A couple of weeks ago, I sailed across the North Atlantic from England. It was the end off a month-long adventure that included a study-abroad experience called Royals and Rebels that completed my requirements for a bachelor's degree at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, followed by a couple of days in Paris, part of which was spent learning some new cooking techniques, and a week on the Queen Mary 2, which treated me to seven days of nothing by ocean. But when people ask me my takeaway from it all, the first thing on my mind was this - sailing into New York Harbor on a sparkling Spring morning.
After having spent a month studying and talking to Brits about our relative political woes and hypothesizing their contradictions and solutions....well....this. There were nearly 2000 guests on board ship that day, and not since the sailaway party had they all been in one place at the same time until that morning. The top decks were shoulder-to-shoulder as we approached the harbor and all eyes trained on the lady who greeted us on behalf of the United States of America. My companions were citizens of dozens of countries from all over the world, but an unprompted hush came over them all as we looked at her shining in the sun.
"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, your homeless tempest-tossed, to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door."
Everyone there, even if they didn't know the words inscribed under that raised lamp, knew what she stood for. There we were, a ship peopled with privileged humanity from almost every continent, remembering a French gift to an American people who had done something no one had ever done before and are still trying to figure out how to succeed in it over the long haul.
The morning before, a very distinguished British gentleman had challenged me with this: he encouraged me to picture our country twenty or fifty years from now after we, having relaxed our borders, lived in a land taken over from people from everywhere else. Then I saw that he wasn't talking about us, the United States, but about Britain. England, after having been master of the world and maintaining a stranglehold over, in particular, India, is now a startlingly cosmopolitan nation, with a quarter million Indian immigrants settling there in 2023 alone. He was looking around at what he saw in his own country, didn't like it, and assumed we wouldn't either.
But there was something that distressed gentleman didn't understand. The UK rests on its tradition and history, one rooted in centuries of kings and queens stretching back in traceable lines. This country does not. The United States is what people from other places made it.
My grandparents, all of them, made a journey across the ocean similar to mine. They sailed into that same harbor, saw that same monument to hope, and made a life here. A good one. And I'm not the only one. Everyone I know is descended from immigrants. It is immigrants who made this country, ones who trusted the promise made by the monument. Consequently, change may not be that by which the United Kingdom identifies itself, but it is at the root of who we in the U.S. are.
It's not possible for a people from a foreign country who settles here with the intent to share in our heritage of freedom to "take over". They simply become the latest in the unbroken chain, not of kings and queens, but of people who have a dream for something better. Will we change as a nation because we have welcomed them? Of course, but that, too, is who we are. It's our responsibility to recognize ourselves in them, because a striving toward hope is something we share.
This is the Fourth of July, a time to celebrate independence from tyranny. That, too, is who we are, even when the tyranny comes from within. As long as this great lady stands at the entrance to our nation, we have a promise to keep to the world and there is a world out there counting on it.
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