American Immigrants and Their Stories | Andrew Tisch & Mary Skafidas | Talks at Google
Every family has a story of how they arrived in America, whether it was a few months, years, decades, or centuries ago. AndrewΒ ...
Senior Vice President of Investor Relations & Communications, Aptargroup
Search every verified Mary Skafidas interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote β 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.
“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.”
Every family has a story of how they arrived in America, whether it was a few months, years, decades, or centuries ago. AndrewΒ ...
Journeys: An American Story- Andrew H. Tisch, BS '71 and Mary Skafida.
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