Here is the full transcript of Ben Huh’s talk titled “What If You Were An Immigrant?” at TEDxPortland conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
So, I’m not here to talk about something that’s funny. I’m here to talk about something that’s really, really close to my heart. In fact, it’s so close I cannot escape it. It’s because I came to this country as an immigrant.
The Immigrant Experience
It’s hard for some people to notice when somebody’s an immigrant. I do things related to Internet culture, which is very American. It is very Internet-y. You have to be in the zeitgeist. It is a class of work that people who are like me do not do. We run dry cleaners, grocery stores, mail salons, 7-Elevens. Maybe we get an H-1B visa and we work at Microsoft.
But we do not go out and make entertainment websites because for that to occur, we must have a connection that is much deeper than a career or profession. I must understand you and your background and where you grew up. But somehow, I ended up here.
And because I came here when I was 14, I was able to understand what it’s like to be an American yet still be an immigrant. If I came here if I was 10, maybe if I was 21, I may have missed that. I may have been set in my ways as an immigrant, or maybe I would have acted more like a second generation where I didn’t remember where I came from. But because I was 14, I remember all these things. I remember living in a one-bedroom apartment with my parents. There was a mattress on the living room floor.
The Struggles of Immigration
I was the only child, so my parents gave me the bedroom, and they slept out on the mattress on the living room floor. And I remember their horror and the shame on their face when I brought my friends home from school. I remember that moment when I walked into the door with the kids, and my parents were like, “You didn’t tell me that you were going to bring guests.” And that awkward moment when they were trying to figure out what to do with that mattress on the living room floor and we had no place for my friends to sit.
Immigration is a very, very unfair trade. I don’t know if many of you have immigrant parents, but they pay for everything. They pay the costs; we, the children, reap the benefits, and as my parents like to joke, the grandkids will forget about it all, and they’ll become useless. Probably because they spoil them, but not my fault.
So, when I look at my immigration experience, I was 14, my parents brought me here, we had relatives. It isn’t poverty. Poverty is defined by the cold and the hunger of it all. It is very Oliver Twist. That is what I think of when I think about poverty. Many immigrants live in near or in poverty. Many immigrants do not. It is not a monolithic experience.
Dreams and Hopes
Yet many immigrants experience poverty in its own way. Yet the reason we believe in the immigrant experience is that the poverty is filled, the lack of something, and it is filled by dreams, it is filled by hope. So that when you are living in a one-bedroom, when you cannot pay the bills for your phone, we justify it by saying there is a better future for the next generation. And the strangeness of it all is that a century ago, immigration was very, very different.
A century ago, immigration was defined by something completely different than what we experience today. 1912, steamships, railroads, no automobiles for people to crisscross on the highway, no internet, no access to information. The greatest suffering for immigrants was caused by nature, by the world that we live in, the physical world itself, distance, illness, acts of God.
Being able to sail around the world to reach America was physically challenging. Your ship could be shipwrecked. You could run out of water. You could die of thirst and disease. And when you got into that train to cross America, you had no idea of what was on the other side.
Modern Challenges
But a hundred years later today, it is vastly different. The suffering of immigration is caused by man. It is not nature. For the most part, we have conquered nature. You can get on a plane right now and in 12 hours be on the other side of the planet, being served drinks and little cocktails along the way. Very different than a steamship.
Today, the suffering of an immigrant is man-made by policy. It is separation, not distance. It is, if I leave this country and I’m a Canadian, let’s say, I may not be able to get back across the border. I may not be able to visit my friends because what if they question my immigration status on the border and reject me? This happens a lot more than my Canadian friends like to admit. It is bureaucracy. People waiting 20 years to enter the lottery to receive a permit to migrate to the United States, watching their relatives and their nephews grow old and unable to visit. It is prejudice.
It is reading about yourself as an immigrant in the papers and knowing that’s not true. It is easier to ship a box of bananas from India than to reunite a child from there with our parents in the United States. The world has gotten small, but we have erected barriers to keep people out.
Yet at the same time, if you ask everyone in the United States, they will almost certainly tell you that this country was built on immigrants and immigration.
That we are all a nation of immigrants, yet for some reason we are uncomfortable with the idea of letting people in. That while we recognize the value and have erected a statue that says, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” we don’t like to see the people outside our borders as people.
Perception and Policy
I’m not sure what drives this fear. Most people aren’t really afraid of me. I post cat pictures on the internet. Maybe it’s because they believe that there’s a finite number of jobs in the United States, that there are 300 and some million people and there’s probably 150 million jobs and if somebody takes my job, I’ll never get that job back.
Maybe we believe that in order for the economy to grow, that only those people with skilled intellectuals or laborers who can do special things should be let in. I came here as a 14-year-old. My only skill set was annoying the shit out of my parents. Maybe, and this starts to get a little bit more uncomfortable, maybe we believe that only certain people that look like me should be let into this country.
Maybe we believe that only certain people who come from countries where we had historical immigration should be let into the country. Strangely, our elected politicians do not ask you what you believe in. They set immigration policy and we just go along. Immigration is usually debated in tight political circles of people who are in the know, who have experience, yet we all claim to be descendants of immigrants.
Sadly, our view of immigration has always been affected by race. Chinese Exclusion Act, there’s a reason why almost every Asian American that you see on the street has been here no before the 1960s. Before the 1960s, this country outlawed people who looked like me. I’m Korean, by the way, so I don’t take really offense to that, but I’m kidding.
National Origins Quota System, fancy words for saying we don’t want Eastern European immigrants back in the 1800s. Arizona State Bill 1070, if you’re brown, we stop you and ask you if you really belong here. These are actual laws that this country has passed that is about immigration, about keeping people out and figuring out who to let in. Whatever label you put on them, whatever fancy acronym you can put on them, it doesn’t hide the fact that we have very, very outdated views on immigration versus what we actually believe in this room.
The Complexity of Immigration
We don’t want to be racist, but somehow we keep letting our politicians pass these bills. It turns out, as I looked more and more into this, the conclusion that I drew was not that immigration itself is controversial. In fact, one of the reasons why the United States has a growing economy and a growing population, while the rest of the developed world has a birth rate that is declining and declining to a point where they’re unable to sustain their own social safety net and tax base, the reason this country continues to have a population that is thriving, that is diverse, is due to immigration.
Most people, most generations who have been in this country for more than three or more generations no longer create babies at a rate that actually makes this economy sustainable. In fact, most of our population growth has come from Hispanic migration. If it weren’t for them, we’d have more houses than we could fill people with, more dollars and more retirees to support than our working folks can actually provide for.
This system is fragile, yet people want to keep everybody else out without recognizing that this system relies on immigration to continue to grow and support itself. It led me to believe that it’s only certain kinds of people that it’s actually controversial.
Maybe it’s not just race. Maybe it has to do with origin. Maybe it has to do with religion. When I planned this talk with the TEDx Portland folks, immigration was kind of on the radar. And a week ago, two immigrants detonated a bomb in Boston. What was their race? What was their religion? Does it matter? I don’t know. After coming to the United States, my father and I worked as a janitor in an office. We were not skilled laborers. There were plenty of Asians to go around.
The Immigrant Struggle
We worked as a janitor. And our suffering of working as an immigrant, making $2,000 a month as an entire family, was actually made harder. We were cleaning out trash cans. The people who in the office, that when you work late, come in and empty out the trash, that was us.
I remember collecting all the empty soda cans that were in the trash. It was, oh my God, it just stunk to high heaven. But I remember putting that in a black plastic bag in the balcony of our one-bedroom apartment. And we had collected enough to, like literally, we couldn’t go out on the balcony anymore.
I remember trading that in. It was like my allowance. Empty soda cans. We traded it in and got $150. It was amazing. Like it was hard labor. I earned it. I still remember the smell of that rotting soda. It was $120, apparently. The immigrant owners of the janitorial business stiffed us. A month of work, my mother, my father, and myself, all we had to show for was $120. It’s not that all immigrants are good.
Reflecting America
I’m not saying that. Some of us are good. Some of us are bad. In fact, we’re probably more of a reflection of America as it is today than most people are willing to admit. But in some cases, in one generation, between my parents and myself, we can go from babies that were born in post-Korean War, where they had no electricity, no infrastructure. My father graduated from middle school and didn’t go back. My mother has a high school degree.
We came to the United States, and I built an internet technology business in Seattle. I don’t know if there’s causation. I don’t know even if there’s correlation. I don’t know what drives that. It feels random, but it happens over and over again. More than a third of all American technology startups have at least one immigrant co-founder. I don’t know why that is.
But what I want to understand is, as the number of people who start to look at immigration rise as we get closer to debating this bill, they will recognize that my story is not unique. They may also recognize that there may be more terrorists in the immigration population than they had recognized before.
A Call for Discussion
That the good may outweigh the bad. That we do not actually know holistically who these immigrants are. That all these people collectively, when they show up on our borders, we may not be able to judge the character of these people by the passports that they bring. So then the question becomes, who do we let in?
Somebody at dinner asked me last night, “So who do we let in?” What is the answer? I don’t know that it’s important for me to tell you my answer, because it doesn’t really matter. At the end of the day, I am one voter, one naturalized American citizen. But it makes me… We’re missing an opportunity to have an intelligent discussion about what we the people want. We are…
We are letting other people decide who we let into this country. This is the second time I’ve appeared at a TEDx talk, I don’t know what’s up with that. Do not let this opportunity pass. It doesn’t matter whether you agree with me or not. It only matters that we actually talk about who do we believe we should let in. And that we tell people who are in the office to make these decisions and let them know that we believe in something, that we will not let them make that decision for us. Thank you.