\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We\u2019re heading into a nasty election, and one of the nastiest issues will be immigration. You\u2019d think that those who yell the loudest would remember that they are the children of immigrants. This is, for the most part, an immigrant nation.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 While campaigning for Andrew Romanoff this summer, I heard him tell the story of his family\u2019s immigrant background. It\u2019s a lot like mine.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 All four of my grandparents were immigrants. They left the villages (and in one case, a city) of what was then the Pale of Settlement of Russia \u2013 now, Ukraine, Lithuania, Romania and Belarus \u2013 to escape the tyranny and anti-Semitism of Russia and to find new lives in the \u201cGoldeneh Medina\u201d of the United States.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 They believed Emma Lazarus\u2019s lines: \u201cGive me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.\u201d (My grandmother actually taught them to me when I was a very young child \u2013 only a little older than when my grandfather taught me the Pledge of Allegiance.) So did millions of Southern and Eastern Europeans who filled the steerage of countless ships that passed Lady Liberty and landed on Ellis Island<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The only immigration lines that existed then were the lines waiting for the inspectors at Ellis Island. They were terrifying enough, since anyone who showed signs of disease was sent back \u2013 and tuberculosis was endemic in the European slums. But at least the terror was short-lived; the immigrants of the 1890s to the 1920s did not have to wonder for months or years if they would be accepted by the U.S. government.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 On the whole, this wave of immigrants did pretty well. They began at the bottom of society \u2013 in my family\u2019s case, on the Lower East Side of New York. My grandmother\u2019s story is fairly typical: as a young woman, she worked in the garment industry, in a sweatshop, ironing \u201cwaists\u201d 12 hours a day for pennies. She could easily have been one of the young women killed in the Triangle Fire, but by then (1911) she was married and had a child.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Shortly after that, my grandfather bought a delicatessen, also on the Lower East Side. After some success, the newly American family moved out of New York and into the \u201creal\u201d American heartland: Dayton, Ohio. It was there my father went to high school, and had dreams of going to dental school that were cut short by the Depression.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 That path \u2013 from unskilled labor to small business; from the teeming city streets to smaller communities \u2013 was not untypical of that generation of immigrants. Or any: look at the immigration patterns of the Chinese and Japanese in the 20th<\/sup> century. And today you find the Italians, the Bohemians, the Poles and the Jews (and the Chinese and the Japanese) at all levels of American society, and in cities and towns across the continent.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But that easy access to the American way of life ended in 1924, when the right-wingers of the day decided that there were too many Italians, Poles and Jews in their white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant America. Congress passed the Immigrations Restriction Act, which restricted immigration to 2% of each of the ethnic groups living in the U.S. in 1890 \u2013 before <\/em><\/strong>the great immigration wave of the late 19th<\/sup> and early 20th<\/sup> centuries \u2013 thus preserving the WASP vision of America. Or so they thought.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 That approach to immigration \u2013 making it as difficult as possible for most \u2013 has held to this day. And it is the fact that the 10 or 12 or 20 million undocumented immigrants are brown<\/strong> that makes the current situation a \u201ccrisis\u201d rather than a problem to be dealt with calmly and compassionately. Would the political backlash be different if these immigrants were from Europe? (History tells us that the Irish were treated pretty much the same as \u201cour\u201d undocumented when they arrived in the 19th<\/sup> century, destitute from a destroyed economy. I guess we haven\u2019t changed much in 150 years.)<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Not so many years ago, this country absorbed an influx from Southeast Asia, and today these immigrants have found solid niches for themselves in American society. But times were better then, and they were refugees from \u201cCommunism,\u201d not just poor folks wanting a better life.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The undocumented \u2013 the \u201cillegals\u201d \u2013 for the most part are working at the bottom of the employment ladder: the \u201cjobs Americans don\u2019t want.\u201d In this terrible economy, they are doing even more poorly than they had been a couple of years ago \u2013 remittances sent \u201chome\u201d to Mexico or Central America are drying up. But meanwhile they are doing the best that they can for themselves and their families, and trying to ensure that their children get a good education so their lives will be better \u2013 higher on that ladder. Their children, in hiding from \u201cla migra,\u201d are performing well in school and hoping to be teachers and doctors and lawyers. Their parents\u2019 aims are not unlike those of Andrew\u2019s grandparents. Or mine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We\u2019re heading into a nasty election, and one of the nastiest issues will be immigration. You\u2019d think that those who yell the loudest would remember that they are the children of immigrants. This is, for the most part, an immigrant nation. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 While campaigning for Andrew Romanoff this summer, I heard him tell the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=119"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":123,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions\/123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}