Our daughter moved out of her rented house a week ago. The moving outfit was owned by a couple who emigrated from China; they had started the business after the husband was laid off from his tech support job in the late '90s.

The owner of the hauling service that took away my daughter's trash was from Peru. And the two grandmothers who cleaned the house after the move were from Mexico.

The agent who had rented our daughter the house served in the Canadian Army in World War II. Her landlord immigrated here from India to get his PhD from Cal Tech. His wife, a medical doctor, joined him two years later.

Our adopted son's birth parents fled Cuba. Our neighbors include a married couple who fled Vietnam. And recently, I got a letter from a reader who is from the Dominican Republic and has been an aerospace engineer in San Diego for 20 years.

When my grandmother's parents arrived from Ireland and looked for work, they were met by signs advising them that "Irish need not apply." In my old neighborhood in Chicago, a candidate had to be Polish to be elected alderman. Chicago, the "second city," is also the second-largest Polish city on the planet. The merchants in the Lithuanian neighborhood would do their best to speak English when you visited their store. Later Valdas Adamkus, who had spent most of his working life in Chicago, returned home to Lithuania and was elected president.

During World War II, Norm Mineta and his family were moved from their home to an internment camp. He would later be elected mayor of San Jose and a U.S. congressman before being appointed to his current post as the nation's transportation secretary. Sen. Peter Domenici of New Mexico recently stood up on the Senate floor and recalled the day in 1943 when federal agents, looking for Italian sympathizers, took his mother away. And Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida fled Cuba when he was 15 and lived in orphanages and with foster families until he was reunited with his family four years later.

What a grand country this is.