I was brought here to America for a better life. I’m an adoptee who came from Guatemala at five months old. I never want to forget how tenuous life can be. Instead of having a great life in America, I could easily have been one of the children in the migrant camps along the U.S. border.
My birth family is still in Guatemala. My birth mom says that making an adoption plan was the hardest thing she’s ever done, but she did it anyway — because she loved me. I now write to her and visit her, and we also send her food every month.
We can debate whether families fleeing desperate poverty should be eligible for asylum. We can debate the amount of violence they have to suffer, or how bad their starvation has to be, before we let them immigrate. But we cannot separate kids from their parents, and we can’t debate the importance of life and the humanity of these refugees.
This is just as true now as it was for my great-grandparents and my Nanna, when HIAS brought them here from Germany after World War II. They sailed past the Statue of Liberty, and they knew that America was different. They called it the Golden Land. It was a place where they wouldn’t have to be afraid for their lives, where they could live freely as Jews.
America treated people like, well, like people. That shouldn’t be a big deal, but in the history of the world, it is. That is what makes America great.
Meir Stein is a 13-year old Jewish Day School Student.
