We Have Room

Since the presidential campaign of 2016, the mantra, “Make America Great Again,” has had a polarizing effect on our country. For supporters of Donald Trump they symbolize his plan for America’s future. For others they portend a frightening totalitarian society where bigotry, nativism, and restricted rights for women loom.

For me, the words, “Make America Great Again,” resonate with hope, but not in the way the former President intends.

While Trump, his acolytes, and his Republican challengers see America’s future greatness linked to severely restricting foreign immigration, I see large scale immigration as a great opportunity.

“We are overcrowded as it is,” some proclaim! “Where are these people going to live, and what are they going to do?”

We have room!

Over the past year and a half, I have driven several times between our home in Sanibel and the east coast of Florida. I have driven even more frequently between Sanibel and Tampa. The amount of open space I see on those drives boggles my mind. Throw in vast stretches of empty land in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas… I went to college in upstate New York…lots of room there. In fact there is hardly a state that does not have enough empty space to comfortably build a small city for immigrants. So make no mistake, we have room.

Israel is a great example

In the 76 years of its existence, Israel, a country about the size of New Jersey, has thrown open its borders to afford an open-arms welcome to immigrants facing oppression in Arab lands, Nazi-occupied Europe, South America, the former Soviet Union, and Ethiopia.

Moreover, Israel provides a wonderful example to the United States in the way it prioritizes immigrant absorption as its most important industry. Israel offers its immigrants vital language immersion, job training, health care, low cost housing and many other services gratis. Providing the infrastructure for these services creates hundreds of thousands of jobs in that tiny country for engineers, contractors, construction workers, teachers, urban planners, doctors, nurses and support personnel. If tiny Israel can do it, so can we.

We hear so much about the Palestinian refugees displaced by the establishment of Israel in 1948. We hear far less about the equal number of Jewish refugees displaced during that same period from Nazi Germany and the Arab countries.

The Difference

The difference is that the Arab world, despite financial resources that dwarf those of Israel, chose to maintain its refugees in squalid camps that became and remain —like Gaza today— breeding grounds for hatred and terror against the tiny Jewish State.

Israel by contrast welcomed displaced Jews from all over the world, housed them, taught them Hebrew, and trained them for productive work. The result: The “Jewish Refugee Problem” problem quickly dissipated while the “Arab Refugee Problem” remains a shameful scar on the soul of the oil-rich Arab world to this day.

And so I suggest:

Let the United States take a huge step toward renewed greatness by welcoming refugees from oppressive regimes and making their successful absorption and acculturation into American society a top national priority.

Some years ago I proposed the former President donate his Mar A Lago estate to become an immigrant absorption and Welcoming Center. That would be a good symbolic first step

We could then build development cities all across the country, along the lines of those built by James Rouse in Columbia, Maryland and Reston Virginia. We need self-sufficient enclaves with affordable housing, fine schools, first class health care, and English language and job training.

Let us follow Israel’s example and put the Welcome Mat on America’s borders. My mind easily visualizes the number of outstanding potential doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, musicians, and other productive citizens that lie behind the frightened eyes of the children imprisoned in holding pens awaiting deportation back to the countries their parents fled with them in terror.

I think of the thousands of vital contributions made in America by those not born in America. I think of the nativist arguments promulgated by so many in the thirties and forties that condemned millions of Jews to death at the hands of the Nazis because — except for a fortunate few — those arguments closed America’s doors.

And finally, I think of the vision of what this country can be, symbolized by the words of Emma Lazarus engraved in the base of the Statue of Liberty:

Give me your tired and your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

I believe with all my heart that the future greatness of America lies in the hearts and minds of today’s huddled masses yearning to breathe free. If we find the will to commit the resources and resolve necessary to welcome them and get them on their feet, they will become citizens whose talent and effort will help make America great again.

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