“Every single immigrant we have, undocumented or documented, is a future American. That’s just the truth of it.”

Junot Diaz

My Irish came in by the boatloads, starting back in 1850 or so, and they’re still coming. They came because the British, bored with abusing the Indians in India, had turned on the Irish. When their sticks and stones didn’t break the Irish bones, they resorted to starving them. That was too much to take.

The joke around my family supper table was that they came because they had heard America was in desperate need of stereotypes: more cops, priests, bartenders, singers, vaudeville comics, laborers and nuns.

Immediately the “No Irish Need Apply” signs went up. Yes, Ireland sent us some dangerous characters, from Legs Diamond to Whitey Bulger. Chicago in the ’20s was run by Irish gangsters who did a lot of damage. But history shows us we delivered some scientists, scholars and not a few handsome politicians like Joe Biden and the Kennedy boys. OK, a few gangsters, nobody’s perfect.

The Italians came along between 1880 and 1924, running from the impossible rural poverty and, for some of them, the oppression of the old Mafia, only to meet with the new Mafia here. They became victims of the same stereotype game: night club singers, owners of pizza parlors and spaghetti joints.

But eventually they produced generations of filmmakers like Coppola and Scorsese, doctors, educators, opera singers, La Guardia and Giuliani and a lot of movie stars.

Angels all? Hardly. The Mafia had their own terrorists, but in the end, the great Italian brand survived.

Slipping in between the first two groups and trying to keep their heads down were, of course, the Jews. They could have been Hungarians, Germans, Poles and Russians. They could have been Cuban pool boys. It didn’t matter. They were immigrants, and worse, they were Jews.

But they were hustlers, hard workers. They became shopkeepers, ragmen, jewelers, pushcart peddlers and tailors. There was Jules Stein who created the great Jules Stein Eye Institute at UCLA. Yes, there were the famous mobsters: Meyer Lansky and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel for two, and the list is long. Hey, even the chosen people had a schmuck or two.

But we were blessed with George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, and lest we forget, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, thank you very much.

Germany gave us immigrants like Irving Berlin and Albert Einstein, and my personal favorites, the great German brewers of American beers, Pabst, Schlitz, Anheuser Busch — immigrants all. Had they been turned away, would there have been a Bud Lite?

My favorite immigrants, the Chinese, probably discovered America long before Christopher Columbus or the Vikings. They came back in droves in the l800s, and we were suspicious and tabbed them with the usual racist nicknames, but soon they were welcomed and “tolerated” because they were such hard-working laborers, toting water and human excrement, laying tracks for the railroads, digging in the gold rush mines and doing all the dirty work the American settlers didn’t want to do. Sound familiar, Jose?

They became prominent citizens, these beautiful children of suspicious immigrants: I.M. Pei, Yo-Yo Ma, Vera Wang, writers Amy Tan and Laura Ling, AIDS researcher David Ho, to name a few.

This year, more than 9 million Syrian refugees have fled the devastation of their homeland, and some are heading toward our shores at our invitation. Some are already here.

Today, because of the horror in Paris, we seem to have changed our minds. As of this moment, 30 Republican governors and a couple of Democrats are working furiously to keep them out, to send innocent men, the widows, their children, the crippled and sick back to wired-in encampments in war torn empty landscapes.

They weren’t coming here to start movie studios or because they had heard it’s a golden mountain, or that we need great Syrian restaurants, tailors or cooks. They’re coming here because it’s America.

Like it or not, for good or bad, we’re still the warm blanket in a cold world, an icon on the world map, a lighthouse on the shore of a dark sea. Sure, there’s gonna be a bad actor in the bunch, and I worry that despite new and increased vetting, one or two will slip through.

Surely we learned on 9/11 that we have always lived in dangerous times. But we never pulled in the door mat.

I’m holding a shred of faith that among these ragged pilgrims there will be police chiefs, teachers, senators or the parents of a future president of the United States.

Maybe even a brilliant young doctor from Damascus will arrive and she will discover a cure for your wife’s cancer. Don’t we want to take that chance? Sure we do.

Christmas is almost a month away, and Congress is working to put a hold on the travelers.

Two thousand years ago, a Middle Eastern carpenter, running from threats of death, came with his wife and child looking for shelter. Do we, this year, tell them there is no room in our inn, or do we open the stables? Your choice.

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.

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