Welcome to this month’s, February 2026, newsletter!

NAAMA has been buzzing with activity and our spring and summer promise to be very active. As outlined in last month’s newsletter, our scope, medical, educational, and philanthropic, is heavily shaped by our current stressors and circumstances. As such, we can hardly avoid talking about immigration and associated issues. The United States has known multiple waves of immigration, starting with more than half a million individuals from Africa sold into slavery between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, a major wave of immigration from 1815 to 1865, focused on Northern and Western Europe, especially Ireland. Immigration culminated between 1880 and 1920, more than 20 million immigrants enriching our ranks. Decline in immigration were noted during World War I (1914–1918), the global depression of the 1930s and during World War II. Between 1930 and 1950, America’s foreign-born population decreased from 14.2 to 10.3 million. The lowest percentage of foreign born in the United States population in the last 100 years was observed in the US Census Bureau records of 1970.