Immigration policy

   I have been thinking quite a bit recently about my relationship with immigrants, and how it informs the ways that I think of myself ethnically and culturally. As an adult, I have often found myself living in neighborhoods with high minority populations, so have often felt like the outsider culturally there. Although I probably have been the minority in those enclaves, I imagine that it has been those residents that has felt that way in the wider society, yet even in that larger culture, I still tend to feel something like a tolerated guest at best.
   I should mention here that although I am white, I am ethnically (though non-religiously) Jewish, and that fact has tended to make it difficult for me to fully identify with other Caucasian people; like the pork industry states about their product, I feel like the other white meat.
   This feeling of being this other in a majority population is a confusing place; like an entity that is forever in between other things, I can't quite figure out to whom or where I belong, and although I have never wanted to belong to groups (most likely as a way to try to verify my uniqueness to myself), I suspect that I in fact don't feel like I belong, rather than not really wanting to belong.
   I recall on multiple occasions seeing programs on television about life in prison, and when prisoners talk of the need for 'staying with your race' for one's own safety, I become puzzled; I suspect the 'white' groups (the apparent group for me) would have neo-Nazi tendencies, and then what place would I have there?
   Born in New York City and a resident there for fourty two years, I had always thought of myself as a "New Yorker", even for some years after living in my current state of California. I now think of myself as a person from New York, and although I try to think of myself as a Californian, I'm not sure that I believe myself.
   Here in the United States, there has been a lot of discussion about immigration over the last few years, and it has given me pause to think about my own policy; am I allowing myself to emigrate, or shall I forever be the 'wandering Jew', remaining the diaspora that I may or may not want to be?