Kamala Harris, An Immigrant Daughter

Our likely next president’s family history reminds us what makes America stronger and better

Kamala Harris in the yellow coat, her sister Maya Harris and their Indian-born mother. (Photo from 1970 shared by Kamala Harris)

Our country has suffered through nearly a decade of degradation and contempt toward immigrants spewed by Donald Trump. It started in July 2015 when he announced his presidential bid by calling Mexicans who enter America at the border rapists and criminals. The despicable vitriol was still spewing forth this weekend when he called unauthorized immigrants “savage monsters.”

The haters may excuse him by claiming he’s only talking about “illegals.” But there’s little doubt the vile and venomous rhetoric spewed by Trump and his hostile acolytes—Nazi talk about migrants as “vermin” and “animals” and “not human”—has harmed many hard-working immigrants and people of color, including those born in America to immigrant parents.

Amid the poisonous misinformation spread by Republicans, it’s useful to note the facts: Immigrants, authorized and unauthorized, are significantly less likely to commit crimes than those born in the U.S. Moreover, research has found that cities that accepted the largest numbers of refugees relative to their size saw their crime rates go down, sometimes dramatically. But let’s zoom out from the fear-mongering exploitation of the issue intended to pit people against each other rather than solve problems.

I may be particularly sensitive on this general topic of immigration, not only because my father, his brother and my grandmother arrived in America from Nazi Germany in 1939 by the skin of their teeth. As an immigrant son, I saw firsthand how patriotic a refugee can be toward his adopted country and the opportunity it provided, which is why my late father proudly served in the U.S. Army. I’m also keenly aware of the profound and positive impact so many immigrants have played in the nation’s flourishing.

“We believe that in America our diversity is a strength. It is not a weakness,” Rep. Hakeem Jeffries said on the day he became House minority leader. “An economic strength, a competitive strength, a cultural strength…We are a gorgeous mosaic of people from throughout the world.”

Jeffries’ speech, delivered in the wee hours of Jan. 7 last year, inspired me because it taps into the reality of how diversity gives our nation the opportunity to continue to grow and provide a model to the world. As I put it then:

The diversity in heritage and lived experience means new insights, new perspectives, new questions being asked and, we hope, new and innovative answers being found. As we face grave challenges in everything from defending democracy to climate change, from economic inequality and racial injustice to global food insecurity and a growing global refugee crisis, we need talented people from every ZIP code and background to ask smart questions and help find world-altering answers.

Why in the world would we be dumb enough to emphasize scapegoating over problem-solving? Why would a leading nation prioritize holding a boot on the neck of the vulnerable rather than empowering the motivated among them to help us make things better? Why wouldn’t we find ways to expand quality education, economic opportunity and social mobility to make this possible?

All this is on my mind since lingering over the charming photo from 1970 of Kamala Harris (born 1964), her sister Maya (born 1967) and their mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris. Married in 1963 to Donald J. Harris and divorced by 1972, she then carried the responsibility to care for these girls and to ensure they learned positive values and gained a productive education.

Shyamala, like the girls’ father, had come to America to study at the University of California, Berkeley—she from India, he from Jamaica. They met in 1962, both were part of an influential Black study group later known as the Afro-American Association, and fell in love with a shared commitment to civil rights. “My parents marched and shouted in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. It’s because of them and the folks who also took to the streets to fight for justice that I am where I am,” Harris wrote in 2020.

While she was from India, Shyamala recognized that her daughters would always be seen as Black in a society that then saw race in binary terms. “My mother understood very well that she was raising two Black daughters,” Harris wrote in her 2019 book, The Truths We Hold: An American Journey.

Both Donald and Shyamala believed that leaving their own countries would be an opportunity to fulfill their aspirations. Indeed, Shyamala studied biochemistry and became a noted breast cancer researcher and Donald was the first Black tenured economics professor at Stanford University.

But their immigrant history and family members still in their home countries played an important role in the life of Kamala. She describes the “profound impact” of walking on the beach in Chennai, India, hand-in-hand with her Indian grandfather and hearing his stories. A governmental official, he invited her to tag along when he talked politics with his retired buddies, passionately discussing equal rights, corruption and India’s future.

Donald recounted in a 2019 essay taking both of his daughters to Jamaica in 1970 to share life there “in all its richness and complexity.” One of his fondest memories: “We trudged through the cow dung and rusted iron gates, up-hill and down-hill, along narrow unkempt paths, to the very end of the family property, all in my eagerness to show to the girls the terrain over which I had wandered daily for hours as a boy.”

Donald was less involved with his daughters after the divorce, deepening Kamala’s reliance on and gratitude for her mother who died of colon cancer in 2009. Here’s how she summarized her mother in her convention speech four years ago:

My mother instilled in my sister, Maya, and me the values that would chart the course of our lives. She raised us to be proud, strong Black women, and she raised us to know and be proud of our Indian heritage…Even as she taught us to keep our family at the center of our world, she also pushed us to see a world beyond ourselves. She taught us to be conscious and compassionate about the struggles of all people.

Yesterday, The Washington Post published a report detailing the massive focus on immigration by Republicans, with more than $247 million spent on immigration-related advertising in the first half of this year. This included more than 700 campaign ads for presidential, Senate and congressional races. (In contrast, Democrats have released not much more than three dozen.)

As the story’s team of reporters write, “Taken as a whole, the ads convey an unrealistic portrait of the border as being overrun and inaccurately characterize immigrants generally as a threat, of which there is little evidence.” They note that FBI data underscores that U.S. border cities are among the nation’s safest. But that hasn’t slowed GOP efforts to make a dangerous border “central to their attacks on Harris in her effort to win the White House.”

These ads are mostly running in states that are far from the Mexican border, with the largest money being spent in Ohio, Indiana and Montana. Some of the ads refer to migrants as “illegals” or “aliens,” while others include more hostile wording such as “trafficker,” “rapist” or “murderer.” As reported, some of the ads describe migrants as invaders and the influx as an invasion.

The intention of this effort is clearly to incite fear and raise doubts about the Democrats. But let’s not doubt that this aggressive misinformation also serves to fuel hostility toward immigrants more broadly. It’s hard to overstate what a terrible disservice this is to a country that has been and will continue to be enriched by its history of immigration. That assumes, of course, the Republicans don’t take power and enact the Trump/Project 2025 plan to round up and deport millions of migrants without due process.

Gaze up again at the touching photo of Kamala in the yellow coat, a strong little girl who is now on the verge of becoming the next president of the United States. Think about the courage it must have taken her mother to come to America at just 19, the sacrifices she must have made to create a life for herself and eventually for her daughters. If we did not welcome people who want to improve their lives, as well as contribute to our country and culture, we wouldn’t be just worse off—America wouldn’t be America.

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