What Does a 'Nation of Immigrants' Mean?
More than many think, and keeping it that way means controlling it. Take it from Barbara Jordan.
By Andrew R. Arthur on February 26, 2021
The president titled his immigration campaign document "The Biden Plan for Securing Our Values as a Nation of Immigrants", and has since used the phrase "nation of immigrants" in an attempt to justify his plan to change the descriptive noun "alien" to "nonimmigrant" in the law. To explain what the term means (and what it doesn't), I turn — as I have in the past — to the late Rep. Barbara Jordan (D-Texas).
Jordan was already a constitutional and civil-rights icon in 1993 when President Bill Clinton appointed her to be the chairwoman of the bipartisan U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform. She was diligent in her work up to her untimely death at the age of 59 in January 1996. She herself used the phrase in her September 11, 1995, opinion piece in the New York Times captioned, "The Americanization Ideal".
That brief column should be included in our national pantheon of documents, because it is up there with Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address" and Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech in the way that it succinctly defines and illustrates the principles upon which this country was founded, and rests. And, like those two speeches, it is a call to all Americans to live up to those principles.
She uses the phrase in the third paragraph of that piece, after noting the then-popular interest in immigration as an issue, and broadly touching on the then-existent shortcomings of the U.S. immigration system (most of which still plague the process). She asserts:
https://cis.org/Arthur/What-Does-Nation-Immigrants-Mean
