definition essay what does it mean to be an american

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What does it mean to be an American?

Sarah Song, a Visiting Scholar at the Academy in 2005–2006, is an assistant professor of law and political science at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Justice, Gender, and the Politics of Multiculturalism (2007). She is at work on a book about immigration and citizenship in the United States.

It is often said that being an American means sharing a commitment to a set of values and ideals. 1 Writing about the relationship of ethnicity and American identity, the historian Philip Gleason put it this way:

To be or to become an American, a person did not have to be any particular national, linguistic, religious, or ethnic background. All he had to do was to commit himself to the political ideology centered on the abstract ideals of liberty, equality, and republicanism. Thus the universalist ideological character of American nationality meant that it was open to anyone who willed to become an American. 2

To take the motto of the Great Seal of the United States, E pluribus unum – "From many, one" – in this context suggests not that manyness should be melted down into one, as in Israel Zangwill's image of the melting pot, but that, as the Great Seal's sheaf of arrows suggests, there should be a coexistence of many-in-one under a unified citizenship based on shared ideals.

Of course, the story is not so simple, as Gleason himself went on to note. America's history of racial and ethnic exclusions has undercut the universalist stance; for being an American has also meant sharing a national culture, one largely defined in racial, ethnic, and religious terms. And while solidarity can be understood as "an experience of willed affiliation," some forms of American solidarity have been less inclusive than others, demanding much more than simply the desire to affiliate. 3 In this essay, I explore different ideals of civic solidarity with an eye toward what they imply for newcomers who wish to become American citizens.

Why does civic solidarity matter? First, it is integral to the pursuit of distributive justice. The institutions of the welfare state serve as redistributive mechanisms that can offset the inequalities of life chances that a capitalist economy creates, and they raise the position of the worst-off members of society to a level where they are able to participate as equal citizens. While self-interest alone may motivate people to support social insurance schemes that protect them against unpredictable circumstances, solidarity is understood to be required to support redistribution from the rich to aid the poor, including housing subsidies, income supplements, and long-term unemployment benefits. 4 The underlying idea is that people are more likely to support redistributive schemes when they trust one another, and they are more likely to trust one another when they regard others as like themselves in some meaningful sense.

Second, genuine democracy demands solidarity. If democratic activity involves not just voting, but also deliberation, then people must make an effort to listen to and understand one another. Moreover, they must be willing to moderate their claims in the hope of finding common ground on which to base political decisions. Such democratic activity cannot be realized by individuals pursuing their own interests; it requires some concern for the common good. A sense of solidarity can help foster mutual sympathy and respect, which in turn support citizens' orientation toward the common good.

Third, civic solidarity offers more inclusive alternatives to chauvinist models that often prevail in political life around the world. For example, the alternative to the Nehru-Gandhi secular definition of Indian national identity is the Hindu chauvinism of the Bharatiya Janata Party, not a cosmopolitan model of belonging. "And what in the end can defeat this chauvinism," asks Charles Taylor, "but some reinvention of India as a secular republic with which people can identify?" 5 It is not enough to articulate accounts of solidarity and belonging only at the subnational or transnational levels while ignoring senses of belonging to the political community. One might believe that people have a deep need for belonging in communities, perhaps grounded in even deeper human needs for recognition and freedom, but even those skeptical of such claims might recognize the importance of articulating more inclusive models of political community as an alternative to the racial, ethnic, or religious narratives that have permeated political life. 6  The challenge, then, is to develop a model of civic solidarity that is "thick" enough to motivate support for justice and democracy while also "thin" enough to accommodate racial, ethnic, and religious diversity.

We might look first to Habermas's idea of constitutional patriotism (Verfassungspatriotismus). The idea emerged from a particular national history, to denote attachment to the liberal democratic institutions of the postwar Federal Republic of Germany, but Habermas and others have taken it to be a generalizable vision for liberal democratic societies, as well as for supranational communities such as the European Union. On this view, what binds citizens together is their common allegiance to the ideals embodied in a shared political culture. The only "common denominator for a constitutional patriotism" is that "every citizen be socialized into a common political culture." 7

Habermas points to the United States as a leading example of a multicultural society where constitutional principles have taken root in a political culture without depending on "all citizens' sharing the same language or the same ethnic and cultural origins." 8  The basis of American solidarity is not any particular racial or ethnic identity or religious beliefs, but universal moral ideals embodied in American political culture and set forth in such seminal texts as the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. Based on a minimal commonality of shared ideals, constitutional patriotism is attractive for the agnosticism toward particular moral and religious outlooks and ethnocultural identities to which it aspires.

What does constitutional patriotism suggest for the sort of reception immigrants should receive? There has been a general shift in Western Europe and North America in the standards governing access to citizenship from cultural markers to values, and this is a development that constitutional patriots would applaud. In the United States those seeking to become citizens must demonstrate basic knowledge of U.S. government and history. A newly revised U.S. citizenship test was instituted in October 2008 with the hope that it will serve, in the words of the chief of the Office of Citizenship, Alfonso Aguilar, as "an instrument to promote civic learning and patriotism." 9 The revised test attempts to move away from civics trivia to emphasize political ideas and concepts. (There is still a fair amount of trivia: "How many amendments does the Constitution have?" "What is the capital of your state?") The new test asks more open-ended questions about government powers and political concepts: "What does the judicial branch do?" "What stops one branch of government from becoming too powerful?" "What is freedom of religion?" "What is the 'rule of law'?" 10

Constitutional patriots would endorse this focus on values and principles. In Habermas's view, legal principles are anchored in the "political culture," which he suggests is separable from "ethical-cultural" forms of life. Acknowledging that in many countries the "ethical-cultural" form of life of the majority is "fused" with the "political culture," he argues that the "level of the shared political culture must be uncoupled from the level of subcultures and their prepolitical identities." 11  All that should be expected of immigrants is that they embrace the constitutional principles as interpreted by the political culture, not that they necessarily embrace the majority's ethical-cultural forms.

Yet language is a key aspect of "ethical-cultural" forms of life, shaping people's worldviews and experiences. It is through language that individuals become who they are. Since a political community must conduct its affairs in at least one language, the ethical-cultural and political cannot be completely "uncoupled." As theorists of multiculturalism have stressed, complete separation of state and particularistic identities is impossible; government decisions about the language of public institutions, public holidays, and state symbols unavoidably involve recognizing and supporting particular ethnic and religious groups over others. 12 In the United States, English language ability has been a statutory qualification for naturalization since 1906, originally as a requirement of oral ability and later as a requirement of English literacy. Indeed, support for the principles of the Constitution has been interpreted as requiring English literacy. 13 The language requirement might be justified as a practical matter (we need some language to be the common language of schools, government, and the workplace, so why not the language of the majority?), but for a great many citizens, the language requirement is also viewed as a key marker of national identity. The continuing centrality of language in naturalization policy prevents us from saying that what it means to be an American is purely a matter of shared values.

Another misconception about constitutional patriotism is that it is necessarily more inclusive of newcomers than cultural nationalist models of solidarity. Its inclusiveness depends on which principles are held up as the polity's shared principles, and its normative substance depends on and must be evaluated in light of a background theory of justice, freedom, or democracy; it does not by itself provide such a theory. Consider ideological requirements for naturalization in U.S. history. The first naturalization law of 1790 required nothing more than an oath to support the U.S. Constitution. The second naturalization act added two ideological elements: the renunciation of titles or orders of nobility and the requirement that one be found to have "behaved as a man . . . attached to the principles of the constitution of the United States." 14  This attachment requirement was revised in 1940 from a behavioral qualification to a personal attribute, but this did not help clarify what attachment to constitutional principles requires. 15 Not surprisingly, the "attachment to constitutional principles" requirement has been interpreted as requiring a belief in representative government, federalism, separation of powers, and constitutionally guaranteed individual rights. It has also been interpreted as disqualifying anarchists, polygamists, and conscientious objectors for citizenship. In 1950, support for communism was added to the list of grounds for disqualification from naturalization – as well as grounds for exclusion and deportation. 16 The 1990 Immigration Act retained the McCarthy-era ideological qualifications for naturalization; current law disqualifies those who advocate or affiliate with an organization that advocates communism or opposition to all organized government. 17 Patriotism, like nationalism, is capable of excess and pathology, as evidenced by loyalty oaths and campaigns against "un-American" activities.

In contrast to constitutional patriots, liberal nationalists acknowledge that states cannot be culturally neutral even if they tried. States cannot avoid coercing citizens into preserving a national culture of some kind because state institutions and laws define a political culture, which in turn shapes the range of customs and practices of daily life that constitute a national culture. David Miller, a leading theorist of liberal nationalism, defines national identity according to the following elements: a shared belief among a group of individuals that they belong together, historical continuity stretching across generations, connection to a particular territory, and a shared set of characteristics constituting a national culture. 18  It is not enough to share a common identity rooted in a shared history or a shared territory; a shared national culture is a necessary feature of national identity. I share a national culture with someone, even if we never meet, if each of us has been initiated into the traditions and customs of a national culture.

What sort of content makes up a national culture? Miller says more about what a national culture does not entail. It need not be based on biological descent. Even if nationalist doctrines have historically been based on notions of biological descent and race, Miller emphasizes that sharing a national culture is, in principle, compatible with people belonging to a diversity of racial and ethnic groups. In addition, every member need not have been born in the homeland. Thus, "immigration need not pose problems, provided only that the immigrants come to share a common national identity, to which they may contribute their own distinctive ingredients." 19

Liberal nationalists focus on the idea of culture, as opposed to ethnicity or descent, in order to reconcile nationalism with liberalism. Thicker than constitutional patriotism, liberal nationalism, Miller maintains, is thinner than ethnic models of belonging. Both nationality and ethnicity have cultural components, but what is said to distinguish "civic" nations from "ethnic" nations is that the latter are exclusionary and closed on grounds of biological descent; the former are, in principle, open to anyone willing to adopt the national culture. 20

Yet the civic-ethnic distinction is not so clear-cut in practice. Every nation has an "ethnic core." As Anthony Smith observes

[M]odern "civic" nations have not in practice really transcended ethnicity or ethnic sentiments. This is a Western mirage, reality-as-wish; closer examination always reveals the ethnic core of civic nations, in practice, even in immigrant societies with their early pioneering and dominant (English and Spanish) culture in America, Australia, or Argentina, a culture that provided the myths and language of the would-be nation. 21

This blurring of the civic-ethnic distinction is reflected throughout U.S. history with the national culture often defined in ethnic, racial, and religious terms. 22

Why, then, if all national cultures have ethnic cores, should those outside this core embrace the national culture? Miller acknowledges that national cultures have typically been formed around the ethnic group that is dominant in a particular territory and therefore bear "the hallmarks of that group: language, religion, cultural identity." Muslim identity in contemporary Britain becomes politicized when British national identity is conceived as containing "an Anglo-Saxon bias which discriminates against Muslims (and other ethnic minorities)." But he maintains that his idea of nationality can be made "democratic in so far as it insists that everyone should take part in this debate [about what constitutes the national identity] on an equal footing, and sees the formal arenas of politics as the main (though not the only) place where the debate occurs." 23

The major difficulty here is that national cultures are not typically the product of collective deliberation in which all have the opportunity to participate. The challenge is to ensure that historically marginalized groups, as well as new groups of immigrants, have genuine opportunities to contribute "on an equal footing" to shaping the national culture. Without such opportunities, liberal nationalism collapses into conservative nationalism of the kind defended by Samuel Huntington. He calls for immigrants to assimilate into America's "Anglo- Protestant culture." Like Miller, Huntington views ideology as "a weak glue to hold together people otherwise lacking in racial, ethnic, or cultural sources of community," and he rejects race and ethnicity as constituent elements of national identity. 24 Instead, he calls on Americans of all races and ethnicities to "reinvigorate their core culture." Yet his "cultural" vision of America is pervaded by ethnic and religious elements: it is not only of a country "committed to the principles of the Creed," but also of "a deeply religious and primarily Christian country, encompassing several religious minorities, adhering to Anglo- Protestant values, speaking English, maintaining its European cultural heritage." 25 That the cultural core of the United States is the culture of its historically dominant groups is a point that Huntington unabashedly accepts.

Cultural nationalist visions of solidarity would lend support to immigration and immigrant policies that give weight to linguistic and ethnic preferences and impose special requirements on individuals from groups deemed to be outside the nation's "core culture." One example is the practice in postwar Germany of giving priority in immigration and naturalization policy to ethnic Germans; they were the only foreign nationals who were accepted as permanent residents set on the path toward citizenship. They were treated not as immigrants but "resettlers" (Aussiedler) who acted on their constitutional right to return to their country of origin. In contrast, non-ethnically German guestworkers (Gastarbeiter) were designated as "aliens" (Auslander) under the 1965 German Alien Law and excluded from German citizenship. 26 Another example is the Japanese naturalization policy that, until the late 1980s, required naturalized citizens to adopt a Japanese family name. The language requirement in contemporary naturalization policies in the West is the leading remaining example of a cultural nationalist integration policy; it reflects not only a concern with the economic and political integration of immigrants but also a nationalist concern with preserving a distinctive national culture.

Constitutional patriotism and liberal nationalism are accounts of civic solidarity that deal with what one might call first-level diversity. Individuals have different group identities and hold divergent moral and religious outlooks, yet they are expected to share the same idea of what it means to be American: either patriots committed to the same set of ideals or co-nationals sharing the relevant cultural attributes. Charles Taylor suggests an alternative approach, the idea of "deep diversity." Rather than trying to fix some minimal content as the basis of solidarity, Taylor acknowledges not only the fact of a diversity of group identities and outlooks (first-level diversity), but also the fact of a diversity of ways of belonging to the political community (second-level or deep diversity). Taylor introduces the idea of deep diversity in the context of discussing what it means to be Canadian:

Someone of, say, Italian extraction in Toronto or Ukrainian extraction in Edmonton might indeed feel Canadian as a bearer of individual rights in a multicultural mosaic. . . . But this person might nevertheless accept that a Québécois or a Cree or a Déné might belong in a very different way, that these persons were Canadian through being members of their national communities. Reciprocally, the Québécois, Cree, or Déné would accept the perfect legitimacy of the "mosaic" identity.

Civic solidarity or political identity is not "defined according to a concrete content," but, rather, "by the fact that everybody is attached to that identity in his or her own fashion, that everybody wants to continue that history and proposes to make that community progress." 27 What leads people to support second-level diversity is both the desire to be a member of the political community and the recognition of disagreement about what it means to be a member. In our world, membership in a political community provides goods we cannot do without; this, above all, may be the source of our desire for political community.

Even though Taylor contrasts Canada with the United States, accepting the myth of America as a nation of immigrants, the United States also has a need for acknowledgment of diverse modes of belonging based on the distinctive histories of different groups. Native Americans, African Americans, Irish Americans, Vietnamese Americans, and Mexican Americans: across these communities of people, we can find not only distinctive group identities, but also distinctive ways of belonging to the political community.

Deep diversity is not a recapitulation of the idea of cultural pluralism first developed in the United States by Horace Kallen, who argued for assimilation "in matters economic and political" and preservation of differences "in cultural consciousness." 28  In Kallen's view, hyphenated Americans lived their spiritual lives in private, on the left side of the hyphen, while being culturally anonymous on the right side of the hyphen. The ethnic-political distinction maps onto a private-public dichotomy; the two spheres are to be kept separate, such that Irish Americans, for example, are culturally Irish and politically American. In contrast, the idea of deep diversity recognizes that Irish Americans are culturally Irish American and politically Irish American. As Michael Walzer put it in his discussion of American identity almost twenty years ago, the culture of hyphenated Americans has been shaped by American culture, and their politics is significantly ethnic in style and substance. 29  The idea of deep or second-level diversity is not just about immigrant ethnics, which is the focus of both Kallen's and Walzer's analyses, but also racial minorities, who, based on their distinctive experiences of exclusion and struggles toward inclusion, have distinctive ways of belonging to America.

While attractive for its inclusiveness, the deep diversity model may be too thin a basis for civic solidarity in a democratic society. Can there be civic solidarity without citizens already sharing a set of values or a culture in the first place? In writing elsewhere about how different groups within democracy might "share identity space," Taylor himself suggests that the "basic principles of republican constitutions – democracy itself and human rights, among them" constitute a "non-negotiable" minimum. Yet, what distinguishes Taylor's deep diversity model of solidarity from Habermas's constitutional patriotism is the recognition that "historic identities cannot be just abstracted from." The minimal commonality of shared principles is "accompanied by a recognition that these principles can be realized in a number of different ways, and can never be applied neutrally without some confronting of the substantive religious ethnic-cultural differences in societies." 30 And in contrast to liberal nationalism, deep diversity does not aim at specifying a common national culture that must be shared by all. What matters is not so much the content of solidarity, but the ethos generated by making the effort at mutual understanding and respect.

Canada's approach to the integration of immigrants may be the closest thing there is to "deep diversity." Canadian naturalization policy is not so different from that of the United States: a short required residency period, relatively low application fees, a test of history and civics knowledge, and a language exam. 31 Where the United States and Canada diverge is in their public commitment to diversity. Through its official multiculturalism policies, Canada expresses a commitment to the value of diversity among immigrant communities through funding for ethnic associations and supporting heritage language schools. 32 Constitutional patriots and liberal nationalists say that immigrant integration should be a two-way process, that immigrants should shape the host society's dominant culture just as they are shaped by it. Multicultural accommodations actually provide the conditions under which immigrant integration might genuinely become a two-way process. Such policies send a strong message that immigrants are a welcome part of the political community and should play an active role in shaping its future evolution.

The question of solidarity may not be the most urgent task Americans face today; war and economic crisis loom larger. But the question of solidarity remains important in the face of ongoing large-scale immigration and its effects on intergroup relations, which in turn affect our ability to deal with issues of economic inequality and democracy. I hope to have shown that patriotism is not easily separated from nationalism, that nationalism needs to be evaluated in light of shared principles, and that respect for deep diversity presupposes a commitment to some shared values, including perhaps diversity itself. Rather than viewing the three models of civic solidarity I have discussed as mutually exclusive – as the proponents of each sometimes seem to suggest – we should think about how they might be made to work together with each model tempering the excesses of the others.

What is now formally required of immigrants seeking to become American citizens most clearly reflects the first two models of solidarity: professed allegiance to the principles of the Constitution (constitutional patriotism) and adoption of a shared culture by demonstrating the ability to read, write, and speak English (liberal nationalism). The revised citizenship test makes gestures toward respect for first-level diversity and inclusion of historically marginalized groups with questions such as, "Who lived in America before the Europeans arrived?" "What group of people was taken to America and sold as slaves?" "What did Susan B. Anthony do?" "What did Martin Luther King, Jr. do?" The election of the first African American president of the United States is a significant step forward. A more inclusive American solidarity requires the recognition not only of the fact that Americans are a diverse people, but also that they have distinctive ways of belonging to America.

• 1 For comments on earlier versions of this essay, I am grateful to participants in the Kadish Center Workshop on Law, Philosophy, and Political Theory at Berkeley Law School; the Penn Program on Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism; and the UCLA Legal Theory Workshop. I am especially grateful to Christopher Kutz, Sarah Paoletti, Eric Rakowski, Samuel Scheffler, Seana Shiffrin, and Rogers Smith.
• 2 Philip Gleason, "American Identity and Americanization," in Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups , ed. Stephan Thernstrom (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1980), 31–32, 56–57.
• 3 David Hollinger, "From Identity to Solidarity," Dædalus 135 (4) (Fall 2006): 24.
• 4 David Miller, "Multiculturalism and the Welfare State: Theoretical Reflections," in Multiculturalism and the Welfare State: Recognition and Redistribution in Contemporary Democracies , ed. Keith Banting and Will Kymlicka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 328, 334.
• 5 Charles Taylor, "Why Democracy Needs Patriotism," in For Love of Country? ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 121.
• 6 On the purpose and varieties of narratives of collective identity and membership that have been and should be articulated not only for subnational and transnational, but also for national communities, see Rogers M. Smith, Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
• 7 Jürgen Habermas, "Citizenship and National Identity," in Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy , trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 1996), 500.
• 9 Edward Rothstein, "Connections: Refining the Tests That Confer Citizenship," The New York Times , January 23, 2006.
• 10 See http://www.uscis.gov/files/nativedocuments/100q.pdf (accessed November 28, 2008).
• 11 Habermas, "The European Nation-State," in Between Facts and Norms , trans. Rehg, 118.
• 12 Charles Taylor, "The Politics of Recognition," in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition , ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
• 13 8 U.S.C., section 1423 (1988); In re Katz , 21 F.2d 867 (E.D. Mich. 1927) (attachment to principles of Constitution implies English literacy requirement).
• 14 Act of Mar. 26, 1790, ch. 3, 1 Stat., 103 and Act of Jan. 29, 1795, ch. 20, section 1, 1 Stat., 414. See James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship , 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 239–243. James Madison opposed the second requirement: "It was hard to make a man swear that he preferred the Constitution of the United States, or to give any general opinion, because he may, in his own private judgment, think Monarchy or Aristocracy better, and yet be honestly determined to support his Government as he finds it"; Annals of Cong. 1, 1022–1023.
• 15 8 U.S.C., section 1427(a)(3). See also Schneiderman v. United States , 320 U.S. 118, 133 n.12 (1943), which notes the change from behaving as a person attached to constitutional principles to being a person attached to constitutional principles.
• 16 Internal Security Act of 1950, ch. 1024, sections 22, 25, 64 Stat. 987, 1006–1010, 1013–1015. The Internal Security Act provisions were included in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, ch. 477, sections 212(a)(28), 241(a)(6), 313, 66 Stat. 163, 184–186, 205–206, 240–241.
• 17 Gerald L. Neuman, "Justifying U.S. Naturalization Policies," Virginia Journal of International Law 35 (1994): 255.
• 18 David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 25.
• 19 Ibid., 25–26.
• 20 On the civic-ethnic distinction, see W. Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); David Hollinger, Post-Ethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995); Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
• 21 Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 216.
• 22 See Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
• 23 Miller, On Nationality , 122–123, 153–154.
• 24 Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 12. In his earlier book, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1981), Huntington defended a "civic" view of American identity based on the "political ideas of the American creed," which include liberty, equality, democracy, individualism, and private property (46). His change in view seems to have been motivated in part by his belief that principles and ideology are too weak to unite a political community, and also by his fears about immigrants maintaining transnational identities and loyalties – in particular, Mexican immigrants whom he sees as creating bilingual, bicultural, and potentially separatist regions; Who Are We? 205.
• 25 Huntington, Who Are We? 31, 20.
• 26 Christian Joppke, "The Evolution of Alien Rights in the United States, Germany, and the European Union," Citizenship Today: Global Perspectives and Practices , ed. T. Alexander Aleinikoff and Douglas Klusmeyer (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2001), 44. In 2000, the German government moved from a strictly jus sanguinis rule toward one that combines jus sanguinis and jus soli , which opens up access to citizenship to non-ethnically German migrants, including Turkish migrant workers and their descendants. A minimum length of residency of eight (down from ten) years is also required, and dual citizenship is not formally recognized. While more inclusive than before, German citizenship laws remain the least inclusive among Western European and North American countries, with inclusiveness measured by the following criteria: whether citizenship is granted by jus soli (whether children of non-citizens who are born in a country's territory can acquire citizenship), the length of residency required for naturalization, and whether naturalized immigrants are permitted to hold dual citizenship. See Marc Morjé Howard, "Comparative Citizenship: An Agenda for Cross-National Research," Perspectives on Politics 4 (2006): 443–455.
• 27 Charles Taylor, "Shared and Divergent Values," in Reconciling the Solitudes: Essays on Canadian Federalism and Nationalism , ed. Guy Laforest (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993), 183, 130.
• 28 Horace M. Kallen, Culture and Democracy in the United States (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1924), 114–115.
• 29 Michael Walzer, "What Does It Mean to Be an 'American'?" (1974); reprinted in What It Means to Be an American: Essays on the American Experience (New York: Marsilio, 1990), 46.
• 30 Charles Taylor, "Democratic Exclusion (and Its Remedies?)," in Multiculturalism, Liberalism, and Democracy , ed. Rajeev Bhargava et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 163.
• 31 The differences in naturalization policy are a slightly longer residency requirement in the United States (five years in contrast to Canada's three) and Canada's official acceptance of dual citizenship.
• 32 See Irene Bloemraad, Becoming a Citizen: Incorporating Immigrants and Refugees in the United States and Canada (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

What Does it Mean to be an American? Reexamining the Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship

Immigration

What does it mean to be an american today smithsonian institution secretary david j. skorton leads a vibrant conversation about the role immigrants play in our nation's economy, politics, and culture., what does it mean to be an american today, read the full transcript from the latest second opinion roundtable.

Dr. David J. Skorton : Hello and welcome to Smithsonian’s Second Opinion, where we convene conversations of importance to the country. I’m David Skorton, Secretary of the Smithsonian.

One of the defining metaphors of the United States has been that our country is a “melting pot” of immigrants from around the globe. But this powerful ideal also coexists alongside an anti-immigration sentiment that has persisted throughout our nation’s history.

Many new populations have come to America over the centuries: Some came in pursuit of a more prosperous life; some came in search of protection from religious, ethnic, or political persecution. Others were brought across the Atlantic against their will. And some Americans’ ancestors were here long before the first Europeans arrived.

In spite of these differences in origin, we all grapple with the concept of what being a “nation of immigrants” entails, as each incoming community has contributed its respective heritage and culture to American society. And we celebrate that diversity today in our foods, our arts, our sciences, our entrepreneurship, our politics, and our faiths. But we also cherish the notion of a shared American identity that transcends our individual differences.

Sometime people see these two different perspectives as a source of friction -- but others see these as the core of America’s great strength.

In this edition of “Second Opinion” we will discuss the role that immigrants play in 21st century America. How do our country’s immigrants contribute to the nation as a whole today? What may be different in these times versus the past? What is gained and what is lost when immigrants come to America and when they shed their heritage and become “American”?

Ultimately, we are grappling with the question of what it means to be an American in the 21st century.

Today I'm thrilled to be joined by a terrific panel of people who bring a lot of expertise, experience, and insights to the question of what it means to be an American. I'm going to introduce them to you starting from my left to your right, beginning with Jeremy Robbins. Jeremy is the executive director of the New American Economy, a bipartisan coalition of more than 500 CEOs and mayors, making the economic case for immigration reform. Jeremy previously worked as a policy advisor and special counsel in the office of New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, a judicial law clerk to the honorable Robert Sack of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, a Robert L. Bernstein international human rights fellow working on prisoners’ rights issues in Argentina, and a litigation associate at WilmerHale in Boston.

To Jeremy's right is Ana Rosa Quintana. Ana is a policy analyst for Latin America and the Western Hemisphere at the Heritage Foundation. She leads the foundation’s efforts in U.S. policy toward Latin America. The portfolio concentrates largely on Central America, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Venezuela. She has authored numerous policy studies and in addition to writing policy papers Quintana's articles have appeared in Fox News, Real Clear World , The National Interest , and The Federalist . Her work has been cited in the Wall Street Journal , The Washington Post , Bloomberg Business , The Guardian , and Deutsche Welle .

To my immediate right is Ali Noorani. Ali is the executive director of the National Immigration Forum, an advocacy organization promoting the value of immigrants and immigration. Growing up in California as the son of Pakistani immigrants, Ali quickly learned how to forge alliances among diverse people, a skill that has served him well in a career of innovative coalition building. Prior to joining the Forum, Ali was executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition and he has served in leadership roles within public health and environmental organizations.

And finally, to Ali's right is Beth Werlin. Beth is the executive director of the American Immigration Council, a D.C. based nonprofit that promotes laws, policies and attitudes that honor our history as a nation of immigrants. Beth leads the council’s efforts to ensure that everyone has a fair opportunity to present their immigration claims, that the doors remain open to those seeking safety and protection in the U.S., and that our laws and policies reflect immigrants’ economic contributions through their skills, talents and innovation.

Welcome to my panelists, it's really great to be together today. We all very much appreciate all the work that you've done and all the insights that you're about to share. I'd like to kick us off with a general question, and that is, at its root the question really before us today is what does it mean to be American? I'd love to hear your views on that. Anybody want to jump in on this one to start?

Jeremy Robbins: Well I'm happy to. I'll jump on something that Ali says all the time which is great and incredibly on point which is that whenever he talks about this issue, and I think he does it very smartly, he'll say that immigration isn't so much about politics, it's about culture. That's absolutely right. What it means to be American and what it means to be an immigrant in America is different for a lot of different people. There are two strains running through America right now, one is what it means to be America, it's about an idea. The idea of equality of opportunity or equality general, this is a country that welcomes people. Then there's another, it's a lot about history. It's more backward looking to who America was or where America was. I think some of that is situational, about what they identify in their own life, but also about what they look at towards their future. For a lot of Americans now who look ahead and see a darker future than their parents did, there's a reason a lot of people are gravitating towards that second rather than that first view of what this means.

What it means to be American and what it means to be an immigrant in America is different for a lot of different people. — Jeremy Robbins

Dr. Skorton : Thanks Jeremy. Anyone else want to comment on this one?

Beth Werlin: I'll second a lot of what you've said. I think for my family I know they were coming to the United States seeking safety and protection, and for a lot of immigrants today that's still the case. People are looking to the United States as a place where they can express themselves as individuals, where they can do that freely and openly. That's very consistent with dreams about what it means to be an American.

Dr. Skorton : Thank you, Beth. Ali, thoughts?

Ali Noorani : Go on, Ana.

Ana Quintana: I'll jump to piggy back off of what you said, my family also came here to seek safety. My family's originally from Cuba. My mother's family came in '81 with the Mariel boatlifts, and my dad was in the military and left the military, lived in Venezuela for a few years and then came over here. So many people's stories mirror that even now, right? Rather it's escaping a Communist regime to escaping crime and violence in Central America and this economic instability that exists down there. People view America as that beacon of hope and opportunity. Everybody always says I want to move northward because that's where the opportunity exists.

Dr. Skorton : Thank you.

Ali Noorani: I have to say that the way that the country is changing, when you look at the globe there are 65 million people who have been forced to leave their home, at this point you see the fastest growth in the foreign-born population in the southeast of the United States. The cultural and demographic change that we're feeling as a country is very visceral to people. When they look at that and they see on the news every night, or they're just in their Facebook feed and they see this Syrian refugee fleeing violence, their assumption is that Syrian refugee's going to be their next-door neighbor tomorrow. How, as a country, how as political leadership, civic leadership, do we help people navigate that tension? That I feel like is our biggest challenge.

Dr. Skorton: Thank you. My father was born in what is now Belarus, it was Russia in those days. When I was a kid at home and we would talk about America he would use the term, melting pot. When I went to school they used the term, melting pot. It's one of those thing that I grew up with. Well in 2014, the University of California listed the term “melting pot” as a microaggression. How do you interpret the phrase, melting pot? Is it something we should still aspire to or should we stay away from that term?

Ali Noorani: As I've been talking to organizations and people across the country, what I've realized is that folks, they love the José or the Mohammed that they know, but they're worried about and afraid of the José or Mohammed they don't know. The term, whether you call it melting pot, assimilation, or integration ...[Clinton Administration head of Immigration and Naturalization Service] Doris Meissner, in a interview I did with her, gave me the best quote, where she said, to paraphrase, Americans cherish immigration in hindsight, in present day they have real fears and anxieties.

... what I've realized is that folks, they love the José or the Mohammed that they know, but they're worried about and afraid of the José or Mohammed they don't know. — Ali Noorani

Beth Werlin: You know, probably many of you saw new census data that came out very recently showing that the places in the United States where there were the fewest immigrants are actually the places where people are most showing anti-immigrant sentiment. In some ways that's somewhat surprising, you might think that people feeling the immigrants in their community encroaching on their communities, so to say, may be the ones who actually show some anti-immigrant sentiment, but it's the opposite. It goes to what you're saying, it's about knowing these newcomers to our communities and understanding and appreciating the values that they bring.

Ana Quintana: It makes sense that people fear what they don't know. If you've never experienced something you don't want to walk into a room and the lights be off, because you don't know what's there. I guess that kind of makes sense, and kind of going back to the University of California labeling it a microagression ... I mean that is so absurd. I think that a melting pot is something that we want to aspire to. That's the great thing about America, that we're not a balkanized country where everybody's broken up into these different ethnic enclaves. At the end of the day we all are American citizens, regardless if you eat fried pork on Thanksgiving like my family does, we don't eat turkey, I've never eaten turkey on Thanksgiving. That's the most absurd thing. You eat pork, you eat rice and beans.

You still have your American flag, you never have a Cuban flag, because that's just ... You're an American citizen and we all have ... That's kind of like what we share and what binds this country together, and kind of why people are so ... It's easy to assimilate in America.

I think that a melting pot is something that we want to aspire to. That's the great thing about America, that we're not a balkanized country where everybody's broken up into these different ethnic enclaves. — Ana Quintana

Dr. Skorton : I'm going to invite myself to that next time.

Ana Quintana .: Oh you should, there is an absurd amount of food, yes.

Dr. Skorton : It sounds really good.

Ali Noorani : We do a mix of chicken curry and turkey.

Ana Quintana : Yeah.

Dr. Skorton : That's great. Jeremy, any thoughts about this?

Jeremy Robbins: Yeah, I agree very strongly with all of this. The one place I'd push back a little bit, and where we struggle as an amnesty organization is that it's more than just being exposed to people and facts, right? I look at places like Lewiston, Maine, which is a great opportunity but also challenge when you think about the immigrant story, that this is a place in the whitest state in the country and now the oldest state in the country, where it's happening what's happening a lot in America. Just depopulating, industries leaving these towns that are very economically depressed.

In Lewiston, where the industry had gone and the main street was largely shuttered, you had a large influx of Somali refugees. They started coming and then when their families were there, more people started coming because they knew people there and there was a community. You start having race riots. Like you said about Doris, that in the moment immigration looks really tough, but in hindsight it looks good. It looked like it was going to be on that trajectory, right? Because they had all these race riots, the mayor went up on national TV and said, "Stop coming." But people kept coming.

Five, ten years later when you look at main street, it's littered with Somali businesses, and when you walk into the Lewiston Sun Journal , the paper of record, and they have the honor roll on the wall, half the names are Somali. That's the great story. People come. Then that Lewiston went overwhelmingly for Trump because the anti-immigrant message really resonated there.

There was some amazing journalism done by the Associated Press and others and going, "Well what's happening here?" Because you go and you talk to the people there and by and large they can all say, "Yeah, that's right. People came in and our town is economically better for it. There are now businesses on main street that we were struggling now they've come back. Still, if the government, really they're helping all the refugees, why aren't they helping us? Why am I still struggling?"

There’s a lot that goes into that, that's economic, that's race, there's a lot of things playing into it, but it's not just that people came in, there was a rosy future and then it got better. There's still a huge challenge facing Lewiston and the larger segments of our country, especially in the southeast, that are still new gateways and are experiencing this in a really profound way.

Beth Werlin: Jeremy do you see that as different though than the past? We've gone through the cycles over and over again, we've had that happen where, you know, “no Irish need apply.” I think we've seen that with every wave of new immigrants. To me it's the same story that keeps repeating ourselves in the United States.

Jeremy Robbins: I think that's right, and when you look at the dialogue of in each generation, the words are even the same. We haven't even become inventive in the way that we push back on immigrants. I do think that there is a central tension between a part of society that really values pluralism and diversity and thinks that that is a good, and a part of society that is worried that that is taking away from the central tenet of why a melting pot should be a good thing to a lot of Americans because it seems that it is, you are coming here, you're adding to America, but you've got to become American. The idea that you're going to change what it means to be American is threatening to a lot of people.

Ana Quintana: The immigration component in Maine that you speak specifically of, so I travel to Maine quite often, northern Maine, pretty much on the Canadian border, it's where my boyfriend's family is from. I think that one of the reasons why they went to Trump or why this message of this anti-immigrant message, I don't think it's so much just on the immigration component, but it's there's so many other different things that are happening in that main social ecosystem, right? Whether it's economic depression, whether it's the second generation of Mainers who have to leave the state to be able to find any sort of opportunity, the ones who stay there have such an absurdly high drug usage. It's just there's so many things that are happening, I don't necessarily think it's just the Somalis have arrived and people are anti-Somali.

It's there is a lack of economic opportunity, there doesn't seem to be a change in the future. Maine's economic trajectory, particularly in district, it's district two, right? That's on the northern side, is on a downward trajectory. I think that's kind of why it's ... I don't know, I just don't necessarily see it as just the anti-immigrant component though. Certainly not.

Ali Noorani: There’s a deep feeling of loss. Last summer as the presidential campaign was reaching a peak, there was an analysis of the Gallup Survey, which was 95,000 person survey per week. What they found is that your typical Trump voter was economically better off than most Republicans, was protected from trade, lived in a culturally isolated community. The determining factor for them to take their vote was that they felt their child would not do better than them. There's this feeling of loss and you kind of mix all these factors up, Trump was able to tap into that anxiety about the other. The question is again, what do you do about that? How do you help people understand that yes, there are tensions as the country is changing, as communities are changing, but I feel like if we don't understand that core sense of loss, that core feeling of loss, we're just talking about microaggressions.

Ana Quintana: Yeah.

Dr. Skorton: Let's drill down a little, tiny bit more on that. The purpose of these discussions is try to enlarge all of our understanding about these very complex issues. Based on polling, Americans who feel economically vulnerable, as you've mentioned, are more likely to see immigrants as an economic threat. Are they justified in feeling this way or is there data behind that? Are immigrants an economic threat to those who are economically vulnerable?

Jeremy Robbins: Certainly I think the reality is the answer is no, immigration is writ large a very good thing for America, but those gains aren't spread equally. I think that immigrants benefit the economy hugely, but they benefit certain segments of the economy hugely. And there are costs that come with immigrants. There are costs that come with anyone. The benefits will outweigh those costs, but when you have costs that are borne locally and disproportionately on a certain population, but benefits that are borne on a different kind of population, more naturally, I think you're going to have struggles.

The reality is this, if you look at immigrants, they are more likely to be of working age, they tend to have a very different skillset than the American born, right? They're much more likely to lack a high school degree, but also much more likely to have a Ph.D. You think about how you compete in a global economy, you want to have diverse talents, you want to have diverse skills. What's happening, there are things happening in our economy that are really scary, right? There are huge riches going to some but it's not being spread. That's happening all over the developed world. Immigration is actually the one thing that we have that a lot of the other countries don't. One of the failures in this debate is that we've allowed immigration to be seen as part and parcel of globalization and automation, all of these things that are changing the economy, instead of being seen as a potential solution to it.

We want to have the skillset in our population that's going to make us adapt to this changing economy, and part of that is home growing it, having a pipeline for STEM and getting people to go to the right things. Part of it's the fact that when people vote with their feet, they want to come here, and that's by and large great for America. Are some people benefiting from that more than others? Absolutely, but that's not a failure from immigration, that's a failure from immigration policy for not being able to spread the gains. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the last time there was a Senate comprehensive bill, found that it added $900 billion to the economy. Now you can have a lot of different views of how you would spend $900 billion to make Americans better off, but that's a lot of money to spend to make Americans better off.

Immigration is writ large a very good thing for America, but those gains aren't spread equally. — Jeremy Robbins

Dr. Skorton: Listen, I'd like to change gears a little bit and take a step away from present day politics and concerns and look in the rear view mirror a little bit about America. Let me ask you what you think history tells us about how immigrants have integrated themselves into American culture. What were the concerns about immigration at the turn of the 20th century, when my dad came over? 19th century? Have the concerns changed? Are things different now or are we really sort of seeing the same things over and over again? What are your points of view on that?

Ali Noorani: We've done a lot of work, for example, with businesses in terms of thinking about immigrant integration or assimilation into the work site. In 1915, Bethlehem Steel was the first company in the United States to provide English classes to their immigrant workforce. You think of 1915, I'm sorry, that's when everybody did it the right way. What we found is that more and more businesses across the country are taking the same steps. We now have a program that works with over 250 businesses to help their staff become citizens. We just finished a second year of a English language program with Publix, Kroger, and Whole Foods in terms of teaching English skills. What we found is that in the second year, almost 40 percent of individuals who completed the program got a promotion because of improved English language skills. They're happy because they have increased opportunities, their managers are happy because they have a more productive workforce. The integration of the immigrant community into the U.S. is happening in incredibly innovative and interesting ways every day.

Dr. Skorton: Very interesting. Others, your thoughts about whether things are different today or whether we're reliving the same things?

Beth Werlin: In many ways, we continue to relive the same things, but I do think there's something different today too. Our world has changed, technology has changed our world, we're much more, I don't know, interdependent upon activities going on in other countries. I look at that, particularly in how we approach the laws and policies around bringing in entrepreneurs and new business to our country, people have other options now. Companies can move from country to country in ways that they couldn't before. To the extent we were a place that people came to brought ideas, there's other places to bring ideas today too, and that's an important thing to remember. We want to continue to be competitive. We value that diversity of opinion, the innovation that newcomers bring to our country. I don't want to see us lose any of that energy. That's something that in this changing technology-driven world is a potential if we're not on top of it.

Our world has changed, technology has changed our world, we're much more, I don't know, interdependent upon activities going on in other countries. — Beth Werlin

Dr. Skorton: Just to jump on that for a moment, this is really one of the biggest issues that I've thought about, a lot of people are thinking about, is how attractive America still is to people around the world, from higher education to the workforce. Today, in 2017, is there something exceptional about the U.S. that continues to make us a beacon for immigrants?

Jeremy Robbins: I think undoubtedly, yes. If you look at one really good, easy way to look at that would just be through where people go to start businesses, right? In a global world, you can go anywhere you want. One of the things that's really interesting about us and the immigration law is that, and most Americans don't believe this when you tell them, but there's no visa to come here, start a business, and hire American workers, which is crazy thing that no matter where you are in the political spectrum, if someone wants to come here, start a business, and have some money invested, they're going to create jobs, probably that should be something that we want.

Increasingly countries around the world are realizing that and they're starting entrepreneur’s visas in all these countries. Their sell isn't, look how great it is to come to Chile and start a business, or even in Canada, look how great it is in Canada. Their sell essentially, like you can't get to the U.S., so come here. Their underlying assumption of their whole visa program is that this is a way to get people who otherwise would come to the United States because the reality is for now people still do want to come here. It's where the capital is, it's where the market is. Because it's easy to start a business, there's an entrepreneurial culture. I think you see that over and over, but like Beth said, I don't think it's inevitable. We've had that advantage over the rest of the world for 50 to 100 years but the rest of the world's certainly catching up. They're using their immigration laws very much as a sword to do that.

Ali Noorani: I would say that's not only in the job creation or the business creation world, but also in the student visa world. I remember 10, 15 years ago and seeing university start campuses overseas in the Middle East. I remember seeing that, it's like okay, that's a huge change because they're going to where the students are instead of trying to recruit the students to come here. Just recently there's press about students going down more and more into Canada than to the U.S. I just think in the long-term we are really undermining not just our economy on a macro sense, but the American worker and their family. That's a real issue.

Dr. Skorton: I was involved personally in two of those projects in the Middle East. A medical school that Cornell University has to this day in Doha and a coed university in a western part of Saudi Arabia. I think what you say is exactly right.

Beth Werlin: I was just going to add, this is also true in many other ideals that we hold here in the United States. Particularly with welcoming refugees. We have for years been a leader in welcoming refugees. We have been a place that people can come. Our doors are open to those seeking safety and protection. To proposals and ideas that might want to limit I think really threaten who we are as a country and the values that are important as Americans.

Ali Noorani: I want to go back to your question because I feel like we're heading down this very negative and dark place. Is America an exceptional country? Yes. For some reason I've been spending a lot of time in Idaho. Idaho is a very unique place. It's incredibly conservative, it's one of the reddest states in the country now. It is a state that has an unemployment rate of about 3 percent, maybe high as 4 percent. Has a dairy industry that is in the top three in the nation. That dairy industry, by and large, those dairy farmers voted for President Trump. Now they are some of the most outspoken advocates for a refugee resettlement, for immigration reform, and really pushing back on the administration because they know that as dairy farmers who have built a business through their family, that their immigrant workforce or refugee workforce is an extension of their family. To me that is exceptional.

Dr. Skorton : Exceptional as a phenomenon in America?

Ali Noorani: Exceptional from an economic perspective, from a cultural perspective, from a political perspective. When we get it right as a country, those are the three things that mix up in the right way.

Dr. Skorton : Very, very positive perspective. Thoughts about that anybody?

Ali Noorani : Come on, somebody else has got to be positive.

Dr. Skorton: All right, I'll take you in a different direction. You were talking about higher education, we talked a little bit about cultural institutions indirectly. When you look at polls in past years, say in the last decade, where many of the institutions in America have fallen and fallen and fallen in terms of public trust. Libraries, museums, archives the military tend to be toward the higher end of the trust range. Focusing on museums, here we are in the Smithsonian Institution. In a melting pot America, if I can go back to using that term, what does it mean to have cultural institutions such as museums that cater specifically to immigrant or ethnic cultures? Is that a good idea, is that something we should go in that direction? It's something that we're actually thinking about quite a bit at the Smithsonian.

Jeremy Robbins: There's an interesting idea, someone who used to work at the Holocaust Museum for a bunch of years is working now trying to start a museum that's going to be the National Museum for the American people. The way that he is framing it, is essentially this question. That we can have a lot of separate museums representing our own ethnic heritages, and I think to me that's a very valuable thing, it's part of America's story. Or you think but the reality is for Americans that for most Americans who want to make those individual stories part of America's story. What he's trying to do is start a museum that would essentially tell America's story through the four almost founding waves. People who came here 10,000 years ago, people who came up until essentially the Civil War time, the slavery story as well, then sort of the immigration wave of the late-19th century, and then post-1965. I think that's an interesting idea, I'm not sure one's right or wrong.

It goes to your question about do we want to be the melting pot or do we want to value pluralism? I think the answer is how do you do both without cheapening either? Which is a long way of saying I'm not sure I have the right answer as to whether having ethnic-focused or group-focused museums is a good or a bad thing. There's a lot of value of doing it; those are hugely important stories to tell, they get lost in the American narrative. To make it part of a larger America you have to tell them as part of a whole American story.

Dr. Skorton: That's very helpful, and actually the tact we're taking at the Smithsonian is really to try to do both. We do have museums and areas in museums that are focused very much on a particular area, culture, civilization, but we also have for example this very new exhibition in the National Museum of American History, “Many Voices, One Nation,” which really tries to do the second of what you were talking about. That's very helpful. In fact, I'm going to say those things and pretend it was my idea.

Ali Noorani: I would say that in this moment in our history, where it feels like our politics are so divisive, the role of institutions is more and more important. I think of an institution as everything from your elementary school, to your university, to your library, to your museum, to your national park. Over the summer my vacation was to drive from Idaho back to D.C. In every town that I stopped in I tried to go to the museum, tried to touch as many parks as I could. I was amazed by the diversity of people in the parks, the diversity of people in the museums, and the diversity of the representation of the exhibits themselves in the museums. That the role of cultural institutions, it's more important than ever.

Dr. Skorton : Glad to hear that because it sounds like full employment for me.

Jeremy Robbins: Right, and the one thing I'd say on that, which sort of goes back to your earlier question, is that politics and culture aren’t linear as much as they're cyclical, right? This is a very challenging time in some ways, but also a time of opportunity in others, in that you almost need those moments where institutions are in doubt to be able to galvanize people enough to make progress. I'm actually optimistic that yes, most cultural institutions, if you look at the trust in the media, it's incredibly low, but that doesn't mean that it's going to stay that way. That's also created, if you look at the New York Times and Wall Street Journal , their subscribers have gone up, their investment in high quality journalism has gone up. You're seeing that in institution, after institution, after institution, that's almost refortifying to meet the challenges of a very different age.

Dr. Skorton: Well moving from cultural institutions to culture writ large. Is it fair to have the expectation that we're going to be able to develop a shared common sort of suite or ensemble of customs that help define what it is to be an American? How has the Internet changed the idea of developing this kind of common culture? Because you can imagine two worlds, one in which people really follow the cultural attributes that they were brought up with, and one in which we somehow come together with a common ensemble. Is it fair to have this expectation, that we can come together in a common culture?

Beth Werlin: I think so. I'll take an example we're struggling with in a very different setting, which is in the workplace. The workplace is changing, right? People work remotely now, people work at different hours of the day, but yet we're actually able to use technology to find ways to connect in different ways that are more personalized and customized to the needs of each office, of each community, of each person. The same thing is happening with respect to our country. Yes, it's growing, yes, we're bringing in different people from different places, we're bringing in new customs, but we're also taking advantage of new ways and new technology to be able to enable us to connect in both very personal ways and as a community.

Dr. Skorton : It's a beautifully optimistic way to look at things. I share that so it must be right.

Ali Noorani: Last year I wrote a book called, There Goes the Neighborhood . A number of the interviews that I did were with folks who, are immigrants themselves but their families ... Or their families are immigrants and they were born here. Through these conversations I started to think of this as a, think of a framework through which this common set of values is developed. It's a dynamic set but there's a path that I started to think about where people go from identifying, let's say somebody comes from Mexico. They come and they see themselves as a Mexican. Then they see themselves as a Mexican-American. Then they fit into this larger world of Latino. Then their kids say, "Well I may be a U.S. citizen but I'm going to go back and see myself as a Latino or Latina." There's this changing set of identity.

Then people integrate into the U.S., they become citizens, they vote, they start businesses. Then ultimately, they are influencing systems by serving on boards, by running for office. We are reaching a common set of values through steps of identity, integration and influence, where people are identifying as American, going back and forth between where they came from, integrating into society but then also trying to change the idea of America. I just think that's a good thing.

Dr. Skorton : Other thoughts about that?

Ana Quintana: Change the idea of American in what sense? Because you brought up the issue of Mexicans, when they come to this country and then they identify as Mexican-American and then into this broader scope of Latino, Latina, Hispanic, which I to this day will never understand even though I'm supposedly classified in that, I just don't get how I am. I see myself as an American of Cuban heritage, right? I'm a first generation American, my parents are from Cuba, and I'm from northern Cuba, a.k.a. Miami, because Miami's an incredibly unique place which I will forever call northern Cuba.

I think what's happening, and I say northern Cuba as a joke, but there tends to be kind of within different communities, within the Mexican community, within the Salvadoran, Honduran, just this kind of habit of folks keeping their culture, which is obviously what we should all do, but allowing their culture to define their identity and allowing that to not translate into what it means to be American. American is not eating apple pie because apple pie is disgusting, it's believing in America, believing in the exceptionality of America and the rule of law, and what it means to be an American citizen.

... there tends to be kind of within different communities just this kind of habit of folks keeping their culture, which is obviously what we should all do, but allowing their culture to define their identity and allowing that to not translate into what it means to be American. — Ana Quintana

Ali Noorani: I think you're right, but I think you also prove my point, because you said you see Miami as northern Cuba, right?

Ali Noorani: Miami is a uniquely American city because it's a very diverse city. There are parts of Miami that call it northern Cuba, parts of Miami that call it Miami and part of the U.S. We can react to people affectionately calling Miami northern Cuba in a defensive way, or we can react to it in saying, "Okay, that's great." Miami is this thriving, vibrant city that is the gateway to the southern hemisphere in many ways. That is a beautiful American experience. We're all going to see that differently. We have a tendency to react to those things in a negative fashion, whereas I think it's great if the Cuban community calls it northern Cuba. It's Miami, Florida, in the United States. I think you kind of made my point.

Ana Quintana: What worries me is the idea of that overlap not happening. Of folks saying, "I'm going to keep my culture and that's going to completely define my identity, and I'm going to completely continue identifying with my country of origin," rather than making that step and assimilating.

Ali Noorani: That's why this definition of identity is so fluid. People through their lives, through generations of families, that sense of identity changes but at the end of the day as people are becoming American they're looking to influence America. Running for office, owning businesses, playing that leadership role in whatever way they see fit. When you ask the question of a common set of values or customs, there's an assumption that that is a very static set of values and customs. That has never been the case.

Dr. Skorton: When you say that has never been the case, the argument that you're making, which I resonate with, I think you could have made the same argument 50 or 100 years ago, the different technology and so on. Perhaps in a way things appear to be changing and certainly the rapidity of information dissemination is different, but the process feels the same to me.

Ali Noorani: It does. Then when you look at what's happening in Europe, for example, the role of ethnic media in the U.S. is incredibly important for a couple of reasons. Number one, it helps the immigrant community integrate or assimilate to the U.S. But it also helps people who are born here and been here for generations to understand the immigrant community. There's a locus of information in language that people can say, "Okay, this is who is moving to my neighborhood, and from a policy perspective this is how I engage." Or, "This is what I need to do as an immigrant." In Europe there is no ethnic media infrastructure other than the Internet. The information that refugees or immigrants from Morocco and Belgium, they only get information about Morocco, they don't necessarily get information on Belgium. Your Belgium official doesn't necessarily get information about Moroccans who are new. There's interesting things underneath the surface too.

...the role of ethnic media in the U.S. is incredibly important for a couple of reasons. Number one, it helps the immigrant community integrate or assimilate to the U.S. But it also helps people who are born here and been here for generations to understand the immigrant community. — Ali Noorani

Dr. Skorton : Very interesting. Social media of course has blown that up a lot and changed things.

Jeremy Robbins: Well I would say on the social media front, it plays both ways. Social media drives you apart in a very profound sense in that I can go on social media and only see people like me. I can only see people who have an exact interest. At the same time that also gives you collective power that makes people more vocal in society and more like Ali's suggesting. Your point about the Hispanic, probably like, "Why are we Hispanic? I'm Guatemalan, I'm Colombian." And we're all different, we're treated the same. There is some notion about how that Hispanic identity actually in some ways probably increases the Americanization as much as it does make people feel separate.

I'll give you one example. Yesterday I did a meeting with Univision, and at Univision they're talking about their corporate sponsors. People in America, businesses in America right now, the American Pepsi and all these other companies, they're huge American companies, they really want to reach the Hispanic audience because they think that there's a huge amount of buying power there and it's a growing audience with a growing club. So they can use social media to target that audience. Those are some of the most American brands, the things that become American culture being directly inputted through social media through other ways to try and be in front of people. As much as you can isolate yourself, there's a way that you find instead of being alone as this single person who feels like an outsider, you have a group. That group then, as Ali's suggesting, does very much become an integral player in society.

Dr. Skorton: That's very interesting. Of course if more people would follow my own Twitter feed, I think a lot of this would be clarified, but I digress. Speaking of social media, let's move just for a moment to traditional media. There's always a part in conversations where you want to take a shot, or some comments, or tell the media how to do their business. How could the media do a better job of covering the topics related to immigration in our country? This is one of the things a lot of us are talking about, maybe more among the most commonly discussed topics. What advice could we give to our colleagues in the traditional media?

Jeremy Robbins: There's been some actual wonderful journalism. A lot of the journalism around immigration tends to focus on law and order, security, terrorism, and things that are sensational and will be clickbait. That's just a reality of the media. There’s been some phenomenal journalism of late, of looking at how immigration impacts a town and doing deep dive, longer form journalism. Those are pieces that don't probably get nearly as many clicks, but when they do have a much higher and longer impact. I'm not in the business of media, I'm not going to tell editors what to do, but the extent that those are out there, I think those do change hearts and minds because you can actually see over a longer term how impact happens.

One of the problems with immigration and understanding immigration generally is it's very natural to see our economy as a zero sum game, right? This job either goes to an American or an immigrant. What's much harder to see is how the economy interrelates. That if you can get the right worker, companies grow, they're more dynamic, it creates more jobs. You don't see, unless you're working for an immigrant founded company, you don't see the job that was created at this company because the immigrant on the team had the right idea or played the right support function. You just see the job. There's a role that journalism can play that's very important in telling the larger picture. There's actually been a lot of good work doing that, I just think it's the nature of media right now that the majority of the stories are going to be more sensational and less nuanced.

You don't see, unless you're working for an immigrant founded company, you don't see the job that was created at this company because the immigrant on the team had the right idea or played the right support function. — Jeremy Robbins

Ana Quintana: Even when they cover the sensational aspect, it's such kind of like a superficial MS-13 is from El Salvador and they're terrorizing the streets and they're going to terrorize America. It's like all right, let's do a deeper dive here and actually look at what exactly is happening on the ground in the northern triangle of Central America. That's an area that I specifically focus on. I don't think folks are really looking enough at the political crisis and how this is something that's going to continue. How the unaccompanied minor crisis that we had on our border in 2014, that's going to repeat itself because the conditions in these countries have only gotten worse. The only reason we're kind of seeing a decrease is because Mexico is increasing their efforts to guard their southern border with Guatemala. Also, when folks tend to criticize Mexico and the Mexican government, their security translates into our security and Mexico has done an enormous job at helping us out.

I think that's only putting a band aid on the situation. Until we get to a point where policy makers, and this is where the media can play a role, in kind of highlighting, doing a deeper dive, longer-form analysis or just highlighting how MS-13 terrorizes a town specifically in El Salvador, Guatemala. I don't think that we're going to have proper ... I don't think in America, rather, we're going to have a proper understanding of immigration dynamics.

Ali Noorani: I look at the media through my day job as an advocate. I would agree with what both of you have said in terms of the great journalism that's been done and the longer, deeper dives that are happening. There was an article a couple of days ago about Hallmark Television, that is the fastest growing network in the country. They are running shows that are warm and fuzzy, that are speaking to the geographic and figurative middle of America. My question is, okay, how are those shows talking about this issue? Are they talking about it at all? We've done work with Christian radio stations. As advocates we have to understand what are people listening to, reading, or watching? Then being able to engage the media, those media outlets in particular, and being able to put forward a conversation or a strategy around immigration that's based on the culture and values of that audience. Not trying to have the political, the policy conversation that we want The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal to have. That's not a conversation that resonates at all with the majority of Americans.

Dr. Skorton: You know, actually one of the hopes that we have for Second Opinion is that people will utilize a toolkit that we put on the web with each conversation which we're calling Vox Populi , Voice of the People, where you could take some of the questions that we're discussing and some of the good work that you've done and other readings that we'll list, and have a conversation like this around the dinner table or whatever.

I want to switch gears for a minute and talk about something a little more arcane but of great interest in this area, and that's the H-1B program, the visa program. Just curious, at this moment in time there's been debate and discussion about this for a long time. At this point in time how do you see the benefits and the costs of the program? What changes should we be making? How does it help and hurt different parts of our economy? It's an important issue. Anybody want to jump in on this?

Jeremy Robbins : I'll probably have very strong feelings.

Beth Werlin: Our organization, we work with a lot of immigration lawyers, our partner organization is a bar association of immigration lawyers. I hear a lot about the H-1B program from their perspective, and it's gotten to the point where they're challenged, they don't know how to advise their clients who are looking for employees and they're not finding what they need here in the United States, which raises questions about how we can do a better job to be making sure we're training our own U.S. citizens to be qualified for jobs that we're going to need in the future. At the moment they're struggling, they're not sure how to advise their clients because it's become an unpredictable, unreliable system for making sure that companies are getting workers that they desire and that make their company successful.

That's a challenge, the fact that a program has become unreliable. There's a lottery system, you're not sure if it's going to pan out, if you're going to get a visa. From the lawyer’s perspective it's an awful lot of work to apply for one of these visas. I mean it's expensive, you put a lot of time into it, it's unreliable, and yet they're still doing it. That signals to me that there's a challenge here that's presented, that companies are not being able to find the workers they need and that the system isn't set up right now to fully assist them and enable them to bring in the employees that would help make their company successful and ultimately help create more jobs, more buying power, and all of that.

Dr. Skorton : Very helpful.

Jeremy Robbins: I'd say on the flip side of that, this goes to the heart of what you'd want an immigration like a work visa to do. That on the one hand you want to bring in talent that can help our economy grow, that can help our country, but on the other hand you want to make sure that you're protecting workers and this visa does nothing. The visa is very much broken in a way that's not working for American workers or for companies. The idea that there should be a limit on the number of smart people that come in is a strange idea to begin with. We want people to come and innovate. There's all sorts of good research showing that if you can bring someone in, they get a degree in science, technology and math, they come and stay and work in our workforce, they're creating American jobs.

There's an idea that on the one hand you want to drive more Americans into STEM. That's where the jobs are, that's where the growth is, that's where innovation is. That's a long-term process. In the meantime you have companies, the Facebooks of the world, the Googles of the world, but also manufacturing companies that are selling our manufacturing goods around the world and creating all these good jobs, that they need those type of workers to design their products. Caterpillar is a great line where their mining equipment has more lines of code in it than a jet airline. Caterpillar sells to 190 or 200 companies around the world, they're creating a lot of jobs in Peoria, Illinois, but they need some designers, and some engineers, to be the people who can help design those products.

Now we have a system, which as you mentioned, there aren't enough visas and so they go every year by lottery which is a very strange way to decide who should come here, by random lottery. At the same time, a lot of visas are used in a way that maybe doesn't benefit American workers, that we have a system of what you should have to pay people that was made in the ’90s when being a tech worker in the ’90s was a really different thing than today. There's some really obvious fixes. You want to make sure that companies are paying a fair wage, you want to increase the number of visas and make sure they're going to, both for companies that are driving innovation. You want to better protect American workers, you want to incentivize people to take those temporary workers and make them permanent so they're bargaining the same way Americans are. There are a lot of fixes that have a lot of support if you could actually get bills on the floor to vote on them. That’s the kind of stuff we're all working on.

Dr. Skorton: Following along your point about innovation in the sense that you're talking about the tech industry for example, because of the coding example, guest worker programs, sort of the darling of the tech industry to some extent. What's your point of view on that, Jeremy or others?

Jeremy Robbins: The H-1B visa, what's interesting is that it's a guest worker program, but it's a one dual-intent visa. By that, the intent is that you can come for it as a guest worker but the idea is that you're going to come to stay. You were president of Cornell, I'm sure the engineers graduating at Cornell, probably half of them are foreign-born. Training the best minds in the world and then sending them abroad to compete against us is a really strange economic strategy. Do I think that you should bring people in if you can, someone's trained at Cornell, if we can get them to stay, and work, and help drive our economy? Absolutely. Should we want to get people who are going to come here and stay? I think it's not going to be the answer for everyone, but absolutely, we want to keep talent here, we want to grow our economy. The H-1B is maybe a temporary way to do that, I think there are a lot of other ways to do it too.

Dr. Skorton: Should we be looking north to the Canadian sort of merit-based point system? Would that be a step forward, or not a good idea for the U.S.?

Ali Noorani: We have to strike a balance. We have to strike a balance where we’re acknowledging the fact that our economy needs the skilled engineers as much as it needs the skilled farm worker. We need to make sure that we're recruiting workers into the U.S. that can fill those needs. When we compare, it's in vogue right now to compare our immigration system, our economy, to Canada or Australia because of their merit-based approach. The fact is that our economies could not be more different. Our economy is exponentially larger, exponentially more diverse. Our nation is much larger and more diverse than Australia or Canada. There are elements of the program that can be brought online, if you will, but assume that we go from the broken system that we have now, to all of a sudden saying, "Okay, if you get 100 points you get in." We're just creating more problems. In 2013, the Senate passed legislation that I think created a balanced approach to legal immigration. The problem is that, Jeremy said, we haven't had the political will to get it onto the House floor.

Beth Werlin: I'll just throw in one aspect of our current system which I don't think we ever want to lose is the importance placed on family and family values, family unification. Some of the proposals around point systems lose some of that. Lose the aspects of family, that families help you integrate into societies. Families provide all sorts of benefits that you can't always measure in the same way you can do ... Even economic benefits, that it could be that the mom's taking care of the children or the elderly family members, and how do we quantify all of that? We've always had a strong system that valued family and relationships, and I don't think that's something we want to lose.

I'll just throw in one aspect of our current system which I don't think we ever want to lose is the importance placed on family and family values, family unification. Some of the proposals around point systems lose some of that. — Beth Werlin

Jeremy Robbins: One other thing I just note quickly is that there's a little bit of sleight of hand in the way that the Canadian and Australian systems are used, suggesting that, oh well we're going to move from our system to their system, we're going to do it. The bill that was introduced by Senators Tom Cotton and Sonny Perdue, it's like we're going to move to a merit system, not by adding more visas for STEM workers, but by slashing family based immigration. If you look at Canada and Australia, they do have a hugely higher portion of their visas that go for merit, for people who fulfill needs in the economy, but they also give more visas for family.

The notion that you have to do one or the other, that if you're going to give more work visas therefore you should give more family visas, that's a false conflict, and one that neither Canada or Australia deal with it. They let in two-and-a-half and three-and-a-half times more immigrants than we do. I think, yes absolutely, should we have a system that is more merit based? Yes in the sense of, we can help our economy and leverage one of our greatest competitive advantages which is that whether it's a skilled engineer or the skilled farm worker, that people who want to work hard want to come here. That, at the same time, doesn't mean by any stretch of the imagination that therefore we should do it by shutting down family based immigration and the traditional ways that we've had our system work that have done really well for the U.S.

Ana Quintana: Yeah, no you're totally right. We definitely need to kind of strike that balance. It isn't a black or white issue where it's like all right, we completely slash family migration. Because if that was the case my family would never be here. They would still be in Cuba and they would still be living completely miserable lives. That's another component of as to why this country's great. It's like all right, let's find a way of fixing our immigration system so we can actually bring the people who we need here, not let it be on this absurd lottery system, which just makes no sense. I mean imagine, how do we even explain that to another country or to folks abroad? It's like, well you know, you might be super qualified but it's going to be this lottery and I'm just going to pick your name out of a hat and you might get picked or you might not. That's embarrassing.

I think that the RAISE Act again, it's something that's kind of like, well do we really want to go that far? We got to strike that balance. It appears quite difficult in this political environment to kind of find any sort of balance on anything.

Let's find a way of fixing our immigration system so we can actually bring the people who we need here, not let it be on this absurd lottery system, which just makes no sense. — Ana Quintana

Dr. Skorton: Well one difficult and touchy issue that I feel we need to explore a little bit as a group is that of crime. It's one of those things that we hear a lot about. Multiple studies have shown that immigrants are in fact less likely to commit crime than native born U.S. citizens, although critics of those studies say, "Well, you're lumping those who came in one way versus those who came another way." What's your point of view about the evidentiary base of this? The notion that somehow an increase or change in immigration would affect our crime profile in the country? Anybody have a view of that?

Beth Werlin: As one of those organizations that issued one of those reports, I'll have to say, our researchers feel really confident that this study showed that higher rates of immigration correlate with reduced levels of crime. We're sticking with that. What we see is an individual incident sometimes making the news on the front page when there's an instance of an immigrant who committed a crime. The same can be said of U.S. citizens, a U.S. citizen could commit a crime. We're never going to eliminate crime entirely. The good thing is that crime rates have gone down recently as immigration rates have gone up. I think it's always been a red herring in the conversation. Unfortunately it's scary, crime is scary.

Any association that is made with an immigrant it kind of puts a blight on immigration, but we have to take a step back from the sensationalism at times. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't be upset when there's a crime, we should. We should do what we can to make sure immigration is done in a way that ... Currently we do have laws that might exclude someone who has a criminal record from the United States. We have a lot of laws that protect the United States from people coming in who might try to do danger. We have those laws in place. I think the real question turns to what's the relationship with local police officers and immigration. That's where things get a lot more complicated. There's a lot of good evidence that communities become safer. Local communities are choosing to separate immigration and local law enforcement efforts because they know that communities are safer when those two things are separate. When immigrant communities feel safe to be able to call the police to report on crime, to be able to cooperate with local law enforcement efforts in order to reduce crime in communities and that's where the focus should really be. What kind local initiatives can we put in place to make sure that communities are safe, that the immigrant population is working with local law enforcement when needed?

Dr. Skorton: Thanks Beth. Other thoughts about this?

Ali Noorani: So we do a lot of work with law enforcement. We've gotten to know Republican sheriffs, Democratic sheriffs, chiefs of big cities, small towns and none of them ... and myself in the forum, we don't want to live in a sanctuary city. We want to live in a safe city. A safe city is a place where every cop on the corner is able to fulfill their oath to serve and protect the entirety of their community and the only way for them to do that is to not be seen as taking on an immigration enforcement responsibility. Unfortunately, a lot of press will say if a local cop is not enforcing immigration law, that's a sanctuary city. But if you talk to that local cop they call that public safety.

The politicization of the law enforcement and immigration question has really undermined the role and the job of local law enforcement and again when you talk to chiefs and sheriffs across the country, they want to live in a safe city. They want to serve and protect everybody and they don't want to be in the business of asking people for immigration status.

Dr. Skorton: Other thoughts?

Jeremy Robbins: Well, I just say to Beth's point about it being a little bit of a red herring. The data's there and it makes sense when you look at it, right? That immigrants tend to move to neighborhoods that are the cheapest because they come here without a lot of resources. What ends up happening, and you see this in city after city after city is that they're moving into neighborhoods where there's a lot of abandoned housing, where there's a lot of blight. Because that's the only place they can afford to live and anyone who realizes that when you get people buying up abandoned housing, when you get them coming opening up corner businesses, when you get life on the street, instead of emptiness on the street, places become safer.

The interesting data about immigrants and crime is not just that they reduce crime or have lower rates than American-born, is that they actually draw natives back. That there's a lot of data showing that for every thousand immigrants that are moving into a neighborhood, it draws about 240 native Americans to move back to those neighborhoods.

So you think about community revitalization, how you ... for a lot of communities especially in the rust belt and the Midwest, where you have these places that are depopulating and all the crime and things that go with that. Immigration has a really positive impact, the flip side of that, which I will say, which is the negative part of integration, is that immigrants come and they commit crimes at a way lower rate than native born, but because integration is a very effective tool and happening at a very fast pace, immigrants catch up in crime, too. By second generation, third generation they commit crimes just like every other American.

Dr. Skorton : But then they're Americans.

Jeremy Robbins : But then they're Americans.

Dr. Skorton: Well, we're going to come to the end of our discussion, but before we do I have to get one more piece of wisdom out of each of you. I'd like you to share, with our readers and listeners and those who are watching this ... any one point you would like to make about our general conversation today? What it means to be an American and the role of immigration. One sort of parting point to those who are hopefully in great numbers enjoying Second Opinion. Anybody want to jump in with this one?

Ali Noorani: I will jump in and say I think the majority of Americans live between two poles, and one pole is there's a strong belief that we are a nation of laws, and there's another pole that pulls on people that says we are a compassionate nation. As advocates, we do the American public a disservice and our work a disservice by assuming that people don't live in that tension and we have thought about this as ... particularly in the Southeast, the Midwest, the Mountain West that are experiencing this cultural demographic change, how do we work with that person's pastor, police chief, local business owner to have that conversation?

Because as a D.C.-based advocate, I'm not going to convince that voter, but the person they go and listen to on church every Sunday, the police chief that drives their neighborhood every week, the business owner who they buy groceries from, those are the trusted messengers, where you can start to have this conversation.

I think the majority of Americans live between two poles, and one pole is there's a strong belief that we are a nation of laws, and there's another pole that pulls on people that says we are a compassionate nation. — Ali Noorani

Dr. Skorton: Thanks.

Beth Werlin: This conversation is just reminding me again what our motto is, that America is a nation of immigrants and our values, as a nation are really reflected, and we continue to want them to be reflected in our immigration laws and policies. Values about equality, fairness, freedom, safety, family, entrepreneurship, innovation, those are core American values and it doesn't work perfectly right now, but I think there's a will and an interest because our values are really rooted in those issues to continue to find ways to really perfect some of that.

Dr. Skorton: Thank you so much.

Ana Quintana: I would just say as someone who works on foreign policy, I would just hope that folks take the time to kind of look at the situations abroad, because I think prevention is the best medicine, right? We could've prevented what's happening in Syria and we didn't. And now look at what we're dealing with and look at what the Syrian refugees are dealing with. For whatever it is that we are experiencing the brunt of it, that humanitarian catastrophe is heartbreaking, the same thing with Central America and now we're seeing it with Venezuela. That's something that, again, could have been prevented, so I would hope that rather than looking at immigration as just a domestic policy issue, it is undoubtedly a foreign policy issue as well.

Dr. Skorton: Thank you, Ana

Jeremy Robbins: I think that’s right, it starts abroad, but then as Ali was suggesting, ultimately, like all politics it's hyper local and that one of the things I'll say about what it means to be American ... like, our country is changing and that there is a lot of opportunity to think about how we meet that change. Immigration is a huge opportunity, but it's also not easy. One of the things that has been inspiring for me, if you think about this ... we're working in 50 communities, almost all in conservative states. Right now that have said all right, we recognize this is a potential, so how do we leverage it? How do we make sure that when people are coming in we're going to minimize sort of this stress and conflict of change and leverage it for growth?

Community after community, whether it's in Utah or it's in Texas, or it's in Iowa or it's in Alaska, are standing up and doing that. I think that's helpful. And the one last plug I'll put for something about understanding what it means as your community ... is that we spent the last two years building this resource and trying to make this a local fight and so at this website called Map the Impact, where for every community in the country ... if you want to understand how many immigrants are there, where are they working, how many businesses they started, how much they pay in taxes, like, that's a resource that's available to people.

I just encourage people to take action and stand up. Understand what's going on in their community and figure out how they can play a role, because it gets very disempowering right now to look around politics and say things are changing, how can I do it? But the reality is that people can have a profound impact, both locally and nationally.

Dr. Skorton: Well, on behalf of the Smithsonian Institution I want to thank Jeremy Robbins, Ana Quintana, Ali Noorani, and Beth Werlin for very, very interesting discussion and I learned a lot from it, and I very much appreciate you sharing your wisdom and experience and insights with us and to those very large number of people who are enjoying this I would hope that you would also take the time, if you can to look at some of the suggested readings, some other interviews that you find on the website related to this, a couple of additional one-on-one interviews that I conducted and I hope that you will take the opportunity to check out smithsoniansecondopinion.org frequently and have a good day, everybody.

Research: What Is American Identity and Why Does It Matter?

Why Does the American Identity Matter?

The most important reason for understanding American identity is related to white racial identification. It may not be prevalent in U.S. political attitudes, but it’s still an issue. A survey from 2012 asked white respondents to indicate if whiteness represented the way they thought of themselves most of the time, as opposed to identifying themselves as Americans . One fifth of the survey’s white respondents said that they preferred the term white to American when identifying themselves.

How to Analyze American Identity

• There’s no such thing as a universal identity, especially for an omni-cultural country such as the USA.
• Everyone has their own understanding of what it means to be American today, as citizens come from different religious, ethnic, ideological, and geographical backgrounds.
• Explaining the concept of American identity calls for an inclusive approach based on solidarity.
• Depending on how you discuss the concept, an academic essay may require arguments on modern-day immigration and immigrant policies. How do they fit within the common understanding of American identity?

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What Does it Mean to Be American?

• Posted November 18, 2019
• By Jill Anderson

It started with a simple and yet difficult question for Lowell High School students in teacher Jessica Lander’s Seminar in American Diversity: What does it mean to be American?

Over the course of a year, the students delved into their identity for the class project that was soon dubbed We Are America . Now, that project has grown into a national phenomenon inspiring thousands of students around the country to share stories about their unique identities.

“This project opens the door to students wanting to share and be vulnerable…,” said Lander, Ed.M.’15, during a recent workshop at Gutman Library at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “Is that a dangerous space to bring students to? I think as an educator what I try to do in class is open doors and create space; if students want to share a particular story, they can navigate a way to share that story. I’m not going to push anyone to share a happy story, a sad story, a big story or a small story. It’s the story you want to share.”

Safiya Al Samarrai's story is one of the many on display at Gutman Library's We Are America exhibit.

From the onset, Lander’s students were aware that their stories would be shared publicly, and potentially beyond their school. During the yearlong project, the students wrote many drafts of their deeply personal essays, often about immigrating to America or about certain aspects of their American experience — from mental health challenges to learning to accept the color of their skin. Those stories culminated in the book We Are America, which features portraits alongside the students’ stories.

A collection of the portraits and stories are now being exhibited at Gutman Library, where Lander and several of the students spoke about how the project came together and how other educators can explore similar topics with their own students.

“Many students were very courageous in sharing stories that are vulnerable,” Lander said. “In that space as an educator it’s [about] being there to support.”

Almost a year after the project began, it was the students – many now graduated and moved on to college – who expressed interest in scaling it beyond their school.

“On the last day of school, we had the idea: Let’s make the project a national project,” said Safiya Al Samarrai, noting that at first they weren’t sure how to make that happen but jumped at the opportunity to take the project to the next level. “It’s very exciting and powerful.”

Now, in collaboration with Facing History and Ourselves , Reimagining Migration , and New York’s Tenement Museum , the project has expanded to 23 states, involving 36 teachers and 1,300 students. At the end of next year, those new stories will be collected into different volumes based on the regions.

Robert Aliganyira, whose story is among those on display at Gutman Library's We Are America exhibit, participates in the panel discussion.

“We are breathing in a really toxic air right now …. As educators, how do we push this out, how do we filter the air, empower young people so they actually have a chance to change the conversation?” said Adam Strom, director of the education initiative at Reimagining Migration. “I think where Reimaging Migration and Jessica Lander … intersect is we believe very much in the power of young people and the power of children to enter these conversations and change these conversations. In the middle of a toxic environment when everyone is talking about you, how powerful for people to reach out and say, ‘This is actually who we are.’”

For Philly Marte, one of the students from Lander’s class who continues to work on the project as a college freshman, the stories are important. “I believe this project and these stories will create a sense of unity within this country for the people writing these stories and reading these stories,” he said. “Your story matters. Your voice matters and there’s someone else that’s gone through what you have and understands. I believe it will create more peace and more understanding across everyone who comes in contact with this project and this book. I’m not just saying that because I’m one of the people leading it but I honestly believe these stories could change a few lives.”

The latest research, perspectives, and highlights from the Harvard Graduate School of Education

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Our current political polarization can feel new, but it has a long cultural history. Two dominant visions of American identity have historically been in tension and at times outright competition with one another: pluralism and exclusion.

On the one hand, the first vision understands the United States as a country built on a commitment to pluralism, where anyone, from anywhere, can be American. As people fled religious persecution, the US as a nation of immigrants provided many a home where diverse religious and political views and backgrounds could co-exist. In this broad sense, the country affirms its society is a land of others. These ideals laid out by the Framers of the Constitution have over the centuries been invoked by groups marginalized by race, religion, and immigrant backgrounds to argue for a more inclusive, representative American democracy.

On the other hand, the exclusionary vision of American society has emphasized that American identity–and all the idealized or normative standards that entails (e.g., race, gender)–is not available to all. Historically, what it means to be American has been exclusively available to white people – white men in particular – with European ancestry , both in how people imagine American identity and how law has enforced boundaries of citizenship. For example, when Asian Americans and Latino Americans made legal claims for citizenship in the 19th and early 20th century, they were forced to argue that they fit either ‘white’ or ‘black’ definitions of citizenship. Both during this period and since, citizenship held by immigrants and/or racialized minorities is insufficient to be considered “American.”

Given this tension between a cultural value for pluralism and narrow notions of American identity, how does the public understand what it means to be “truly American” and are these views changing?

Since 2015, PRRI has asked questions about the hard boundaries of American identity on four occasions. This battery of questions assesses how important the following factors are to being “truly” American: being a Christian, being born in America, being able to speak English, and believing in God. Since 2018, PRRI has included a question about whether being of European heritage is important to being “truly” American.

We examined attitudes about each of these items on a cross-section of Americans in 2015, 2018, 2021, and 2022.

Second, most Americans place the greatest importance on English language skills as the most important factor of the five posed to being truly American, whereas being of European heritage is the least important of the five factors.

Finally, while these trends suggest slight movement toward inclusion, they also show that many people still believe that religious identities and beliefs, language, and place of birth dictate who counts as a true American to some degree. Rates of moderate agreement with these questions are more stable over time.

Together, this snapshot suggests that the tension between the pluralist and exclusionary traditions endure. While the over time trend suggests a move towards a more pluralist vision, the majority of Americans still believe that these hard boundaries of American identity and the exclusionary vision that they support define what it means to be a true American.

Today, some Americans believe that speaking English and holding particular kinds of religious beliefs are central to American identity. These beliefs are tied to citizenship and denied to religious minorities . National political rhetoric often underscores the reality of this vision of America. National identity is regularly invoked in American politics, often to turn public opinion away from progressive  immigration policies. Politicians regularly contrast American citizens with immigrants, arguing that their cultures and religions are incompatible with American values and that they will never be “true Americans.” Research also shows that people do not always choose a pluralist or an exclusive vision of American society – their attitudes toward different social groups often combine parts of both visions .

Nazita Lajevardi , Evan Stewart , Roy Whitaker , and Tarah Williams are members of the 2021-2022 cohort of PRRI Public Fellows.

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Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — American Values — Understanding Of What It Means To Be An American

Understanding of What It Means to Be an American

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Published: Jul 30, 2019

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What Does It Mean To Be an American Essay, with Outline

Published by gudwriter on January 4, 2021 January 4, 2021

Do you have a paper due tomorrow and don’t understand all the requirements given? Our world history homework help is here to ensure you receive a quality paper within the deadline given and at an affordable price. Below is; what does it mean to be an American essay with an outline.

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What does it Mean to be an American Essay Outline

Introduction

Being an American means enjoying the right to freedom of speech, embracing diversity, embracing the American way of life, and having equal rights of determining the country’s leadership.

Paragraph 1:

An American is free to speak their mind because of the right to freedom of speech.

• This freedom makes it easy for American citizens to serve their country.
• The stand up for what is just and right.
• Free speech is based on the country’s creed which encompasses peace, freedom, and security.

Paragraph 2:

Being an American means one is part of one of the most diverse cultures in the world.

• In the U.S., nationality may not possibly be defined by religion, ancestry, or race.
• The country has many different religions and cultures.
• Rather than religion, race, or ancestry, Americans are defined by their unique social, economic, and political values.

Paragraph 3:

Being an American means leading the American way of life .

• This way of life emanated from the system of the limited government and personal liberty.
• It is rooted in the traditions of equal justice to all, respect for the rule of law, merit-based achievement, freedom of contract, private property, entrepreneurism, personal responsibility, and self-reliance.

Paragraph 4:

Americans have equal rights of determining the political leadership of the country.

• Citizens elect leaders from state legislators, Congress members, to the president.
• Even the president is just a representative of the people.
• Bills passed by state legislators and Congressmen and women should be ones geared towards bettering the life of the common American.

Paragraph 5:

Some people may argue that a true American should profess the Christian faith.

• This is an argument that is majorly fronted by members of Native American communities who are largely Christian.
• America should be open to everyone who believes in the American spirit of hard work and lives by American ideals.
• An American knows that they are free to speak freely and that they live in a diverse-cultured country with a certain way of life.
• It means being in a position to determine who leads in whatever position in the country.
• An American is entitled to economic and social rights.
• Americans should resist at all costs anyone who might try to interfere with their freedoms and rights.

Insights on  what makes you unique essay with examples.

What is an American Essay

What it means to be an American goes beyond the legal definition of an American citizen. According to Philip Gleason , a renowned historian, a person did not have to be of any particular ethnic background, religion, language, or nationality in order to become or be an American. All one had to do was to live by the political ideology pegged on the abstract ideals of republicanism, equality, and liberty. American nationality was based on a Universalist ideological character which meant that anyone who willed to become an American was free to do so. One must act as an American to be an American by for instance paying taxes, voting in elections, and serving their country at home or abroad. Thus, being an American means enjoying the right to freedom of speech, embracing diversity, embracing the American way of life, and having equal rights of determining the country’s leadership.

As an American, one is free to speak their mind because of the right to freedom of speech. This freedom makes it easy for American citizens to serve their country by standing up for what is just and right. In this spirit, it would be better and greater for an American to say a “no” from their inner conviction than say a “yes” to please anyone or worse off, to avoid getting into trouble. Free speech in America is based on the country’s creed which encompasses peace, freedom, and security. It also means that Americans have the opportunity to come together and overcome their challenges by finding befitting solutions, a possibility that might not be achievable in other countries. That is why as pointed out by Grant (2012), the freedom to worship God in different religions and communities is a great source of pride and does not undermine the oneness of Americans.

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Being an American also means one is part of one of the most diverse, if not the most diverse, cultures in the world. The United States is one of the very few world countries where nationality may not possibly be defined by religion, ancestry, or race. It is a melting pot of many different religions and cultures and it is near impossible to come across anyone whose ancestral roots are not tied to immigrant bloodlines from Africa and Europe (Grant, 2012). Rather than religion, race, or ancestry, Americans are defined by their unique social, economic, and political values. The Great Seal of the United States which reads “E pluribus unum” further drives home the fact that Americans are from all manners of backgrounds. In English, this translates to “From many, one” implying that one may even become and American without being born in the country as long as they embrace what the country stands for.

Third, being an American means leading the American way of life. This way of life emanated from the system of the limited government and personal liberty enshrined in the Constitution as well as the ideals proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. It is also rooted in the traditions of equal justice to all, respect for the rule of law, merit-based achievement, freedom of contract, private property, entrepreneurism, personal responsibility, and self-reliance (Raymond, 2014). However, with these freedoms also comes the need for deliberation whereby people must listen to and understand one another. In addition, they need to have the will to moderate their claims with a view to achieving a common ground especially when it comes to making political decisions. With a sense of solidarity, Americans can show one another mutual respect and sympathy which in turn cultivates common good for all.

Further, Americans have equal rights of determining the political leaders in whose hands the governance of the country rests. Every citizen has one vote and has the responsibility of casting it every four years in order to choose their leaders (Grant, 2008). This involves the election of leaders from state legislators, Congress members, to the president. As such, even the president is just a representative of the great people of the United States and any decisions he makes pertaining the presidency should be for the good of all. Similarly, bills passed by state legislators and Congressmen and women should be ones geared towards bettering the life of the common American. This is because they represent the interests of the electorate from whom they get the power to legislate.

Some people may bring in the issue of religion into being an American and argue that a true American should profess the Christian faith. In a certain survey, one quarter of the respondents indicated that one factor essential to being an American is being Christian (Elfenbein & Hanson, 2019). However, this is an argument that is majorly fronted by members of Native American communities who are largely Christian. What they forget is that they too were not U.S. citizens until in 1924 when the Indian Citizenship Act was adopted (Elfenbein & Hanson, 2019). America should be open to everyone who believes in the American spirit of hard work, lives by American ideals as provided for in the Constitution, and vehemently fights for the country’s flag, regardless of their religious affiliation.

To be an American is to be someone who knows that they are free to speak freely and that they live in a diverse-cultured country with a certain way of life. It means being in a position to determine who leads in whatever position in the country. An American has the opportunity to achieve upward economic mobility and cherishes freedom from slavery, freedom to fight for America, and freedom of speech. These ideals were established by the country’s Constitution and are rooted in its Declaration of Independence. No one can take them away from Americans or replace them with oppressive ones because they are the very pillars that distinguish America from other countries. It implies that Americans should resist at all costs anyone who might try to interfere with their freedoms and rights.

Elfenbein, C., & Hanson, P. (2019). “What does it mean to be a ‘real’ American?”.  The Washington Post . Retrieved June 16, 2020 from https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/01/03/what-does-it-mean-be-real-american/

Grant, J. A. (2008). The new American social compact: rights and responsibilities in the twenty-first century . Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Grant, S. (2012). A concise history of the United States of America . New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Raymond, T. (2014). Rights and responsibilities of citizens: first grade social science lesson, activities, discussion questions and quizzes. HomeSchool Brew Press .

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Stanford University

What Does It Mean to Be an American?: A Web-based Curriculum Toolkit

For several years, I had been anticipating September 2, 2020—the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II—to be a momentous day. And, with the approach of the 75th anniversary of the permanent closing on November 28, 1945 of the Poston Relocation Center, the concentration camp that detained my family during World War II, I also anticipated that 2020 would be a time of reflection on the question, “What does it mean to be an American?”

In 1942, approximately 120,000 people of Japanese descent—approximately two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens—primarily along the West Coast were incarcerated by their country, the United States. My grandparents and parents were among them. They were sharecroppers in Salinas, California, prior to the Pearl Harbor attack and following Executive Order 9066, which was signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, they were forced to leave their homes and move to the Salinas Assembly Center, which was hastily built on the Salinas fairgrounds and racetracks. A few months later on the Fourth of July, they were sent to the Poston Relocation Center, Arizona, one of the ten permanent concentration camps for Japanese Americans.

This month, in addition to reading about solemn ceremonies marking the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II, I read “Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’,” in The Atlantic , September 3, 2020, with difficulty as I thought about Hachiro and others who had given the ultimate sacrifice and their Gold Star Families. Through Shinichi, I know that Hachiro and the other Japanese American soldiers wanted to prove that they were every bit as American as anyone else. As a high school student from 1968 to 1972, I struggled with accepting what my family had endured during World War II in part because my high school U.S. history textbook mentioned nothing of their experience, as my family was not part of the “master narrative” of U.S. history.

I had anticipated that the 75th anniversary of the end of the war would prompt unity and reflections on how far we have come as a nation in terms of embracing diversity. Instead, I will remember 2020 as one of the most divisive years in my lifetime. My hope is that the free educational web-based curriculum toolkit—“What Does It Mean to Be an American?”—will help us in a modest way to move toward “a more perfect Union.” Authored by SPICE’s Rylan Sekiguchi for use at the high school and college levels, the curriculum examines what it means to be American. The website was developed by the Mineta Legacy Project’s Dianne Fukami, Debra Nakatomi, and Amy Watanabe in partnership with SPICE. Inspired by the life and career of Secretary Norman Y. Mineta, the six themed lessons are: Immigration, Civil Liberties & Equity, Civic Engagement, Justice & Reconciliation, Leadership, and U.S.–Japan Relations. Mineta, as a 10-year-old boy, was incarcerated with his family at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center, Wyoming, one of the ten permanent concentration camps. In the video “ Bridging Two Countries: Norman Y. Mineta ,” Mineta notes the following when asked why he wears an American flag pin on his lapel.

The six standards-aligned lessons use primary source materials, interactive exercises, and personal videos that connect to students’ lives and showcase a diverse range of American voices—from young adults to former U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush whose replies to “What does it mean to be an American?” are highlighted here .

The curriculum is designed to encourage critical thinking through class activities and discussions and introduce new voices and perspectives on issues that are as relevant today as they have been for much of America’s past. One of the most compelling videos focuses on “ What Does It Mean to Be a Young Black Man in America? ,” which prompted me to reflect on Shinichi’s encounter in Europe with the segregated 92nd Infantry Division, composed of African Americans, who along with the 442nd helped to break through the Gothic Line, the final main German defensive line in northern Italy. My hope is that young students today—when considering civil liberties-related issues—will also remember the sacrifices of those before them.

There are three objectives of the curriculum. The first is to empower educators to foster student inquiry around the question “What does it mean to be an American?” The second is to help educators discover how best to leverage the resource for their own classrooms. We hope that teachers will reflect on the toolkit vis-à-vis specific curricular needs and assess its optimal integration into their existing practice. The third is to have students consider the importance of the six themes in their lives and to know that they too have important voices in the shaping of what it means to be an American.

I wish that my high school U.S. history teacher had introduced curriculum like this to me. To learn, for example, that the 442nd Infantry Regiment had become the most decorated unit in U.S. military history for its size and length of service—including 21 Medals of Honor and eight Presidential Unit Citations—would have given Hachiro a voice in the curriculum. Many Americans like Hachiro remain buried in Europe. Each year, French people, whose towns were liberated by the 442nd, kindly pay their respects at Hachiro’s grave. I hope that future U.S. presidents will visit cemeteries like the Epinal American Cemetery as well.

SPICE’s Rylan Sekiguchi and Jonas Edman Share Stage with Secretary Norman Mineta

Secretary norman mineta and spice’s rylan sekiguchi speak at the ronald reagan library, presidents bill clinton and george w. bush interviewed for the mineta legacy project.

What Does it Mean to be American?

To me, being American is much more than just being an American citizen or living in American.

To me, being American is much more than just being an American citizen or living in American. It seems people in America have a responsibility, and an obligation to be the best person they can be. It’s part of being an American, and another part is doing your part to keep society running properly. One of the best things about this place we call home, is that the country is basically run completely by the people inside it. Another great thing about being an American is the ability to have the American dream. In an American Creed article by Forbes, the American dream is described as “anyone, through gumption and hard work, can achieve any degree of financial success.” But, a survey ran by Erik Sherman of Forbes magazine said that only 23% of people thought it was common for someone to start poor, and get rich, even though that is categorized by many people as the American dream. A different study by Pew Research center, said that 36% of U.S. adults say their family has achieved the American dream, while another 46% say they are “on their way” to achieving it. This study defined the American dream as “freedom of choice in how to live, having a good family life and retiring comfortably.” Part of the reason Americans feel they haven’t achieved the American Dream and don’t have a chance to, is because our country has gotten so far from its ideals.

In Tribe, Sebastian Junger says, “For humans to be happy, they need autonomy, competence, and community.” People need to feel competent at what they do, authentic in their lives, and they need to be connected to others. Right now, in America people don’t live in tight knit communities, and most people don’t like what they do for a living. This leads to depression, and makes it almost impossible to achieve the American dream. Junger says, “It’s also why when people come back from war they suffer from PTSD and depression.” In order for everyone to get the American Dream, America needs to go back to it’s ideals, that every man is created equal. Another problem is that our prison systems are dominated by minorities. The Federal Bureau of Prisons shows, around 50% of people in prison are minorities. That statistic alone proves to me that the American dream is far from where it needs to be. Right now, everyone doesn’t have the same opportunity to achieve the American Dream.

America was built on the idea that all men are created equal, and that there shall be liberty and justice for all. However, today our country is split into multiple sections, from our politics, races, and lifestyles. In the past, we still had close to the same diversity, but we were closer as a nation, and didn’t let problems split us apart, rather bring us closer together. Junger, in Tribe, also says, “intact communities are more likely to survive than fragmented ones.” Our nation needs to get back to how people lived community wise, at the beginning of time, where there was tight knit communities.

Being American means to be free and have equal opportunity. Also to have the ability to do what you want, how you want, and where you want. The amendments are what give us those freedoms, like the freedom of speech, and the freedom of religion. We’ve strayed from our ideals created by the founding fathers, and became more individualistic, and selfish. America needs to get back to the idea that everyone is created equal.

• Written by Eddie F.
• From Columbus High School
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Columbus High School What It Means To Be American

This group is comprised of Columbus High School students in Columbus, Montana. They have written arguments with the National Writing Project's C3WP materials to answer the question "What does it mean to be American?" posed by Mark Meckler in the documentary film American Creed.

More responses from What It Means To Be American

More responses from columbus high school, more responses from "citizenship", "dream", and "work".

What is Good Friday? What the holy day means for Christians around the world

Christians around the world observe Good Friday two days before Easter, but what is it, and why do they commemorate the holy day?

The holiday is part of Holy Week, which leads up to Easter Sunday. Palm Sunday kicks off the series of Christian holy days that commemorate the Crucifixion and celebrate Jesus Christ's resurrection.

"Good Friday has been, for centuries now, the heart of the Christian message because it is through the death of Jesus Christ that Christians believe that we have been forgiven of our sins," Daniel Alvarez, an associate teaching professor of religious studies at Florida International University, told USA TODAY.

What is Holy Saturday? What the day before Easter means for Christians around the world

When is Good Friday?

Good Friday is always the Friday before Easter. It's the second-to-last day of Holy Week.

In 2024, Good Friday will fall on March 29.

What is Good Friday?

Good Friday is the day Christ was sacrificed on the cross. According to Britannica , it is a day for "sorrow, penance, and fasting."

"Good Friday is part of something else," Gabriel Radle, an assistant professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame, previously told USA TODAY. "It's its own thing, but it's also part of something bigger."

Are Good Friday and Passover related?

Alvarez says that Good Friday is directly related to the Jewish holiday, Passover.

Passover , or Pesach, is a major Jewish holiday that celebrates the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt.

"The whole Christian idea of atoning for sin, that Jesus is our atonement, is strictly derived from the Jewish Passover tradition," said Alvarez.

How is that possible?

According to the professor, Passover celebrates the day the "Angel of Death" passed over the homes of Israelites who were enslaved by the Egyptians. He said that the Bible states when the exodus happened, families were told to paint their doors with lamb's blood so that God would spare the lives of their firstborn sons.

Alvarez says this is why Christians call Jesus the "lamb of God." He adds that the symbolism of the "blood of the lamb" ties the two stories together and is why Christians believe God sacrificed his firstborn son. Because, through his blood, humanity is protected from the "wrath of a righteous God that cannot tolerate sin."

He adds that the stories of the exodus and the Crucifixion not only further tie the stories together but also emphasize just how powerful the sacrifice of the firstborn and the shedding of blood are in religion.

"Jesus is the firstborn, so the whole idea of the death of the firstborn is crucial," said Alvarez.

He adds that the sacrifice of the firstborn, specifically a firstborn son, comes from an ancient and "primitive" idea that the sacrifice unleashes "tremendous power that is able to fend off any kind of force, including the wrath of God."

Why Is Good Friday so somber?

Alavarez says people might think this holiday is more depressing or sad than others because of how Catholics commemorate the Crucifixion.

"I think [it's] to a level that some people might think is morbid," said Alvarez.

He said Catholics not only meditate on Jesus' death, but primarily focus on the suffering he faced in the events that led up to his Crucifixion. That's what makes it such a mournful day for people.

But, the professor says that Jesus' suffering in crucial to Christianity as a whole.

"The suffering of Christ is central to the four Gospels," said Alvarez. "Everything else is incidental."

According to the professor, statues that use blood to emphasize the way Jesus and Catholic saints suffered is very common in Spanish and Hispanic Countries, but not as prevalent in American churches.

Do you fast on Good Friday?

Father Dustin Dought, the executive director of the Secretariat of Divine Worship of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, previously told USA TODAY that Good Friday and Ash Wednesday are the two days in the year that Roman Catholics are obliged to fast.

"This practice is a way of emptying ourselves so that we can be filled with God," said Dought.

What do you eat on Good Friday?

Many Catholics do not eat meat on any Friday during Lent. Anything with flesh is off-limits. Dought says this practice is to honor the way Jesus sacrificed his flesh on Good Friday.

Meat that is off limits includes:

Instead, many Catholics will eat fish. According to the Marine Stewardship Council , this is allowed because fish is considered to be a different type of flesh.

Contributing: Jordan Mendoza ; USA TODAY