

January 10, 2019






This interview has been edited for length and clarity.



My brother is six years younger than me, and he was born in the United States, so he had citizenship. So in my own family, my father’s a U.S. citizen but really felt Japanese, my mother was a Japanese citizen who felt Japanese, I grew up in this country feeling very American but finding out as a young teenager that I had no citizenship at all.


So it’s a lot of details, but I think it shows that in one family, we often have a people separated into different legal statuses by the accident of their birth. And yet functionally, in terms of how they relate to American society, even living in the same household, they’re either identical, or separated only by generations.






It’s really been a consistent strand in American immigration history that families are the vehicle for integrating Americans into American society, and helping immigrants be productive members of American society. It’s not enough to come to this country with a diploma. It’s not enough to come with a particular skill set. You have to have people help you become part of American society. And many of the “immigrant success stories” we have are people who came with relatively few resources, or not necessarily stereotypically high education levels, but [succeeded] because there was a family standing behind them.


In many mixed families, you have a younger child who is a U.S. citizen. And the rules say that when that citizen child turns 21, then the citizen child can sponsor or petition for their parents. But it’s not as straightforward as all that. It’s true that when the parents have the child turn 21, the child can file paperwork and the parents qualify to get into a category that allows them to get legal status. But there are a couple complications. One is that the sponsor needs to guarantee the financial support of himself and the parents.

The other thing is that just because you get into a line, it doesn’t mean you can get legal status. The system is actually incredibly complicated, and there’s talk about, Why don’t you stand in line? And yet, we have situations where even people who qualify for a status find the going very difficult.


And yet, that’s the way the system has run for at least 50 years, and to some extent the last hundred years. Especially regarding workers from Latin America who have been essential to many industries, but for whom there’s no actual line to stand in.

Historically, how has the United States treated immigrants?

I think the arc of American history has been one of generosity toward immigrants, punctuated with periods of retrogression, downright repression. That’s been the flow.

And we see this actually in the fact that the people who are kind of being hard-line against immigration now are often the very people who would’ve been discriminated against in an earlier age.

So one can look at this as hypocrisy, or irony, but the fact of the matter is, it’s also a sign that this country moves forward. And the people we discriminated against in an earlier generation, my God, they’ve become so American that they can actually discriminate against others.

How do you feel about United States Citizenship and Immigration Services taking the line “nation of immigrants” out of its mission statement in [February 2018]?

Well, I think it’s very troubling. The reality is, the United States is, and will continue to be, a nation of immigrants. I’m really focusing not on the possibility that one administration or one agency can change the nature of this country or the character of this country. But I’m focusing on what that means. And I think that it really means that the government is not really taking seriously the types of contributions that immigrants have made to this country. And I think the government is really adopting the posture of, You can only come to this country if you’re going to jump through a lot of hoops. You’re going to pay a lot of money. And it’s going to be based on what you can do for us now. As in tomorrow. Or even today.

But I think many of the contributions that immigrants have made to this country have not been very obvious on Day 1. This is the many stories we have of people who came to this country either penniless or at least under modest circumstances, and really contributed and created jobs and created entire industries. And I think a lot of what I see in the removal of “nation of immigrants” is, are we not understanding the history of this country? We’re being extremely short-sighted about what has made this country great.

A previous version of this story ran on February 28, 2018.
