I love celebrating July 4 by singing the famous song, “God Bless America.” Recently, I asked a young friend if he knew that song. He immediately started humming the tune, and we ended up happily singing it together. Then I asked him if he knew who wrote it. He had no idea, but knew the song because “God Bless America” is sung at baseball games. Irving Berlin, who wrote 1,000 famous songs, claimed that this song is one of lifelong gratitude. Not surprising since his Jewish family emigrated from Siberia/Russia, and Berlin began his career singing for pennies as a child on the streets of Brooklyn.
Immigration these days is a topic of huge contention. The Trump administration is working furiously to deport as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time possible. Originally, those plans only applied to criminals, but that was obviously a marketing scam. Now, you can be deported even if you have no criminal record, have a job and pay taxes. And now with a recent Supreme Court decision, the issue of birthright citizenship is in flux, which will create chaos and confusion for hundreds of thousands of people born in the United States whose parents are undocumented.
We’re looking at current immigration limits that apply to racial and ethnic groups. This is nothing new. In the early 1920s, legislation like the Johnson-Reed Act accepted immigrants from Northern and Western Europe but limited those from Southern and Eastern Europe. The resulting quotas affected Jews, Africans and Asians with the goal of protecting American “racial stock” by limiting these so-called undesirables.
Fortunately, Berlin’s family came to the US before these quotas, or he would never have earned this testimonial: “Irving Berlin has no place in American music — he is American music.” July 4 should be a time to celebrate Berlin and other famous immigrants for their dedication to this country, the land that they loved, and their contributions to our culture, science and politics. Who might these people be?
Here are just a few of the immigrants deserving a July 4th shout-out: Nikola Tesla (engineer — Serbia), Levi Strauss (fashion — Germany), Joseph Pulitzer (journalist — Hungary), Arnold Schwarzenegger (actor/politics — Austria), Madeleine Albright (politics — Czechoslovakia), Bob Marley (Reggae music — Jamaica), and Albert Einstein (science — Germany).