Immigration Again

These are Not Your Huddled Masses

   In January of this year I posted a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette op ed of mine about the importance of immigration to the US. That op ed was prompted by a book, then just published, about the series of young people who came to America in flight from Hitler.  It had as its theme that this cadre of immigrants succeeded—in education, careers, distinctions, etc.—far beyond statistical expectations and well beyond their “native” brethren. While I’m not obsessed with the topic of immigration, I’ve long been interested in it, no doubt because I am an immigrant myself.

   The topic came to mind again prompted by the long lead article in the Summer 2016 issue of the Columbia Magazine: “Meet the Girl with the NUP214-ABL1 Gene.” The article was most interesting, though I did not read it carefully enough to get everything in it. But I do want to say, by way of digression, that I was impressed by the great improvement of that publication, one that I have received since forever.

   The girl, Myrrah Shapoo—a smiling photo on the cover and many more inside—daughter of middle class Indians is diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia and winds up at the Columbia Medical School’s Pediatric Oncology Center. The complicated and quite extensive story has a happy end: her cancer is cured with the standard proviso that even “cured” cancers can recur.

   OK, good story, what now? What does this have to do with immigration? Let me begin by listing the group of physicians and scientists who worked on this path breaking project:

            Andrew Kung

            Prakash Satwani

            Maria Luisa Solis

            Alberto Ambesi-Impiombato

            Adolfo Ferrando

            Susan Hsiao

            Mahesh Mansukhani

   Now granted that except for Native Americans, everyone else on this continent is an immigrant, a curious convention has it that only people who arrived here starting in the latter part of the 19^th century are actually called immigrants. Now look at the above list of members of the Pediatric Oncology Center. Their names and their status in a top university research center suggest that they came into this country on special visas for experts of various kinds that are wanted by institutions such as their Columbia employer. Perhaps one or another of them is the immediate offspring of such a person. These are not the huddled masses yearning to be free of Lazarus’s poem; rather, they are brought here—induced to come—so that they will take on roles for which there not a sufficient number of locally available candidates.

   This brand of immigration gives a quite different meaning to the characterization of America as the land of opportunity. That time-honored phrase refers to a country that while it does not block the paths to success to newcomers, the people who have newly arrived must identify such a path and have the ability and energy to pursue it toward a worthwhile accomplishment. By way of contrast, for the group now under consideration, the opportunities pre-existed their coming to this country and they are invited to pursue the goals of which the opportunity is constituted because they have been identified as persons who have the training, the skills, the temperament to pursue the goals of which the opportunity is constituted.
   Numerically, these special immigrants are a small minority of those who come here day after day But they are an important ingredient of the liberal ideology in support of immigration.