Journeys: An American Story- Andrew H. Tisch, BS '71 and Mary Skafidas

Good afternoon. My name is Eduardo Peñalver, and I'm the I.M. & R. Tisch Dean at Cornell Law School. I'm delighted to see you all here for this fascinating discussion of an exciting new book. At the outset, I'd like to extend a few special welcomes. First of all, welcome to Cornell's 14th president, Martha, who's here with us today. Welcome back to the law school. I'd also like to recognize the Tisch professors who've traveled from across campus to be with us. In addition, I'd like to welcome a number of colleagues and former deans: Gretchen Ritter, the former dean of the College of Arts and Sciences; Kate Walsh, the Dean of the School of Hotel Administration; Glenn Altschuler, the Dean of the Cornell School of Continuing Education and Summer Sessions; and Fred Van Sickle, the vice president for alumni affairs and development. Thank you all for joining us here today for this discussion of Andrew Tisch and Mary Skafidas's wonderful book, 'Journeys: An American Story.' The book is a celebration of an enduring truth: that we Americans, with the exception of the nation's indigenous communities, all of us are immigrants. As the varied stories in the book make clear, our ancestors came here from all over the world seeking better lives for themselves and perhaps more often for their children, as people continue to do today. It may sound trite to say that we're a nation of immigrants, but it is a truth that we seem determined to forget from time to time and which we Americans need to be reminded of every few generations. As the first truly American university, Cornell is also a university of immigrants. Ezra Cornell's commitment to found an institution where any person could find instruction in any study included immigrants among those he intended to welcome. Here at the law school, Cornell's earliest classes included students who traveled from all over the world to study law. Our first two graduating classes included several students who came to Ithaca from Japan. If you think it's hard to get in and out of Ithaca today, imagine what it was like traveling here from Japan in the 1880s. Living Cornell's values is particularly challenging when some members of our community cannot gain entry to the country or cannot risk returning home to visit their families during school breaks simply because of the country of their citizenship, or when members of our community live in fear of deportation. In times like these, I think it's appropriate for Cornell to reiterate its founding values. At Cornell Law School, we add to those values a special reverence for the rule of law. This means, among other things, that we have an interest in ensuring that the legal rights of our students, faculty, and staff are fully respected. With the support of President Pollack and Provost Kotlikoff, Cornell Law School has taken a number of concrete steps to assist the members of the wider university community whose security has been thrown into doubt by recent changes in immigration law and policy. I'd like to mention just a few of those before turning the podium over to Professor Steve Yale-Loehr, who will introduce our distinguished speakers today. Through the Law School's Migration and Human Rights Program, the clinical faculty here have committed to providing, without charge, legal assistance to Cornell DACA students who have needed help renewing their DACA registrations or who are threatened with deportation, which thankfully hasn't happened yet. In addition, the team of Cornell Law School faculty, of counsel, dozens of individual students, have offered numerous Know Your Rights programs for the wider Cornell community. I want to thank the law school faculty and fellows who work tirelessly to make those efforts possible. And now I'd like to introduce Professor Steve Yale-Loehr, who will introduce our guests and moderate the discussion. A member of Cornell Law School's class of 1981, Professor Yale-Loehr is a double Cornellian, having earned both his undergraduate and law degrees here in Ithaca. He's a universally regarded expert on the nation's immigration law and policy. In addition to many books and articles, he's the co-author of 'Immigration Law and Procedure,' a definitive 21-volume treatise on U.S. immigration law. It's no exaggeration to say that not a week goes by where you will fail to see him explaining the complexities of our immigration system on CNN, in the pages of the New York Times, or hear him on Morning Edition. In short, he's always on TV talking about immigration. At Cornell Law School, he's the co-director of our Asylum and Convention Against Torture Clinic and also teaches our basic immigration law course. In his spare time, he maintains an active immigration practice downtown at the law firm Miller Mayer. Please join me in welcoming Professor Steve Yale-Loehr.

Thank you. It's my great pleasure to introduce Andrew Tisch and Mary Skafidas. Andrew is the co-chairman of the board and chairman of the executive committee of the Loews Corporation. He went to Cornell before me; he graduated in 1971. He's active at Cornell still; he's a trustee emeritus, former chair and vice chair of the Board of Trustees, chairman of the Dean's Board of Advisors in the SC Johnson School of Business. He's also active at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts and many other organizations. To his left is Mary Skafidas, who is vice president of investor relations and corporate communications for Loews. She's responsible for leading all investor and public relations and communication strategies for the company. She has more than 20 years of experience in financial communications, corporate marketing, and positioning for public companies. Together they decided to write this very interesting book. Rather than give you a boring talk, we thought we would have them start with maybe one interesting story each from the book and then go into a discussion about the book and about immigration generally. So I don't know which of you might want to start, and what story you want to start with.

Well, I'm going to start, if I may, by just reading a paragraph from our introduction, which kind of sets up the way we approach the book. Thank you very much. Thank you, Eduardo, for inviting us here. We start off by saying: '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 but quite distinctive the closer you get. A mosaic is only as strong as its grout, the sand and glue used to bind the stones together. After all, without the grout, which is our shared sense of ideology, democracy, opportunity, freedom of expression, and equality, without that grout, the mosaic would only be a pile of stones.' And that's really the way that we look at our collective being here in the United States. We are each stones held together by common beliefs. So with that, Mary, why don't you read one of your stories or one of your paragraphs?

So I'm going to read about... well, seeing as this evening is the homecoming, I'm going to read a story from my rabbi. She writes: 'So as a Korean Jewish American immigrant female rabbi, I know a thing or two about feeling like the other. Perhaps we should celebrate the other, that stranger. We should embrace what it means to be the other, the immigrant, the outsider. Because if we personally know the soul of the stranger, then the force of that memory is an ever-present bulwark against bigotry, superiority, and apathy. If we can empathize with being a stranger, then we will never forget that that person behind the barbed wire or the wall, that family forced to hide or run, that couple carrying all their belongings on their back, those people of different colors, faiths, or philosophies, we can instead remember and protect and love the stranger, because we are that stranger.'

That's great. So what motivated you to think about writing such a book? What interested you in this? Andrew, why don't you start?

I joined the board of the New York Historical Society about two years ago. One of the things we have at the New York Historical Society is a very nice auditorium. We loan it out to Immigration and Naturalization about once a quarter to do a naturalization ceremony. I was asked by the Historical Society to offer greetings for an upcoming naturalization ceremony. So I prepared my three minutes of remarks about my family's history, did a little bit of research, found out a lot of the lore that we had in our family was just that, lore. And as I'm about to give my remarks, I looked out and around the room, and they're like I'm doing right now, and I said, 'Yeah, everybody's got a story.' I went back to the office, having been inspired by what I saw, and I said to Mary, and Mary and I had been writing op-eds for a number of years together, I said, 'What would happen if we wrote a book about immigration?' And we started to talk to people and started writing down their stories. And we then said, 'It's tough to write in somebody else's voice.' So we asked a few people if they would write their stories down themselves. And that's basically how we got to where we are. We started asking people, and everybody's got an interesting story. Everyone wanted to share it. The response... we were able to accumulate 72 essays. The book went from inception to printing in two years, which I'm told is not a long time, although it felt like it. And very few people really turned down the request. They either turned it down because they were working on their own book or because they had lost that family history. But everyone was excited about the project and very willing to share their family story.

And how did you pick the 72? I mean, you've got a range of people in the book. Some are very famous, some are just average people. How did you decide which ones to include in the book?

I was just talking to people. I was taking an Uber from Herndon, Virginia to Union Station. I started talking to my Uber driver, and it turned out that his ancestors were from the same part of Ukraine as my ancestors, from Yekaterinoslav. And his ancestors came over to America about the same time as my ancestors. But unlike my ancestors, when they got to Brooklyn, and his great-grandfather started to get off the ship, the captain of the ship shut the doors and said, 'No more off at this stop. Everybody else gets off at the next stop.' Well, unfortunately, the next stop was Buenos Aires. So my Uber driver ended up... they spent the next three generations as Jewish gauchos, doing whatever it took to get by in Buenos Aires, until he finally came here as a street musician in the 1970s and made his life. He has four children who are all Harvard... no, Cornellians? Stanford. But I just thought to myself, 'There but for the grace of God, or the captain, goes any of us.' We could have easily ended up somewhere where we really didn't want to be. So that's why we included Mario Nieman in the book.

And Mary, you know, you've got 72 people. You have to categorize them in some way. You could have done it alphabetically or by when they immigrated to the United States. You came up with several interesting categories. You called some people 'Changers,' other people 'Lovers' or 'Rescuers' or 'Seekers.' How did you and Andrew decide which kind of person should be in which part of the book?

And you have a wide range of political views in the book. I've got Elaine Chao, who's married to Senator Mitch McConnell. You have other Republicans and Democrats and people not affiliated with any party. Did you do that deliberately to try to make sure that it's not perceived as a political book?

Well, it's not a political book. We want it to be as apolitical as possible. But we really started with the idea that it didn't matter whether you were a Democrat, Republican, far right, or far left. Everybody had a story that was worth telling. We were very pleased with the response that we got from everybody that we asked. We wanted to raise awareness of the issue, and we wanted to really for people to celebrate the immigrant and to remind them that whether you're someone who votes more red or blue, we all started the same way. We all came here from another country.

And speaking of red, I see many Cornellians in the book. I was very happy to see that. You've got Pete Gogolak, the Cornell football player from the 1960s, Ockman, Todd, Med, Ryan, Platt, Jackie Koppel, Hunama Dukkha, David Harris, and I can go on and on. So did that come into play, or that just because you know everybody everywhere and just familiarity?

Pete Gogolak has a wonderful story. The Gogolaks came over as young teenagers during the Hungarian Revolution, and the family settled in upstate New York in a town that was so small it didn't have a soccer team. So he and his brother went out and they tried out for football, and they couldn't kick a football. They just didn't know how to kick it. I mean, you kick it with your toe, you go straight through the football, so they were kicking it sideways, and they were kicking it far and they were kicking it accurately. Cornell recruited Pete, and Princeton recruited Charlie, and they became the first two soccer-style kickers. They changed the way football was kicked. They kicked in a better way. To this day, Pete Gogolak holds the record for the most points scored by a New York Giant. And he wrote in his book he wishes he had patented that style. He'd be a multi-millionaire if he had. But then Pete gets drafted by the Buffalo Bills and the New York Giants. After he played a season with the Buffalo Bills, the New York Giants moved him away for $92,000. The outcry was so huge that it led to the merger talks that led to the merger between the AFL and the NFL into one big league. So he changed the world again by being the catalyst to change the way football is played, owned, and legislated. And then he went on to work for RR Donnelley, so a third career as well.

Correct. So Mary, let me ask you. I mean, you write with Andrew in the introduction that immigrants are sort of a mosaic and we have this grout of shared ideals, democracy, opportunity, freedom of expression, and equality holding us all together. Without getting too political, do you believe that that grout is being frayed somewhat these days?

I think if you look at the numbers, the average American is very much in favor of immigration, and the numbers have been fairly consistent over the years. It's been so politicized though, and made into such a, no pun intended, political football, that it's become a big story. Some of the things that are happening or not happening, these are not what Americans do. This is not the way we treat people. But those are the ones that become the stories. I'm very troubled about the number of immigrants that are going to be allowed in next year, 30,000 refugees, when it was over 100,000 in the late 1990s. These are not the way that we do things here.

I think just to add to that, last week we hosted here at the law school a talk by Ali Noorani, who's the executive director of the National Immigration Forum. He did something similar to your book. He went around and spoke to conservative people throughout the United States about their immigration values, to point out that people like immigrants individually. It's just when you think of immigration with a capital 'I' that you tend to get a little bit scared. And he's doing somewhat the same thing as you, he's telling stories about immigrants. So with that as pre-loaded, I was wondering, Mary, what's been the reaction to your book? How have people reacted to the various stories in your book?

Well, let me ask you something. Let me have some of you people in the room. How many of you were not born in the United States? Just a show of hands. Let the record reflect about a third. How many have at least one parent who was not born in the United States? More hands go up. How about at least one grandparent who was not born in the United States? How many have four grandparents that were born in the United States? About five or six. So you can see, this is not an old country. This is a country where we are constantly having new people come. And how many people here know people who have moved out of the United States? You'll find it's very few, right? Maybe a few academics here and there, a few investment bankers. But Mary, do you have any other stories that you want to share at this point?

And Andrew, do you want to give another excerpt from one of the stories?

Sure. I'm going to read from a man named Zacchaeus Scull, a Cornell graduate who was a captain in the US Marine Corps and stationed in Iraq. He writes about his interpreter: 'Abood emailed me that he had headed to Jordan with his wife and daughters. Insurgents had left a severed dog head on his doorstep, a note that warned that he and his family would be next if they didn't flee Iraq. And that's when another fight began, to get them to the United States. Unfortunately, the US government had no programs in place to provide them safe passage to America. Instead, many of the interpreters fled to Syria, Jordan, and Kurdistan with little recourse. I put my uniform back on and traveled to Capitol Hill and began knocking on doors of senators and representatives, hoping that someone in the halls of Congress would do the right thing and establish a special immigration program to provide asylum to those who put their lives in danger in the service of our country. Senators Arlen Specter and Ted Kennedy held hearings on the issue. When a Buddhist family received refugee status and referral to the United States for resettlement, eventually Congress established a special visa program for other interpreters in Iraq and Afghanistan. The day Abood arrived in New York, we settled with his family in a small apartment in Bay Ridge, not far from where my family had settled 100 years prior on their escape from Russian pogroms targeting Jews in Eastern Europe. We then walked through the city. Abood was awestruck. Four years later, unfortunately, Abood passed away from lung cancer, but his daughters continued to follow in his footsteps. They are NYPD officers. Though their family has already given so much to our country, like so many other immigrants, they feel a deep sense of gratitude reflected in their continued service.' In that regard, there is a program now nationally called the International Refugee Assistance Project that helps people like Abood who served in Iraq and Afghanistan get this special kind of visa. And Cornell Law School has a very active chapter that has been doing a lot of those cases here. So kudos to all of the law students and the people who help them out with those pro bono cases.

With that, I'll open it up to questions. And I'll also repeat the question because this is being recorded. While we're waiting for people to think about their question, I'll ask the first question. Either of you, what would be the most surprising story or thing that you didn't expect when you started, that someone was going to write for you?

Andrew, I think the thing that amazed, I don't want to say surprised me, but the thing that was driven home to me was the difference in emotional response from African Americans who came as slaves versus those who didn't, versus all others who came here voluntarily. I was amazed at the depth of feeling. When you read these stories, these are all great patriots, but you could see the raw emotion. For so many people, for so many Caucasian and others, coming to America was the great event in their family's life. For African Americans who came as slaves, coming to America was not the greatest event in their life. It may have been something else, but getting here was so painful. It made me much more aware of the difference between the two great questions.

Yes, back there. Let me repeat the question for the recording: 'What is the role of institutions, community or otherwise, in helping immigrants assimilate into the United States?' And you've got a whole ending part of your book about institutions.

Institutions have played a key role. In our book, we look at three of them, but they really played the key role in helping to set up the social services originally, almost on an ethnicity-by-ethnicity basis. We had Catholic Charities, you had Irish groups, you had Jewish groups, Chinese groups. Each one took care of their own. There are more universal groups today, but they are all very, very important in helping the new immigrant establish themselves when they get here. The easier we can make it once they're here, the better off they are, the better off we all are.

And a lot of these organizations did start about a hundred years ago because, as the New York Times reported last week, immigration was at a high in about 1910 to 1917. Then we enacted the Immigration Act of 1917, which imposed major restrictions on immigration. So we had a really deep decline in immigration through the 1930s, and it was only after World War II that we started to see an increase in immigration again. And now we're at the same point in terms of annual immigration levels to the United States that they were in the 1910s and 1920s. So the need for such institutions to help immigrants is just as great today as it was a hundred years ago.

The Immigration Act of 1917 was also known as the Asiatic Barred Zone Act. It was designed to keep Asians out. When Chinese labor was imported to build the railroads and build the infrastructure of this country, very few visas were given to Chinese women because it was particularly motivated by the people of California. They did not want too many Chinese in California. They would rather that the men go back to China to get married and have children. Indeed, it was not until the Immigration Act of 1965 that we removed those racial barriers. As a consequence, you started to have more and more immigration to the United States, and now actually immigration from Asia is outpacing immigration from Mexico and Central America for the first time.

Right. Next question. Yes. So the question was about why did you include a story about a Native American in the book?

We thought it was the right thing to do. We thought about who we were missing in the book. We tried to be as inclusive as possible. I will tell you that we tried very hard to find a Japanese American who had been interned in World War II. We wanted to have a story from one of them, and we just couldn't find the right story before we put pencils down on the project. But through the New York Historical Society, we found him right over there, and he was very happy to tell his story. You can see the pain of what he has endured, what his people have endured all these years. These are not simple stories. They're not all happy stories. They're very complex. While we wanted to celebrate immigration, we also wanted to bring out as much as we could about the whole immigration issue in 200-some-odd pages.

Next question. Yes. So the question is: 'There's a lot of misinformation about immigration these days. How is your book trying to counteract that?' Mary?

And just to follow up on that, at the law school we have the Migration and Human Rights Program. If you just Google 'Cornell Migration and Human Rights Program,' it will take you right to the website where we list all these organizations that are doing great things on behalf of immigrants, including here at the law school, of course.

I think just having the conversation, making sure that people are talking about it, is a first step. And not just watching what's happening on the evening news and wringing your hands and saying, 'Gosh, we should do something about it.' It's having the conversation and then figuring out what it is you can do about it. So it's a good first step.

Question: 'Is there any story that your research that you decided not to put in the book?'

There were a few. I must tell you, my favorite one was someone sent in their family recipe for moonshine from their ancestors. So we thought that was probably not a good start. There were a few, but it was tough to turn down a story that came in that somebody had spent so much time working on. But there were a few that we felt we needed to turn down for various reasons.

They'll be in your next volume, right? Volume 4.

That's over here.

Let me take a crack at that one. Yeah, so the question was: 'What's being done about the children who are separated from their families? How many are there and how many have been reunited?' 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. So there is ongoing litigation regarding that. There is a partial settlement that came out last Friday that the parties are reviewing. If it's approved, it would mandate that the government work more actively in conjunction with pro bono attorneys to try to find the remaining parents and reunite them, if not with their parents, then with someone else, so that they're no longer in detention. So it's an ongoing controversy, and we'll see whether the parties agree to the proposed settlement and whether the court then agrees to what the parties come up with.

Yes. So the question is: 'How do we 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?' Nice simple question. Andrew?

It's a great question, and I want to think about that one because you're right. People come here with different skills and for different reasons. Most people have great merit. 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 to deal with a bureaucracy in order to do that, and bureaucracies will destroy any good idea quickly. So the question is how do you make it bureaucracy-free? I could select a great country from your 72 stories, but then how do we pluralize that so that we've got enough people doing it the same way that we end up with the right thing? One thing I can tell you is that taking young PhDs and sending them eviction notices rather than stamping their passports so they would stay here... make sure that the people that come here and get a great education, 40 of the 50 best universities in the world happen to be based in America by the latest poll, and we are taking great young minds and evicting them. That's just crazy. Making sure that we have the right people who first of all come here, but secondly stay here, that's the important thing. We've got to figure out how to do that right.

And just from a comparative perspective, other countries do have different ways of selecting immigrants. Canada and Australia, for example, have point systems. But even their point systems include characteristics such as family in their particular country. So it's not just education and ability to speak the language. Senator Kennedy's aide once told me, 'People don't come just to work or just for family reunification. People come. If they're selected on economic criteria, they bring their families. If they're selected on family characteristics, they come to work.' So you have to have both sides of the equation to have an effective immigration system. I think we have time for one more question, and then we'll conclude. If not, let me wrap it up by saying that Andrew and Mary will be back in November. They'll be speaking at the Trustee Council Alumni Meeting, and they'll do a panel discussion where they'll be interviewing Cornell students about their own immigration experiences. So if you want to hear more about this, come back in November. Also, Cornell Law School is hosting a conference in New York City on Friday, October 5th, about DACA and what the status of those people are and what the legislative prognosis is. So if you want to learn more in particular about DACA, feel free to come down to New York City. There will be information on the website soon. With that, I'll turn it back over to the Dean. I want to thank our authors for joining us, for writing the book, and for discussing it with us today, and our wonderful moderator, and all of you for your thoughtful questions. The authors will be signing books right here. So they'll be up here to sign books. You should have all received the book. If you didn't, there are more in the entryway. But please join me in thanking them for such a gracious event.