Leadership Quote by Frank B. Kellogg

Gratitude can be a form of diplomacy, and Kellogg’s line reads like a velvet-gloved inventory of power. On the surface, it’s a compliment to an immigrant community: your people have become “residents and citizens,” and America is better for it. The phrasing does a lot of quiet work. “So many of your people” keeps the addressee collective and slightly outside the “we” of the nation, even as they’re welcomed in. Assimilation is praised, but as a condition: belonging is affirmed through usefulness.

The engine of the sentence is transactional. These citizens are “lending their influence” to “civic and economic life,” influence framed less as an inherent right than as a contribution extended to the host country. Kellogg doesn’t say they are shaping democracy because they are part of it; he says their presence “has meant so much to our development,” turning plural lives into a developmental input. That’s classic early-20th-century American rhetoric, when immigration was both lionized for nation-building and policed through quotas, “Americanization” campaigns, and anxiety about divided loyalties.

Kellogg, a politician and later a top diplomat, is speaking in the register of statecraft: praise that stabilizes relationships. The subtext is reassurance to multiple audiences at once. To the immigrant group: you’re seen, valued, and safe - insofar as you’re productive and civically legible. To the broader public: these newcomers aren’t a threat; they’re an asset. It’s inclusion, but on probation, with the terms spelled out in the language of development.