A Healer’s View on Immigration, Identity & Belonging

What if we treat our politics with the same care we give our patients?

“You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” — Exodus 22:20

Immigration isn’t only a policy issue. It’s a measure of whether we can still hear one another across fear. I’ve written this post because the stories I hear each week in my clinic - and the anger I hear outside it - seem to be speaking past one another. That truth has followed me from the journeys of my ancestors, stories of escape and arrival, to my work as a physician, where listening across languages, cultures, and wounds is the first act of healing.

My family’s story began in a ship’s manifest written in Yiddish around 1900. They fled pogroms in Poland and Lithuania, carrying little more than faith and endurance. They arrived through Ellis Island and settled in Atlanta, where my orthodox great-grandfather, Shmuel Yankel Kavalerisky, studied Torah and his son, Avrum Mayer Goldstein, peddled dry goods, learning English one transaction at a time. They helped build two small synagogues, reminders that community is how faith survives exile.

Shmuel Yankel Kavalerisky

My father, Marvin C. Goldstein, of blessed memory, was the youngest of five. As a child, he rode beside a Black store manager through segregated Atlanta, delivering white linens even to businesses that welcomed profit but supplied the KKK. From him I learned that courage can be quiet, that decency sometimes walks beside contradiction. In both orthodontics and civil rights, he taught me that the work of our hands can also be the work of repair.

That conviction has helped guide my work in medicine. In my family medicine clinic, I regularly meet America’s newest arrivals, patients from Russia, Myanmar, Vietnam, Pakistan, Mexico, Honduras, and beyond. Their stories differ, but their needs sound familiar: Can you help me? At the Student Health Action Coalition (SHAC), a student-run free clinic serving uninsured and indigent patients across the North Carolina Triangle region, I watched future physicians learn that caring for the uninsured is not charity but national memory, a way of remembering who we once were.

One patient from Pakistan, a computer engineer, suffered a stroke weeks after finding sponsored work. He lost his strength, then his job, and then his insurance, but not his resolve. When he said, “Doctor G, I just want to walk again,” I thought of my ancestors who prayed simply to keep standing. While I could offer empathy, a few free medications, my time, and prayers for healing, the edge of my limits was painfully real. The frustration of that truth still lingers, even as I accept that endurance, for most immigrants, is a language less of choice than of necessity.

Not every encounter is so straightforward.

Once, an older woman came in to see me for back pain. While I was opening her chart, she said, almost casually, “Don’t you just hate how Mexico keeps sending all its migrants and criminals to rape our women?” The words stopped me cold—ugly, bigoted, and profoundly out of place. I felt anger rise, not just as a Jew or as a physician, but as a human being. Yet in that moment I also recognized the power I held in that room. I took a breath and said, “I don’t agree with that. Maybe today we can just focus on helping you feel better.” It wasn’t agreement or avoidance; it was boundary and care. I treated her pain but refused to let hatred set the terms of our encounter. Healing, sometimes, begins with restraint.

The public conversation about immigration, too, has grown louder and harsher. Across Europe, anti-immigrant protests have turned violent, fueled by anger, cultural change, and economic uncertainty. In the United States, the same tensions fracture political parties as well as faith communities. Beneath the slogans, both sides speak from fear: fear of losing safety and fear of losing compassion. Radical listening, grounded in empathy, may be our only way forward. As Emily Dickinson reminded us, “The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.” Listening, especially when fear is loud, is not weakness but courage.

Complexity on immigration policy is real though. Many who come here do so legally, working hard, paying taxes, and enriching our nation. Others cross unlawfully, often driven by desperation, opportunity, or deception. A few bring ideologies hostile to democratic life. Such realities can fuel legitimate anxiety - in the news, on television, in our streets, and even in our houses of worship. Acknowledging this anxiety feels honest, but it does not usually lead to wise policies or strengthening of our moral compass.

Tension is clearly embedded with ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement). ICE enforces immigration law under the Department of Homeland Security, and its stated goal is to protect national security and public safety. When ICE pursues human traffickers, violent offenders, or organized crime, it performs essential public-safety work. Its methods and priorities, though, reflect policy choices, not immutable law. For several years, ICE adopted policies like Prosecutorial Discretion, Alternatives to Detention, Sensitive Locations policies (to avoid hospitals, schools, and faith-based institutions), and Family Unity Directives; such frameworks were designed to focus resources on genuine threats while limiting enforcement against people with deep community ties or humanitarian factors. This approach implicitly blended justice (upholding law) and compassion (considering human context).

ICE’s enforcement and actions today seem to have lost much of its moral compass. Families are routinely separated, non-violent long-term residents deported, and veterans who served honorably expelled. Federal audits reveal chronic neglect, preventable deaths, and poor oversight in detention centers. A system meant to defend safety cannot be credible if it forgets mercy. We need laws that distinguish between threat and presence, crime and circumstance, and leaders willing to enforce both justice and humanity.

Imagine a protest outside an ICE facility, where one sign reads, “No human is illegal.” Another declares, “Secure the border now.” Both seek justice; both reflect fear. The harder work is not choosing a side but creating space where both truths can be heard and turned into solutions. How can we achieve this goal?

In medicine, my work begins anew each day. Immigration is not theoretical; it is found in my patients’ sleepless nights, rising blood pressure, and fragile hopes that tomorrow will be better. My task is to listen and to help others listen, not to win arguments. I need to build bridges where stories meet. Healing, whether of bodies or of nations, may begin there, in quiet conversations between two people willing to listen.

Can medicine offer lessons that could move the immigration debate forward? In health care, we begin not with ideology but with diagnosis. We listen before prescribing, and we tailor solutions to individual stories rather than abstractions. We are trained to hold complexity without contempt, to balance compassion with accountability, and to work toward outcomes that preserve dignity. Can our politics learn even a fraction of medicine’s discipline, to pause, assess, and treat a cause rather than a symptom? if so, perhaps, we might discover that healing a nation is not so different from healing a person.

The measure of our nation is not how it welcomes perfection but how it treats imperfection, with grace. Almost all of us were immigrants at one time. The question is not only who belongs, but how we behave toward those already here.

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Adam O. Goldstein, MD, MPH

I write these reflections to invite dialogue at the intersection of medicine, faith, and moral life. I welcome your thoughts and stories about what “belonging” and “healing” means where you live and work.

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“The test of faith is not what we believe, but what we do for those whom society counts as other.”
— Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

Drawn from Torah, Talmud, and rabbinic wisdom—reminders that conscience and compassion are older than politics.