Immigration

Community Nursing Founder

b. March 10, 1867
d. September 1, 1940

“Nursing is love in action ...”

Lillian Wald was a social reformer and the founder of the American community nursing movement. Her visionary leadership in public health; women and children’s welfare; and labor, immigrants’ and civil rights led to the formation of countless institutions worldwide.

Wald was born to a German Jewish middle-class family in Cincinnati, Ohio. After graduating in 1891 from the nursing program at the New York Hospital Training School, she took a job at the New York Juvenile Asylum, an orphanage, where she quickly grew disillusioned with institutional methods of child care. As her biographer and friend, R. L. Duffus, commented, “She had too much individuality to be willing to lose herself as a cog in an established institution. Instinctively, she wanted to change things—to do better.”

Wald attended medical school briefly. During this time, she witnessed firsthand the poverty and hardship endured by immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side. She resolved to bring affordable health care to those in need.

In 1893 Wald quit medical school and organized the Henry Street Settlement, otherwise known as the Visiting Nurse Society (VNS) of New York. The VNS operated on a sliding fee scale to provide all city residents with an opportunity to access medical care. Wald pioneered, and coined the term, “public health nursing” with the belief that the nurse’s “organic relationship with the neighborhood should constitute the starting point for a universal service to the region.” By 1913, through her tireless efforts, the VNS grew from 10 to 92 nurses, making 200,000 visits annually. It became a model for similar entities across the nation and around the globe.

Wald became a highly influential advocate at the city, state and national levels. She persuaded the New York Board of Education to initiate the first American public school nursing program in Manhattan. She successfully lobbied President Theodore Roosevelt to create a Federal Children’s Bureau to protect children from abusive child labor, and she helped form the Women’s Trade Union to protect women working in sweatshops. She campaigned for women’s suffrage and supported racial integration, helping to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Upon her recommendation, The New York Commission on Immigration was formed to investigate the living and working conditions of immigrants.

Wald did not marry and maintained her closest relationships with women. Although she did not self-identify as a lesbian, her letters reveal the intimate affection she felt for at least two of her companions, Mabel Hyde Kittredge and Helen Arthur.

Wald died of a stroke at the age of 73.

Social Activist

b. October 20, 1873
d. January 4, 1952

“No effective program can be made until we set our own house in order.”

Frances Alice Kellor was an American social reformer dedicated to women’s rights and immigration issues. She spent her life advocating for workers and the naturalization of immigrants. 

Kellor served as both secretary and treasurer of the New York State Immigration Commission and chief investigator for the state Bureau of Industries and Immigration. She also served as managing director of the North American Civic League for Immigrants and oversaw the American Association of Foreign Language Newspapers. Kellor cofounded the National Urban League. 

Kellor grew up in Michigan, raised by a single mother. She earned money hunting with a slingshot and a rifle. After lack of money forced her to drop out of high school, she worked at a local newspaper. A few years later, two wealthy sisters invited Kellor to live with them and paid for her education. 

In 1897, 23 years before women won the right to vote, Kellor became one of the first women to graduate from Cornell Law School. She later studied at the University of Chicago and the New York School of Philanthropy. For a time she lived at Hull House, the famous settlement house in Chicago, where she became interested in many of the issues that shaped her lifetime of advocacy. 

A lifelong progressive and proponent of education, Kellor believed social change could be accomplished if more women and immigrants had the same opportunities as American-born white men.  She studied the cause and effect of imprisonment rates of poor black women in the South and the economic conditions that led to crime. She founded the National League for the Protection of Colored Women, and she worked to eradicate poverty, to end prostitution and to provide education in urban areas. She went undercover to expose poor management decisions that endangered workers’ rights and safety. 

During World War I, Kellor directed the National Americanization Committee (NAC), a group advocating English language education for immigrants. She believed that better communication skills would help them avoid workplace accidents and grow professionally. She also worked to get suffrage into the national party platforms. 

Kellor never married. She enjoyed a long relationship with Mary Dreier, a fellow progressive in New York City. Together they created the Inter-Municipal Committee on Household Research, a group dedicated to protecting domestic laborers, and the Bureau of Industries and Immigration, which served as an arbiter between employers and workers throughout the country. The women shared a home in New York for 47 years, until Kellor’s death in 1952. 

Immigration Activist 

b. February 3, 1981 

“I am an American. I just don’t have the right papers.”

Jose Antonio Vargas is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a filmmaker and an immigration rights activist. He founded Define American, a nonprofit organization dedicated to immigration and citizenship issues, and launched #EmergingUS, a digital platform that focuses on race, immigration and identity. 

Born in the Philippines, Vargas came to the United States when he was 12. He revealed his status as an undocumented immigrant in a 2011 essay in The New York Times Magazine in an effort to promote dialog about the U.S. immigration system and to advocate for the DREAM act. 

Vargas took an interest in journalism in high school. Before college he worked as a copy boy for The San Francisco Chronicle, eventually earning a private scholarship after being turned down for financial aid because he was undocumented. He graduated from San Francisco State and for years kept his status secret for fear of being deported. 

Vargas came out in high school after seeing a documentary about Harvey Milk, the assassinated openly gay San Francisco politician. He later described the disclosure as “less daunting than coming out about my legal status.” 

Vargas’s public immigration advocacy began with his revelatory 2011 essay. The following year, he wrote a cover story on his experience for TIME. He went on to direct a documentary called “Documented,” which premiered at the AFI Docs film festival in 2013. It was released in theaters and broadcast on CNN in 2014. The same year, Vargas was arrested in the border town of McAllen, Texas, after 21 years in the United States. He was questioned for hours, but then released.

In 2015 “Documented” earned an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Documentary and Vargas produced a television special, as part of MTV’s “Look Different” campaign, called “White People. The program examined what it means to be young and white in America.

Vargas has written extensively for publications such as Rolling Stone and The New Yorker and was a senior contributing editor at the Huffington Post. As a Washington Post staffer, his 2006 series on HIV/AIDS in Washington, D.C., inspired the documentary film, “The Other City,” which he wrote and co-produced. It premiered at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival and aired on Showtime. Vargas was also part of the Washington Post team that won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech. 

Vargas has discussed his experiences as a gay undocumented immigrant on such diverse television shows as “The O’Reilly Factor” and “Real Time with Bill Maher.” He has received numerous honors, including the Freedom to Write Award from the PEN Center.

Activist

b. September 6, 1860
d. May 21, 1935

“Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself.”

In 1889 Jane Addams cofounded Hull House, a social settlement on Chicago’s Near West Side. Social settlements were established to attract educated, middle- and upper-class people to poor urban areas. Addams also cofounded the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a nonpartisan nonprofit organization created in 1920 to defend and preserve individual rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

After graduating from college, Addams studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She eventually turned her attention to women’s issues. She and several other women founded Hull House as an educational hub for neighborhood residents, most of whom were recent immigrants. Addams lived and worked at Hull House until her death.

Throughout her life, Addams was dedicated to improving the lives of those on the fringes of society, becoming one of the most important social reformers during the Progressive Era in America. She became a leading advocate for women’s rights, immigrants’ rights, better housing, fair labor practices, improvements in public welfare and stricter child labor laws. She and other Hull House residents helped pass legislation and influenced critical social policies in many of these areas. Addams also worked for the Chicago Board of Health and served as the first vice president of the Playground Association of America. She advocated for black rights, becoming a charter member of the NAACP.

In 1894 Addams became the first woman appointed as sanitary inspector of Chicago’s 19th Ward and was instrumental in reducing disease and death in the city. She was also a charter member of the American Sociological Society and lectured widely about women’s rights.

In 1931 Addams became the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. On December 10, 2007, Illinois celebrated the first Jane Addams Day. A Jane Addams Memorial Park was also established near the Navy Pier in Chicago. She was inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame in 2008.

Her close companion was Mary Rozet Smith.

Activist

b.  March 9, 1947, Manila, Philippines

d.  December 17, 2012, Los Angeles, California

“We really felt that people could achieve the life they wanted.”

Richard Adams filed the first U.S. lawsuit to seek federal recognition of same-sex marriage. What should have been the beginning of a happy marriage laid the groundwork for his almost 40-year quest for federally recognized marriage equality.

On April 21, 1975, Adams and his Australian partner, Anthony Sullivan, obtained a marriage license in Boulder, Colorado. They were married before the Colorado Attorney General declared same-sex marriage licenses invalid.

Adams applied to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) for Sullivan to receive a permanent residency green card as the spouse of an American citizen. In response, the couple received an INS reply that stated, “You have failed to establish that a bona fide marital relationship can exist between two faggots.”

Adams lodged a formal protest. The INS reissued their denial without the slur. Adams filed a suit in federal court, but the judge upheld the INS. Adams filed a second federal suit claiming that after an eight-year relationship, deportation of Sullivan constituted extreme hardship. The federal district court and U.S. Court of Appeals ruled against Adams.

Subsequently, Sullivan requested permanent residency for Adams in Australia. The Australian government denied the request. In 1985 the couple moved to Britain. Adams left behind his family and friends and a job he had for over 18 years. After one year in Britain, the couple returned to the U.S. and kept a low profile so as not to attract INS attention.

Subsequent to Adams’s death and after the U.S. Attorney General in 2011 declared the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional, Sullivan filed for a green card as Adams’s widower, so he could remain permanently in the United States.

Labor Activist

b. 1958

“Our local unions and divisions should drive our national priorities, not the other way around.”

Mary Kay Henry is a labor union organizer and the first female president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

Henry grew up in a Detroit suburb as the eldest girl in a family of 10 children. During college, she was a lobbyist for a grassroots advocacy group alongside union activists. In 1979, she earned her bachelor’s degree in urban planning and labor relations from Michigan State University.

In 1980, she started her career at the SEIU California State Council as a researcher. Over the next 10 years, Henry held various positions there. She helped pioneer the union’s nontraditional collective bargaining agreements and system-wide health care organizing strategies.

Henry moved to SEIU International, where she served as director of the health care division, an executive board member, the chief health care strategist and the executive vice president.

In 2010, she was elected international president of SEIU. Henry advocates for labor, immigrant and LGBT rights. She is a co-founder of the Lavender Caucus for SEIU’s LGBT employees.

Henry serves on the executive board of Families USA, a consumer health care advocacy organization. In 2009, Modern Healthcare magazine named her one of its “Top 25 Women in Healthcare.” In 2011, CNN named Henry one of “Washington’s Most Powerful Women.”

Henry and her partner, Paula Macchello, a senior strategic organizer with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, are outspoken advocates for same-sex marriage. Together for 24 years, they share homes in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco.