Immigrants & Slaves Built This Country

Historically, as we review some of our nation's beginning footsteps, we often forget some of the major players who contributed so very much to the building of our nation. 

Recently, I heard President Biden, a descendant of Irish immigrants, comment during his historic visit to Ireland on the ways that Irish immigrants significantly contributed to the fabric of our nation. 

In a previous post, Riding the Rails: From the Underground Railroad to the Transcontinental Railroad, we talked about the profound influence migrant and immigrant workers had. They were not welcomed with open arms, but often enslaved, derided, and greeted with violence. 

 From Riding the Rails:

"The year is 1863... as many as 15,000 Chinese immigrants do the dangerous, backbreaking work of blazing a path across the US to make the Transcontinental Railroad a reality. As they dynamite their way west, thousands die.

In other parts of the country, hundreds of thousands, indeed millions of enslaved people bend over under the scorching sun, toil in the vast fields of cotton, rice and tobacco, to build the very economic backbone of the United States."

Today, immigrants play a powerful role in the nation's economy. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities states that "In fact, immigrants contribute to the U.S. economy in many ways. They work at high rates and make up more than a third of the workforce in some industries. Their geographic mobility helps local economies respond to worker shortages, smoothing out bumps that could otherwise weaken the economy. Immigrant workers help support the aging native-born population, increasing the number of workers as compared to retirees and bolstering the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. And children born to immigrant families are upwardly mobile, promising future benefits not only to their families, but to the U.S. economy overall."

Irish, Black, Asian, Native, European - we all descended from immigrants. It's who we are. 

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"