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 is so close I cannot escape it.
It's because I came to this country as an immigrant.
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, nail salons, 7-11's.
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 more deeper than a career or profession.
I must understand you, and your background, and where you grew up.
But some how I ended up here.
And because I came here when I was 14, I
was able to understand what its like to be a American, yet still be a immigrant.
If I came here when I was ten or maybe if I was 21,
I may have missed that.
I may have been set in my ways as a
immigrant, or maybe I would've acted like a second generation,
where I didn't remember where I came from.
But because I was 14, I remember, 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.
My parents, I was an only child, 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 are like, "You didn't tell me that you were gonna bring guests."
And that awkward moment when they were trying to figure out
what to do with that mattress in 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.
[LAUGH].
>> 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 whole, by, 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.
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, and it's...
And it is filled by dreams, it is filled by hope.
So that when you are living in a one bedroom,
when you can not pay the bills for your phone...
We justify it by saying, there's 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 steam ships, railroads.
No automobiles for people to criss cross on
the high way, 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 ship wrecked.
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.
But 100 years later, today, it is vastly different.
The suffering 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 steam ship.
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 what my friends, 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 there relatives
and there 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 her parents in the United States.
The world has gotten small, though 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 boarders as people.
I'm not sure what drives this fear.
Most people aren't really afraid of me.
I post cat pictures on the internet.
[LAUGH].
>> Maybe it's because they believe that there's
a finite number of jobs in the United States.
That there 300 and something 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 the, 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.
[LAUGH].
>> Maybe,
and this starts to get a little bit more uncomfortable....
Maybe we believe, that only a 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 have 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 descendents 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 in the street has been no, no before the 1960's.
That before the 1960s this country outlawed people who looked like me.
I am Korean, by the way.
So, I don't take, really, offense to that.
[LAUGH] >> But, I'm kidding.
[LAUGH]
>> 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.
We don't wanna be racist, but somehow,
we keep letting our politicians pass these bills.
And 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 nets 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've 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 you could fill people with,
more dollars and more retirees to support,
that our working folks can actually provide for.
The system is fragile.
Yet people wanna keep everybody else out, without recognizing that the
system relies on immigration to continue to grow and support itself.
So 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 kinda on the radar.
And if, and a week ago, two immigrants det, 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 office.
We were not skilled laborers.
There were plenty of Asians to go around.
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 trashcans.
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 stunk to high heaven.
But I remember putting that in a black plastic bag
in the balcony of our, of our one bedroom apartment.
And we had collected enough to like, literally
I, we couldn't go out on the balcony anymore.
And I remember trading that in.
It was like my allowance.
Empty soda cans.
We traded them in, and got $150. It was amazing.
It was hard labor. I earned it.
I still remember the smell, that rotting soda.
It was $120 apparently.
The immigrant owners of the janitorial business stiffed us.
A month of work, my mother and my father and
myself, and all we had to show for was a $120.
It's not that all immigrants are good.
I'm not saying that.
Some of us are good, some of us are bad.
In fact, we are probably more of a reflection of the 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 a 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 cofounder.
I don't know why that is.
But what I wanna understand is, as the number of people
who start to look at immigration rise as we get closer to debating this bill.
They'll 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.
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's, 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 teared up at the Tedx talk.
I don't know what's up with that.
[LAUGH]
>> Do not let this opportunity pass.
It doesn' 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.