[T]hings happened not necessarily because we were refugees or Southeast Asian, but because we were human and did some of the same things that other Americans did. Our failures — and our successes — were due to our complicated humanity, not because of our ethnic or national origins.
To love, to laugh, to live, to work, to fail, to despair, to parent, to cry, to die, to mourn, to hope: These attributes exist whether we are Vietnamese or Mexican or American or any other form of classification. We share much more in common with one another than we have in difference.
And yet these differences — of color, religion, language, origin and so on — matter because we make them matter, or because others persuade or coerce us into believing in they matter.
Five short documentaries about the immigrant experience in America appearing in The Times’s Op-Docs series testify to both the depth of our shared humanity and the height of the walls separating us.
We act out by longing for enemies to conquer in the vain hope that this will restore our greatness, and we mistake immigrants and refugees for those enemies. But if we are mature enough to examine ourselves, we can both celebrate the accomplishments of American culture and also acknowledge — and maybe even atone for — its terrible deeds.
We can help to make up for these tragedies by doing two things that foes of immigration argue are incompatible: renewing our commitment to the most marginalized Americans who are already here, and welcoming the immigrants and refugees who regenerate us. But we don’t have a lot of time.
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