American Immigrants and Their Stories | Andrew Tisch & Mary Skafidas | Talks at Google

First of all, I'm actually just curious to know how many of you here in this audience were either born outside the United States, or have a parent that was born outside the United States? Just to get a show of hands. All right. I'd say that's almost half the room. Interesting.

So tell us a little bit about where you came up with the idea for this book, which is, again, 72 essays all about immigration, from folks that you've heard of and others that you haven't. But like, why?

Well, I had joined the board of the New York Historical Society. And one of the things we have at the New York Historical Society is a very nice auditorium that we loan out periodically to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. So I was asked if I would offer greetings to 100 new immigrants who were being sworn in on behalf of NYHS. I said, sure, why not? And as I was preparing my remarks, I decided to talk about how my family got here—the family lore of how we came to America. And as I was sitting there looking out on the audience, I thought to myself, everyone has a story. Virtually every one of us is an immigrant. And with everything that's going on—and this was now 18 months ago, 24 months ago—with everything that was going on then, I said, why not start to tell some of the stories? And so I went back to the office and talked to Mary. And Mary and I had been writing for several years, writing op-eds together. And I said to her, how would you like to write a book? You're not gonna make any money.

And then what? You've got such an amazing collection of stories here from everyone from Marlo Thomas, Nancy Pelosi, Rabbi Angela—like just such a mix. How did you find these people? Were they reluctant to share? Excited to?

Very few people were reluctant to share. As a matter of fact, when you talk to people, they got energized by it. You know, many people, after we asked them three or four questions, would start to come up with things that they hadn't thought about. And at the end of the discussion, they were thanking us. But we started out by interviewing people. And we realized, or at least I came to the realization, I can't write in another person's voice. So maybe I was being a little bit lazy, but I said, why don't you write an essay? Write 500 to 1,500 words about how you or your family got here. And then we'll do a light edit on it. And the stories that we got in were unbelievable because it was people really pouring their hearts out about what America meant to them, what their family meant to them. It was the stories. Each one of them tells a story. And collecting the stories was kind of the easy part, because people wanted to. It was telling people, no, we have enough stories already, or no, we don't need this story or that story. So getting people to open up their hearts, open up their minds, write about it, that was kind of the easy part.

What were the common themes? I know you categorized the stories throughout the book. You kind of grouped them. But tell us a little bit about some of the themes that emerged as you started to look across all these fascinating tales.

One of the problems we had early on was figuring out how to divide up the chapters. So we thought about doing it alphabetically. And then we realized, well, we have Alan Alda, and Arleen Alda, and we have Ashok Amritraj, and Ahmed Ahmed. We had way too many A's for 72, so we couldn't do it that way. We couldn't do it geographically, because you had Europe, Africa, so you'd almost be doing it racially, which we didn't want to do. We couldn't do it chronologically because we had people from the Mayflower, and people who came over—we literally had one person who wrote his essay on the day that he was sworn in as a US citizen.

Thematically. We had people who were coming over here for opportunity, people who were coming over here for love, people who were coming over here fleeing something. But I guess the common theme was that people came over here for opportunity, and because they really believed that there were things here that they couldn't get anywhere else in the world. And I'll take the example of my family, who came from Dniprovska, which was in Ukraine. And they could have just as easily gone to Warsaw. It probably would have been much easier to go to Warsaw, which had a great Jewish community there in 1905, and it would have been a very safe choice. And they would have been wiped out. And I would never have been here after World War II. Somebody in my family, probably my great grandfather, took a leap of faith, heard that there was something going on here that was worth pursuing, and came here. And six months later, brought his wife and their three children, one of whom was my grandfather.

Amazing. So, so powerful, those crossroads. So who is this book for? Who do you hope reads this book?

The book is completely apolitical. And we run the gamut from Nancy Pelosi to Elaine Chao, from Cory Booker to Tim Scott. We have people on the left and people on the right. Immigration itself really is not a political issue, in most cases. There are a few people for whom it is. There are Native Americans who have been here, and who have gotten screwed, quite frankly. There are people who came over here unwillingly, i.e. slaves. But for the most part, this is not a political book. This is a book to raise awareness that we are a nation of immigrants. America and Israel are probably the only countries in the world that have been created by and for immigrants.

Yes. It's not a political book, but boy, is immigration a hot political topic right now. So I want to kind of delve into that a little bit. What do you think—has the direction of the political discourse around immigration—are we moving forward? Are we moving backwards? It is a hot topic. It is divisive. What is our status as a nation today, in terms of, have we moved kind of backwards or forwards in our ability to talk about this issue of immigration?

Well, we've always been somewhat xenophobic in this country. Last year was the 100th anniversary of the Immigration Act of 1918, which was also known as the Asiatic Barred Act, which basically barred most Asians from coming to America because people in California thought there were too many Asians here. And it was literally impossible for an Asian woman to get a visa to come here because people wanted the Asians that came here—if they wanted to get married—to go back to their native country and get married, and not stay in America. So we've always been somewhat xenophobic. We've always had negative discourse about immigration. When people first started coming in, when groups first started coming in, it's taken a generation and a generation and a half for them to be accepted. So it's not that this is the first time that we've had terrible xenophobia. But what's going on now is certainly of great concern to every one of us.

Or the children of immigrants.

Including Google.

Including Google.

Yeah. Let's talk about that a little bit more. I mean, from your standpoint, what are some of the economic arguments for immigration? Because I think that also fuels the fear of things being taken away. But there's a pretty strong economic rationale for why immigration is—

Well, first of all, let's just take something as simple as unemployment. 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. And we just don't have enough people. Now, we have, in this country, achieved ZPG, also. So if we want to change the zero population growth, that's going to take about 20, 25 years. And we don't have the social systems to run that many more people through the schools, so that's impractical. So we need immigrants. We need immigrants to come in. We also need immigrants because we've got three Ponzi schemes in Washington. We've got Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. And 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. It's a game the government has played, and everybody knows it, and nobody's doing anything about it. So we need immigration. We need immigrants just as workers, number one. Number two, many immigrants take jobs that nobody else will do. And 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. And oftentimes, they end up with the jobs that nobody else will take. So that's very important. And then you look at the brains that stay here, and the number of PhDs that come here. And you look at the university systems. 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. Boy, 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 of years. Because to give them an eviction notice is insanity.

And I'm not asking where you stand on these issues, but why is immigration, at this moment in time, so polarizing? Why are we involved in such heated debate over the wall, the ban. Given that it's hard to argue with, I think, what this book makes so clear, we are all immigrants. This country is founded on values of openness and embracing everyone from gathering our huddled masses. Why has the dialogue around immigration gotten so heated?

Well let me turn around and ask you, what are we not polarized on in this country right now? We are living in a political environment where everything is being polarized. And that gets into a broader question of leadership, but I think it's going to take a while for the pendulum to swing back to more cooperation. A lot of the things I'm doing in Washington involve trying to reestablish some sort of decorum and ability to work across the aisles.

That's great. That's great. What changes would you make in our current immigration policy, were you to be able to wave your magic wand?

You want to start that?

And things like DACA—that's insanity. What are we going to do, send people back to a country that they've never been to? It's insanity.

I mean, yes. And we can get the group involved in this. Googlers are opinionated and not shy. A lot of the discourse goes on, I think, face-to-face, but also there's a number of online places where Google can discuss and get into the issues. I know that Sundar has spoken out—

On immigration, and has personally committed funds to support certain issues. And maybe there's folks in the room who can speak more to this. I also read that Larry and Sergey, our founders, are also immigrants. And I came across an article that was critical, actually, of Larry in particular for being quieter on immigration. So I think Google demands a lot of its leadership when it comes to these issues.

Yeah. Have you seen other corporations or business leaders sort of really stepping out on this topic in ways that have been meaningful and impactful?

We're starting to see more and more. The Chamber of Commerce is starting to get more vocal about it. And you're starting to hear more people. And I think as the labor pool tightens up, you'll hear more and more senior executives, who can't get the right people, comment about it.

Right. So I want to give the Googlers a chance to start asking some questions. So start thinking of your questions, and we have mics. But just getting back to the stories, I am curious what your favorite one or ones are. And I hope this isn't like asking you to pick your favorite child—probably a little bit—and why.

No, a senior.

I think I'll pick out two. I'll pick Ryan Platt, who is now a sophomore at Cornell. And those are the only two Cornell—

But Ryan is the daughter of a single mother. She's adopted from a Chinese orphanage. And when she went back to China to see the orphanage from where she came, she tells the story about walking into the orphanage and seeing all these little Chinese babies, all girls. And she said she had a very tough time identifying with them because every time she looks in the mirror in the morning, she sees an American girl. And it just stuck with me that her identity is American. And I guess the other one is Stephanie Murphy, who was a Vietnamese boat person who left as a—

And her family left Vietnam when it was taken over. And they got marooned on the South China Sea. The engine broke down, and they were adrift, and they got picked up by the US Navy, refueled, fixed the engine, pointed them towards Malaysia. And Stephanie is, today, a Congresswoman from Orlando. So those are the ones that I like. I love Angela Buchwald, who's a Korean-born rabbi at Central Synagogue. Cory Booker's essay is great. Every one of them has something in there that people will find interesting. And some are more interesting than others. I love Pete Gogolak's. Pete Gogolak was a football player. They came over from Hungary. And he changed the world twice, actually, because he and his brother couldn't figure out how to kick a football. They kicked it sideways, not forward.

Soccer-style.

And became the first soccer-style kickers. And then Pete was drafted by the New York Giants and the Buffalo Bills, and started kicking for the Buffalo Bills. And the New York Giants hired him away for a bonus of $90,000. And the uproar was so great that it led to the merger talks between the American Football League and the NFL. So he changed the world twice. The way we kick the football, and the way we watch football.

I love that story. I love that story. There are so many good ones. OK. Let's open up the mics to questions. Go for it.

Hi. My name is Bjorn. I am from Denmark. I have lived in this country now for 20 years, this month. And I also have a PhD. You mentioned that. I have that from this country. And very much agree, by the way, that instead of trying to kick us out afterwards, you should try to keep us. I managed to do that. And I am looking at citizenship in a couple of years. I am also white—very. And I want to say—and ask what you think, obviously—and I should also say, politically, I'm as left-leaning as you get probably, OK? In terms of immigration, at least, and many more things. But I don't actually think it's very useful to say that we are all immigrants, because if you go out in Pennsylvania in a mining city, or whatever they're called, you will have people who are white like me and who have no identity of being immigrants. That is to say, no one who is alive in that family are actually immigrants. No one's direct immigrants. They didn't come here. They were born here. And so to someone like them, especially a lot of Trump voters, we know, it is not the same as saying, here's a Danish guy. Let him come over, get a PhD, learn a lot, and then contribute to this society. That's not the same as the kinds of immigrants that we all know that Trump and his followers are afraid of. And so calling them all immigrants I don't think is useful. What do you think?

OK. My feeling is, we have essays here from Mayo Stuntz. Part of his family came over as Hessian soldiers in the Revolutionary War, and that's the young part of the family. The older part of the family came over along about the Mayflower. And they recognize that they came from somewhere else. Maybe they're not immigrants this generation or this past generation. But at some point, everyone's going to have to admit they came over from somewhere else, unless their last name is Thundercloud. And I think that that's the reality of it. Now if they don't want to be reminded of it, fine. I don't mind offending them, if that's how they feel.

Hi, guys. My name's Jenny Johnson. And Andrew, I wanted to ask you, since you're so involved in New York City, and New York City is a city that has been founded on immigrants, do you see cities serving a role in facilitating immigration beyond the connection to Washington and the government?

Absolutely. I believe that, first of all, cities are where the immigrants generally start out. And the services that the cities are going to provide are going to be very, very important. My wife, Ann, who is sitting right behind you, is an educator and has school in Astoria, where they teach people from, what, 67 different countries? Who are immigrants from 67 different countries. You don't get that in too many places. So I think the cities are the places where the immigrants tend to go to first. And they have the social systems that are there to help them. And in the old days, the social systems were by the immigrants themselves, or by the descendants of the immigrants. So the Irish helped the Irish, and the Jews helped the Jews, and the Italians helped the Italians.

And the religious institutions were and are very important. So I think cities, all municipalities, we want to make it as easy as possible for people to come and become productive members of society.

Thank you.

My name's Hannah Bradheim. I'm the granddaughter of one of the people who wrote in the book, and the great granddaughter of one of the people in the book.

Wow.

So I'm Morris Turritz' great granddaughter, who's one of the people in the book. So for me, it was great to be able to read from the book and see—I knew my great grandfather's last name was Turritz. I had not known his first name. I knew he was from Lithuania. I didn't know where in Lithuania he was from. So I was wondering, for the people who worked on the book and wrote in the book, how much of it was a discovery for them, for yourselves also included parts in it? Did you find a lot of the people writing different chapters learned a lot of different things? Were there sort of interesting or unusual things that came up?

I'll tell you my story. Our family lore was that we came from Dniprovska in the Ukraine. And everybody thought that in 1904, the entire family went to Odessa. And half the family turned left and went to Tashkent, and the other half of the family turned right and came here. And so when I was doing the research, I went to Ellis Island, and they found the ship's manifest that had my grandfather's name on it in March of 1904, and the ship was from Hamburg. Now, there was no way you could go from Odessa to Hamburg. You really had to go, if you were going from Dniprovska, directly to Hamburg. So they probably took a train to Hamburg. And we surmised that there was some feeling that they were in peril because of recent pogroms in Russia. But the family went to Hamburg. My great grandfather came over here in March. And then six months later, my great grandmother and her three children, one of whom was my grandfather, came over to join my grandfather after he scouted out and found a place for them to live. So the whole idea that half the family went to Tashkent after we all went to Odessa kind of went out the window. But doing the research was a lot of fun, and it connected me with a couple of relatives who still remember what's going on. I am now pretty much in touch with some of them pretty regularly.

Yeah. It was fun. Every once in a while, members of my family have the same Facebook post they do, because my great grandfather had a granite business. So that was the sum total of what I knew. My grandfather, Joseph Boward—he found a bunch more information in there. And then recently, I was in his basement, and I found a bunch more information about other things that I think he probably dug out recently, and that's why they were on top.

And your grandfather was a professor of mine in business school.

That's cool. Other questions? Hi.

Hi. Good afternoon, Andrew and Mary. Thank you for being here this afternoon. So some of the more sensational stories that have animated new activism amongst Googlers and young people everywhere, and really just almost any citizen—border separations, the wall, immigration bans, et cetera—they bring to mind this question of, what can we be doing, as people of some privilege, to give our leaders a little bit more courage to address the systemic issues that underlie these outcomes that we've seen in recent news? What is your advice on addressing those people, or participating as a citizen, not just an observer?

I'm a big one for political activism. I would just say, vote. Most important thing you can do is vote. Even if you think your vote doesn't count, it counts. People read it. And I don't think I've missed voting since I was 21 years old. I even vote by absentee ballot, just to make sure that I'm not going to miss it. But then, I've gotten involved politically in initiatives that I find very important. One of the initiatives I'm involved in is the US Global Leadership Coalition, which its sole purpose is to keep foreign aid in the federal budget. Foreign aid being 6/10 of 1% of the federal budget. But there's always some idiot congressman who says, if we can just cut out government waste and foreign aid, then we can balance the budget. Forget that we're running a trillion dollar deficit this year, and every year as far as we can see. But get involved and express yourself because there's a lot of things that have to be done to get this country, in my opinion, moving in the right direction.

Make friends with your neighbor. Visit America's sites. Go see the Statue of Liberty, and the Liberty Bell, and the Grand Canyon.

The big thing is get involved.

One of the things, if you ever have the opportunity to do it, go visit a swearing-in ceremony. Go attend a swearing-in ceremony where you get to meet new citizens, and find out how important being an American is to them.

Is that something that you need to get invited? How does one do that?

We have to find a way.

So you can't just show up. You can't just invite yourself.

You can. A lot of them—Monticello, on July 4th they have a swearing-in. I was fortunate enough, Mary and I were asked to be in attendance. And I gave a keynote address.

There were 67 new immigrants who were sworn in as new citizens. And there were, what—

3,000 people were there?

Someone asked a question about New York City and state having many social programs to help immigrants, and also you can get free legal advice, and so on. And I was actually wondering, is it all in New York City and state who's doing it? Or were more states in the United States who are also involved in doing programs like that?

Thanks.

Are your stories in this book? And how did they influence the way you approached this book?

Yes, indeed, our stories are in the book. And when we send out the request to people, we led with our chins in that we sent our stories to them to say, we're willing to put our stories in the book. We hope that you will join us. And we had very few turndowns from people because they were excited to be part of this. And one of the things you'll find in the book is that the last eight pages are blank. And they're just lined so that you can write your story into your book. We also give you the opportunity to go to www.journeysanamericanstory.com, and put your story onto our website, so that there are additional stories on the website of people whose stories came in too late to make publication. So we're anxious that people tell the stories because the more they talk about it, the more we believe people will remember that we are all, as Americans, from somewhere else. But we're here as Americans, and we're here together.

I think that's a really great note to end on. Thank you again for being here. Thank you for creating this book, for sharing your stories, for sharing the stories of so many others. And I hope you guys will share your stories, maybe by hand, maybe on the website. And thank you for being here today.

Thank you very much.