Out of Many, One: Portraits of America's Immigrants

Overview

George W. Bush’s 2021 book Out of Many, One pairs original oil portraits with short profiles to honor immigrants who have shaped the United States. The title echoes the national motto, “E pluribus unum, ” and the project seeks to humanize a polarized policy debate by foregrounding individual stories of striving, sacrifice, and contribution. Drawing on his post-presidential painting practice, Bush presents 43 portraits, an intentional nod to his place as the 43rd president, alongside essays that recount each subject’s path to America and the lives they built here.

Structure and Approach

Each chapter centers on a single immigrant, coupling a full-color portrait with a narrative vignette written in Bush’s plainspoken style. The profiles compress early life, migration journey, career milestones, and personal reflections into a few pages, often noting mentors, setbacks, and pivotal acts of welcome. The subjects span a wide range of backgrounds and vocations, public servants, entrepreneurs, athletes, artists, faith leaders, scholars, and frontline workers, mixing famous names with people known primarily in their communities. An opening essay sets out Bush’s case for a confident, orderly, and compassionate immigration system, and a brief coda reflects on what painting taught him about attention, empathy, and individuality.

People and Stories

The portraits depict refugees fleeing persecution, students drawn by educational opportunity, innovators launching businesses, and family members reuniting across borders. Some arrived with advanced degrees; others came with little more than determination and a sponsor’s phone number. Many stories chart a pattern of initial dislocation, hard work in unglamorous jobs, and gradual establishment, learning English, navigating schools and licensing, building networks, starting companies or community organizations, and, in many cases, serving the country that gave them a chance. Bush emphasizes not only achievement but gratitude, highlighting mentors who opened doors and the obligations the profiled immigrants feel to pay that generosity forward.

Themes

A recurring idea is that American identity is civic and aspirational rather than ethnic, anchored in the Constitution and a shared commitment to liberty, rule of law, and opportunity. The book underscores how newcomers renew those ideals, often seeing promise that native-born citizens can take for granted. It also spotlights resilience: the discipline of learning a new language, the courage to leave home, the patience to navigate bureaucracy, and the creativity to adapt skills to new contexts. Bush links these virtues to national strengths such as economic dynamism and cultural vitality. He argues that empathy for individual migrants can coexist with respect for borders and process, framing reform as both moral and practical.

Tone and Purpose

The tone is warm, bipartisan, and deliberately uncombative. Bush uses art to slow the reader’s gaze, inviting attention to faces, posture, and light as cues to character. The prose favors concrete details over abstractions, allowing stories to carry the argument that immigrants are neighbors, colleagues, and patriots whose success expands the national we. Without delving into legislative minutiae, he calls for policies that are orderly, fair, and welcoming, protecting the nation while recognizing the benefits of legal pathways and the need to resolve the status of people long embedded in American life.

Significance

Out of Many, One extends Bush’s late-life project of painting as public service, following his veterans’ portraits with another gallery of civic gratitude. As a former president associated with earlier immigration reform efforts, he uses his platform to reframe the conversation through faces and names rather than slogans. The result is part art book, part civic appeal: a reminder that the United States is continually made and remade by people who choose it, and that seeing them clearly, one story at a time, can help the country live up to its creed.