On immigration: As the president prepares to make his big announcement, we ponder what it means to be an American

You can watch the president here. The message from the White House is: "It's time to fix our broken immigration system. Tomorrow night, President Obama will address the nation on new commonsense steps he's taking to fix as much of it as he can. Tune in tomorrow at 8pm ET on http://WhiteHouse.gov/Immigration-Action #ImmigrationAction."

by Ken

Howie passed along the clip of the president talking about what he's going to do tomorrow on immigration, wondering if I was thinking about writing about it. Not so much, I replied. Then it occurred to me that I do have something to say.

There's a paragraph I simply adored early on in a funny and charming (in a goofy kind of way) short story by Dave Eggers published in the November 17 New Yorker, "The Alaska of Giants and Gods." The story is about a 38-year-old woman named Josie who, on impulse, has just dragged her two children to Alaska -- to an RV parked in a campground outside Seward, to be specific. Josie isn't exactly strong on personal direction. (As we'll read later, "Josie paged through the years of her life, trying to remember a decision she had made that she was proud of, and she found nothing.)

Here's the paragraph, preceded by the paragraph that, you know, precedes it. I wasn't going to include it, because it's not what tickled me so, but some of it sets up "my" paragraph (which I've boldfaced to make it look like it's more important to me, which it is), in ways I didn't want to deprive you of. Here it is:

She had been born a blank. Her parents were blanks. All her relatives were blanks, though many were addicts, and she had a cousin who identified as an anarchist. But otherwise Josie's people were blanks. They were from nowhere. To be American is to be blank, and a true American is truly blank. So Josie was a truly great American.

Still, she'd heard occasional and vague references to Denmark. Once or twice she heard her parents mention some connection to Finland. Her parents knew nothing about these nationalities, these cultures. They cooked no national dishes, they taught Josie no customs, and they had no relatives who cooked national dishes or had customs. They had no clothes, no flags, no banners, no sayings, no ancestral lands or villages or folktales. When she was thirty-two, and had wanted to visit some village, somewhere, where her people had come from, none of her relatives had any idea at all where to go. One uncle thought he could be helpful. Everyone in our family speaks English, he said. Maybe you should go to England?

I just love this. In fact, I think it's almost the opposite of what it means to be an American, since it seems to me that most Americans are perennially acutely aware of where we came from. It's maybe the thing we most nearly have in common as Americans -- that we came from someplace else. Though I suppose there are "real Americans" who are as blank as Josie. Either way, it seems to be what, more than anything else, makes us Americans.

And as always I come back to the seeming paradox that a nation of immigrants can be as obtuse and hateful as the anti-immigration loonies are, with their total-nutjob fantasy of Islamic terrorists slithering across the Mexican border bearing ebola. (Be afraid, people!) Of course, if you think about it awhile --  though not too long, I would suggest -- it makes a kind of hilarious and appalling sense.

By the way, as best I recall, the narrator of "The Alaska of Giants and Gods" doesn't tell us whether Jose ever actually went to England.

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