Some Personal Thoughts on the History of Immigration

SOME PERSONAL THOUGHTS ON THE HISTORY OF IMMIGRANTS

The Statue of Liberty, a gift from France in 1886, welcomes immigrants with these poetic words added in 1903:

‘’Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp,’’’ cries she
With silent lips. ‘’Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’’

But from the beginning of our nation under the Constitution we have not welcomed immigrants who lacked the WASP pedigree. The first Immigration Act (1790) made only white people eligible for naturalization. The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) prohibited Chinese immigration, after they did the dangerous dynamite blasting work in building the Transcontinental Railroad. They operated the laundries, the restaurants, and the opium and prostitution dens for the rugged sex-starved men in the mining camps of the West like obedient, loyal dogs.

The Irish-Catholics, seeking to escape hunger from the potato famine in the 1840s, got one-way steerage fare from Britain to Canada where they illegally entered the United States to head for Boston or New York. They met with bigoted opposition and violence from the ‘’Know-Nothings.’’ In the 1880s, Russians, Poles, and many Jews seeking refuge from pogroms became farmers in cattle-rich Wyoming -- only to be hunted down and murdered for rustling a single cow to feed their family in the Johnson County War (1892), the subject of the movie ‘’Heaven’s Gate.’’

I am second-generation Italian, the last historian of my family who immigrated from industrial northern Italy on my father’s side around 1890 and from impoverished, agrarian southern Italy on my mother’s side around 1910. I stand in a privileged historical perspective to see who my grandparents were and who they hoped their grandchildren, great grandchildren, and great-great grandchildren would become. I grew up in Steubenville, Ohio, the gateway to the Old Northwest Territory when the first land office was built there in 1785. The city sits on the bank of the Ohio River which, after the Civil War, became dotted with Carnegie steel mills from Pittsburgh to Wheeling, the US Steel Corporation after 1901. The steel industry attracted cheap immigrant labor. The population of Steubenville grew with Polish and Italian immigrants from 1900 to 1920.

The first wave of Italian immigration (1880-1900) came from Northern Italy, generally literate, skilled workers from industrialized cities like Milan or Genoa. They became tradesmen (shoemakers, tailors, barbers) and businessmen (grocers, restaurant owners, wine-makers [vintners]). Many moved west to California to make their fortunes: 1881- Andrea Sbarbaro: Italian Swiss Colony wine; 1933- Ernest & Julio Gallo: Gallo wine; 1904- A. P. Giannini: Bank of America. The second wave of Italian immigration (1900-1920) came from Southern Italy, generally illiterate, unskilled workers from impoverished agrarian provinces like Abruzzi or Calabria. They took dangerous, unskilled jobs in construction in and around New York City, or in the steel industry or coal mining of the Ohio Valley. Most intended to return to Italy and did not wish to assimilate to the American lifestyle. Those who stayed established a "Little Italy" in cities where mutual aid societies [Sons of Italy, 1905] and Italian-language newspapers [Il Progresso, Oggi] flourished. As in the villages and regions of the Old Country, the boundaries of Little Italy and community loyalty lay within sound of church bell ["campanillismo" ].

My grandparents were relatively well-off, even during the Depression. They gave birth to the Greatest Generation, my parents, and survived poverty through thrift, dedication to family, and a sense of community loyalty from which they drew their strength and commitment to help each other. They went to Sunday mass at St. Anthony’s church in the swelter of summer and the bone-chill of winter. They bought their groceries at Antonucci’s market and crusty Italian bread at DiAngelo’s bakery. They carried the food up the steep hill on foot to their classic American four-square houses that sat on narrow lots that overlooked the black smoke of the steel mills by day and their fiery glow at night. Home life centered around the warmth and aromas of the kitchen. Happiness lay not in wealth but in the circle of family and neighbors within sound of the church bell.

The war came and the men of my family, first-generation Americans, went off to fight against the country their parents came from. When they returned, I was born along with all my cousins. Home life had not changed, and for a short time I was able to see America first-hand as it was before listening to the radio or reading a book devolved into a television culture; before families split apart with moves to the suburbs; before learning to speak and write a complete sentence was valued more than ‘’It’s like Wow’’ to express oneself; and before pictures of family and friends were held more dear than ‘’selfies.’’

But the world changes, for without change there would be no such thing as history. Change is the very thing that my grandparents, like all other immigrants, hoped for, strove for, and expected for their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and all the future generations they could never expect to see. Because of their willingness to part with their past in Italy, I had a future as a lawyer in the United States. Our immigrants also had ancestors in whom they took pride, even though those ancestors may have been peasants rather than nobility; but when they courageously left the Old World, they put that pride behind them because they rightfully were less concerned about who their ancestors were and more hopeful of who their children and grandchildren might become in the New World. Indeed, as Voltaire quipped, do well and you will have no need for ancestors. And America is the better for their courage.

 

Well written testimony to what migration in populations can do to advance society, improve economic diversity / sustainability and add tangible and intangible value to immigrants and the country that receives them. Too often we talk about the costs of accommodating diversity and immigration, and forget to tally up the dividends we get paid for decades.

 

All immigrants should concentrate on the present and forget the past. They should be happy in America.