Who is coming to this country to live? Why do they come? What do they go through to get here? And what happens to them once they arrive? These questions form the basis of the stories that follow—individual stories (told in the words of the protagonists themselves) which in turn tell a larger collective tale: a tale of this country’s renewal and reinvention, one immigrant at a time.

These first-person accounts give freshness and vitality to the immigration saga. They emerge from a range of points around the globe. Each tale of immigration is not just a tale of a beginning but an exit interview of sorts from the country of origin, a gauge on the forces to which the United States is vulnerable, now perhaps more than ever. The distance between this country and Afghanistan, Bosnia, or Sudan has never seemed shorter and our sensitivity to the social and political tremors in far-off lands, never more acute. The connection between “us and them” has never seemed as immediate and profound.

In the past, that connection was no less pressing, but the perceptions may have been different. And the tale of past immigrants typically had a discernible—and comforting—beginning, middle, and end: struggle or persecution in the old country, the saga of the passage, and triumph over initial hardships once the protagonists reached the United States.

My own family’s story has some of those classic elements to it, complete with its own mythology and comfort in the telling. There was a patriarch in Mexico whose death at a fairly young age in the early 1940’s caused the collapse of a family business and threw his widow and children into economic hardship. There was a son, who inherited the patriarch’s intelligence and verve, who made forays into the United States under early “bracero” programs. (A government program under which Mexican workers were brought to this country to fill labor shortages, primarily in agriculture.)

That son (my uncle) eventually made his way to northwest Indiana where jobs in the steel mills were plentiful. He was the family’s alpha male and he provided the leadership and structure for his siblings to follow—some directly from Mexico, others after a period of transition in Texas. For years, he and his siblings and their families lived hard by the steel mills, railroad tracks, and refineries of East Chicago, Indiana. Their homes were apartment buildings, from which they could see the glow of the blast furnaces, hear the pounding of foundries, and smell the biting fumes of industry. In time, with solid working-class mill jobs as their foundation, they moved into sturdy homes with lawns.

A new generation of American-born family members then started a cycle of education, home ownership, and participation in the workforce. Many members of that new generation served in the armed forces or in government—proof, if needed—of their status as Americans who love and are loyal to the country to which their parents came.

It is a tale with familiar and reassuring rhythms for many Americans. It is a theme and variation played by millions of other American families. In fact, the tale has such a predictability to it that I, for one, am slightly taken aback when I hear one that ends with a family member moving “back to Russia” or “back to Greece.” I wonder to myself, “What went wrong?”

Many of us look to each tale by a new immigrant to retell our own stories. The country of origin, language, and particulars may differ; but there is an expectation that the basic structure will be the same and with a similar conclusion: the creation of new Americans who love this country and see themselves as part of its fabric.

The timeliness of such a telling is clear. The specter of domestic terrorism has changed the debate over immigration away from social and economic concerns to matters of life and death. Stories in the news about investigations and arrests of Americans of Middle Eastern descent are troubling for several reasons: the potential implications for civil liberties, the possibility these suspects in fact pose a threat, and perhaps at a deeper level the prospect that people are betraying a basic tenet of immigration. That tenet holds that to move to America means to develop an allegiance to her. One who would betray that tenet is a viper to us.

Once upon a time a critic or foe of immigration might have asked, “Is this person going to take away my job?” Now that person might ask, “Is this person here to kill me or the ones I love?” And while that may be an unsettling commentary on both our times and the current climate for immigration, it is a new reality.

Once upon a time immigrants were seen by many as this country’s lifeblood—rich and renewing. Now some see the immigrant community as a potentially lethal virus to the body politic. Is this person a threat? Does he or she come from a background about which suspicions seem warranted?

No reasonable person can disagree that the United States government owes its citizens rational vigilance to potential threats. Such a threat is clearly not theoretical. If there were another act of terrorism, and it was traced to government sloppiness or inattentiveness to the people allowed in the country, the outcry would be monumental and warranted.

And no reasonable person can disagree that immigrants—and this country’s openness to their intellect, labor, skills and spirit—continue to be essential to this country’s human, cultural, and physical prosperity.

The challenge lies in balancing the legitimate need for security with the legitimate need for self-serving openness, “self-serving” in the best sense of the term: a direct acknowledgment that the United States needs immigrants to remain viable as a nation; and more importantly, to remain authentic to the remarkable historic impulses that resulted in this country’s creation in the first place—impulses grounded in the need for human renewal and ascendancy.

As Jeff Libman so vividly illustrates in An Immigrant Class, the renewal, the reinvention continues. New storytellers are coming forward. To paraphrase Walt Whitman, I hear the new tale. And it is mine. It is yours. It is ours.