Americans All. Immigrants All

What Brought Us to the United States?

Have you ever played with a magnet and a bunch of iron filings? Wasn’t it amazing to see the bits of iron leap across space to reach and cling to the magnet? This story is about a magnet much larger and more powerful than you have ever imagined—one 3,000 miles long and 1,500 miles wide. A different kind of magnet, too, one that attracted not iron filings, but human beings, real live people. A magnet that attracted every type and variety of human being alive! White people, black people, yellow people; Catholics, Protestants, Huguenots, Quakers, Baptists, Methodists, Unitarians, Jews; Spaniards, Danes, Chinese, Japanese, Dutch, Bohemians, Italians, Austrians, Slavs, Poles, Roumanians, Russians—and I’ve only just begun; farmers, miners, adventurers, soldiers, sailors, rich men, poor men, beggar men, thieves, shoemakers, tailors, actors, musicians, ministers, engineers, writers, singers, ditch-diggers, manufacturers, butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers. That magnet was AMERICA.—From “We the People”—by Leo Huberman.