There I sat at a round table in Beijing's Great Wall Hotel dining room some 21 years ago, with a vice chairman of the People's Insurance Company of China on one side and an attractive young lady, who was AIG's Beijing Branch Manager, on the other, trying to eat an abalone with chopsticks. My wife sat scowling at her own gastronomic delights, while I wondered just how foolish we looked to these sophisticated people (to whom I was just another bumbling American businessman, traveling with his wife).

As uncomfortable as I was in that strange land where I knew neither the customs nor spoke the language, imagine how uncomfortable foreigners and immigrants in America must feel when they encounter our systems of doing business. Of all the places in the world, America has the greatest diversity of customs and nationalities, and that is what makes it the great nation it is. I tend to cringe when I hear immigrants being bashed by Americans who ought to know better. “Why don't they just go back to where they came from?” they complain.

Yeah, why don't we all! Except for the few who are of Native American heritage, the rest of us, or our ancestors, came from somewhere else at some time in the not-too-distant past. Anthropologists have studied DNA to determine the routes of migration from Africa to Asia, from Asia to Europe, and from Asia to North America in prehistoric times. Migrations from Europe and Africa — some in the form of slavery — to North and South America are a part of our own history. Immigration is part of the American culture; to be anti-immigrant is to be anti-American. How would our nation have grown had we not migrated from state to state, always expanding the frontier?