These initials are surely someone else's, but it's more fun to think of President John F. Kennedy whenever I pass this carving on top of Stone Mountain (even imagine him there with a chisel). Especially now more than ever, as I talk with so many people from all over the world but mere feet away from "J.F.K." Just months before JFK was assassinated 51 years ago today, he was actually in the midst of revising A Nation of Immigrants, a pamphlet he'd first written in 1958 as a junior senator (for the Anti-Defamation League's One Nation Library), into a book. It had in fact just been excerpted in the New York Times Magazine and would be posthumously published in 1964 (and republished in 2008 by the ADL). Ever a champion of fair immigration laws, JFK had not surprisingly been urging Congress to make reforms from the very outset of his presidency. His wish for such change would also be posthumous but would live on in the form of the hugely significant Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965.

As Obama's immigration speech from this week still percolates through the airwaves and newsfeeds, I'm reminded of A Nation of Immigrants and that next year marks the 50th anniversary of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965. Save for a handful of amendments and modifications, largely after 9/11, much of the immigration policy we know today is still informed by this act that did away with so many offensive, un-American racial and sexual exclusions and quotas. Kennedy believed then that "emotions of xenophobia – hatred of foreigners – and of nativism - the policy of keeping America ‘pure’ … continue to thrive," and although this "great Republic" has made "a teeming nation of nations" of progress in 50 years, we still have miles to walk based on some of the anti-immigrant comments I've read this week..