The Country That Changed My Life: An Immigrant’s America (#680)

I came to America in 1978.

I did not come as an American.

I came as a young Australian who had grown up in Australia, spent the previous few years in Canada, graduated with a veterinary degree from the University of Sydney, had some ambition, and possessed no particular claim upon the country that was about to become such an important part of my life.

America owed me nothing.

And yet America gave me almost everything.

America educated me as a veterinary neurologist and neurosurgeon.

America trained me to become a researcher.

America gave me mentors who invested their time, knowledge, and confidence in me.

Colorado State University gave me a faculty position.

Later, the University of California, Davis gave me another.

America gave me a career, colleagues, students, friends, family, a professional community, and eventually a home.

I was an immigrant.

And that fact was remarkably unremarkable.

Nobody seemed particularly interested in where I had been born before deciding whether I deserved an opportunity.

Nobody suggested that an Australian should not occupy a position that might otherwise have gone to an American.

Nobody implied that because my accent came from somewhere else, my ambitions should somehow be smaller.

The questions were much simpler:

Could I do the work?

Could I contribute?

Could I teach?

Could I learn?

Could I make something of the opportunities I had been given?

America's answer seemed to be:

Let's find out.

That was the America I encountered.

And perhaps that is why contemporary America troubles me so deeply.

The America That Took Me In

It is easy to talk about America in terms of presidents and elections, Democrats and Republicans, Supreme Court decisions, wars, borders, and flags.

But that is not primarily the America I know.

My America has always been people.

Teachers who taught me.

Mentors who encouraged me.

Colleagues who treated me as one of them.

Universities that opened their doors.

Students who trusted me with their education.

Friends who invited me into their homes and their lives.

Institutions that seemed to operate on a wonderfully optimistic assumption:

Talent could come from anywhere.

That idea may be one of America's greatest strengths.

For much of its history, America has possessed an extraordinary capacity to look at someone who came from somewhere else and imagine not simply what that person was, but what that person might become.

I was a beneficiary of that generosity.

No Questions Asked

Of course, there were questions asked.

There were visas and immigration forms.

There were qualifications to establish and professional standards to meet.

America in 1978 was not a borderless utopia, nor was it free of prejudice, inequality, or injustice.

But something deeper was largely unquestioned.

My legitimacy.

Once I was here, working, contributing, and building a life, I was not constantly required to justify my presence.

I was allowed to belong.

That distinction matters enormously.

Immigration policy is a legitimate subject for political debate.

Every country has both the right and the responsibility to control its borders.

Reasonable people can disagree about how many immigrants should be admitted, under what circumstances, and through what legal processes.

But something fundamental changes when the immigrant himself becomes an object of suspicion.

There is a profound difference between asking:

How should immigration be managed?

and asking:

Do these people belong among us?

Contemporary America too often seems to confuse the two.

I Know What Immigration Looks Like

For me, immigration is not an abstraction.

I see it when I look in the mirror.

An immigrant arrived in America in 1978.

America trained him.

American universities employed him.

American colleagues mentored him.

American students sat in his classrooms.

American institutions allowed him to conduct research, treat animals, train veterinarians and specialists, and contribute to a profession he loved.

America invested in an immigrant.

And that immigrant spent the rest of his career trying to repay the investment.

This is the part of the immigration story that is too easily lost when human beings become categories:

Alien, foreigner, migrant, legal, or illegal.

Behind every category is a person.

And behind every person is possibility.

The newly arrived graduate student may become the professor.

The refugee may become the physician.

The child struggling with English may someday teach English-speaking children.

The immigrant carrying a suitcase through an airport may eventually spend decades educating Americans.

A country cannot possibly know, at the moment someone arrives, everything that person might someday give back.

America once seemed unusually comfortable with that uncertainty.

America gambled on people.

I was one of those gambles.

Something has changed

America has always argued with itself.

It has always contained contradictions.

The nation that proclaimed that all men were created equal tolerated slavery.

The country built by immigrants repeatedly experienced waves of anti-immigrant hostility.

Civil rights expanded only because generations of Americans demanded that the country live up to principles it had proclaimed but imperfectly practiced.

There was never a golden age.

Certainly not in 1978.

But the America I entered seemed to possess enormous confidence in the idea that its strength came partly from its ability to absorb people from elsewhere and turn outsiders into participants.

Today I sense something different.

Fear has increasingly replaced confidence.

Difference is too often treated as threat.

Immigration is too easily discussed not as a complicated national challenge involving economics, law, security, and humanity, but as an invasion.

Political disagreement has become personal estrangement.

People who vote differently are increasingly described not simply as wrong, but as enemies.

And perhaps most troubling of all, cruelty can be presented as strength.

That is not the strength I remember.

The America that impressed me was strong enough not to be frightened of me.

America did not need me to diminish my “Australianness” before I could participate in American life.

America did not demand that I erase my past before embracing my future.

America did not regard opportunity as a finite national resource that had to be protected from outsiders.

America simply opened a door.

And I walked through it.

The Immigrant's Gratitude

I eventually became an American citizen while remaining Australian.

A dual citizen.

I have never regarded those identities as contradictory.

Indeed, becoming American did not require me to stop loving Australia or being an Australian.

That was another quality I admired about this country.

America understood that belonging did not have to be exclusive.

You could arrive with another accent, another history, another culture, another set of memories - and add them to America rather than surrender them at the border.

That was the genius of the idea.

America did not simply tolerate immigrants.

At its best, America transformed them into Americans while allowing them to remain something else as well.

And so, when I criticize contemporary America, I do not do so because I dislike this country.

Quite the opposite.

I criticize it because I know what it gave me.

There is a peculiar kind of patriotism available to the immigrant.

We remember arriving.

We remember being outsiders.

We remember when America was not yet our  country.

Things that people born here may understandably take for granted can remain astonishing to someone who arrived from somewhere else.

Opportunity.

Reinvention.

Belonging.

The assumption that your beginnings need not determine your destination.

My gratitude for those things has not diminished.

But gratitude does not require silence.

Sometimes gratitude requires remembering aloud what a country once promised to be.

America Is Bigger Than Its Politics

Presidents come and go.

Political movements rise and fall.

Administrations occupy Washington for a few years and eventually become chapters in history books.

America is larger than any of them.

America is the professor who stays after hours with a struggling student.

America is the mentor who sees ability in a young person before that person fully sees it in himself.

America is the researcher who shares an idea rather than hoarding it.

America is the family who invites the newcomer to Thanksgiving because they discover he has nowhere else to go.

America is the university that looks at a young Australian veterinarian and asks what he might contribute rather than where he was born.

America is millions of ordinary acts of generosity that never appear on television.

That America still exists.

I encounter it all the time.

And that is why I refuse to surrender the word America to any president, political party, ideology, or movement.

They do not own it.

I Don't Want 1978 Back

Perhaps saying that I want the old America back is too simple.

Some Americans never experienced the country as generously as I did.

For Black Americans, Indigenous Americans, women, gay Americans, and many others, the America of earlier decades could be profoundly unjust.

Nostalgia becomes dangerous when we remember only the doors that opened for us and forget those that remained closed to others.

So, I do not want America to return to 1978.

I want it to recover something I encountered in 1978 and carry it forward.

Confidence without arrogance.

Patriotism without exclusion.

Borders without dehumanization.

Disagreement without hatred.

Strength without cruelty.

Opportunity without demanding the right birthplace.

And above all, the conviction that the stranger standing at the door might have something to contribute.

Because once upon a time:

I was that stranger.

I came here with an Australian passport and an Australian accent.

America educated me.

America trusted me.

America gave me opportunities beyond anything I could have predicted when I arrived.

America allowed me to become useful.

And eventually America allowed me to become American.

What America Means To Me

So, when I look at contemporary America and sometimes struggle to recognize the country that welcomed me, my response is not simply anger.

It is sadness.

And disappointment.

But above all, it is gratitude mixed with hope.

Because I have seen another America.

I have lived it.

I owe much of my life to it.

And beneath the shouting, the suspicion, the tribalism, and the politics of fear, I believe it is still here.

Perhaps those of us who came from somewhere else have a particular responsibility to remind America of that.

We remember standing outside the door.

We remember what it meant when the door opened.

We remember being given a chance.

And we know what can happen when a country is confident enough to offer that chance to someone it does not yet know.

In 1978, I was a young Australian veterinarian arriving in America.

I could not have known where the journey would take me.

Neither could America.

But America looked at an immigrant and, in effect, said:

Come on in.

Show us what you can do.

That America changed my life.

I still love it.

I still believe in it.

And I would very much like to meet it again.

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