Senior Vice President of Investor Relations & Communications, Aptargroup
Search every verified Mary Skafidas interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Mary Skafidas, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations & Communications at Aptargroup, co-authored the book "Journeys: An American Story" with Andrew H. Tisch, published in 2019. In September 2019, she participated in two events to promote the book: a Talks at Google interview and a discussion at Cornell Law School. Skafidas stated that the book aimed to raise awareness about immigration "in a way that didn't alienate" either side of the political debate, and to remind people that "we're all immigrants." She described the book as a collection of 72 essays from a diverse group of contributors, including celebrities, business leaders, and undocumented immigrants, with blank pages at the end for readers to write their own family stories. During the events, Skafidas expressed concern about the reduction of refugee admissions to 30,000, noting that the number was over 100,000 in the late 1990s, and called this "not the way that we do things here." She also discussed the separation of children from their mothers at the U.S. border in 2018, stating that about 700 children had still not been reunited with their parents at the time of the talk. Skafidas argued that the U.S. needs immigrants for economic reasons, citing full employment and the reliance of programs like Medicare and Social Security on a broad working population. She described the U.S. as a "mosaic" rather than a melting pot, with a shared sense of ideology and opportunity as the "grout" that binds different groups together.
“I always do what Andrew tells me. Oh fine. So in trying to pick a couple of the stories that we would read today, the first one I wanted to read was in a chapter in the back of the book called the undocumented. My aunt's story is in there but I'm not reading my aunt's because I can't actually get through it without cry...”
“Julianne came here when she was five years old with her mother and she was undocumented for most of her life here. She recently graduated Law School and about a month before the book was published she passed her bar and today she is an immigration lawyer.”
“The population of the United States is often referred to as a melting pot still of many different ingredients combined and homogenized. We prefer to think of our country as a mosaic: tiles are many different colors and shapes and sizes which are indistinguishable from afar are quite distinctive the closer you get. A mo...”
“I think when you talk to real people and you don't necessarily look at Twitter or the way comments are taken maybe out of turn from the media, the pride in being American, the shared culture is still very much there. Things have been blown out in the media and are being used to politicians' advantages but I really don'...”
“I'm very troubled about the number of immigrants that are going to be allowed in next year at 30,000 refugees, when it was over a hundred thousand in the late 1990s. These are not the way that we do things here.”
“Our ancestors came to America at a time when immigration to my great good fortune was virtually unrestricted. Those days are long gone and national security demands that we control our borders but that does not preclude a reasonable or generous immigration policy.”
“There are at least 2,500 children who were separated from their mothers in the months of June and July before the Trump administration reversed its policy. About 700 of them have still not been reunited. The administration claims their guardians or parents have some criminal background or other problem to reunite them....”
“How do you decide which people should be allowed to immigrate to the United States and if you're going to do it on merit, what is the definition of merit? Most people have great merit and I need to think more about how you would do something so radically different in the way you do it. The problem is that then you have...”
“I think there's a rational side and there's an emotional side and I think when you're dealing with people, how do you marry the two? You can't take the emotion and the humanity out of the equation. You have to give some credit to people who actually took the step to come here. Not everyone is linked to the United State...”
“Well, I think we wanted to raise awareness of the issue. And we wanted to do it in a way that didn't alienate. I mean, right now there are sides in immigration. We didn't want to alienate either side. We really just wanted to remind people of what makes America great, and that we're all immigrants.”
“I think every new group that comes in, there's always this fear. And it takes a while to get over it. But then there's the realization that you need immigrants. We need immigrants. 40% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants, or they were the children of immigrants.”
“We have basically full employment in the United States right now. We have 3.1%, 3.2% unemployment. That is full employment, and anyone that wants a job can probably get a job. Maybe not the best job in the world, but we need more people to be working. So we need immigrants.”
“We've got three Ponzi schemes in Washington. We've got Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. The only way that they work is if we get a broader and broader population working base to pay in, because the three of them are funded by current dollars, not by any kind of real trust fund.”
“Many immigrants take jobs that nobody else will do. It's a plain and simple fact of life that immigrants want to come here and they want to work, and they want to work hard, and they want to do whatever it takes. Oftentimes, they end up with the jobs that nobody else will take.”
“We have the greatest university system in the world. Of the top 50 universities in the world, 40 of them are American universities by the latest rankings. If I was running the country, any foreigner that got a PhD, I'd immediately confiscate their passport and say, you got a PhD here. You got to work here for X number...”
Journeys: An American Story- Andrew H. Tisch, BS '71 and Mary Skafida.
Every family has a story of how they arrived in America, whether it was a few months, years, decades, or centuries ago. Andrew ...
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