By Michael Gold
As America celebrates its 250th birthday, there are now two competing visions of America – President Trump’s ideal of the country is one where whites from northern Europe are the true and only owners of the land and people of color are not welcome.
Bruce Springsteen, of all people, provides a counter-ideal – one where immigrants from all over the world can come to this country, work hard and become part of the American vision of inclusion and shared prosperity.
The question becomes – which vision will win?
“I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong,” Vance said in a July 2025 speech to the Claremont Institute, a conservative think based in California.
It’s interesting that J.D. Vance married a woman of Indian heritage. Does he believe she has a lesser “claim” over America than himself and his fellow Americans of Scots/Irish heritage?
This is the same guy who said Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, during the 2024 election, with no evidence of course. So, you know, he’s got a tendency to twist things and just make stuff up.
Now, those Haitians, about 350,000 of them, who had temporary protected status (TPS), who were here legally, are going to be ordered by the Trump Administration to leave the country and go back to Haiti. Six thousand Syrians, who had escaped a civil war and also had TPS, are going to have to leave as well.
Haiti is an extremely dangerous country. The U.S. State Department warns people, “Do not travel to Haiti due to the risk of crime, terrorism, kidnapping, unrest, and limited health care.”
There are good reasons these people escaped Haiti. But they also came here because of the promise of America. The Haitians didn’t want to go to China, Russia or Iran. Neither would I.
About 10,000 to 15,000 Haitian immigrants live in Springfield, Ohio. They’re working in warehouses, manufacturing and services. They’ve opened restaurants and grocery stores, according to the city of Springfield (source: HTTPs://springfieldohio.gov/immigration-faqs/).
In other words, they are living productive lives and contributing to the prosperity of the community.
While the Trump Administration is busy deporting people of color, it’s intent on importing white people. Trump has informed Congress he wants to allow 10,000 more white South Africans into the U.S. This will cost taxpayers approximately $100 million (source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-administration-thousands-more-afrikaners-refugees/).
Bruce Springsteen, the mega-watt rock star, whose own ethnic heritage is a mix of Dutch, Irish and Italian, offers a more welcoming perspective. He often sang in concerts, “This Land is Your Land,” by Woody Guthrie, now a classical American song.
In 2006 Springsteen composed a song, called “American Land,” which builds on Guthrie’s work, providing us a far more expansive vista of what America is than J.D. Vance.
I didn’t know about this song until a few years ago, when I heard it on one of Sirius XM’s 400 radio channels. But ever since I heard “American Land,” it has inspired me. The song provides a counter-story to the policies of the Trump Administration, which lets us know that people of color and minority religions simply don’t count as much as white Christians from the old Confederate states.
The music of “American Land” is laden with Irish penny whistles, fiddles and something called a frame drum. What it says is equally as powerful. It’s told from the perspective of an immigrant in either the nineteenth or early twentieth century. Here are samples of the lyrics from different points in the song:
“I docked at Ellis Island in the city of light and spire
I wandered to the valley of red-hot steel and fire
We made the steel that built the cities with the sweat of our two hands
We made our home in the American Land.
“The McNicholases, the Posalskis, the Smiths, Zerillis, too
The Blacks, the Irish, Italians, the Germans and the Jews
They come across the water, a thousand miles from home
With nothing in their bellies but the fire down below.
“They died building the railroads, they worked to bones and skin
They died in the fields and factories, names scattered in the wind
They died to get here a hundred years ago, they’re still dying now.
“There’s treasure for the taking, for any hard-working man
Who will make his home in the American Land.”
My two grandfathers came to Ellis Island. There are millions of Americans who can proudly say that.
My paternal grandfather arrived in the early 1900s, as a baby. His mother and father lived in Russia, and they wanted nothing to do with it.
Grandpa Abe grew up on the Lower East Side. He was forced to drop out of middle school to earn money for his very large family when his father died suddenly and got a job in a slaughterhouse. He eventually started his own business and created a good life for himself and his children.
There are millions of Americans who can proudly say that.
Wherever they came from, they re-created themselves as Americans – Germans fleeing the revolution of 1848, Irish escaping the deadly potato famine, Italians desperate to escape poverty and instability, Jews leaving Russia in droves because of state-sponsored slaughters and persecutions by the Czarist government.
A Vietnam veteran I once interviewed had come from Italy in 1959. He worked as a radio operator during the war. He was almost killed twice during his service. He took shrapnel in his legs from bombs and was shot in the arm. Joe earned two Bronze Stars, got a high school diploma while still in the Army, and worked for IBM for 37 years.
A second vet I met, also Italian, went to Vietnam too. He got shot during battle as well. His name is John. He won the Silver Star and a Purple Heart. John lost a lot of buddies, plus his cousin, during combat. He told me he had read the entire Bible 18 times. John became a plumber and drove a taxi at night to support his family.
I taught elementary school in New York City for almost twenty years and met children from all over the world – Ecuador, Peru, Yemen, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Kenya, the Ivory Coast, Mexico, Dominican Republic.
One of my students, a black girl from a Caribbean island, earned a full scholarship to Spence, a top private school in Manhattan. Another one of my students, a Hispanic kid, got into Stuyvesant High, one of the city’s toughest schools for math, science, engineering and technology.
In the east Bronx, there are now thousands of families from Bangladesh. I taught a number of Bengali kids. Their families were driven to succeed. The vast majority of my Bengali students worked hard to learn English. The parents talked to them about how important school was. They made the kids work. The parents were working hard themselves. They lived in apartment buildings in a neighborhood filled with windowless warehouses, auto body shops, bad air, and pigeons on the street everywhere. They wanted a better world and were busy striving for it.
A few years ago I ran into one of my former Bengali students. She’d gotten into the City College of New York and was studying computer engineering. She went to a high school prom with another one of my students, a Hispanic boy, who, she told me, was now at Manhattan University. The boy’s father was a bus driver for the city.
These immigrants still believe in the American dream, as Bruce Springsteen does. As I do.
Are Italian war veterans, my United Nations of students and me somehow less American than J.D. Vance’s white Civil War descendants?
The father of our country, George Washington, stated something important and vital that directly contradicts J.D. Vance’s pinched, country club exclusion-like version of America, rooted in blood and soil. Instead, Washington insisted that the United States is a country of ideals.
Washington penned a letter to a Newport, Rhode Island Jewish congregation in 1790, which stated, in part:
“The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy—a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.
“It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”
Take that, J.D. Vance!
Washington has given us a tremendous gift, one that keeps on giving. That’s the America I believe in. That’s the America of which I am proud. That’s the America we need.
Michael Gold is a columnist for The Yonkers Times. His work has been published in The New York Daily News, The Albany Times-Union, The Hartford Courant and other newspapers. He’s a volunteer trustee with the Putnam County Land Trust.
