For Ray Suarez, “home” is one of the most evocative words in the English language. It resonates with everyone, connecting to our sense of belonging and identity.
But the term, and what it represents, also raises important questions about ourselves, our surroundings and our neighbors.
Suarez, a seasoned journalist and academic, has worked as a chief national correspondent for PBS NewsHour, as the host of NPR’s Talk of the Nation and as a reporter in places as far away as London and Rome. More recently, he has served as a guest lecturer at New York University’s campus in Shanghai.
It was in China where Suarez focused his writing on the meaning of home.
A world traveler and, like many Americans, the child of immigrants, Suarez decided to explore the concept of home among immigrants in the United States. Are they at home? Is this their home? Do they consider it their home?
The answers, he said, are in the 300 pages of his new book, We Are Home: Becoming American in the 21st Century: An Oral History, for which he interviewed dozens of immigrants and their children. The book also examines how immigration laws, politics and social perspectives have changed — or remained the same — over time in the United States.
“Though some of the subject matter is grim, it is also funny. And while it’s sentimental, it’s absolutely rigorous and clear-eyed about the future of the country,” Suarez told Capital & Main as he reflected on the complexity of the relationship between immigrants and their new homeland, as well as the adversities and joys they encounter along the way.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Capital & Main: The title of your book is, in a way, self-explanatory. But how can immigrants turn this country into their home considering all the difficulties and inequalities they face, and the high price they pay in exchange for the American dream?
Ray Suarez: It becomes home because it sort of becomes part of who you think you are, how you dream and what you hope to accomplish in life. Then, you have neighbors, you have love relationships, and the place becomes home, sometimes in isolation to politics, or in isolation to economics. One of the reasons why I spoke to so many people from so many different places is because I wanted to give people who live in America, maybe somewhere they don’t know a lot of immigrants, a flavor for the sometimes accidental, sometimes intentional way that people end up being Americans.
I hear anti-immigrant people talking about immigrants and trying to make them fit into all one thing, like some kind of an ungrateful, transactional group of people who just arrive for one reason and stay for one reason. Not at all. This is a much more textured story. People arrive for all kinds of reasons, and America penetrates their hard shell in all kinds of ways. The stories are varied; the reasons have varied.
“This question about whether taking in a lot of immigrants will water down, erode or damage the American culture, that’s a hundred years old. There’s nothing new about it.”
You address a conundrum immigrants or their children face: the feeling that you are not from here, this country, nor from there, your origins. “Ni de aquí, ni de allá,” as we say in Spanish. Yet at the same time, you may also feel from here and also from there. Is this sentiment part of becoming an American or a result of the divisions created by Americans?
One of the most common things shared by many of the people who told me their stories of coming to America was that the longer they’re in America, the more they realize they don’t belong there anymore. It may be sentimental, with memories of that place that gave them their lives, but they don’t feel like they belong there anymore. Their lives really are back in America. And in many cases, it comes as a shock to them because home, as in the place where you were born or the place where you grew up, is always special, even if you were very poor, even if those times back in your home country were very hard. You put it in a special place in your head.
I think that’s part of the transformative nature of living in the United States, or moving anywhere. I have lived in a couple of foreign countries, and in some cases I knew that I was going to be just sojourning there. I have affection for the places, but I didn’t long for them. I didn’t become part of them just because it wasn’t long enough, and I recognized what was different about that experience. But with immigration, it’s a different animal. For whatever reason, you end up in another place; whether you’re just striving to do better or to save your life, the place where you end up takes on a different role in your life.
In some cases, the mentality against immigrants has changed, and so have the laws. But the perception of immigrants as a threat prevails, even as we have a much larger percentage of the U.S. population who are foreign born or first generation. What does this mean in our current political context?
When President Trump keeps referring to immigrants as sources of crime and disease, it may seem new to the people at his rally who cheer and are happy to hear him talk about mass deportations. But immigrants seen as vectors for crime and disease appeared in newspapers in big American cities in the 1880s, 1890s and the early 20th century. There’s nothing new.
This question about whether taking in a lot of immigrants will water down, erode or damage the American culture, that’s a hundred years old. There’s nothing new about it. It’s like a disease that we think we’ve fought, but all we’ve done is tamp it down so it’s a low-grade fever, and then it bursts into a new illness.
It’s the idea of immigrants bringing with them the problems of society, rather than thinking of our society as being a place with problems. Immigrants suffer just as native-born people do. It’s just such an old American tendency. So in some ways, we’re repeating the mistakes of the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s. And in some ways, we’re putting a new twist on it.
So on one level, yes, in the stories inside the book, we come back to this theme that Americans always seem to revert to these old tropes in our way of understanding what it means to have a lot of new people in our midst. And to be sure, we’re back up to a level of foreign birth that the country hasn’t experienced since the 1910 census. But 110 years ago, those people and their children became central pillars of American culture: Babe Ruth, Irving Berlin, the Marx Brothers … all these people were children of immigrants, while nativists were saying disease, disorder, chaos, and foreign ideas and religions were polluting our culture. But then those people became the culture. And we’ll see that again in the 2030s and the 2040s.
“The internet … allows white nationalists, Christian nationalists and white supremacists to find each other with an efficiency that a Ku Klux Klan leader in the 1920s or ’30s would have been very jealous of.”
And yet, to quote your book, “Change and adaptation are demanded as a price of staying alive” as an immigrant. In the 21st century United States, is it still important for immigrants to be “whitewashed” to fulfill certain expectations?
I think there’s a convergence. There’s both the demand from people who were already here that people coming in should tamp it down a little bit and act more like us in public, in social display or in the way you keep your house in a neighborhood. And also there’s an impulse from the people who are coming in not to stick out too much, to fit in, and to maintain their family culture and their national culture inside their house.
I think the two sides are just a natural part of the process. Yes, it can be oppressive. It can be condescending. It can be paternalistic. It can be a power play as already established populations try to muscle new people into being something that they’re not naturally inclined to be.
You know, everybody gives a little and changes a little, and we don’t give enough credit, I think, to the desire for new arrivals to dress like Americans, to listen to the same music as Americans, to try pizza and hamburgers and try to fit in to the culture to the degree possible. They want to try America on like a new suit of clothes. And that’s been true for as long as people have been coming here from someplace else.
As a journalist, you are aware of all the changes we have been facing regarding information, misinformation, the so-called “fake news” and the reinterpretation of facts based on personal systems of belief. What impact does that information and misinformation have on immigrant and refugee populations and their adaptation?
Modern technology and the internet supercharges the ability of extremists and the most hostile anti-immigrant forces to organize to get their messages out.
The great replacement theory has circulated widely in dark corners of the internet. It allows white nationalists, Christian nationalists and white supremacists to find each other with an efficiency that a Ku Klux Klan leader in the 1920s or ’30s would have been very jealous of.
But the internet also allows scattered communities, linguistic communities or cultural communities to still be in contact with each other in a way that would have been difficult when Norwegians were coming in the late 19th century.
So, technology has done two totally contradictory things: It’s empowered and strengthened the haters, and it’s empowered and strengthened the immigrant communities at the same time.
What do you think is the role labor unions should pursue in the immigration debate, particularly given the current economic situation in the United States?
You know, craft unions were not good to non-white immigrants for a long time. So, there are some union histories that are not histories of outreach, as they sort of shut their doors and tried to keep themselves white for a long time.
I think the modern union movement has realized it’s a vital part of keeping organized labor alive in the 21st century, also with new groups like the home health care workers. And they are using some of the approaches that organized labor used in their early days to create national associations and try to build a floor underneath the feet of workers who are among the lowest paid in American society.
We’re seeing the logic and the actuality of labor organizing inspiring and empowering their movements. Talk to immigrant laborers, people who are cleaning office buildings at night or working as janitors in big American cities, and you’ll find they are real believers in the union, and they are in many cases leading to this new prominence.
So, organized labor is speaking back, and in many cases, the leadership, and certainly the rank and file, are foreign-born and, in many unions, an integral part of the resurgence in organizing.
“Comprehensive immigration reform, in political terms, is just a pipe dream.”
In your book, you recall this old short film from World War II featuring Frank Sinatra. The movie’s point is that being American, or being patriotic, is about embracing immigrants while tolerating their different beliefs. “We are not like the Nazis” is pretty much the plotline. But how can we teach a new generation of Americans this approach when the Nazis are not the enemy anymore?
Well, I hope we don’t have to go to war. I hope we can figure it out within ourselves.
The laws change from time to time, and to be honest, they don’t always work as promised for everybody. I think we are seeing, right now, new versions of patriotism being written. I understand the discouragement that a lot of people feel when America doesn’t live up to its ideals. And in the last two chapters of my book, I set out the gap between the real and the ideal, where I suggest to the reader that as long as you’re not deceived about it, as long as you realize that there is a gap between the real and the ideal, it is a noble thing trying to bring those two closer together.
I think it’s fine to be patriotic and to be open about recognizing the places we fall short but also to recognize that there’s something good about the aspiration of that ideal.
Kamala Harris is birthright citizenship in the flesh, and right now she has a plausible path to the Oval Office. That should make Americans say, “All right, look — historically, we haven’t always acted the way we said we’re going to act. Historically, we haven’t always done the things we promised to do. But we always think it’s a worthwhile national project to be moving in the right direction.” And the fact that Kamala Harris can be a nominee for president is an embodiment of that obligation to move the real closer to the ideal.
And immigrants remind us of that every day.
Through your book, you follow the path of many immigrants as they become part of the American fabric. And I would say you also follow their paper trail, with all the burdens that the current system brings to them. There are people who couldn’t become citizens because of race-driven restrictions. Others didn’t have the proper qualifications. Others, due to legal barriers, had to stay home for years while their relatives migrated. Or there are also those benefited by DACA who, at the end of the day, have to think twice whether it’s convenient for them to enter the program. We’ve heard for years the need for a new immigration policy to improve the situation. What do you think this reform should look like?
Comprehensive immigration reform, in political terms, is just a pipe dream.
Looking at the close division between Republicans and Democrats in Congress, looking at the landscape as it is, I think a comprehensive immigration reform is a dream, and it’s just not going to happen.
So, we should start breaking our challenges into smaller pieces that can be addressed one by one. In our politics, the gears are so seized up, and the incentive to compromise is so degraded right now, that the big and creative thinking that it would take to pull off one package of legislation is just impossible.
So, we should deal with the long-term undocumented immigrants. The average undocumented person in the United States has lived here for longer than 10 years. We’re talking about parents, workers, homeowners and business owners and taxpayers. We’ve been saying, “Go home, and get in the line.” It’s a dumb answer. There is no line. It takes forever. It’s expensive. It’s byzantine.
Those long-term undocumented people have got to solve their problem. But we also have to address the three-quarters of a million DACA young people and their families. They’re a separate thing. They’ve been paying taxes. They’ve got social security numbers and driver’s licenses. They are not people who have been hiding for 15 years. We know who they are. We’ve got all their details. We’ve got their work histories. We’ve got their cell phone numbers. But we can’t just leave them out there in limbo.
So, pretending that our legislators are going to have the creativity and the guts to solve all their problems all at once in a comprehensive package, it’s just not going to happen. So, I had to come around to the idea that doing it piece by piece is the only way to go. And it also helps build confidence that we can fix it.
America is enriched culturally and materially by immigration. Right now in 2024, too many of us don’t believe it, but it’s the absolute truth, and it’s easy to prove, and more economists are on my side. If we shut the door, it will create a lot of problems because in recent years, native-born people haven’t been having many babies.
And to keep this whole great big machine of a society going, we need workers, we need people pitching in, we need people sharing the burdens. We should see them, just as we should have in 1890, as people who are going to build America.
And they will.
