I have been struggling with a question that refuses to leave me alone: Why do people still want to come to the United States?
As someone who has spent a lifetime working with suffering – grief, trauma, and resilience – I know that human beings do not make life-altering decisions lightly. Leaving one’s home, culture, language and, often, family is not an act of convenience. It is an act born of something deeper.
Yet, today the conversation around immigration often feels simplified by arguments, fear, and slogans. I wanted to understand it more honestly.
And then, recently, I had a dream.
In the dream, I was trying to solve immigration like a puzzle. Pieces were scattered everywhere – numbers, policies, stories, faces. Nothing seemed to fit. Every piece told a different version of the truth.
Then, unexpectedly, I found myself sitting across from President Donald Trump. I chose to engage with him and talk to him in an attempt to bring a human lens to something that has become so divided.
He listened respectfully, then asked a question I have heard countless times when people notice my accent:
“Where do you come from?” Without thinking, I answered in Italian: “Dal dolore.” From sorrow.
When I woke up, something had become clear. People come to the United States, first and foremost, from sorrow.
They come from places where safety is fragile or gone, where opportunity is limited or nonexistent, where corruption replaces fairness, and where the future for their children feels already decided.
Sorrow is not weakness. It is often the beginning of movement. It pushes people to risk everything for the possibility – just the possibility – of something better.
But sorrow alone does not explain why they come here.
They also come because of a second truth: The promise of meritocracy.
At its best, the United States still carries a powerful idea – that effort can matter, that talent can rise, that your starting point does not determine your ending.
Despite our divisions, the numbers quietly confirm that people still believe in that promise. Each year, roughly 1 to 1.2 million people legally immigrate to this country. Millions more apply for visas. Even among those who arrive without authorization, many are not fleeing law as much as reaching toward opportunity.
If this country held no promise, people would stop coming. They come because, even now, America still whispers:Try, and your life might change.
There is, however, a third truth we must face honestly: The system is under real strain.
In recent years, hundreds of thousands, sometimes close to a million people annually, remain in the United States without legal status.
Over the past decade, an estimated 2.5 to 4 million people have been deported. Border encounters have surged, reflecting both global instability and pressure on our systems.
These are not small challenges. They require thoughtful, responsible solutions.
And yet, there is another part of the story that is often misunderstood.
The majority of immigrants are not criminals. In fact, about 65 to 75 percent of immigrants in detention have no criminal convictions, and only a small percentage are associated with violent crime.
This does not eliminate legitimate concerns about safety or law. But it does remind us that the dominant narrative of danger is incomplete.
Most people who come are driven not by criminal intent, but by human need – and often, by hope.
There is one final truth, and it may be the most important.
Immigration is not only about those who are coming.It is also about what is happening within us.
I see, more and more, a quiet resignation in our culture:Nothing can be fixed.The system is too broken.There is nothing we can do.
In psychology, we call this learned helplessness, the belief that our actions no longer matter.
And here is the irony: We risk becoming like the very places people are leaving, places where upward mobility feels impossible, where effort no longer leads to opportunity, where hope quietly erodes.
Immigration is not just a political issue. It is a human one.A psychological one.Even a spiritual one.
It reflects three realities:The pain of the world.The promise of this country.And the state of our own collective spirit.
So perhaps the real question is not only why do they come; they come because they still believe in the promise.
The deeper, and more uncomfortable, question is this:
Do we, as Americans, still believe in the promise they are risking everything to reach? The answer to that question matters because, as long as that belief exists anywhere in the world,they will keep coming.