# Barack Obama — "We were strangers once, too" > [!quote] "Scripture tells us that we shall not oppress a stranger, for we know the heart of a stranger — we were strangers once, too. My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too." > — Barack Obama, Address to the Nation on Immigration, the White House, November 20, 2014 ## Context Obama delivered this prime-time address announcing the DACA-expansion and DAPA executive actions, which would have shielded several million undocumented immigrants from deportation. He closed on Exodus — "we were strangers once, too" — explicitly restating [[John F. Kennedy]]'s formulation more than half a century later. The actions were challenged in court and DAPA never took effect, foreshadowing how contested the consensus had already become. ## Why this matters The most recent president to make "a nation of immigrants" a defining national creed from the bully pulpit — and arguably the last before the phrase became a partisan flashpoint. Within months the 2016 campaign would reframe immigration around "invasion" and a border wall, and the Trump administration would eventually direct U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to strike "nation of immigrants" from its own mission statement (2018). Obama's address marks the closing of the long bipartisan arc that runs from [[George Washington - bosom of America is open]] through Reagan and both Bushes to here. ## Verification - **Primary source:** [Obama White House Archives, "Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on Immigration," November 20, 2014](https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/11/20/remarks-president-address-nation-immigration). - **Status:** Verbatim from the official transcript. Undisputed. ## Related quotes - [[John F. Kennedy - a nation of immigrants]] — the phrase Obama is deliberately echoing. - [[George W. Bush - the great American tradition of the melting pot]] — the Republican predecessor making the same case from the same desk eight years earlier. - Featured in [[Presidents on the Nation of Immigrants]].