Iyow - in your own words

_Part two of ‘A Long Way Home,’ a series on immigration we began in April 2006._

My parents came over in the late 1960s, my father from a poor, uneducated Armenian family in Iran (his father was a cab driver, his mother took care of the seven children), and my mother an orphan raised by her grandparents in Croatia. My mother was taking a “temporary” break from her studies at the University of Zagreb, and my father came to get an education, something that would have literally been impossible with his ethnic/religious and economic status in Iran.

Neither of my parents really spoke English when they arrived (they actually met in English language school). My father worked as a busboy at Denny’s while putting himself through night school (first English, then undergraduate, then graduate), my mother working at an insurance company as a clerk until I was born. They bought their first house in L.A. when I was born, about five years after coming into the country, a literal shoebox (one-bedroom, no garage).

My father got his bachelor’s and two master’s degrees (in engineering) and built a successful career in manufacturing before starting a string of his own businesses, all of which were enormously successful. He got US citizenship only three years after arriving and never looked back. He has always been enamored of American culture and values, and my brother and I were raised without much interaction with the Armenian community. For a period in my twenties, I regretted this, but now I understand and accept it, and understand there would have been no real way to flourish individually within the stiflingly closed Armenian world.

My mother was more reluctant to get US citizenship but finally relented about 20 years after arriving. She is still, in her heart, a Croatian—she talks to her family back home almost every day, and doesn’t as readily embrace Americanism as much as my father. Different folks, different strokes.

Now my parents are retired, comfortably esconced in their Southern California home of their dreams, a true testament of the power of ingenuity and ambition to provide a better living for themselves and their family. At this point, even my mother would agree that they wouldn’t have done anything differently had they the chance to do it all over again.

What I find most troubling about the current immigration debate is the talk of a guestworker program. Most of its proponents probably have no idea how badly this system bombed in Europe, and how it created a permanent underclass of immigrant descendants in countries like Germany, France, the Netherlands and Sweden. It might come as a surprise to people how exceedingly well the U.S. absorbs and assimilates immigrants compared to any other country in the world—if you think our immigrant debate is ugly, then you really haven’t lived elsewhere. It does get worse, much worse.

I fully contend that the motivation for those immigrants who stay in the U.S. is the promise that either they or their children will eventually become American. Could we expect the same drive, record of achievement and economic vitality brought by immigrants if we were to take away this specific, vital hope?