Letter to the Editor: Two hundred and fifty years of dreaming

Published 3:00 pm Wednesday, July 8, 2026

Trump’s mother, his paternal grandparents and two of his wives were immigrants. Melania’s parents benefited from chain migration.

I often think about a friend from college whose family fled Vietnam. He was pursuing a degree in electrical engineering and earning a “B” average. Yet his parents were disappointed with him. “Why can’t you be like your sister?!,” they asked him. His sister was a straight “A” student. His parents’ expectations were extraordinarily high because they believed America rewarded excellence and hard work. They viewed the United States as a land of opportunity and wanted their children to “kiss the ground” of America.

I never felt threatened by my friend’s success or by his family’s aspirations. I admired them. I saw in them the very qualities Americans claim to celebrate: diligence, sacrifice, gratitude, and a commitment to education. I never regarded my friend as an outsider, an “other,” or someone less worthy because of where his family came from. He was simply a fellow student pursuing his dreams, just as generations of immigrants have done before him.

It has been said over and over that if your ancestors were prospering in Europe; they didn’t get on the Mayflower! They probably wouldn’t and didn’t board a crowded ship, cross a dangerous ocean and they weren’t among the “tired and the poor” who came through Ellis Island.

This is why I find Trump’s, SCOTUS’s and MAGA’s hypocritical, amnesic, racist immigration politics troubling.

Today, immigrants are too often treated with lack of empathy, suspicion, hostility, and contempt unless they are South African whites or Ukrainians. Fear of immigrants has become a political strategy where division is misconstrued for patriotism.

Under Trump and SCOTUS, it has grown easy to condemn desperate migrants from the comfort of our safety and prosperity. It is harder to ask what we would do if our children were hungry, if gangs threatened our families, if political violence stalked our neighborhoods, or if opportunity had vanished from our homeland?

Many of the immigrants demonized by MAGA are driven by the same motivations that brought my college friend, the Trumps, Stephen Miller’s forbears and generations of European immigrants before them: safety, opportunity and religious freedom. People do not voluntarily abandon everything familiar—their home, family, friends, language, culture, traditions, and way of life—unless they believe staying behind would be difficult, dangerous, or hopeless. True? Before condemning those who arrive at our borders in desperation, we should remember that many Americans whose European families arrived during the late 1800s through 1920 were once viewed with the same suspicion that new immigrants often face today.

From the window of a turboprop airplane, one can see America’s vast open spaces that stretch to the horizon. America’s greatest limitations are not a lack of land for development or an inability to build new economies. Ask Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg. They know. America’s limitations are enamored in racism and xenophobia.

By the way: I would have “killed” to have a “B” average in electrical engineering.

Stanley McKie

Enumclaw