‘We Are All Immigrants’ — a high school student aims to unite with children’s book

Immigration can be a hot-button topic, something frequently discussed on cable news and splashed across the headlines. But to one enterprising young author, it’s also the perfect material for a children’s book that helps young people understand each other’s roots.

Last month, Scarsdale, New York, high school senior Max Reddy Spencer wrote and self-published a children’s book titled “We Are All Immigrants.”

Spencer, the son of an Indian American mother and a white American father, said he was motivated to share the message that we are all more alike than different.

“We Are All Immigrants” follows the story of a young boy with a very similar background as Spencer’s. But he said he wanted the character to stand in for every child.

“I didn’t name the protagonist in the book,” he told ABC News. “I did that intentionally, actually, as a way to try to make the boy represent all of us and also not be the highlight of the story … I wanted the characters he interacted with to be the center of focus and attention.”

Through the boy’s journey in the book, he discovers that most people in his life who live in the United States are, in fact, immigrants. Whether it be his Venezuelan American neighbor, his Taiwanese American teacher, or his Italian American lunch cook, he begins to understand the fabric of his community is woven from different, diverse backgrounds.

Spencer said his book aims to make conversations about immigration more accessible to children, and it doubles as a coloring book with illustrations generated by artificial intelligence.

For Spencer, immigration is deeply personal, he said. His maternal grandparents immigrated from India. His grandfather was from a tiny, rural village in south India called Pathur, in Andhra Pradesh, India. His grandmother’s hometown was called Madanapalle.

Spencer said he grew up understanding America is built on immigration and that his goal in writing the book was to teach children about immigration, while also encouraging people to reflect on their similarities. 

 “I am very much pro-immigration from an economic and cultural perspective, but I am mostly just trying to remind our country that we are all far more similar than we are different,” he said. “I know that is obviously far more than my little book can do. But that was a big piece of what I was trying to share.”

Previously, Spencer started an initiative called the Inspiration Project, which collects and distributes free children’s books to underserved communities. His goal is to collect more than 3,000 children’s books to redistribute before he graduates high school. He estimated he’s collected at least 2,000 so far.

Spencer said he is donating all the proceeds from “We Are All Immigrants” to the organization Hearts & Homes for Refugees, a New York-based organization that helps resettle refugee families.

“We Are All Immigrants is available” online.