July 4th: America can be as beautiful as we want it to be

One of the singers in Coke's "America, the Beautiful" commercial.

OPINION

I'm a sentimental sap. Despite 28 years as a journalist - having to deal with tragedies, liars, bigots, criminals, despots, PR spinmeisters and countless examples of people's inhumanity towards man and woman - I never let the "bad" news turn me into a grouchy, old cynic, an unfortunate occupational hazard.

I still get a lump in my throat when the "Star Spangled Banner" is played as the TV camera focuses on the faces of our Olympic athletes; I stand a little straighter when veterans get honored; I struggle to compose myself when I talk about the struggles our AAPI pioneers had to endure, and I get teary-eyed when I see and hear this multi-lingual version of "America, the Beautiful." Among the languages used in the commercial to sing "America, the Beautiful" are Tagalog, Mandarin, Hindi and Farsi.

Mrs. Dolores Baso

One of the images in this long version of the Coke commercial,which includes scenes and interviews with everyone involved in its making, there's a brief image of a former neighbor of mine, the late Dolores Basco, an immigrant from the Philippines. If you don't look for it you'll likely miss it. I was surprised to see it and had to go back and freeze the frame with her image. There she was!

Mrs. Basco - that's what I called her - always had a smile for me. Her wisecracks about other people in our Filipino/American community are part of my fond memories of her. She always pitched in when my parents hosted an event at our house, using her kitchen as an auxiliary when the food prepping got too big or the four burners on our kitchen range was not enough. Her kids babysat our daughters.

Mrs. Basco is also the grandmother of Dante Basco, the very same actor who played the groundbreaking role of Rufio, leader of the Lost Boys, in the movie Hook. The Basco family's fourth generation are also shown in the clip's swimming pool sequences.

RELATED: America's challenge is learning to live with itself.

When the 30-second commercial was first shown during the 2014 Superbowl, the bigots and faux patriots came out in droves, especially on the Internet "How dare Coke! 'America, the Beautiful' should only be sung in English!" was the gist of their outrage.

To its credit, Coca-Cola resisted the xenophobes, defended the concept, doubled down and aired a 90-second version of the commercial during the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics a couple of months later.

Behind the scenes of the Coke commercial: America, the Beautiful.

I wish they would air the commercial again during the Republican Convention this summer just to tweak the white supremacists who have flocked to their candidate. During this presidential campaign when so much hate and fear is being stirred up, it's easy for people of color to become despondent, disappointed and cynical.  Our country has a lot of flaws - (a lot!) - but the biggest flaw it suffers, is not living up to its lofty self-image. 

RELATED: The GOP's new Southern Strategy based on racism

I know, it's a Coke commercial and it's hard to justify the amount of sugar in one serving of the soft-drink - but what better way to celebrate America's birthday than by mixing capitalism with patriotism? To many people around the world, Coke is as iconic a symbol for America as the Red, White & Blue or Statue of Liberty. Try to think of the message, not the soft-drink. The real product the commercial is selling is what America can be; what American should be. 

RELATED: Dear White America ...

The message of the "America, the Beautiful" commercial needs to be heard again. Forget the soft-drink and focus on the message: America is a country of diverse peoples; you don't have to be an English-speaker to love America; you don't have to be white to be an American. It is not a nostalgic longing for the past, but a reach towards the future of our country.

I can almost see Mrs. Basco sipping coffee in our kitchen, saying, in her wisecracking manner, "Let America, be America!"

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The American story: Immigrants, innovation and entrepreneurship

Space X, a U.S. company founded by immigrant Elon Musk, seeks to  find ways to make space travel accessible to the general public. Above, one of their rockets underwent a test launch.

ASIAN IMMIGRANTS led the list of billion-dollar American companies started by immigrants, according to a policy brief by the National Foundation for American Policy.

Titled "Immigrants and Billion Dollar Startups," the research shows the benefits of making it easier for foreign students to study in American colleges and universities. A quarter of the companies in the study were launched by students who attended U.S. institutions and decided to pursue their dreams in this country.

Entering the U.S. as an international student has shown to be a good avenue for starting successful U.S. companies. Nearly one-quarter (20) of the 87 billion dollar U.S. startup companies – and almost half of the companies with an immigrant founder – had a founder who first came to America as an international student. 

Immigrants have started more than half (44 of 87) of America’s startup companies valued at $1 billion dollars or more and are key members of management or product development teams in over 70 percent (62 of 87) of these companies. 

The research finds that among the billion dollar startup companies, immigrant founders have created an average of approximately 760 jobs per company in the United States. The collective value of the 44 immigrant-founded companies is $168 billion, which is close to half the value of the stock markets of Russia or Mexico.

With 14 startups, India led all countries. Other Asian immigrant entrepreneurs came from China, Singapore, South Korea, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan. 

Other key findings of the research:

• Fifty-one percent, or 44 out of 87, of the country’s $1 billion startup companies had at least one immigrant founder. This illustrates the increasing importance and contributions of immigrants to the U.S. economy. A 2006 study conducted with the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) identified an immigrant founder in 25 percent of venture-backed companies that became publicly traded between 1990 and 2005, while a 2013 NVCA study found immigrants started 33 percent of U.S. venture-backed companies that became publicly traded between 2006 and 2012. 
• This study is one of the first to examine the role immigrants play on the management or product development teams in leading private companies in information technology, health, energy, financial services, and other sectors. The research found 62 of the 87 companies, or 71 percent, had at least one immigrant helping the company grow and innovate by filling a key management or product development position. 
• The billion-dollar startup companies with an immigrant founder excel at job creation. The leading companies for employment are SpaceX (4,000 employees), Mu Sigma (3,500 employees) and Palantir Technologies (2,000 employees). Uber has only 900 direct employees but has 162,000 active drivers.
• California was the headquarters of 32 of the 44 immigrant-founded companies, followed by New York (6), Massachusetts (4) and Illinois (2).
• Contrary to popular belief, holders of H-1B visas are not taking jobs away from Americans. As a matter of face, for every H-1B visa position requested, U.S. technology companies increase their employment by five workers.

The study concludes that the U.S. should be making immigration rules that encourage foreign students to flourish in America and warns against the restrictive policies encouraged by some of the presidential candidates. For example, if S. 2394, a bill by Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Jeff Sessions (R-AL), had been in effect over the past decade, few if any of the billion-dollar startup companies with an immigrant founder would have been started in the United States. 

Immigrant entrepreneurs make important contributions to America, bringing new ideas and starting companies themselves or joining forces with native-born co-founders. Instead of making it more difficult for them to stay in this country, we should be finding ways to encourage them to stay. As the study shows, many of them come to this country to take advantage of the education and facilities offered by our best universities, founding a company and creating jobs is the best payback.

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For more news about Asian/Americans and Pacific Islanders, read AsAm News.

Washington Post editorial: Immigration in reverse

PEW graphic

I THOUGHT this editorial from the Washington Post is worth sharing because a lot of the fear-mongering on immigration is sheer political poppycock from presidential candidates hoping their supporters don't do any research on the issue.

If any further study is performed, it would be found that the largest group coming to the U.S. since 2012 is Asian immigrants, surpassing the numbers coming from Latin America. 
Asians are expected to constitute 36% of the immigrant population by 2055, surpassing Latinos, who by then will be 34% of immigrants.

However, unlike immigrants from Latin America, who share a common language, immigrants from Asia come from a myriad host of countries with their own languages and cultures.

Those political candidates stirring up the anti-immigrant fervor by labeling them rapists and drug dealers and talk about building walls need to catch up with the facts. They have been living in the past too long.

Immigration in reverse

By The Washington Post Editorial Board
January 24, 2016

THE ANTI-ILLEGAL immigrant rancor and outright nativism afoot in the Republican primary field give rise to the impression that illegal immigration has soared to unprecedented levels and that the border is no more than a line in the sand, scarcely monitored and easily crossed. The truth diverges wildly from that rhetoric, as a pair of recent studies demonstrate.

Notwithstanding the demagoguery of Donald Trump and some of his GOP rivals, the number of illegal immigrants in this country, which has declined each year since 2008, is now at its lowest level since 2003, and the percentage of undocumented immigrants likewise is at its lowest point since the turn of the century.

A report from the Pew Research Center shows a decline of nearly a million unauthorized immigrants, to 11.3 million, from 2007 to 2014. An even more recent survey, from the Center for Migration Studies, a New York think tank, indicates that the number of illegal immigrants has now fallen to 10.9 million, a precipitous drop driven largely by declining arrivals from Mexico. In fact, according to Pew, for the first time since the 1940s, Mexican migrants have been leaving the United States at a greater rate than they have entered.

Those numbers underscore what demographers have known for several years: that the great wave of Mexican immigration that began in the mid-1960s crested a few years ago and has been tailing off. Some 11.7 million Mexican-born immigrants, roughly half of them undocumented, are now in this country, down from 12.8 million in 2007 . Most of those who have left have done so of their own accord; comparatively few were deported.

That Mr. Trump has leveraged fact-free rhetoric for political advantage is not news. Still, it is noteworthy that so much of the GOP-primary oxygen, at least until the terrorist attacks in Paris, was consumed by alarmist rhetoric about border security, when in fact the border is more tightly patrolled than ever, and apprehensions at the southwestern border, a rough measure of illegal crossings, have been cut by about two-thirds since Sept. 11, 2001.

The dwindling Mexican immigration since the Great Recession reflects a number of factors, including, on the “pull” side, balky economic recovery and tougher border enforcement in the United States and, on the “push” side, improving economic conditions and a falling birthrate in Mexico. The result, according to Pew, is that in the five years ending in 2014, more than 1 million Mexicans (including 100,000 children born in the United States with dual citizenship) returned from the United States to live in Mexico, while 870,000 Mexicans entered the United States, many or most of them illegally.

Republican rhetoric on immigration has not caught up to those numbers, nor to the reality that the U.S. economy, like other Western economies, cannot function without low-wage, low-skill labor, which Mexico has supplied. An estimate 7 million-plus undocumented immigrants, most of them Mexicans, are employed in this country. Mr. Trump’s fantasies of mass deportation notwithstanding, they will not be replaced by native-born Americans. At some point, Republicans will need to grapple with that reality.

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