Dear President Trump,
Your recent election victory made clear that a significant majority of American voters favored your candidacy and wished to see you back in the White House.
Surely, though, you are aware that a substantial minority of Americans consider your election a frightening development that will lead America down a path of totalitarian fascism. Would it not be wonderful, and would it not make our country stronger if a substantial number of those who dislike you and fear your presidency became your supporters? Here is how you can do it:
If you wish to “Make America Great Again.” Embrace our great heritage of welcoming and assimilating immigrants.
Instead of sealing our borders, I suggest you open and monitor them. Carefully vet those who would live in our country, Keep out the criminals, drug dealers and those released from mental hospitals. You are right. We should not have to deal with them. But open our doors wide to the hundreds of thousands of eager hard working potential citizens who will enrich our nation. Among them are future doctors, nurses, teachers, computer experts, entrepreneurs, social workers skilled and unskilled laborers who will expand and strengthen our industrial, informational and mercantile strength. The potential is limitless.
Because you are a believer and exponent of significant symbolic gestures, here is one I suggest you do. Donate your Mar a Lago estate back to the National Park Service to whom Marjorie Merriweather Post bequeathed it in 1973. Designate it for remodeling and subsequent use as “The Donald J. Trump Official United States Immigrant and Absorption Center.” Think of it as the Ellis Island of the twenty-first century. But it can and should be so different than Ellis Island.
Ellis island was a place of fear and trembling. Accommodations were spartan, lines were endless and the treatment of those knocking on our doors was often cruel and harsh. Many were refused entrance because of medical conditions that today are easily treatable and curable.
I have visited Ellis Island several times, and I was always struck by the exhibit of newspaper and magazine editorials from the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s urging the closing of our border keeping the dirty unwashed, Irish, Italians, Germans, Jews –the group names were interchangeable—away from our shores and keep America for Americans. How fortunate our nation is that those strident editorials did not completely close our border to so many of us who thrive here today. The new Trump Absorption Center could be a place of kindness and compassion
In such a center our nation could employ thousands of health care professionals, security personnel, teachers and social workers. They could ease the process of resettlement. They could provide first rate medical care. They can provide English lessons and job training. The possibilities for meaningful service to our country they could provide are limitless.
Incredulously, there are those who say we don’t have room for millions of new immigrants. As one who has driven frequently from the west coast of Florida to the east, I know this is ridiculous. In Florida alone there is some much space that could be turned into wonderful new villages, towns and cities. Multiply Florida’s vast open spaces by those of every state in the union. Think of the amazing example of James Rouse who began in the sixties to buy up farmland two thirds of the way between Washington DC and Baltimore. He turned it into Columbia, now the second largest city in Maryland and one of the most desirable places to live in the country. Across this great land there are endless possibilities for Columbia, Maryland facsimiles with good schools, affordable housing, hospitals and medical clinics and industry—everything need to provide opportunity and meaningful living.
If you want an example of how this can be done, send a team of experts to Israel, a nation, like ours built by immigrants. Between 1990 and 2010 more than a million Immigrants flooded into Israel, a country barely the size of New Jersey, from the former Soviet Union.
Between 1984 and 2000 Operation Moses and Operation Solomon brought 90,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel. That, Mr. President was the first time in history that Black people were taken from one country to another not in chains as slaves but as brothers and sisters with love. The absorption of so many from the Former Soviet Union and from Ethiopia was not easy, but Israel did it. And these immigrants have transformed Israel for the better in so many ways.
Their successful absorption is comparable to the United States absorbing the populations of France and Holland. New immigrants to the Land of Israel received housing, job training and intensive instruction in modern Hebrew. They come as refugees, but they did not remain refugees for long. Very quickly they become productive, tax-paying Israeli citizens.
The same can happen here, Mr. President.
Yes, just as Israel barred the criminal Meyer Lansky from seeking citizenship in Israel, so we should bar criminals from our country. But so many others could with a warm welcome and a little help contribute to our greatness.
Emma Lazarus’ poem inscribed on the base of our Statue of Liberty can once again become our nation’s calling card:
“Give me your tired and your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”
Open wide our “Golden Door,” Mr. President, and lead hundreds of thousand of future U.S citizens to new lives of freedom, prosperity and service to our nation. In so doing, you will indeed, “Make America Great Again.”
Finding Ourselves In The Bible 