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Border Stories

by on May. 04, 2010, under Arts

What if we all told the stories of how we came to be in this country? Mine goes like this:immigrant-ship

Ellis Island received all four of my grandparents from various eastern European countries in the beginning of the 20th century. I was able to find my Hungarian grandmother’s name on the ship manifest because I have her name from a sampler she stitched and my Austrian grandfather’s ship because my father shared his name. But my mother’s parents arrival informations remains a mystery to me because I don’t know the names that they had before they were “americanized” by the immigration officials.

My grandparents and their generation never talked about “the old country”, at least not to us kids. They had all worked very hard to assimilate and leave the bad memories of pogroms, the coming of World War I and other horrendous stories behind them.  I assume they all became citizens of this country; I don’t even know. We didn’t talk about it.

My grandfathers got work, my grandmothers stayed home with the kids and barely learned English because they were in a New York neighborhood of Eastern Europeans and didn’t have to. My father spoke German until he was in first grade.

My parents were both born here as was I – and my children and grandchildren. We are all the descendants of brave people who crossed the big ocean under very unpleasant circumstances, not knowing what their reception would be once they arrived.

Substitute the time period and the countries and my story isn’t that different from that of all immigrants who cross borders for a better life.


This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 4th, 2010 at 3:46 pm and is filed under Arts. Tags for this post: , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  • Pete

    This is an interesting article. If you were to compare this to today you would find many f those Europeans probably would be illegal. With what it takes to immigrate to the US now it is amazing that there aren’t more illegals. My wife is Brazilian. To get here here legally was almost impossible. It took getting my Congressman involved to get the INS to finish things. We spent almost 3 years of re sending paperwork, 7 trips to get her fingerprints (because for some reason they were considered unreadable) just trying to get her temperary Green card. She is now a Citizen.

    • Penelope Starr

      Pete,
      Thanks for telling your story.  The more we hear about the human side of immigration law, the faster things will change.

  • Albert Vetere Lannon

    All of my grandparents arrived in the US via Ellis Island, my father’s from Southern Italy and my mother’s from Finland.  The darker-skinned Italians were treated as subhuman, and the Finns not much better.  In fact, if they had kept “terrorist watch lists” then my maternal grandfather, as an active member of the radical Industrial Workers of the World in the copper mines, would probably have been on it.  If they ever figured out his name.  He was Isaac Bjorklund, but the immigration officers couldn’t deal with the BJ, so they made it Lund.)  They came for the same reasons immigrants always come – for work, for a chance at a better life.  Working in  mines and steel mills and streetcar conducting and tending bar.  Of course, we are all immigrants or the descendants of immigrants.  Even the Native Americans came here from someplace else many thousands of years ago.  The best research to date shows us all originating in Africa, a thought that must drive the tea-party folks crazy.

    But it has always been true that in times of economic/political stress we look for scapegoats, and the immigrant — especially if they have darker skin — has always been a target.  It’s also true that there are real border issues that need to be addressed through a thorough re-examination of immigration policy.  With all due respect, it is hard for me to get worked up against immigrants when we in the United States bear a huge responsibility for the border crossing, both in our greedy demand for cheap, non-union labor who can’t complain, and in our insatiable demand for drugs.  And in the social dislocation caused by hundreds of American factories along the border, dislocation that keeps young men unemployed and young women both exploited on unsafe jobs and made targets for sexual predators and murderers.

    It would be nice if we could have rational discourse and ramp down the racism that infects any discussion, but that is not likely to happen.  The best we can hope for is that Congress takes on comprehensive immigration reform, but I fear that lack of strong leadership by the administration and the pandering to voters that keeps legislators fearful of real and meaningful change will leave the issues to fester at least until there is full economic recovery…and that may be a long way off.

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