My great-grandfather was an immigrant from Germany. Nearly five years ago, just a few months before she died, his daughter, my paternal grandmother, told me the story of his immigration to America as a teenager.
John Glaser was born in a small village in Southwestern Germany at the turn of the 20th Century. When just 15-years- old, he boarded a train that would begin his journey to America. His village soon disappeared from sight seemingly forever as the train entered surrounding woods.
It was then, my grandmother told me, that her father was devastated that he would never see his home again, but luckily for John, a small clearing in the trees soon appeared. For a final, brief moment in time, he had one last chance to see the only place he had ever called home. In that moment, he could see all that he was sacrificing.
I share my great-grandfather’s story with you, not because it is extraordinary compared to other ancestral stories, but rather, the opposite. I share it with you because it is so ordinary in America.
If you explore your family’s history, you will discover stories, like John’s, of people making great journeys at great risk for better opportunity. I share his story with you because its ordinariness is what defines America.
Spanning 74 years, my great-grandfather’s life began and ended in two different centuries that shared a common immigrant struggle. Whether from Europe, Asia, the Americas or Africa, early newcomers to America were often met with the same fear, prejudice and hostility that greets many immigrants today. Many argued that taking in so many foreigners would threaten native-born Americans’ economic livelihood and security.
While we must remember that these persistent anxieties had far-reaching negative consequences, ultimately, a more compassionate, inclusive and ambitious America emerged.
Indeed, in John’s lifetime, the world saw that America, belonging as much to one generation of immigrants as the next despite sins and shortcomings, is not a nation of a common place of origin, race, or religion but of a common creed—that we are to be a union forged by and for the betterment of, as the poet Emma Lazarus wrote, “the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” We are to be a nation of immigrants and a nation for immigrants.
Whether it was you, your parents or grandparent, or some distant ancestor you cannot even name who came here, each of our American stories begins with an immigrant story. For most of us, it was not us ourselves, but rather, someone like John who made us American by coming here. Someone who saw all that he or she was sacrificing but still chose to risk everything for something better for them and their descendants. And so we, as beneficiaries of that sacrifice, owe to them a debt of gratitude.
Just over a century has passed since John Glaser last saw his small German village. We now face the choice of how to repay that sacrifice of those immigrants in the upcoming election.
Watching this race unfold, I wonder what it would be like if John’s life had been displaced by a century in time and he was a recent immigrant today, and I was to be born eighty years from now. What sort of nation would I want to welcome him and to be passed onto me? In this election, would I want America to embrace or even tacitly condone a nativist politics that dehumanizes, criminalizes and ostracizes immigrants like John? A politics that abandons and even disowns the importance of immigration to America? Or would I want a reaffirmation of the America that, despite many faults, made John and my story possible a century ago?
As much as it may seem on a day-to-day basis, this election is not just about candidates, parties or ideologies. It is about what America has been and should be.
Immigration is so central to the American story that to disown its role in our history or to abandon it now out of a recycled fear is to gut the very core of what it means to be an American and to pass on a hollow shell of a nation that millions sacrificed so much to join and build. For John and the millions of immigrants like him, we, as caretakers of the union they forged, cannot let that happen.
Chaz is a sophomore majoring in political science. Has your family’s American experience shaped your views on immigration and democracy? How do you think America has been doing to accept and embrace immigrants? Do you think that this election will have a significant impact on the culture and diversity of America for future generations? Please send all comments, questions and concerns to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
