Stephen Miller states that even some grandchildren in immigrant families fail to adapt to American culture.
Miller wrote: “migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands,” suggesting that he is an unadapted grandchild who better fits the dictatorial government his family fled, not America’s great democracy built and enriched by centuries of diverse immigrants.
Rep. David Reed’s 1924 Johnson-Reed law that constricted legal entry asserted, “Southern and Eastern Europeans (many of them Catholics and Jews) … arrive … less capable of contributing to the American economy, and unable to adapt to American culture.”
Many Republicans today assert that immigrants are “poisoning America’s blood,” for example potentially undermining America’s tradition of great scientific achievements. Claiming to “protect our blood,” Donald Trump, Miller and Republicans are slashing even legal immigration, and dragging away thousands of hard-working beloved members of our community.
Yes, Americans, we are right to be proud of the accomplishments of “our civilization.”
The Nobel Prizes are announced next week, so let’s use that to measure scientific achievement: nearly half of all Nobel Prizes in chemistry, physics, and physiology or medicine are connected to U.S. institutions.
Fifty of America’s Nobel Prizes in fields of science and medicine, representing 10% of all relevant Nobel Prizes, were earned by children and grandchildren of the millions of immigrants who fled to our shores from 1880-1924, the very ones Reed asserted, are “less capable of contributing.”
Now, after failing to undo birthright citizenship, Miller asked the Texas legislature to stop free K-12 education for all children. Another Republican said: why should we pay to educate “other peoples” children?”
New York City understands that these are “our children.”
A devastating pogrom in 1904 drove Bob Lefkowitz’s paternal grandparents to flee from Poland. He is one of Bronx High School of Science’s nine Nobel laureates (all children or grandchildren of immigrants). As of 2018, around 30% of FDA-approved drugs work through the class of proteins Lefkowitz’s work illuminated.
NYC gave immigrant child Stanley Cohen a free education at Brooklyn College. He discovered Epidermal Growth Factor (EGF) and more than dozen anti-cancer drugs are built on this discovery. Cohen is one of 12 CUNY graduates with Nobels in science —all of them immigrants or children of immigrants.
Aside from Nobel Prizes, immigrant families have made broad contributions to American medical science. Polio vaccine pioneer Jonas Salk was a child of the disparaged pre-1924 immigrants. Albert Sabin, of the sugar cube polio vaccine, was a teenage refugee from Poland merely three years before he could have been kept out by the Reed-Johnson law.
The children of today’s immigrant families continue to excel. They include a large proportion of high school students winning National Science Competitions and Dreamers studying to serve as much-needed physicians (assuming we don’t deport them).
America’s “blood” was created by and is renewed by the energy, hard work and dreams of each visionary who leaves all that was familiar behind setting out on a challenging journey, across the ocean more than 100 years ago or carrying a child across the Darién Gap today. Immigrants infuse our culture with the optimism that something better exists and can be achieved somewhere, somehow, through hard work.
By pulling immigrant children out of school, spending our hard-earned taxpayer dollars to imprison them, destroying their families by deporting their beloved parents, it is Miller, Trump and the Republicans who are the ones destroying “America’s blood.”
Caporale, author of “Darwin in the Genome,” has a doctorate in molecular biology.