The Land of Hopes and Dreams No More
How America’s Policy Toward Immigrants Harms Democracy and Threatens the Country’s Future
I was deeply moved, and my mind flooded with memories, when I read the commencement speech Dr. Abraham Verghese recently gave at Harvard. He’s an immigrant to the U.S., as am I, and also like me, he experienced the terror of a brutal autocratic regime seizing power, for him in Ethiopia, and for me in Romania.
Verghese was born in Ethiopia, to parents who were themselves immigrants, having moved from their native India to answer a call from the Ethiopian government to fill much needed roles as teachers. He was a medical student when a Soviet-backed military dictatorship deposed Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974, and he knew fellow students who were tortured and “disappeared.” He fled the country to complete his medical degree in India.
In his speech, he expressed his profound “appreciation for those committed to truth,” a sentiment close to my heart as well, having witnessed first-hand how an autocratic regime systematically eviscerated all bastions of truth-keeping. He went on to praise the U.S. as a country that “allows an immigrant like me to blossom here,” and recalled that Americans he’d observed who were serving in the Peace Corps, before he came to the U.S, gave him “an impression of a country that was decent, generous, and compassionate, not only to its own citizens, but to other nations.” That resonated powerfully for me, as it beautifully describes my experience of the country, having arrived as a fifteen-year-old who spoke no English and had only a fourth-grade education.
Verghese was speaking that day as one who had taken great advantage of the opportunities the U.S. offered him, with an illustrious career as a physician and leading advocate of patient-centered medicine, as well as an exquisite novelist, dual achievements for which he was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2015. As wave after wave of immigrants have done since the country’s founding, in coming to the U.S., Verghese helped fill a pressing need for talent. He was one of a legion of Indian doctors who took positions in the most understaffed and underfunded hospitals of inner cities and rural communities. Arriving in 1980 for a residency in Johnson City, Tennessee, he worked 60-hour shifts in rotation at several hospitals in tiny towns, just as AIDS began afflicting residents “like recipients of a biological chain letter,” as he writes in his memoir of those years, My Own Country. The locals embraced him, teaching him to “talk country,” and he embraced them as well, including throwing himself into their cuisine, such as corn pone, squirrel stew, and baked possum. He indeed made rural eastern Tennessee his own country.
As I reflected on my own experience in communist Romania and the remarkable opportunities I was given in the U.S., I couldn’t help but think how different my experience here might have been had I come today. I was fortunate enough to be released as a child, along with my older brother Costa, from forced labor under the totalistic oppression of the communist regime of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. And our release was due to an outpouring of American support for my parents, who were in the U.S. and couldn’t return to Romania to work for our freedom. They would have been killed immediately upon arriving in the country. For years, they tried desperately to get us out, and even just to get word to us that they were alive, but we heard nothing of that. We had no idea what had happened to them, and I didn’t see or hear any word of my parents for eight years.
I was seven years old when the communists seized power in Romania in 1947, backed by the Soviet Red Army. Following Stalin’s brutal example, the regime promptly rounded up influential Romanian citizens, imprisoning, torturing, and executing them, with the total number of people killed during the course of the regime estimated between 500,000 and two million. Hundreds of thousands of children were orphaned and sent to horrifying orphanages, where many were abused and starved.
My grandfather, Sever Bocu, was one of those imprisoned and beaten to death. I can still vividly hear the pounding on the door when the secret police came in the dark of night, barging in to haul him away. My brother and I were staying with our grandparents at their rural farm near the town of Lipova in Transylvania, where my parents sent us ahead of the Nazi invasion of the country, to keep us safe. My grandfather was a national hero, especially revered in the region because he had vigorously advocated for the rights of Transylvanians, first as a journalist and then as a member of the Austrian-Hungarian parliament when Transylvania was under the empire’s rule. He’d been arrested thirty times for protesting the regime’s oppressive treatment, and he helped negotiate the transfer of Transylvania to Romanian rule. I was so proud of him when we’d walk through town; all the men took their hats off to him.
My grandmother was also beloved. The legend in town was that she had rushed, all on her own, old woman though she was, down to a battalion of Romanian soldiers. They were about to retreat from Nazi troops approaching the outskirts of the town, poised to seize it. She succeeded with her excoriations to our troops in steeling their will to keep fighting. Grandma was so devoted to Transylvanian culture and history that she had collected traditional clothing and created a library of history books and folklore, and she created a small museum for the items in the front room of their house.
Yet, that night when eight secret policemen showed up in their jackboots, menacingly wielding their rifles, I recognized that they were men from town who’d before shown my grandparents so much respect. I saw from the terror in my older brother’s eyes that neither he, my trusted older guardian, nor my grandparents could protect me. The townsmen took my nearly eighty-year-old grandfather, and he was sent to Sighet prison, where one day, as he was washing the floor of his cell, a guard kicked him in the face with such force that he broke grandfather’s skull, killing him.
After Grandpa’s arrest, Costa and I became pariahs in the school we’d been attending. Our grandfather was an enemy of the people, we were taunted. The teachers were replaced with communist party functionaries and students were told to address them as “Comrade Teacher.” New textbooks denounced the “decadence of Western science,” and praised Stalin and the glories of the Soviet Revolution. We’d passed through the looking glass into a surreal realm of evil. Children were pressed to report their parents as traitors. Costa knew a classmate who gave his uncle up for listening to Voice of America. Though I was in line to become president of my class, due to good grades, I was told I was unworthy, and I felt so humiliated. But much worse was to come.
Two years later, my grandmother, Costa, and I were detained, on the pretense that we were being taken to see my parents. Costa and I were thrilled. It had been several years since we’d been with them. Instead, we were sent far away to a small town in far eastern Moldova, where my grandmother was put under house arrest. The soldiers who “escorted” us were amused when we realized they had duped us. We lived in one room of a house, the only furniture in which was one bed we shared, sleeping on padding of freshly cut hay. There was no running water, and we washed by filling a basin from a well in the yard. My grandmother was not allowed to leave that room for over five years. She had no human interaction but with Costa and me, and we were gone to work for some eight to ten hours.
A secret policeman showed up at the door to our room every morning at 6:00 for the first year to take us to our separate grueling jobs. I cleaned sewers, hunched over all day in tunnels in unbearable stench, with rats swarming at my feet. Later, I dug holes for telephone poles, and as a ten-year-old, also hung high-tension wires, an extremely dangerous job I had no training in. Our food rations were barely enough to fend off starvation, but I was proud that I earned a blue ration card, the best, which was given to those who did the most dangerous work. I invested so much of my sense of self in that card, because I took it to mean I’d shown how hard I could work, doing as much as a grown man. It became my only source of solace, and I think my determination to show I was a really good worker was what kept me sane in the five years we were in captivity. Maybe, just maybe, I thought, eventually I would be given some kind of better work. That was a naïve child’s delusion. The only interest the regime had in us was in crushing our spirit.
As with all totalitarian leaders, the Romanian communists had no true concern for ideology, certainly not for uplifting the lives of the oppressed. Their only concerns were for power and money. Shortly after the regime took charge, it seized the property of all Romanians. Autocracies so swiftly become kleptocracies.
Costa and I were regularly sent to brainwashing interrogations, put into separate rooms and berated. Sitting on the floor, my head bowed, I was terrified as two interrogators in military garb shoved their heavy boots in my face, pounded loudly on the walls to show their fury, and barked that my parents were the worst of traitors to their country. My father, who was an executive for Standard Oil, was “capitalist scum.” I hoped their fixation with my parents meant they were still alive, but it would be several more years before we would have any word of them.
You might expect that in our little room at night, my grandmother, Costa, and I would dream out loud about our future once we were freed. But as years of the same drudgery dragged on, we never talked about the future. This was our future; there was no reason at all to think otherwise. While we were not in an actual labor camp, the control of the regime over our movements, and that of all of the townspeople, was total. No one could travel from the town, for any reason, without the permission of the police. That’s why after our first year there, the secret policeman no longer showed up to take Costa and I to work. If we’d made any attempt to flee, we would have been immediately apprehended, and our grandmother would likely have been killed.
Our saving grace was that my parents had been in the U.S. when the communist regime took over. My father and my mother had traveled there for a Standard Oil meeting in New York City. They couldn’t return to Romania, because they’d been told by trusted contacts in the country that they were near the top of the list of those to be executed. That has been the authoritarian communist playbook starting with Lenin in 1917 and carried on by Stalin throughout his reign – find disloyal influentials and dispose of them. That was not only because my father worked for a major capitalist “exploiter” of the working people, but because he had joined the Romanian resistance against the Nazis after they seized control of Romania in World War II, for which he was arrested, when I was two. From prison, he worked as an informant for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the C.I.A., and my mother acted as a courier, passing on information he gave her when she visited him.
Agonizing about our fate, they had pressed the U.S. government to intervene but were told there was nothing that could be done. They’d repeatedly sent large sums of money to Romania to pay various operatives to smuggle us away, all to no avail. Then, one day in 1953, my father was approached by a Romanian diplomat from the Washington embassy, who told him if my father would agree to spy for the Soviet and Romanian regimes, Costa and I would be free to come to the U.S. He showed my father a picture of Costa and me, and written on it was, “Dear Daddy, please do all you can to help us,” with our signatures. What an evil proposition; they had put my father in a horrible position. He had to worry that if he refused, the regime would hurt us, perhaps kill us. But he and my mother refused. My father also informed the F.B.I. of the Soviet/Romanian offer made. While U.S. officials told him there was still nothing the government could do to get us out, they advised him to bring the story of our captivity and the attempt to bribe him into spying to the press. My father arranged for a news conference, and every TV station and newspapers all around the country ran with our story, with headlines proclaiming, “Father Refuses to Spy for Reds to Save Sons,” and “Distraught Father Helps U.S. Smash Plot, Choice is Tough.” My parents also made an appeal by radio and TV, addressed to the mothers of Romania and America, in which my father shared the story and my mother pleaded for us, “We just pray they will not be harmed. They are two innocent children.” The media sparked an outpouring of public outrage, and vigorous efforts on our behalf, including from the formidable Ohio Congresswoman Frances Bolton, who lobbied intensively with President Eisenhower to obtain our freedom. The unyielding pressure led Eisenhower, after several months, to broker a deal for our release, and to our great astonishment, Costa and I found ourselves in the first-class cabin of a Pam Am Super Constellation airplane, complete with sleeping berths, headed to New York.
After we touched down, we were told to wait until all the other passengers had disembarked. Then our father came aboard and wrapped his arms around us in a long embrace. Holding our hands, he led us onto the stairs, and we were greeted by a cheering throng of well-wishers and a phalanx of media. At the bottom of the steps, I saw a woman overcome with emotion, wearing dark sunglasses and a hat. I didn’t recognize that she was my mother, and when we hugged, I didn’t recognize her scent. We had so much time to make up for.
Costa and I had traveled back through the looking glass. I’ve called that day we arrived in America, when I was fifteen, my second birthday; my American birthday. Our only regret was that our grandmother was not allowed to accompany us. She was finally allowed to leave Romania ten years later, and moved to England to live with my parents, who had moved to London for dad’s work.
The contrast between our oppression in Romania and the good will and caring shown to us by the American people could not have been more stark. I benefited from a host of guardian angles. Shortly after our arrival, my father received a call from the headmaster of Exeter, Wiliam Saltonstall, offering to enroll me in the school. When I got to campus, though I had so little education, he showed me the great respect of asking what grade I wanted to be placed in, demonstrating such empathy about how embarrassed I would be to attend classes with students younger than me. So, with a fourth-grade education and four months of learning English, I went into tenth grade. In the end, I did okay. My years of labor in Romania had taught me the rigors of hard work. When the soccer coach at Exeter heard I’d arrived, he put me on the varsity team, assuming that as a European, I had played a good deal. I’d in fact never played at all. And yet, he and my teammates bore with me as I learned the game.
Years later, after I had graduated from Princeton, the indomitable Frances Bolton, who had kept in touch with me, paid for me to attend Stanford Business School. At a recruitment dinner towards the end of my second year, I was invited to fill an empty spot at the Young and Rubicam table, and at the end of the dinner, I was offered a job at the company. Having started as a trainee, I eventually rose to become the CEO and Chairman of the Board.
Abraham Verghese and I both experienced the best of the long American tradition of embracing immigrants. The sad truth is, though, that the country has had a love/hate relationship with immigrants, right from the founding. In the debates over the drafting of the Constitution, Alexander Hamiliton, himself a poor immigrant from the West Indies, supported naturalization of larger numbers of immigrants, saying that the “advantage of encouraging foreigners was obvious.” But just ten years later, he had reversed himself, becoming an ardent advocate of restrictions. When the Central Pacific Railroad faced a labor shortage in building its portion of the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1860s, it recruited as many as 15,000 workers from China, at least 1,000 of whom were killed due to horrific working conditions. Despite that and the additional enormous contributions Chinese immigrants made, in 1882 the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, not only greatly restricting further Chinese immigration but barring those already in the U.S. not yet naturalized from becoming citizens. When the industrial revolution led to severe shortages of labor for the explosion of new American factories, millions of immigrants filled the jobs, and by 1920, immigrants accounted for over half of all manufacturing workers. The country’s ascendency to the world’s most formidable industrial power could not have happened without them. Yet, the Immigration Act of 1924 established strict quotas on immigrants, with a focus on restricting arrivals from Southern Europe and Asia as well as Jews.
The overriding story of immigrants in America has been one of capitalizing on the opportunity given to them and contributing astonishing economic dynamism and cultural richness to the country. Inventions and discoveries they’ve brought us, and the world, include, to name just a few, the telephone, from Scottish-born Alexander Graham Bell; the antibiotic streptomycin, the first effective treatment for tuberculosis, crafted by Ukrainian-born Selman Waksman; and a mathematical formula fundamental to the creation of the internet, discovered by Nigerian-born Philip Emeagwali. Forty-four of the Fortune 100 companies as of 2024 were founded or co-founded by first- or second-generation American immigrants, which includes Ford Motor, AT&T, Apple, and Google, and an estimated 40 percent of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are either immigrants or the children of immigrants. Immigrants currently account for 28 percent of our physicians, over 16 percent of registered nurses, and almost 40 percent of home health care aides. Our agricultural industry would be in severe crisis without immigrants, as they account for an estimated 73 percent of hired farm workers.
As specialist on immigration in the U.S. sociologist Charles Hirschman has written, in the U.S., uniquely among world nations, “Civic identity, rather than ancestry, has been the distinctive feature of American ‘peoplehood’ from the very start.” The founders, he highlights, established that “being American was defined as acceptance of the Enlightenment ideas expressed in the founding documents” of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. I fear that today, with so many in the country choosing to see immigration as a threat rather than an indication of the enormous appeal of that founding vision, which draws so many to our shores, we are in grave danger of eroding the cornerstones of our democracy.
Our current president was elected in part due to a promise to carry out the expulsions now so vigorously underway. But he was also elected for his promise to improve the lives of so many Americans suffering from ever-widening economic inequality. When it comes to that, his policies as of yet are mystifying at best. The New York Times recently reported a shortage of 400,000 workers in the country to fill factory jobs, with restrictions on immigration and deportations only making the problem worse. Farms and construction companies are also facing labor shortages, with potential serious ripple effects on the economy. How can revoking the visas of students who flock here from all around the world, and so often stay to make important contributions, be in our economic interests? All of these are clear indications that catering to the current resurgence of anti-immigrant fervor is, in fact, at cross-purposes with the goal of economic uplift, which would benefit us all.
As an immigrant who will be eternally grateful for the kindness and opportunity Americans granted him, I can only hope that we can turn this ugly tide and find our footing again as the country, in Abraham Verghese’s words, “Far from perfect...But striving to live up to the ideals expressed in its founding documents.”
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Notes
https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2025/05/harvard-commencement-speech-2025-abraham-verghese
Abraham Verghese, My Own Country: A Doctor's Story, (Simon & Schuster, 1994).
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6190931.stm
https://www.rferl.org/a/romania-communist-orphanages-starvation-abuse/32711948.html
St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Tuesday, May 26, 1953, Page 7.
Lawton Morning Press, Wednesday, May 27, 1953, Page 14.
https://www.cato.org/blog/founding-fathers-favored-liberal-immigration-system
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2760060
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/about-us-
https://fortune.com/2019/01/15/immigrants-founded-half-fortune-500-companies/
https://www.fwd.us/news/immigrant-farmworkers-and-americas-food-production-5-things-to-know/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3856769/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/23/business/factory-jobs-workers-trump.html
When I was living in Bucharest between 2004-2020, I often walked by the imposing corner villa with the Young & Rubicam sign on, I believe it was Vasile Lascar near the Slovakian Embassy, and thought of you, having heard about your deliverance from Romania, but I never knew the details before. How remarkable! And how deeply anguishing the current situation in America must seem to you now.
Thank you Peter. I never knew your story until I read your first book. We first met when I was a young F&B Director for John Gardiner at Enchantment. I hope all is well with you and your family.
Chris