Politics & Power Quote by Thomas Menino

A statistic dressed up as civic myth, Menino’s line is doing two jobs at once: sanctifying Boston as an origin story and laundering immigration into the safest possible national language. “One in every six” sounds like hard fact, but it functions like a drumbeat - less evidence than elevation. It’s meant to make local pride feel like national destiny, turning a particular city into a gate through which “America” itself is imagined to have entered.

The phrase “began their journey” is key. It romanticizes arrival as narrative: not paperwork, not quarantine, not exploitative labor markets, not nativist backlashes, but a pilgrimage. Menino frames families, not individuals, because families are morally disarming; they smuggle in sympathy and continuity. And by choosing “the land of the free,” he doesn’t just praise the country - he recruits the founding slogan as an alibi. Freedom becomes the endpoint that justifies the messy middle.

Context matters: as a Boston mayor, Menino spent years arguing that the city’s future depended on newcomers while also managing the anxieties that come with demographic change. This line reads like a political bridge between old Boston and new Boston: your grandparents came through here, so today’s immigrants are not an exception but a repetition. The subtext is a quiet demand for civic generosity, packaged as historical inevitability. It’s persuasive because it doesn’t argue policy; it offers belonging, and makes dissent sound un-American.