This week, President Trump suspended work visas for the remainder of the year including work visas that would go to skilled workers. It’s his most extreme anti-immigration push yet. This is a response to that.
America is not just the land on which we stand, nor is it the blood and bones of our ancestors. If those were the things that made our nation, we would be nothing, for many of our ties to the land are weak. As a nation, we are young. Most of us have, at most, a couple hundred years of ancestry here. The Old World measures these years in the thousands. No, what makes America great is the idea of America. It’s the idea that no matter who you are, no matter how rich or how poor your parents are, no matter what you look like or the color of your skin, you can make yourself anything you set your mind to if you work hard enough.
‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’ The idea is simple. Provide people with the freedom to carve their own names into the tree of life in any way they would like, and the progress that we have made because of that, not only as a nation, but as the human race, has been nothing short of spectacular. The sheer power and variety of all the accomplishments here are breathtaking, and it’s all made possible because of an idea. Yet, there are threats to the continuation of this open society. Authoritarian governments are on the rise again and these new forms of Kings and Queens would like nothing more than to see America, the world’s oldest Democracy, falter.
This we cannot abide. We must, as we always have, recruit new soldiers in the War for a Better World. If we do, we will be the greater for it and we will rise, nay grow, to the challenge. Our qualifications as Leader of the Free World are undisputed. These qualities are what magnetize us; people will fight to come here because of them.
Donald Trump would have you believe that the threats to our Democracy are new faces, but I am here to tell you that the threat comes not from those who wish to pledge fealty to American Ideals, but men like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin who see the world not for what it could be, but what they can take from it. We should not fear newcomers because it is their help that will deliver us to the greatness we so desire.