BV: Yes, it applies to me as well. All four of my grandparents immigrated from Italy, and my mother as well, coming over at age ten. All learned English and assimilated. The children were given Anglo names and not just because of the prejudice against Italians, but out of respect for Anglo-American culture. Before the rot set in in the 'sixties, it was understood that immigration without assimilation would lead to trouble of the identity-political and tribalist sorts we are now experiencing. It was also understood that the borders had to be enforced and that only legal immigrants were to be allowed in. What's more — and this is also very important and now completely ignored — it was understood that there is no right to immigrate and that legal immigration was to be allowed from only some countries and that these countries were to be ranked in terms of the potential contributions of their citizens to the well-being of the host country. It was understood that an immigration policy is not a suicide pact, and that ethnomasochists are to have no hand in its formulation. But now we must witness the spectacle of a destructive fool who calls himself ALEJANDRO Mayorkas, a brazen liar who heads the Orwellian Department of Homeland Security, who repeats against the evidence of the senses that the border is secure! It is evident that he and the entire Biden Administration is working to destroy the United States as she was founded to be.And so, Tony, I am considerably less sanguine than you are. We are over-extended abroad and collapsing under the weight of our own decadence within. All of our institutions are being undermined by leftist termites. But we fight on, nonetheless, to the tune of 'It ain't over til it's over.' It will be very 'interesting' to see if the fight can be confined to the political sphere.
Your and Tony’s stories on immigrant ancestors brought to mind that of my maternal grandfather Giovanni, who arrived with my grandmother, Anna, and three very little daughters in New York City just after the turn of the last century. Giovanni, who was a skilled machinist, in the days when that meant literally making and assembling the parts of machines, leaves his job at the naval shipyard in Palermo, travels to Naples to board a liner, crosses the Atlantic with a wife and three children, arrives in New York, where he is met by a cousin, Fausto, who is employed in a company that makes machines to produce paper bags. The cousin leads the immigrants to a small apartment in the Bronx, which he has procured for them, and early the very next morning, Giovanni, who speaks no English, leaves with the cousin, descends into the subway, emerges in mid-Manhattan, and ends up in a factory adjacent to the West Side piers, where he is immediately hired by the company (no big state welfare with this crowd) and where he works more than fifty years, sitting alongside of immigrant German machinists, all of them fashioning parts for prototype machines. Like your grandparents and mother, everyone learned to speak, read, and write English, although the girls were given Italian names and Sicilian, along with English, was spoken at home.
Another America, another New York, both of which I love dearly, now unrecognizable in my old age.