An immigrant is someone born in another country with citizenship in another
country who wants to come to the United States to pursue their dreams.
We are a nation of immigrants. Except for Native Americans we've all
come here from somewhere.
People coming here to make a better life for themselves
and to be part of the American experience are what built this country.
They come to join family. They come to work.
They come for opportunity.
They come because they believe in the American Dream.
There's an interesting relationship between what our country needs
and what immigrants give to our country.
This is the first nation in the history of the world that can say we are a free people
and we come from everywhere.
Through early history it was overwhelmingly from European nations.
They came because of religious persecution - the pilgrims.
They came because of famine - the Irish - the potato famine and so forth
The United States has been seen as a land of opportunity.
Not that they knew what the opportunity was - it was just going to be
a different place, and they could build their own life.
Up till the 1870s, the United States had really no immigration system.
It was kind of whoever got here was here.
And that took us from the days of Columbus through the Industrial Revolution.
For the best part of America we were trying to fill up this continent - Manifest Destiny.
We were doing everything to encourage immigration.
After the 1870s, you saw efforts to really curtail and control immigration.
so that it was only limited frankly to Western European countries.
It was not until 1924 that we had our first permanent quotas.
Quotas were imposed based upon the National Origin System
so we would get the "right kind" of immigrants.
But when Congress imposed quotas, they cut off virtually all avenues
for people to come legally.
Now this is the problem. If you think about it, we had huge barriers from most countries.
We had the Atlantic Ocean and we had the Pacific Ocean.
Latin America we have adjoining land borders
and people could literally walk in here.
We had centuries of what we call "circular immigration".
People would come from Latin America, overwhelmingly from Mexico,
To work they work they go home. They work and go home.
These immigrants came in because there was a job magnet here in the United States.
There was a need to fill lower-skilled or lesser skilled service jobs.
Starting in the mid 70s we started increasing enforcement.
People that would come back and forth and normally work
within a hundred miles of the border - they did something quite logical:
Instead of going home and seeing my family on the weekends I'll smuggle them in
on a one-time basis. And that began to create this phenomena that has entered
into our political debate of large-scale illegal immigration.
Being a nation of immigrants isn't just a key component to our culture it's been
a key driver in creating the world's most powerful economy -
the world's most dynamic economy.
Immigrants supplement our workforce as landscapers,
construction workers, service workers, hospitality workers.
Although they may not have a lot of formal education, many of them
come with skills and abilities that really contribute to these industries.
Immigrants actually fuel the economy.
You can't get to three or four or five percent growth in GDP without
immigrant workers, and I find that to be kind of missing from the
whole argument here. If you want to grow and you want to increase
and expand U.S. businesses in the United States you've got to have people
to do the work.
On the other side, immigrants bring creativity.
They bring building businesses, starting businesses. About half of the dot-com
companies that we have in this country were created either by immigrants or
children of immigrants.
I mean these are big companies that are having a major
footprint on the nation's economy, but then when you get down below that you see
approximately 28% of small businesses have been founded by immigrants.
So the economic impact of immigration is not just your Fortune 500 company,
it's the small business on the corner who is creating jobs for American workers and
their families that they're going to every day.
That's the beauty of America.
That's what, I think, makes America strong. Essentially a concept of fairness
based upon what a person can do as opposed to who a person is.
That's what makes people come here.
For this is a great paradox, I think:
that we cannot think of the United States as anything else but a nation that migrants come to
inject vitality, inject dynamism, creativity, talent and then become part of the society.
That immigrant who left any of a number of countries around the world
to come to the United States to pursue their dream, they do that because
they believe in the idea of America.
The question is do Americans still believe in the idea of America
as a nation of immigrants.
We are seeing not just a tension that comes with this question
but, I think, a tipping point for the country.
Our immigration system is stuck in the 1990s, literally.
It's the last time that we have made any major renovations to our immigration system
Because of the failure of leadership in building an immigration system that's
responsive to the modern economy that we have today, a lot of the
immigration that comes outside of the system is happening because our system
has closed itself off to the realities of our time.
We've never had immigration law built on economics.
If you build it on "you deserve this"
if people look and see someone here who's undocumented and here illegally
they think "you don't deserve this".
On the other hand if we say the purpose
of immigration is to build a stronger economy, a greater social fabric, that's a
very different framing of the problem.
I do believe that most Americans want to see that immigration reform.
I think there are some out there on the fringe
fueling this fear that immigrants are criminals sucking off of our welfare
system and they are taking our jobs. Fact shows that's just not the case.
The majority of Americans are people of good will. They may not be Democrats, they
may not be Republicans. They're living in the literal and figurative middle of the country.
So I'm optimistic that those Americans of good will
will add their voices to the debate.
John F. Kennedy: It is a proud privilege to be a citizen of the Great Republic...
- to hear its song sung.
To realize that we are the descendants
of 40 million people who left other countries, other familiar scenes,
to come here to the United States to build a new life.
To make a new opportunity for themselves and their children.
I think it is not a burden, but a privilege,
to make this really as it was for them a new world.
That's what this country has stood for for 200 years,
and that's what this country will continue to stand for.