignettes that Tom Gjelten has given us in this remarkable new book. Please join me in welcoming and Marcela Garcia to our stage. [applause] 

TOM GJELTEN:  Thank you.

MARCELA GARCIA:  Thank you, Tom. And thank you for being here, despite this weather. Thank you, Tom, and thanks again to the Library for inviting me to talk about this book, whose timing obviously is quite exquisite, other than the fact that it's honoring the 50^th anniversary of this Act.

And so, I wanted to ask first a very simple question: If you could tell us, how did you arrive at this premise? What made you decide to write about this Act? There's many, obviously, topics to write about, and obviously you've had an extensive career. What drove you to report on this?

TOM GJELTEN:  Well, most of my career has been, as Tom mentioned, either overseas or writing about foreign policy or national security. But as I get older and got older, I wanted to write more about America. I wanted to write more about this nation, our identity, our culture, our history. And so for a while I'd been looking for a new way to kind of focus my reporting and I saw this anniversary coming up. And to tell you the truth, I couldn't have told you that there was a 1965 Immigration Act. I don't know how many of you knew about this either. It's one of the most unrecognized laws that we have had in this country, and yet monumental.

Somebody brought it to my attention and pointed out that we were approaching the 50^th anniversary. And that this law, as much as anything else, is responsible for changing the character of America, the identity of America, and really for the first time forced America kind of to live up to its promise of being an open country and forced America to actually define what does American exceptionalism really mean? A term that's thrown around a lot.

And so, I just saw this as an opportunity, Marcela, to redirect my reporting for a while, and to look our country. 

MARCELA GARCIA:  I did not know that there was a 1965 Immigration Act. 

TOM GJELTEN:  See? You either.

MARCELA GARCIA:  In fact, what I think about when people say 1965, I think about the Voting Rights Act, and, the year before, the Civil Rights Act. Was that same spirit of this Act? If you can tell us exactly what this law did, and then maybe we can get into the unintended consequences of it. 

TOM GJELTEN:  As Tom Putnam said, the idea to make America more open in its immigration policy goes way back to the 19^th century and to people like John Fitzgerald, who was fighting this fight back then. And when John Kennedy ran for Congress in 1946, he was campaigning in the North End. And one of the things that he discovered is that Italian and Jewish voters in particular felt very strongly that they were discriminated against in the immigration policy.

So the drive to get rid of the national origins quota, which, the numbers are just staggering. There were 50,000 visa slots reserved for people from the United Kingdom, under the national origins quota, with 100 for Japan, 100 for India, 100 for Korea. So it was completely out of balance.

So the push to get rid of those national origin quotas goes a long ways back. But you're absolutely right. It only was in the context of the civil rights movement and the great society legislative momentum of the '60s that the mobilization was finally possible to do this. 

In doing research for this, I was listening to a recording of a meeting that Lyndon Johnson had in the White House in January of 1964, just two months after taking office, where he was trying to line up support for this immigration reform. And everybody was saying, "It's a great idea and we're proud of you for doing it. It'll never happen." There was a feeling that the time was not yet right. 

And it became right only with the great majority, the great progressive majority, if you will, after the elections of November 1964, it was only with that majority that it became possible. And it was certainly fueled by the spirit of the civil rights movement. Vice President Humphrey said, shortly after the '64 Civil Rights Act was passed, "We have now gotten rid of the idea of second class citizenship in our country. It's now time to get rid of the second class status of people who are applying to be immigrants here."

So it was very closely linked to the other civil rights initiatives when it really was passed finally.

MARCELA GARCIA:  So exactly what did the law do? It got rid of the national origin quota, but instead– as I understand the political climate there, can you talk about the political climate? Like you were saying, people were telling Johnson this was never going to happen. How did it work out?

TOM GJELTEN:  It's amazing to go back and read the debate in the committee hearings over this act. Because now we're, to use one of Donald Trump's favorite terms, we're now so politically correct in our language that we are more careful what we say. In the '60s, people weren't that careful. And they were literally standing up, members of Congress were saying, "We really don't want Asians coming here. We don't want Africans coming here. People of Ethiopia don't have the same right to come here as people from England." They were very candid about their preference for northern and western Europeans. This was an Anglo-Saxon country and we need to keep it that way. You probably wouldn't say those kind of things today. But that was the political climate.

There are a couple of unique things about that moment when the law was approved by Congress. One is that the '65 Immigration Act actually got a larger share of Republican votes than it did votes from the Democratic Party. And hasn't because the main opposition, both to the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act as well, and the Immigration Act came from Southern Democrats who were conservative Democrats. And also at that time, there were a lot more liberal and moderate Republicans in Congress than there are today. 

But still, there was opposition to it. And this is an interesting story, and it's a really important one. The chairman of the House Immigration Subcommittee was basically allied with these conservative groups who wanted to keep the national origin quotas. And for months, he refused to hold hearings on President Johnson's bill. And it was only when President Johnson put very direct personal pressure on him, and also after he had a very scary primary race in his district in Cleveland, it was only then that he agreed to hold hearings on this bill.

But he agreed to support the bill only after getting a really important, to him, change. President Johnson and Phil Hart, the Senator from Michigan who supported it in the Senate, and Manny Celler in the House originally proposed that the main preference category for immigrants should be those who have skills and training that are especially advantageous to the United States. Michael Feighan, chairman of the House Immigration Subcommittee, reversed that preference, and instead elevated the importance of family unification as the top criterion for giving out visas.

Interestingly enough, he thought that by giving preference to immigrants who already had relatives here, you would bring in more of the same. It would be, in the words of the American Legion, it would be a naturally operating national origins system. Because the assumption was that the people most likely to benefit from it would be the ones who already had relatives here, who were largely European. And that was the key to getting enough conservative support to get the bill passed. 

So when it went into law, 50 years ago today, the top priority was for immigrants who had relatives here. And in fact, in the first few years, that's exactly what happened. But what they failed to realize is that the demand to move to the United States was no longer in Europe. It was in the developing world – it was in Asia, it was in Africa, it was in Latin America. There were a few opportunities for immigrants from those countries to come to the United States, largely through employment categories. And as each one of those immigrants came to the United States under those other categories, the family unification provisions offered them the opportunity to bring in not only their children or their parents, but their brother and sisters, and their brothers' and sisters' spouses, and their spouses' brothers and sisters. So you saw this chain migration phenomenon kick in. And it ended up bringing in exactly the kind of people that Michael Feighan and the conservatives wanted to keep out, which was the non-European immigrants. 

So now, nine out of ten immigrants to the United States are from outside Europe, precisely the opposite result of what Michael Feighan and his allies thought would happen when they emphasized family unification. 

MARCELA GARCIA:  It's amazing. I'd like to read a bit of a paragraph that takes us back exactly to 50 years ago, October 3, 1965. And I'm going to read exactly what happened that day, when this Act was signed into law:

President Johnson signed the Immigration Act on October 3, 1965, in an elaborate ceremony on Liberty Island in New York Harbor in a scene almost exactly as he had envisioned it. October 3^rd was a beautiful autumn day with blue skies and a blustery wind, and hundreds of invited guests and interested onlookers gathered around, some of them hoping to get one of the souvenir pens the president would hand out. 

The White House had invited almost everyone who had had a hand in the preparation and passage of the immigration legislation. Among the invitees was Erich Leinsdorf, the symphony conductor from Austria who had first sensitized Lyndon Johnson to immigrant concerns, and who had been able to escape Nazi rule, thanks to Johnson's personal intervention. 

The president's remarks, delivered at a podium in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, reflected the ambiguous interpretation of the legislation. "The bill that we sign today is not a revolutionary bill," Johnson said. "It does not affect the lives of millions. Yet it's still one of the most important acts of this Congress and of this administration."

So 50 years later we can see how that amendment sort of backfired in a way that they didn't intend.

Now, what do you think is the significance of this legislative move? What lessons can we learn from that now? How is it relevant today to the current immigration climate? And also, talk about the passage of this law contributed to essentially breaking our current immigration system. Because what you had was an increasingly flow of people and their families coming in, and deprioritizing employment-based visas and green cards, which as you probably know suffer from incredible backlog. So can you talk about that significance?

TOM GJELTEN:  When President Johnson in the 1964 State of the Union address announced that he was going to be working for this, he said the key question that we should ask potential immigrants is, What can you do for our country? Not, In what country were you born? So his idea was that immigrants should be selected on the basis of whether they could contribute to our economy.

Now, in the current moment, fewer than 10% of the immigrants coming into the country are coming in according to that criteria. The great, great majority are coming in under family unification, which was– this is the big unintended part of this legislation. No one realized at the time that family unification was going to drive immigration to the extent that it has now. And that is what has really overloaded the system.

Now, I'm not going to get into whether it makes sense for naturalized citizens to be able to bring in their adult brothers and sisters and their brothers' and sisters' spouses, and so forth. But there's no question that that is the provision that really explains why we have the numbers that we have had. And I would guess that if this country ever gets anywhere in the way of immigration reform, that's going to be one of the most debated issues. I don't get into that. I'm just sort of explaining that that's what happened. 

But for me, the really symbolic importance of this legislation was that it committed the United States for the first time in its history to a colorblind immigration policy. That is the key principle.

And no longer did we select immigrants on the basis of what kind of people they were, what culture they came from, what race, or ancestry they came from.

And so, now it made possible for the first time to have the diversity that our country has now.

And I think that is the key thing. So finally, we are sort of redefining what does it mean to be an American; what is this American nation all about. And I think that is a really important thing to focus on in the current political climate, because up until now there's been so much of the immigration debate is focused on, what do we do about people who are coming here outside the law, the undocumented immigrants. Should there be amnesty? Should there be a wall between the United States and Mexico?

But what this occasion brings up is the question of, are we still committed as a country to bringing in people from all cultures, all backgrounds? Are we willing as a country to deal with the challenges that diversity and multiculturalism raises for a society? And that's why think this anniversary is so important. 

MARCELA GARCIA:  Just to repeat those statistics: In 1965, 85% of the population was white, and seven out of eight immigrants were coming from Europe. By 2010, the share of the US population born overseas had tripled, and nine out of ten immigrants were coming from outside of Europe.

So if I could ask you for a second to imagine, what would be different today in America had that law not go through? And I know it's a big question, but if you could just imagine. And we were talking about this before; there have been other legislative changes, major legislative changes since 1965 that have impacted immigration, or the makeup of our country right now, as major as that one: 1986, the Reagan-mandated amnesty. And 9/11, for sure, as well, which prompted a lot of restrictive immigration policies. But I wonder if 1965, if this hadn't happened.

TOM GJELTEN:  It's in my interest as somebody who has written about the 1965 Act to basically exaggerate its importance. And I want to be careful not to do that, because there are certainly other factors that have contributed to the current situation. One of them that I pointed out before is that the geopolitical situation changed dramatically. Europe in 1965 was really becoming prosperous again. The whole wave of European immigration after the Second World War was in the aftermath of the war, when Europe had largely been devastated. By the mid1960s, Europe was very prosperous and growing, and there was no longer much of a motivation for Europeans– as much of a motivation for Europeans to move to the United States. So that's one factor.

Meanwhile, in what we used to call the third world or the developing world, if you look at Africa, it was going through a decolonization. There were wars and violence all over Africa. Their ties to their old colonial motherlands, as it were, were being broken. And so, for the first time there was really a push on the part of many people in African countries to migrate. That was a new phenomenon. Changes in global transportation and global communication were making migration more practical and feasible than it had ever been. 

So all of those factors contributed to this change in migration patterns. And just with respect to Hispanic immigration, for example, in 1964, the Bracero program was abolished. The Bracero program brought largely agricultural workers from Mexico and other Latin countries to the United States legally to work in the fields. That program was eliminated in 1964, largely by the same people who voted for the '65 Immigration Act. It was seen as exploitative, so it was ended.

But the problem was that a lot of workers who had been accustomed to the United States through the Bracero program continued to come to the United States afterwards, along the same routes, going back to the same communities where they worked. Found work in the same fields as they had been working as Braceros, but only now they were illegal, because the Bracero program had been abolished.

So you saw this rise in undocumented immigration from Mexico in particular as a consequence of the elimination of the Bracero program. 

My point is, there are many other factors that explain this change. But the '65 Act was an important one. 

MARCELA GARCIA:  I don't want to make it sound this is a policy book entirely. The thing that I love about your work here is that you are able to intertwine these human stories with the policy aspect. You essentially put all these human stories of immigrants that arrive during the past 50 years in the context of the policy change and how it affected them. I don't want people think that it's an entirely legislative book. But it does have a lot of policy that helps explain the situation these people living in.

I wanted to ask you about assimilation. That's another topic or rather a theme that I see along the stories of these people. You tell the story of Bolivian immigrants, of Muslims, Libyans, et cetera. What did you learn about the assimilation experience? Are there any lessons for new Americans now that we can draw from this experience, from them?

TOM GJELTEN:  Well, Marcela, you've written a lot about immigration, so you know that assimilation is kind of a loaded term among a lot of immigrant groups, because the connotation to many people is that assimilation means taking on the dominant culture. And if that was possible for European immigrants to do in the early 20^th century, it's a lot less possible for people from non-European backgrounds. Whether they want to or not. You're of a different color. You may very well have a different religion.

MARCELA GARCIA:  Language.

TOM GJELTEN:  Well, a lot of immigrants have different languages, but there are certain things that there's nothing you can do about. You can't do anything about your skin color. You can't do anything about your religion. You can't do anything about your cultural, philosophical background. All of those factors set you apart from the dominant culture. And whether you want to assimilate or not, you've got all these things working against you.

So the term that a lot of immigrant advocates prefer is integration or acculturation. But this to me is really a core issue, and one we should spend some time thinking about as a society. Arthur Schlesinger – who those of you who are followers of John F. Kennedy know him very well, the famous Kennedy liberal – wrote a book in which he was very critical of the multiculturalism movement. The national motto is e pluribus unum, out of many, one. And Arthur Schlesinger famously said, "My concern is that we have too much pluribus and not enough unum. His point is, we celebrate diversity so much, what about celebrating unity? What about working for unity?

And on the one hand, I point out, and I think the stories that I tell sort of illustrate this, that you can't have absolute unity because people are coming from different backgrounds. But it is important for us as a nation to think about, all right, what does the concept of "we" mean? What is the concept of unity? What is the unum that we can establish, given that we are now a multicultural nation, a land of diversity? It's still important for us to have an unum. It's important for us to have a unity. But we have to think about it in some creative ways, and we have to really work to establish a new definition of what "we as a nation" means. 

And that's one of the questions that I explore in writing about the experiences of these various families. Because one of the things that unites them all, whether it's the family from Bolivia, the family from Korea, the family from Libya, the woman from El Salvador that Tom read about, they all in one way or another are committed to the idea of being American, and all do believe that there is something about being American that unites them all. They define it differently. It's an interesting story to explore because different people are going to come up with different interpretations of what that means. But it's the key issue. 

MARCELA GARCIA:  One of the things that I found, on the topic of diversity, actually, one of the topics that I found very, very interesting, you dedicate a chapter on what happened post1965. And again, given that the spirit of this law was also part of the civil rights movement, you explore what happened, what was the dynamic between African Americans and new Americans.

And it wasn't always good. So if you could talk a little bit about that, because that's fascinating.

It's a dynamic that we can still see.

TOM GJELTEN:  Absolutely, absolutely. Well, there's a chapter in my book called "Crossroads," in which I explore in quite some detail the history of a historically black community in Northern Virginia. They're not immigrants; their struggles don't have anything to do with immigration. But I wanted to sort of establish that setting, because that part of Northern Virginia went through three really difficult and traumatic experiences in the space of a few years. 

That part of Virginia was racially segregated up until the 1960s, both in terms of neighborhoods and in terms of schools and public facilities. So it went through desegregation in the 1960s, which for them was a very traumatic experience. 

The other thing is, they were a distant suburb of Washington, DC, basically a rural area throughout the '50s that, as Washington, DC, was expanding, got swallowed up as part of the metropolitan area. So they went through urbanization, was the second big process that they went through. Huge population growth and development.

And then, it also happened to be the area that experienced more of an immigration influx than any other part of the DC area. 

So desegregation, urbanization and immigration back to back. This produced tremendous stress. And the black community that I focus on quite narrowly had finally just barely gotten the same level of public services that white neighborhoods got. They finally had schools; they were finally able to go to integrated schools. I tell the story of them being able to build a community center for the first time, with the support of their local government.

No sooner had they achieved those things than they were basically – I say this in a nonpejorative way – they were basically inundated by an immigrant influx. They were one of the lower income neighborhoods in the county, and that's where the immigrants sought their own housing. So no sooner had these African American leaders established some kind of justice for their community, where they had to share all these resources with immigrants. And the immigrants were not necessarily aware or sensitive to how much work had gone into establishing this. And so, there really was some pretty fierce conflict between those African American leaders and the immigrant leaders who came in.

And as you say, Marcela, this is a dynamic that has gone on for this whole 50-year period. It's not entirely resolved. And I try to dodge the question of whether immigrants are taking jobs away from American workers, which is a really key issue. I do think that one of the data points that is fairly clear, is that the very low skill level, low income level of the labor market, there actually is competition between immigrant workers and native-born workers. And that often impacts African Americans in particular.

I think a strong argument can be made that if you look at the economy in macro terms, the net effect of immigration is positive, because of immigrant entrepreneurs who create jobs and economic growth that can be tied directly to immigration. But I think it's hard to argue that there is no impact at all on the labor force at the lowest levels. And so, that's an issue that African American and immigrant leaders have dealt with throughout all this period. 

Now, what unites them, particularly in this period, is this sense that the power structure in a sense is opposed to both of their interests. They sort of find politically they may have something in common that they don't have in common economically. And so, that relationship, that alliance has been developing. But it's another key issue to explore.

MARCELA GARCIA:  And I think finding those coincidences is what has led in certain instances for the Latino to have political success, to ally themselves with the black community and learn from those lessons.

If I can ask you also another big question, because we've seen in the late 1800s/early 1900s, and in the context of the passage of this law, there was this very anti-immigrant, or very, as you were saying, non-politically correct way of describing unwanted immigrants. Why do you think that's coming back now? Was it always there; did it never leave? And why is it such a big trend for this country for so long? Why is it still latent there?

TOM GJELTEN:  First of all, I have to say, I don't know if it's coming back. I don't know, I mean, certain comments by certain individuals get a lot of attention. I've yet to be convinced that that is a really widespread– those statements of resentment against immigrants or people of color, I have to be convinced that that is a really widespread sentiment. I'd like to think that during a primary season when you've got a really polarized population and you've had gerrymandered Congressional districts that encourage candidates to appeal to their narrow party base, that certain sentiments get kind of blown out of proportion. So I think the jury is still out on how widespread that is.

The other thing is that's sort of the most successful periods of acculturation in immigration have coincided with periods of economic growth, when the pie is bigger. And when there's more fear and anxiety about your future, there's a temptation to blame your anxiety or insecurity on others. We've seen that not only in the United States; I covered the war in Bosnia and I saw how the economic stress in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the former Yugoslavia produced a wave of ethnic nationalism that had been dormant. And it was directly attributable to dictators, to demagogues who were encouraging people to blame their neighbors on their problems. 

MARCELA GARCIA:  The other.

TOM GJELTEN:  The other. So that is a phenomenon that we see over and over again in societies everywhere. And to the extent that we're living in a period of economic stress now, it's inevitable that that's going to happen. 

Now again, I have yet to be convinced that we are back where we were 50 years ago.

MARCELA GARCIA:  Even to a certain extent, the Voting Rights Act in particular is being challenged in many ways, in many counties, with these voter ID laws that are meant to really restrict the vote of minorities. So it's just striking, and a lot of people may say it's almost like cyclical, that we see this oppression coming back.

I wanted to ask you, too, going back to the human element stories, when you talk to these people in this county that you chose. And feel free to talk about that, too, why focus on this county in Virginia to take a deep look at the impact of the immigration law. What was something that surprised you during your reporting or your research that you found out that went against conventional wisdom or something that really, really struck you as, Wow, I never thought I would find this amongst these people. 

TOM GJELTEN:  There were two ways that I could approach this. I wanted to write about real people who were here basically indirectly or directly as a result of the '65 Act. There were two ways I could have approached that. One would be to pick eight or ten really interesting people from around the country with diverse experiences. Instead, I decided that I wanted all of these people to be from a really defined area; in this case, a county. In many ways, the characters that I focus on in my book include not just the immigrants, but law enforcement people, government people, education people, those people who had to deal with it.

So I wanted to tell the story in a setting, a particular setting, and not just the stories of disparate individuals from around the country. So I chose Fairfax County as a place, because there I could establish the context in which this happened. And I could talk also about the interaction between the immigrants themselves.

I tell the story in the book of a young man from Bolivia, named Alvero, whose closest friends in high school were another young man his age from South Korea and another young man from Pakistan. All three of them emigrated to this country at about the same time, at the age of nine or ten. None of them spoke English when they came. None of them came from high income backgrounds. They had very similar struggles, but look, they're coming from a Latin culture, an Asian culture and a Muslim culture in Pakistan, speaking Spanish, Urdu and Korean. There was far more that separated them that united them. But the shared experience of being immigrants in this diverse community really brought them together, and they became very close friends.

And it was those kind of interconnections that really intrigued me. I'm sorry I'm sort of going off on a tangent, but you asked what surprised me or what sort of challenged conventional wisdom. One of the things that I found in Fairfax County is that unlike previous high immigrant areas, you did not have groups settling in enclaves. You don't have like Chinatown, you don't have

Little Italy. There is a place in Fairfax County called Koreatown, but mostly people in Koreatown are Hispanic. 

So what you had in Fairfax County was immigrants, and because they were coming largely one by one and settling with families, they chose where the neighborhoods that had the best schools, the safest communities. And they did not necessarily go to the Korean neighborhood or the Latino neighborhood or the Muslim neighborhood. There weren't neighborhoods like that.

So you saw a whole different pattern of immigrant settlement that really differed from previous immigrant settlement patterns. And what it made possible was, it really nurtured this sense of a new identity, a new national identity, because these people were, for the most part, separated from other immigrants of their background and forced to find the things that they had in common with each and with native-born Americans.

So some of the things I write about in this book are elements that contribute to what I said before, this new sense of identity. What is it that these people find in common about living in this country from other backgrounds? What is it that they, working together, can identify as their common identity? And being able to articulate that and elaborate that and explore it is what Fairfax County offered. 

I should just point out that Fairfax County in 1960 was about 92% white, about 7.9% African American, and about 0.1% foreign-born. And today, 29% of the residents of Fairfax County are born outside the United States. So it has gone through just tremendous change.

MARCELA GARCIA:  We're going to take some questions. You can start preparing, going to the mic, in a few minutes. But I wanted to ask, without giving away too much, if you can tell us about your experience. You talk about your family, where it's from, and their immigrant experience to the United States years ago. Can you talk a little bit about that and how that shaped also your views?

TOM GJELTEN:  I debated whether to be so self-indulgent as to tell my own story or not. And I decided finally to do it, because my ancestors represented– I have a chapter called "Good Immigrants, Bad Immigrants." My ancestors exemplified the good immigrants. They came from Norway. They were white. 

MARCELA GARCIA:  In 18–?

TOM GJELTEN:  Right around the turn of the century. They came in different groups, but in the last few years of the 19^th century and turn of the century. So they represented everything. And at that time, there was the most racist stuff being written about immigrants that you could imagine. You had eugenics experts–

MARCELA GARCIA:  From Harvard!

TOM GJELTEN:  From Harvard, I have to say, saying that Scandinavians were the purest race. So my ancestors were of the purest race, according to these immigration experts at the time. So I thought it was important to explore. What is that drove these good immigrants, ideal people to come to the United States. And I did a little research and find out that the factors, the forces, the conditions that drove my immigrants to this country were, to me, no different than the factors that drive people from Central America to come. They were coming from an agrarian– Norway in the 19^th century was a pre-industrial, agrarian economy where if you didn't inherit the family farm, there was nothing for you to do. There was a lot of poverty. There was no opportunity for you. And if you had any initiative at all, and were at all enterprising, you would go to America.

MARCELA GARCIA:  You would leave, yes.

TOM GJELTEN:  That's what you did. And it was easy in those days. Because they were white, and because you could buy a package– amazingly, in rural Norway, you could buy a ticket that not only got you a land ticket to the coast, a steamship ticket across the ocean, and a railway ticket into the interior. You could get this package, this America package that would take you all the way into the interior. 

So it was very easy for you. So that's why– there were years in which Norway lost 5% of its population every year to emigration. Now, that is more than what you see in Central America these days. And as I say, it's exactly the same forces that drive people. People have been migrating for a million years in human history. They migrate when they feel circumstances force them to migrate.

And so, I wanted to stress the continuity of my ancestors' experience with the experience of immigrants today, but also to contrast the way that they were received and the openness that they encountered, versus what is facing immigrants who are doing exactly the same thing today. 

MARCELA GARCIA:  Throughout the book, the other thing that also really, really fascinated me is that you really demonstrate and exhibit that immigrants indeed self-select. The one immigrant that's going to come, regardless of their motivation, they are already deciding to be someone; they're already enterprising. And one could argue that that's the kind of immigrant that we want.

TOM GJELTEN:  The different families that I choose, Marcela, each of them tell a different story. And I focus on a Muslim family who explores what it means to be Muslim in this day and age; the Asians with their incredible loyalty to their parents and their self-discipline, and so forth. 

And there's a Bolivian family. And like you say, not everybody emigrates. So I focus on this Bolivian family who just exhibit incredible enterprise, always a determination to start their own businesses. Most of them failed, but they exemplify risk-taking, which is, as you say, that is what immigrants– out of a whole community, which are the immigrants that decide to break ties and leave? They're the ones that are willing to take a risk–

MARCELA GARCIA:  Sacrifice.

TOM GJELTEN:  And sacrifice and work hard and get somewhere. That's why you have a somewhat higher than average rate of entrepreneurship and business ownership among immigrants.

MARCELA GARCIA:  That's absolutely right. So we can leave it here. Maybe we can take some questions now. We have someone, go ahead, hi.

Q:  Very interesting. I had a question on, today in the debates there's a difference in the right to legalization versus the right to citizenship. Was that part of the debate at that time? I assume it wasn't. Now because a majority of immigrants tend to be associated with the Democratic Party.

What was the timeframe to become a citizen at that time, in 1965?

TOM GJELTEN:  As I recall, I don't write about this, but I don't think it was that different. I think the phenomenon of people coming here outside the law is basically a post-'65 phenomenon. 

MARCELA GARCIA:  I would agree.

TOM GJELTEN:  There wasn't a lot of– the whole issue of whether you're legal or not was not a big issue back then. If you were able to get into the country, with the exception of Chinese, who had sort of a special status, where they were allowed to come and be contract laborers, but they weren't allowed to be naturalize, with the exception of that category, largely the issue was whether you could get into the country. It was not whether you could become a citizen.

Q:  And what was the waiting period to vote?

MARCELA GARCIA:  If I can–

TOM GJELTEN:  Please.

MARCELA GARCIA:  I think in 1965, again the process was pretty much the same, but what changed or what differs from then to now is the numbers. The demand right now is just incredible, to the point that, again, depending on where you are and why you're applying for citizenship, whether it is employment-based or marriage– marriage right now is the fastest way to become a citizen, in reality. And back then, again, I suspect that it was the same. But the waiting period shouldn't have been that long, because again, the sheer numbers weren't– the numbers that we have now, we didn't have them there. So that wasn't an issue because there wasn't enough demand to clog the system in the way that we have right now.

TOM GJELTEN:  The time period now, if you become a legal permanent resident under an employment category or as a brother or sister of a naturalized citizen is five years. I actually don't know if it was five years before, but I don't recall–

MARCELA GARCIA:  Oh, you have to wait five years, that's right. 

TOM GJELTEN:  After you become a legal permanent resident, you have to wait five years before you can become a citizen.

MARCELA GARCIA:  And I think that if you marry someone, it's less.

TOM GJELTEN:  It's shorter.

MARCELA GARCIA:  Like three years or something, yeah. After you become a legal resident. 

Q:  I was just wondering, the undocumented immigrant, has it always been a problem, or is it just more recent now that we have so many undocumented immigrants? And what do you think the cause of that is?

TOM GJELTEN:  As I just said, this is a recent phenomenon. You know what the number one category of immigrants who are here illegally is? It's not people that have snuck across the border. It's actually people who have overstayed their visas. So there's a kind of a myth out there that these are all Mexicans or Central Americans who come across the border, when it may just as well be a British citizen who has overstayed his or her visa, or something else. So there are some misconceptions about that. 

And as far as the cause, I mentioned before, the elimination of the Bracero program made illegal what had previously been legal. That was a factor. But I would say that right now the biggest single factor is what Marcela was mentioning, which is this huge backlog. You may be here legally under a tourist visa or a student visa or something, and you want to stay and become a citizen. You have to wait so long for your number to come up that at some point your student visa or whatever expires and at that point you become illegal. And you're only illegal really because you're waiting your turn for your hearing to come. It's not because you set out deliberately to break the law. It's a function of the backlog.

MARCELA GARCIA:  Which is also a bit of a myth, to say that people should just join the line. There is no line because essentially all these numbers have gotten rid of the line. And there really is no clear process for someone to become a citizen, someone who's overstayed their visa.

Like you say, they're forced to become illegals.

But other factors that have caused these numbers. Central America, political situation in Latin America, geopolitics – which of course the US has had a lot to do there – just cause this migration. Pretty much what we're seeing in Europe as well. Wars cause people to leave. And economic and poverty, too. So a combination of all those factors in Latin America in the '70s, in the '80s started causing all these people to come. And again, they get a tourist visa and they stay.

Q:  But it does sound like it's probably a lot to blame on the government, because they're not really– it's a backlog because of the government.

MARCELA GARCIA:  Totally. The system is completely broken, entirely broken.

TOM GJELTEN:  There are not enough judges, for one thing.

MARCELA GARCIA:  There are not enough judges. It's incredible, the amount of work that they have to do. It's impossible. Unless you reform the system and change some of the rules. And whether you want to call it amnesty or not, you have to do something to deal with the 11 million people. And to your point earlier about the cost, these people are paying taxes as well, the undocumented. They pay taxes in many ways, not just income taxes. And again, there's this myth that they take public benefits, which is completely untrue.

So it's a system that's broken, completely.

Q:  Thank you.

Q:  I think the actual correct figure of the people who have overstayed their visa is 40%. The majority still sneak over. And there is a way to deal with them, and it's not called amnesty; it's called deportation. Now, Theodore White, who was a close acquaintance of the Kennedys and was, of course, a well-known journalist and historian, has called the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of '65, the most thoughtless act of the many acts of the Great Society. He went on to say that there's only one great republic in history that has seen such a change in the texture of its population and that was the Roman republic. And as a result of that, it ultimately made that republic ungovernable. And that's what's happening here today, that this republic is becoming ungovernable because people are apologizing for these blatant violations of the law and of the border.

The discussion around immigration always turns into advocacy. And if we look at some of the people that are looked at in a more reflective way, we can see that the '65 Act, and those that have followed have had a very detrimental impact on this country. And I think we should heed the lessons that they've given us; they're so overlooked in this debate.

TOM GJELTEN:  Sir, you must have missed my explanation of how this happened, because Hart and Celler and President Johnson had in mind a completely different outcome. They had in mind an outcome where people would get visas on the basis of their employability. The number of people getting visas on the basis on their employability is about 10% of the immigrants coming in. What instead, the numbers that you're referring to are a result of the family unification provisions, which were put in place by a Congressman who was opposed to the elimination of national origins quotas.

So it's very hard for me to see how you can speculate that this outcome was the intent of Hart and Celler. It wasn't the intent. It was actually the opposite of what happened. And what happened was the result of a specific decision by one member of Congress to elevate family unification over employability. That's the fact. It's absolutely clear if you read the testimony and what happened at the time. 

Q:  Which is why it's so thoughtless, and why we need to go back and revise it and change it and enforce it.

TOM GJELTEN:  Just be clear about who made the strategic error. It wasn't Hart and Celler.

Q:  As long as it's not advocacy.

TOM GJELTEN:  I totally agree, and I want to avoid advocacy.

Q:  About Ronald Reagan, what law was passed during his administration? And was it an amnesty?

MARCELA GARCIA:  It was amnesty, yeah. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan, who a lot of the current presidential candidates looking to get nominated for the GOP always refer to him as their hero and their savior and their number one, they always fail to mention that he was the main engineer of this act, which essentially offered amnesty to– and I really don't remember the number of undocumented immigrants who were living back then here. But essentially he legalized all these people. 

And again, it's very interesting to see, to get that– that that fact does not get recognized as part of President Reagan's legacy outside of immigrant advocacy. 

I don't know if you want to add anything else.

TOM GJELTEN:  No. I argue, as I say, I have a vested interest in seeing the '65 Act as the most important act ever passed, because I've written about it and I'm trying to sell books about it, but the '86 Act was incredibly important because of that amnesty provision. You're absolutely right. 

TOM PUTNAM:  Perhaps this will be the last question. First, I want to thank you both for this fascinating conversation. Tom, I found an interesting exchange at the end of the book, and it might be an interesting one to end with. One of the other heroes in this Library, Arthur

Schlesinger, was the great historian of the Kennedy period. But then in his later years, he wrote a book, The Disuniting of America. You talk about that and the response from Professor Asante at Temple University, and I thought that might be an interesting way to end today's thoughtful discussion.

TOM GJELTEN:  Professor Asante said something, and I sort of alluded to it earlier. And it's a very brief quote. And I think it's worth mentioning, because as I said before, Arthur Schlesinger was a critic of multiculturalism as it was playing out. And as I said, he felt there was too much pluribus and not enough unum. And this professor of African American studies at Temple University wrote a rejoinder to that. And he said:

Schlesinger’s critics countered that his unum was simply a white Anglo-Saxon construct reflective of an earlier, less diverse America, and that it could not possibly bind all Americans in the post-1965 period, whether laudable or not. "A nation of more than 130 cultural groups cannot hope to have all of them Anglo-Saxonized," wrote Molefi Kete Asante in his book The Painful Demise of  Eurocentrism. Asante, a professor of African American Studies at Temple University, argued that Schlesinger and others who wrote critically of multiculturalism were not only out of touch with the contemporary US reality but were actually advocating a vision that would divide Americans, not bring them together. "Since the American idea is not a static but a dynamic one," Asante said, "we must constantly reinvent ourselves in the light of our diverse experiences.

One reason this nation works the way it does is our diversity. Try to make Africans and Asians copies of Europeans and you will force the disunity Schlesinger fears."

And again, I don't want to get into advocacy here, but I thought that was a very eloquent response to this concern about the lack of unity in our country today.

MARCELA GARCIA:  Great. Well, thank you so much. Unless anybody else has question?

Thank you, Tom. Go and buy this book, it's amazing account. Thank you so much.

TOM GJELTEN:  Thank you.

[applause]