Immigration in America

By John Wray

Editor's note: The following is a side-bar article meant to be printed alongside a larger article that discusses immigration reform. The article is meant to take the immigration debate and relate it to everyday Americans.


BOSTON-- While the debate over immigration reform is fierce, immigration’s undercurrents flow through ordinary Americans like Stephanie Clark, a 19-year-old from Irvine, Calif., studying at Boston University. Clark’s background is as multifaceted as America’s.
Raised in a predominantly white area of California, Clark has a background with bits of Irish, German, French, Native American and Japanese. Her father’s father met his wife in Japan during World War II.
“They got married on a warship on the way back to the States,” Clark said.
She described how her grandmother was treated upon her arrival on U.S. soil. She was persecuted for her ethnicity and spoke little English in a foreign country at the age of 19, but she persevered, learning to speak English and raise a family.
Clark’s diversity doesn’t stop there. Her father is French and German, along with other nationalities that not even he knows.
“Two of my aunts are actually related to the Hatfields from the Hatfield-McCoy rivalry,” Clark said, referring to the 19th century families, split down Union and Confederate lines, who were involved in numerous confrontations over land disputes, many of which resulted in murder. Not only is Clark related to the Hatfields, but she also noted that “somewhere along the line one of my members of the family actually married into Ben Franklin’s family.”
When asked about her views on immigration today during an on-campus interview, Clark spoke candidly. Raised in a Republican stronghold in Democratic California, Clark holds views on immigration that are based in part upon her interaction with immigrants. She relayed the story of a house painter she knew who worked for her family, and how it changed her view of immigrants.
“He’s just trying to make a better life for himself and his family,” Clark said.
Clark extended that logic to immigration reform as a whole. “It would be stupid to close off our borders to [Latin America] entirely,” Clark said. “You’d be essentially eliminating an entire section of the labor force if you deport all of them.”
Clark talked about how the ideal of American immigration should shift from the idea of a melting pot to that of a stained-glass window. While each of the pieces of glass is a different color, the edges blend into one another, creating a whole picture. This way, the glass retains specific sections that are unique, while blending together to form a larger, more important picture that uses each of the pieces separately.
“If the colors of the stained-glass window were to be melted together, the beauty would be lost,” Clark observed.
Clark herself is an example of a stained-glass window. Her roots extend from the islands of Japan to the hills of Ireland, from the Hatfields to the Franklins, but all of them have combined to form Stephanie Clark’s stained-glass window. Without immigration, that composite would never have been possible.
“Since America has become its own country we’ve had immigrants from all over the world,” she said. “It’s made America what it is.”



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