Leaving your country of origin for America is the same as going onto the dance floor after watching from the sidelines. Americans make their way to the shores of a geographical reality that is the external map of an internal citizenship.

Malcontents, dreamers, rogues, persecuted minorities, people "yearning to breathe free", even broken-hearted lovers – pack up, shake the dust of their homeland from their itchy feet and make tracks for the canvas of America.

America, as a nation and a concept, invites the troubled geniuses and the ambitious architects – the hungry and the disinherited - into the great casino. The one thing anyone passing through the actual and metaphorical Ellis Island has to have, then and now, is a passion to work.

The great fault line in the country was the early belief that slavery was part of a manifest destiny. It was a racist economic mauling of humanity. Slave and slave-owner locked into a subhuman contract sanctioned by the official laws of the new land. The continuing racism in America is tinged with guilt and the refusal to feel guilt.

The kidnapped Africans who were hauled here as merchandise, and their descendants, are American. The fact the journey here was involuntary gives way to the more powerful fact of a presence that shapes America culturally and spiritually in a way the criminals at the time could have foreseen.

In 2000 as descendants of slaves were targeted as voters whose votes should not be cast or counted, it was also those descendants in Congress who tried to rescue the country from the lie of that election. The miraculous irony of the most injured population of a country being the group that worked the hardest to rescue it makes America a thrilling place.

As Mexican and Hispanic men and women come into America they are greeted with indignation and need. But they are Americans even before their citizenship is official. They are here and the beauty of their humanity and their energy, not their utility, needs to be paramount even as they are viewed begrudgingly as the only way for the American machinery to move – in any direction.

The organizing ethos of America is not just a lust for money, although some might argue that it is. It has to be that awakening – that internal restlessness and confidence in the future and one’s ability to meet and collaborate with it. In some ways the newly arrived are more American than the second and third generation of immigrants.

If laws need to be adjusted to organize this swelling phenomenon of immigration it needs to be done honestly. If the federal government is permitting the gray area of immigration for the sake of cheap, uninsured labor, that, we all hope, is less American than the people who have come here to be American.

Bill C. Davis is a playwright. www.billcdavis.com and Green Party candidate for Congress in Connecticut's 5th CD. www.votebillc.org