Opinion | I am third-generation ‘garbage’

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Recently, President Donald Trump singled out Somali people as “garbage.” His key adviser is Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller, who is pushing some of the most intense anti-immigrant policies. Some months ago, I read a piece written by Miller’s uncle during the first Trump administration (“Stephen Miller is an Immigration Hypocrite. I know Because I’m His Uncle,” Politico, 2018), that explained that their family fled Belarus in about 1903 to escape persecution. His uncle said that the family is unsure why Stephen has such a deep antipathy to immigrants when his own grandparents were once “garbage,” peddling fruit on the streets when they first arrived in the U.S.

Reading this, I was surprised by the parallels to my own grandparents’ immigration story. When my grandfather Sholom and his siblings came to America in 1910, they were fleeing pogroms and widespread discrimination in Belarus. On arrival, he worked for eight long years, probably in a factory or sweatshop, but also attended night school and graduated from Brooklyn College in 1918 with a degree in dentistry.

My grandmother Masha, who was from Galicia in Poland, and my grandfather were married in the early 1920s and moved to Yorktown Heights in New York. Their children — my father, Max, and his sister, Louise — were raised in comfort and enrolled in local schools.

Their life was not comfortable for long. Masha died in 1940 during brain surgery, and Sholom died of a heart attack two years later in 1942. The kids moved back to Brooklyn, and Louise dropped out of school to support my father and their grandmother. Fortunately, he was an excellent athlete and got a scholarship to play basketball at Connecticut State Teachers College (now Central Connecticut). Then, Louise was able to go back to school and eventually become a teacher in the New York City Public Schools.

Max graduated from college, joined the U.S. Army and served in Korea for two years. When he returned, he was able to use his GI Bill to get a master’s degree from New York University and join a doctoral program at Columbia’s Teachers College, where he met my mother, Nancy Adams Cogan. (I love my parents’ story, but the focus here is on my father’s parents.) While his parents might not have been classified as refugees on arrival, no one who stayed behind survived World War II. My father and his sister would never have been born if their parents had not found refuge in this country.

I had my own learning opportunity from August 2024 to August ’25 when I worked in a factory in southeastern Minnesota. There, I was trained and mentored by immigrants who marveled at how little I knew about power tools. After ninety days of patient training, I was a solid worker and had earned their respect. Some of my friends on the team were Somali. For Eid al-Fitr, at the end of Ramadan, a Somali co-worker (who, like many Somali people in the U.S., has a university degree) brought a full range of sambusas and breads and even spiced tea. We had worked together through the entire fasting period, and he showed so much perseverance that I couldn’t help but admire him. There were similar feasts of tamales and pizza and seasonal delicacies from many traditions. The time spent together over food made the workplace more cohesive.

In the second half of the Biden administration, a bipartisan immigration reform proposal was developed but not considered. Our nation depends on immigrants, and the system is broken. Republicans and Democrats have already done substantial work. The time for scapegoating and demonizing is past. Now is the time to finish that work.