All these immigrants

I had dinner with a bunch of immigrants on Friday.

One is a a health counsellor, another works at Amazon Web Services, there's a paralegal at Starbucks, a Wells Fargo EVP, marketing whizz, art teacher, Microsoft strategist, former banker working on affordable housing projects, and a knitter who started her own business a year ago. Very nice they were too.

We came to the States in dribs and drabs over the last 20 years and all raised our families, paid plenty of tax, coached kids' sports teams, were there for neighbors when they needed us (and needed them as much if not more). Just the things people do. Most of us have been lucky enough to become citizens and some had to forego their birth citizenship to do it.

We're not here as a grift. Quite the opposite. We're here to live our lives and build community and opportunity. We're not some other kind of immigrant, in other words. We are immigrants, period.

The fact that opportunity made it easier for us to be here than some others makes us luckier not better. So why wouldn’t we help those who come after us to grow, be there when we need them, and find and create opportunity?

We arrived on December 31st 2009. Two tired boys aged six and eight who'd left their school and friends behind in the UK and really weren't convinced this was what they wanted, and two apprehensive parents who wondered if they'd done the right thing. We moved into a hotel room for the first month while we enrolled the boys in school and found somewhere to live. I was working for Microsoft which had the wherewithal to move people around the world, and this was an opportunity to make a different future.

A recently arrived immigrant family, January 2010 (photograph by exhuasted mother)

We became citizens in 2017. Our boys went through the public school system beginning to end, then to college. They worked Saturday and holiday jobs; played high school soccer, Little League baseball and rec basketball; volunteered and coached kids' sports; learned to ski and drive; wore braces and bad haircuts; lived through a global pandemic; met their first girlfriends, drank their first beers, went to their first concerts and made amazing friends and plenty of mistakes.

A typical immigrant story, really.