I have often written about the value of and contributions to America by immigrants.
A year ago, I was deeply troubled and offended by White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller’s angry claim that the immortal words engraved at the Statue of Liberty – words about “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses…” – do not reflect American values towards immigrants and immigration.
I redoubled my efforts to highlight the fact that America is “a nation of immigrants” who have helped make this country great.
I recounted the immigration stories of some of our readers and contributors and their ancestors, of the hardships and persecution many of them experienced in their “old country” and how many risked or lost everything to come to America.
Susan Rappoport’s grandparents fled the Bolsheviks in the Ukraine after losing virtually everything and, after a harrowing journey through Poland, finally sailed for America from Le Havre, France.
Eventually, Susan’s grandparents owned a rooming house in Long Beach and were able to put all their children through college, including Susan’s father who became a chemical engineer and did research at UCLA. Susan herself eventually retired from the University of California after a successful career in science and Information Technology
Markus’ family, including Markus, endured the full weight of the Nazi boot in World War II Poland, suffered the humiliation and horrors of ghettos, cattle cars, labor camps and near starvation and, after life in refugee camps and a stay in Berlin, finally were able to come to America where, as so many other immigrants, they and their descendants became the successes “we,” immigrants, like to point to with pride.
Markus is a retired medical oncologist whose wife, sister, and brother in law are a MS, a JD, and a PhD, respectively, and whose offispring includes a teacher of troubled children, a firefighter, and three college students.
From my interactions with and Susan and Markus, I know for a fact that they are tolerant, compassionate, patriotic people.
So, what does all this have to do with Trump’s adviser, Stephen Miller, the man whose anti-immigrant and other discriminatory views based on race, ethnicity, religion or country of origin have now become policy in the Trump administration?
I will let Miller’s uncle, David. S. Glosser, who calls Miller an “immigration hypocrite,” explain.
In an eye-opening piece in Politico, Glosser says, “If my nephew’s ideas on immigration had been in force a century ago, our family would have been wiped out.”
Glosser’s story begins “at the turn of the 20th century in a dirt-floor shack in the village of Antopol, a shtetl of subsistence farmers in what is now Belarus. Beset by violent anti-Jewish pogroms and forced childhood conscription in the Czar’s army, the patriarch of the shack, Wolf-Leib Glosser, fled a village where his forebears had lived for centuries and took his chances in America.”
Glosser then writes how Wolf-Leib Glosser, with only $8 in his pocket, set foot on Ellis Island in 1903 and was soon followed by an elder son, Nathan and others:
By street corner peddling and sweat-shop toil Wolf-Leib and Nathan sent enough money home to pay off debts and buy the immediate family’s passage to America in 1906…The Glosser family quickly progressed from selling goods from a horse and wagon to owning a haberdashery in Johnstown run by Nathan and Wolf-Leib to a chain of supermarkets and discount department stores run by my grandfather, Sam, and the next generation of Glossers, including my dad, Izzy…In the span of some 80 years and five decades, this family emerged from poverty in a hostile country to become a prosperous, educated clan of merchants, scholars, professionals, and, most important, American citizens.
Finally, Glosser explains why he considers Miller to be am immigration hypocrite: “Well, Izzy Glosser is his maternal grandfather, and Stephen’s mother, Miriam, is my sister.”
And how he has “watched with dismay and increasing horror” how his nephew, well aware of his heritage, “has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country.”
And how he shudders “at the thought of what would have become of the Glossers had the same policies Stephen so coolly espouses— the travel ban, the radical decrease in refugees, the separation of children from their parents, and even talk of limiting citizenship for legal immigrants — been in effect when Wolf-Leib made his desperate bid for freedom.”
And so do the de Winds shudder, and – I am sure – the Rappoports and Markus’ family and millions of other immigrants who came to be part of a nation of immigrants.
Please read Glosser’s full, superb and timely essay here, wherein he concludes:
As free Americans, and the descendants of immigrants and refugees, we have the obligation to exercise our conscience by voting for candidates who will stand up for our highest national values and not succumb to our lowest fears.
Miller’s uncle, Dr. David S. Glosser, is a retired neuropsychologist, formerly a member of the Neurology faculties of Boston University School of Medicine and Jefferson Medical College.
Lead image: The ocean liner “Paris” that brought Susan’s grandparents to America from Le Havre, France, in 1922. Courtesy Susan Rappoport.
