Honoring our immigrant ancestors

Immigration has been a contentious topic for the past few years, as the migrant crisis at the southern border has continuously grabbed headlines, prompted intense debate and served as a major policy point for candidates in elections across the nation. While Americans have always, and likely will always, disagree on how to handle this issue, there’s no denying the increasingly vitriolic, outlandish and in many cases outright racist language used to describe these immigrants.

Every American is a descendant of immigrants, whether your ancestors came here on the Mayflower, through Ellis Island or, in recent decades, on a plane. My ancestors came from Italy, Scotland, England, France and Germany, some as early as the 1600s and some as late as the early 1900s.

So it’s disappointing, as someone who was raised to take pride in my family’s history, who learned about the struggles that my Italian and Jewish relatives faced when they arrived, to see how willing many Americans are to assume the worst about all immigrants.

There are some who will say, “I don’t hate all immigrants — just the illegals who come to our country to steal our jobs and murder us.” While I can appreciate the very real worries about gang members or criminals arriving in our neighborhoods, I’d like to ask a simple question.

How do you think your immigrant ancestors would feel if someone accused them of eating dogs?

I can promise you, most of our ancestors did face discrimination when they came to this country. In the mid-1800s, when waves of Germans and Irish arrived, and decades later, when Italian, Greek, Russian, Jewish and more people came here in droves, they faced the racist backlash that many immigrants are still facing today.

The Know Nothing Party of the 1850s was a nativist political movement that opposed Catholic immigration into the country. They ran on a platform of keeping America Protestant and “pure,” rejecting the notion that Catholics and non-Anglo-Saxon peoples had anything to offer our young nation.

The Know Nothings used slurs to insult the many Irish immigrants who had fled the Great Famine, many of whom endured hellish conditions on their journey over. They drew caricatures, published cartoons calling Irishmen “wild beasts,” and ran political campaigns on a platform that the Irish were not fit to be members of civilized society.

According to Kevin Kenny, a professor of history at Boston College, “Native-born Americans criticized Irish immigrants for their poverty and manners, their supposed laziness and lack of discipline, their public drinking style, their Catholic religion, and their capacity for criminality and collective violence. In both words and pictures, critics of the Irish measured character by perceived physical appearance.”

Sound familiar?

I’m not saying people don’t have a right to be concerned about illegal immigration. It’s a serious issue that has remained unresolved through far too many administrations of both parties. But we must remember that our words have meaning, and that when we make blanket judgments about people or groups, we are, as the adage goes, cutting off our nose to spite our face.

Because immigrants have always been the backbone of this country, from the day of the signing of the Declaration of Independence — which features the signatures of eight immigrants — to today. From early arrivers like Tadeusz Kosciuszko, who built Fort West Point and helped the Americans win the Battle of Saratoga, to later ones like Andrew Carnegie, the tycoon who dominated the steel industry in the 19th century — neither of whom had ‘legal’ documentation when they arrived — immigrants have always had an outsized impact as workers, innovators and leaders.

Arguably the most famous immigrant in our history, Alexander Hamilton, came to New York as a boy with nothing, and ended up one of our most influential Founding Fathers. I wonder what people these days would call the immigrant orphan child of a prostitute from the Caribbean with no formal schooling.

Immigration is difficult. It is a quagmire that provides immeasurable benefits while, conversely, creating serious social, economic and political pressures. But we should never resort to reductive and hateful stereotypes.

Every immigrant, no matter how he or she came here, is a human being, and should be treated as such. Don’t make the same mistake the people who called my relatives “wops” and “dagos” did, and assume they have less to offer.

Will Sheeline is a senior reporter covering Glen Cove, Glen Head, Oyster Bay and Sea Cliff. Comments? WSheeline@liherald.com.