Viet Thanh Nguyen

But even they recognize what I say, which is, you know, these devices

confuse the human relationships.

You actually understand more if you're not taking notes on your laptop.

You understand more if you're not tempted by going to shop online at Amazon.com instead of interacting with other people in your classroom.

So they recognize that.

But there are a lot of other people who are not so well prepared.

So I think that I see some encouragement in these surveys that say that there are some younger people, teenagers, who recognize the dangers that technology poses to them and to their human relationships.

I think we have to lean into that.

And we have to offer our young people and our students and our children more human opportunities.

And we have to do things like take away their damn phones.

I believe in something that apparently a quarter to a third of the country doesn't believe in, which is that immigrants and refugees make America great.

And if we look at our history, I think we have repeated evidence of that taking place, both at a qualitative level in terms of things like food and culture and music, and at a quantitative level in terms of economics and metrics and that kind of stuff.

And we also live in a country in which every now and then, periodically, cyclically,

the American people, some portion of them, turn against immigrants and refugees.

It's happened repeatedly throughout our history.

People freak out about some kind of economic or political or cultural problem, and it's very easy to tempt them into fear-mongering and into demonizing people who appear to be different from them in some way.

So we, again, repeatedly throughout American history, 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act,

1907 Gentleman's Agreement that prevented Japanese from coming in, 1924 Immigration Act that prevented almost all non-white immigration, on and on and on.

We deported two million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the 1930s and 1940s.

And reading about that as a student, I wondered how could that possibly happen?