It's been easy to forget that piece of our immigrant past in the last decades. We hand out green cards to the most skilled. We skim off and brain-drain other countries. We put up border guards and barbed-wire fences to keep out the uninvited. There are so many who want to come here that we hold a lottery.
Citizenship is the luck of the draw.
It's been easy to forget the great refugee migrations that began with an exodus. At Amerikan's birth announcement I reached back to an old history book of mine, Oscar Handlin's classic narrative about the experience of the 19th-century immigrants as The Uprooted. So it is for these new refugees who will soon number 20,000. They repeat the real story of this country. These are the lucky ones, alive, free of tent cities and cigar-factory quarters, free to have their newborn swathed in designer stars and stripes.