The Critical Importance of Celebrating the Indomitable Immigrant Spirit

The vast majority of us were once strangers in this land. We are a country of immigrants. And that is worth celebrating.

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There’s a line from Leviticus that Jews repeat each year at Passover: “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

Whatever your position on the current immigrant crisis, these words are a humbling reminder of something that has been all but lost amid the often dysfunctional policy debates: The vast majority of us were once strangers in this land. We are a . And that is worth celebrating.

This was made movingly clear to me last week while visiting and the in New York City with my eleven-year-old son, Ian.

Nothing But a Dream

From 1892 to 1954, around twelve million immigrants passed through Ellis Island, including my paternal grandfather and Ian’s great grandfather after whom he is named: Yakov Kaufman. A fourteen-year-old Jewish boy from Krakow, Poland, Yakov disembarked in 1906 at the three-story brick…