WARNING: Bleeding Heart Editorial! It's hard to talk any sense with an idiot!!!

Americans share history of immigration and hope
Greg Bean
Coda
http://ems.gmnews.com/news/2007/0815/Ed ... s/018.html



It's tough to know the exact details, because family legend sometimes takes on certain fictional properties. In other words, the family members (at least in my family) passing the legend along don't always let facts get in the way of a good story. That said, here - according to family legend - are the very abbreviated tales of how a couple of my great-grandparents came to America.

On my father's side, my great-grandfather was born in Ireland, but left at the age of 7 or 8 to live with relatives in Liverpool, England. When that didn't work out (he was 10 at the time), he somehow got himself aboard a ship traveling to America. Once the ship was anchored, he jumped overboard to avoid a customs search, swam to shore and started looking for work. He wound up working as a "boney picker" in the coal mines of Pennsylvania, and then worked on the Transcontinental Railroad.

When work on the railroad was completed with the driving of the Golden Spike in 1869, he went to work as a coal miner in Rock Springs, Wyo. There, he became a union organizer, one of the first members of the United Mine Workers of America.

We know at least that part is unvarnished truth, because his name is listed in UMWA histories, and histories of the Union Pacific coal-mining operation in Wyoming.

On my mother's side, my great-grandfather was born in Scotland and emigrated to America, along with a brother, sometime around 1880, or maybe a few years later. As younger sons in the Scots culture, they would not inherit from their parents and faced a poor and uncertain future in the land of their birth.

They were in their early teens when they emigrated to America (illegally, the story goes, although the Immigration and Naturalization Service wasn't created until 1891), and once here, found work on farms in Missouri. They worked as farm laborers until they moved West as homesteaders shortly before the turn of the century. On their new homesteads, their homes originally built of sod hacked from the prairie, they tended families, cows and crops and built lives they never could have imagined in their native land.

By the time my grandfather was born in 1907 (the next to last of seven sons), the family was still only making the 90-mile trip to "town" in a horse-drawn wagon for supplies twice a year and was incredibly poor by today's standard. Still, over time, the clan's prosperity grew sufficiently that it could afford to send my grandfather and his brother away to attend high school in town, where they became the first members of the tribe to earn high school diplomas. Those diplomas, to them, were the realization of an ideal, proof of the promise this nation offered to those who weren't afraid to work.

These stories - many confirmed in county history texts - were always told with pride in my family. They were stories of young men uprooted from their homelands by economic necessity, men who faced taunts and discrimination in their new country on account of their poverty and ancestry. They were stories of humble, brave men who built lives and raised families, asking for nothing more than what they earned with the muscles in their backs and the sweat of their brows.

Those stories certainly aren't unusual, and maybe similar stories are told around kitchen tables in your family when the old folk get together to pass history along.

But it was the stories from my family that I thought about driving home recently after a day when the overriding topic at work was illegal immigration, and specifically, the negative effects of illegal immigration in Monmouth and Middlesex counties.

That day, it seemed you just couldn't escape the topic. There were stories and letters to the editor about it in our Greater Media newspapers, stories in the regional dailies, stories on radio and television. I wandered into at least three discussions on illegal immigration as I walked around the newsroom.

The most striking conversation, however, was between me and a woman who called and wanted to complain about people she believes are illegal aliens hanging around the parking lot at a convenience store in Jamesburg every morning, waiting for work. She thought we ought to look into the matter, write a story about it for the paper, and get it stopped.

Her family, she said, had been legal, tax-paying residents of New Jersey for generations going back to Colonial times. It was her contention that the flood of illegal, largely Hispanic immigrants in the state now is sapping jobs and resources while giving nothing back. They are, at root, lawbreakers, she said. And we ought to develop the no-nonsense policy toward them of simply rounding them up and sending them home.

When I suggested those men at the convenience store might only be trying to earn a living, realize the most basic promise of our nation, she accused me of being a liberal.

"I should have expected that reaction from someone in the liberal media," she said. She said liberal media like she'd say Communist infiltrator.

I didn't argue further with her then, but in hindsight I wish I had. While I agree that illegal immigration has created serious problems - problems in our health and educational systems for example - I've always had a great deal of empathy for the men and women waiting in those parking lots for work each morning.

And the reason is that I have a lot more in common with them - at least in terms of family history - than with that allegedly blue-blooded woman who called to complain. Those men waiting for work in the convenience store parking lot every morning at 8 a.m. could very well have been my great-grandfather a couple of generations ago. There's not much difference between them that I can see.

I'm proud of those ancestors - without them I wouldn't enjoy the life I do today - and I guess I'm proud of the determination and work ethic of this new bunch as well. I hope they can make a good life here, become legal, tax-paying members of our society. I believe that instead of building thousand-mile fences between borders, we should be building laws and policies that make it possible.

If that makes me a liberal in her book, so be it. I'd argue it just makes me an American.

Gregory Bean is executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers. You can reach him at gbean@gmnews.com.