 |
| (Casey Christie, Bakersfield Californian / February 4, 2012) |
Here's a totally unrelated story about non-citizen veterans who are being threatened with deportation. My favorite part of the story is when the others who were already deported join the protest on the other side of the border. I am picturing it.
I am sorry that this place is in jeopardy, but I wish it weren't closing down because I would be putting it on my list of stops for the next time I drive home ... I was trying to figure out when that would be ... and I just don't know....
I enjoyed reading this one... posting in its entirety because the links to these always "break"
Writer's Family Tree Shows Immigration's Human Side
Winthrop Quigley /Albuquerque Journal WriterStaff/Published: 2/21/12
I'm the first to admit it. I have a really stupid name. There is a reason, of course.
The Quigleys originate in County Mayo, in the west of Ireland. Quigley is an anglicized version of a Gaelic name. My branch of the family seems to have arrived in the United States, as so many Irish did, in the 1840s. I assume they immigrated legally, but I really don't know.
The Irish owned less than 5 percent of the land in Ireland at that time. The rest was held by English landlords and absentee owners. That made the Irish some of the most impoverished people on earth. Their diet consisted of potatoes and little else, because potatoes could be grown in marginal soil and are high in calories.
A blight devastated Irish potato production in 1845. Crop failures continued until 1852.
About a million Irish died of starvation and disease. Desperate people began emigrating from Ireland in enormous numbers. Between 1840 and 1880, the population of Ireland declined from 10 million to 5 million. Almost 3 million immigrants arrived in the United States from Ireland between 1846 and 1900.
The immigrants were mostly Catholic, they had no money and little education, they were willing to take any work they could find, and they spoke Gaelic or strangely accented English. The women became domestics in the homes of wealthy Americans. The men wanted land to farm, but that took capital they didn't have, so they mined coal, worked in factories, built railroads. Children worked alongside their parents.
The Irish constituted about 25 percent of Boston's population in the early 20th century, about the time my father and his two brothers were born. The immigrants and their descendants had helped elect a couple of Irish American mayors, but most of the wealth remained in the hands of white Anglo Saxon Protestants, and the Irish generally stayed in their ghettos.
My uncle was born near Boston in 1913. His parents named him John Winthrop, after another immigrant. John Winthrop was a wealthy Puritan lawyer in England, a founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the leader who first described the colony as a city on a hill. Winthrop was speaking theologically, but his concept has become one of the foundational principles of the country -- that the United States should show people everywhere what they can aspire to become.
Whether my uncle got his name because his parents had great ambitions for him or because they wanted to impress their Yankee neighbors, I do not know. He dropped John early on and was always known as Winthrop. I was named Winthrop, not John, in his honor. My grandparents' hopes for my uncle were realized. He got an Ivy League education and became an executive with a New York based mining company.
It's just another immigrant story, one of millions in this country.
My father in law has an even better story. Stavros was a shepherd in Greece. The house where he was born was a pile of stones shoved against a hillside. It was heated with a fire built in the middle of the dirt floor. The floor was sloped so the animals could take shelter downhill from where the family slept. The water came from the stream at the bottom of the hill.
When Stavros turned 12 years old, about the same time my uncle was born, his parents gave him a quarter, a boat ticket and the address of a family who had immigrated to New York from their village some years earlier. They told him to send money home so they could ship the rest of the kids to America. Stavros landed at Ellis Island, entered the country legally and found his former neighbors.
His first job in New York was washing dishes in a restaurant kitchen. Eventually, Stavros owned his own restaurants, in North Dakota, of all places, and he sent enough money home to bring two of his brothers over from Greece.
I've been thinking a lot about immigrants over the past several weeks, as our Legislature wrestled with the question of continuing to issue driver's licenses to people who are in this country illegally. I know I should try to hone some economically cogent argument on one side of the issue or the other, but I can't. Whenever I try, I think of my grandparents and Stavros and all the other immigrants and children of immigrants I know.
I think of my Leadership New Mexico classmate, Farok, who emigrated from Malaysia and became an executive with Washington TRU Solutions.
I think of Jesus, who went to university in Mexico for a year until the money ran out. He runs a stable for 20 horses in the Rio Grande Valley and never takes a day off unless it is to help out on his family's ranch near Chihuahua. The stable's owner emigrated from Wales.
I think of Suny, whose family fled Vietnam after the war. She's a dental hygienist.
Most of us know some variation of these stories from our own family lore.
I get that at its most thoughtful the immigration debate is about fairness, rule of law and national security. I just can't separate humanity from policy when it comes to immigration. With so many lives at stake, I hope our state and federal leaders can't either.
UpFront is a daily front page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Winthrop Quigley at wquigley@abqjournal.com.
This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment