Becoming American: Why Immigration Is Good for Our Nation's Future Read Online Free Page A

worked abroad for weeks and months at a time. Sometimes I wonder how it must feel to marry an immigrant like myself, and then I wonder how I was so lucky to find such a supportive wife. She has helped me withstand life’s storms and has kept me moving forward. She has tolerated moves from one place to another, from urban D.C. to bucolic State College to Tehran, Iran, and she has traveled all around the globe to grow our companies.
    This is only one story of an immigrant. My success is built on hard work, a supportive family, and the American culture, which is based more on meritocracy and the tolerance of immigrants than on one’s heritage. But it would not have been possible without a number of mentors over the years—such as former Ursinus president Richter, who recommended I transfer to MIT; Professor Stobaugh of Harvard Business School, who always encouraged me; and William Schreyer, who not only supported me and my center at Penn State but also encouraged me to join CSIS.

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    What It Takes to Uproot Yourself
    IMMIGRATION AS A FORCE OF CHANGE
    A s a nation of immigrants, the United States has wrestled with immigration since its founding. Who should be allowed to pass through the Golden Door? How many? The issue is always approached with an array of sentiments—from ambivalence to ignorance, xenophobia to embracement, nationalism to fear.
    Yet no one can rightly deny that what helped make America strong economically, governmentally, politically, and militarily has been immigrants. They came and continue to come to this country with grand ambitions to succeed in an open and free society.
    Our nation’s prosperity is built on the renegade, risk-taking, entrepreneurial concoction of truly American innovation and invention. Wave upon wave of immigrants bought into the American Dream that anything was possible in the United States, and anyone who put in the effort could succeed here. Immigrants, having taken the risk to come to the United States, are often entrepreneurial in nature. It is the entrepreneur who comes up with new ideas, takes risks, and tries new things. It is the entrepreneur who works long and hard, who finds the money for risky ventures, who breaks the rules, who is the pioneer and the inventor. Truly, entrepreneurs are the heroes of a growing economy.
    However, “the continued failure to devise and implement a sound and sustainable immigration policy threatens to weaken America’s economy, to jeopardize its diplomacy, and to imperil its national security,” concludes a Council on Foreign Relations Independent Task Force cochaired by former Florida governor Jeb Bush and former White House chief of staff Thomas “Mack” McLarty. 1
    For most immigrants in the twenty-first century, coming to America is about the chance to start anew, to begin again, said author Joseph O’Neill, who is half Irish and half Turkish. He was raised in Holland, but he now lives in New York with his family. “One of the great pluses of being an immigrant is you get to start again in terms of your identity,” O’Neill said. “You get to shed the narratives which cling to you.” 2
    Our immigrants are truly the Mothers of Invention. As Google vice president Omid Kordestani told the graduating class at San Jose University in 2007, “To keep an edge, I must think and act like an immigrant. There is a special optimism and drive that I benefited from and continue to rely on that I want all of you to find. Immigrants are inherently dreamers and fighters .” 3
    Within today’s political and media discourse, immigration is generally framed as a social problem in need of solving. Newspaper headlines, editorials and blogs, as well as talk radio and television reveal a number of widely held negative perceptions about immigrants, including that they are reluctant to learn English, take jobs from native-born Americans, add to the crime problem, and contribute less to the tax revenue system than they use.
    Yet a careful reading of the