June marks Immigrant Heritage Month — and people across the country are sharing their American stories. Whether you've recently embarked on your first day as an American or want to share how your ancestors came to arrive here, we want to hear from you. Add your voice to the conversation today.

America is a country bound together by its diversity. Almost all of us share the common thread that our families came from somewhere else. Our immigrant families are bound by more than that, however. We also are bound by a common belief that the opportunity available to immigrants who are willing to work hard in this country outweighs the substantial risk involved in pulling up stakes and restarting life in a new country. But the equation doesn’t work if you only weigh opportunity versus risk. The secret factor that tips the scale and propels people to take on such risk for such a tenuous shot at opportunity is courage. Each immigration story — whether it be from 1692, 1910, or 2015 — was built on the foundation of courage.

I see that courage at play in my own family. My heritage stems from the islands of Sicily, Italy (Bisognano/ Raffa) and Ireland (McEachern/O’Brien). On August 23, 1914 in Queenstown, Ireland, at the age of 19, my great grandmother Bridget Clougherty boarded the S.S. Franconia bound for Boston, labeled as a laborer. She boarded this ship 19 days after the declaration of war by the United Kingdom in what would become World War I. She had the courage to leave most of her family behind and risk losing the stability that had defined her life in the small village of Clifton, Ireland in order to realize the opportunity she envisioned in the new world across the Atlantic.

The O’Brien/Cloughterty on the porch of their Quincy, MA home. (Circa. 1945)

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Congress passed two bills that will help rewrite the rules for our trade policy: Trade Promotion Authority and the Trade Preferences Extension Act, which includes Trade Adjustment Assistance. Today, President Obama signed them into law. 

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That’s a good thing, because as President Obama has said, past trade deals haven’t always lived up to the hype. Now, thanks to the new rules of the road laid out by Congress, our latest trade deal — the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) — can put in place high, enforceable standards that reflect our values on the environment, on workers’ rights, on transparency, and more. 

Here’s a quick look at the rules the President signed today and how they will help ensure American workers can benefit from the most progressive trade deal in history.

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It was one of those impromptu meetings that could only happen in a hallway.

One afternoon in late 2012 the tech and education teams had a few minutes to compare notes. And that day, we realized the same problem had been bugging us all: Internet access in schools was incredibly slow. So slow, in fact, that the average American school had the same connectivity as the average American home — but served hundreds of times as many people.

We all know slow Internet is the worst — and it’s doubly frustrating when it’s a matter of kids learning, and not just a given evening’s entertainment.

Slow Internet in our schools meant teachers in separate classrooms couldn’t do something as basic as stream a couple of videos at the same time. It meant that interactive maps or online biology lessons simply wouldn’t load.

So even if a school wanted to invest in a tablet for every child, in our Wi-Fi world, it couldn’t be much more than a backlit textbook. If we didn’t do anything about it, school would become the only place in kids’ lives not being transformed by technology.

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June marks Immigrant Heritage Month — and people across the country are sharing their American stories. Whether you've recently embarked on your first day as an American or want to share how your ancestors came to arrive here, we want to hear from you. Add your voice to the conversation today.

I was born in Somalia, but mostly what I remember are flashes of a carefree child, happily unaware of the world beyond the Utanga Refugee Camp in Kenya. About half a mile from our UNHCR-issued blue tent was the fence that surrounded the camp. Beyond the fence was an endless blue horizon of ocean. And if you stood close enough, on the slight precipice before the fence, you could see where the beach welcomed the waves — its sand, sometimes clear and brightly glistening; other times, dark and dusky, casting sad grayish hues. It felt abandoned and desolate. I never saw any people down there. But sometimes I would catch the sight of boats with colorful sails drifting over the waves.

Most of the other children congregated over at the dumpsites and water wells, fashioning toys out of trash and rocks. I kept to myself, a quiet but curious observer exploring the neighborhoods within the camp. I would often come home well past sundown, only to be rightfully scolded by a concerned parent. But those daily, miles-long excursions only left me hungry for more.

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