<p><span class="deck">A walk through the old Jewish Lower East Side of New York City recalls the era when that battered, close-packed quarter was a high-pressure machine for the manufacture of Americans.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">It’s a politician’s bromide, and it also happens to be a profound truth. No war, no national crisis, has left a greater impress on the American psyche than the successive waves of new arrivals that quite literally built the country. Now that arguments against immigration are rising again, it is well to remember that every single one of them has been heard before.</span></p>
<p>The Statue of Liberty has been glorified, romanticized, trivialized, and over-publicized. But the idea of “Liberty Enlightening the World” endures. </p>
<p>The daughter of a Gaelic-speaking fisherman on a remote Scottish island emigrated to New York, worked as a maid in the Carnegie Mansion, and married Fred Trump. Her son would become a tycoon like his father and then the president. </p>
