The impeachment hearings stand as a rebuke not only to President Trump’s conduct but also to his anti-immigrant, shut-the-doors worldview. The parade of witnesses before the House Intelligence Committee offers an implicit testament to a different America, more welcoming and inspiring. In a month that has exposed the white-nationalist inclinations of Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration adviser, these witnesses are the anti-Millers, an antidote to his exclusionary vision.
That dichotomy was on display Thursday as former National Security Council official Fiona Hill, in the lilting accent of her native northeast England coal country, described her journey to becoming “an American by choice.” Hill’s father, Alfred, “joined his father, brother, uncles and cousins in the coal mines to help put food on the table.” After the mines closed, Alfred Hill dreamed of emigrating to the United States, to the coal mines of West Virginia or Pennsylvania. He had to stay home to take care of his mother, “crippled from hard labor,” but he loved America, “a beacon of hope in the world,” Hill said. “He always wanted someone in the family to make it to the United States.”
Fiona Hill was the one who made it, becoming a U.S. citizen in 2002. “Years later, I can say with confidence that this country has offered for me opportunities I never would have had in England,” Hill testified. “I grew up poor with a very distinctive working-class accent. In England in the 1980s and 1990s, this would have impeded my professional advancement. This background has never set me back in America.”
Indeed, Hill became one of her adopted country’s leading Russia scholars. She rose to the top ranks of its foreign policy establishment. And on Thursday, she told the impeachment inquiry that it was her “legal and moral obligation" to testify — and firmly took Republican members to task for endorsing the “fictional narrative” that Russia did not meddle in the 2016 election and that Ukraine did.
Hill’s life story would be inspirational standing alone. It becomes even more powerful combined with the biographies of several other key witnesses, different in their individual origin stories but shared in the sense of their pride in being American and gratitude for the privilege.
There was Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, brought to the United States as a 3-year-old by his father and grandmother, Ukrainian Jews fleeing a repressive regime. “Next month will mark 40 years since my family arrived in the United States as refugees,” Vindman testified. “When my father was 47 years old, he left behind his entire life and the only home he had ever known to start over in the United States so that his three sons could have better, safer lives.”
That courageous decision, Vindman said, inspired Alexander and his two brothers to join the military, “serving the nation that gave my family refuge from authoritarian oppression.” In Russia, Vindman said, his testimony “would surely cost me my life.” Then, wearing his dress blue uniform decorated with an array of ribbons and medals, he concluded, “Dad, my sitting here today, in the U.S. Capitol talking to our elected officials is proof that you made the right decision forty years ago to leave the Soviet Union and come here to the United States of America in search of a better life for our family.”
There was Marie Yovanovitch, impelled to serve by a similar history. “My service is an expression of gratitude for all that this country has given my family and me,” she testified. “My late parents did not have the good fortune to come of age in a free society. My father fled the Soviets before ultimately finding refuge in the United States. My mother’s family escaped the U.S.S.R. after the Bolshevik revolution, and she grew up stateless in Nazi Germany, before eventually making her way to the United States. Their personal histories — my personal history — gave me both deep gratitude toward the United States and great empathy for others — like the Ukrainian people — who want to be free.”
And there was U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, with an account a generation removed from the other three but nonetheless evocative of a welcoming America. “My parents fled Europe during the Holocaust,” he said. “Escaping the atrocities of that time, my parents left Germany for Uruguay, and then in 1953 emigrated to Seattle, Washington, where I was born and raised. Like so many immigrants, my family was eager for freedom and hungry for opportunity. They raised my sister and me to be humble, hardworking and patriotic.”
We are a nation of immigrants, and these are quintessentially American stories. In an otherwise dispiriting and tribal time, they offer a soothing vision of the better country that the United States has been and must remain.
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