Opinion: We’re all immigrants

A park ranger walks through the registry room on Ellis Island in New York. Seth Wenig / AP
Published: 10-26-2024 6:25 AM |
Jane Hunt lives in Concord.
We’re a peripatetic species. Some theorize we always have been, beginning deep in prehistory when, at least according to one notion, folks from what is now Asia trekked across a long-lost land bridge into what we call North America.
Were there other people here before these ancient travelers arrived? We don’t know. Did the newcomers drive existing inhabitants out or kill them off? We don’t know. Did the arrivals settle peaceably among and intermarry with long-term residents? No idea. We do have evidence that native North Americans have been here for thousands of years before the likes of Leif Ericson or Christopher Columbus turned up on native doorsteps, and we also know that new folks have been arriving ever since.
How far must you clamber through the branches of your own family tree to discover a newcomer to these shores? Maybe you yourself are that person. Maybe it was a parent, a grandparent, or someone who turned up so long ago his or her name and story are long forgotten. For me, deep in my 80th trip around the sun, that first arriver was only two generations ago. One of my grandfathers first saw the light of day on the far side of an ocean.
I never knew this grandfather well. He and my grandmother divorced long before I was born, and during my few visits in early childhood, I struggled to understand his heavily accented English. Also, he had moved on, re-marrying and founding a new family, and had little time for his now-adult first daughter and her offspring, me.
I’m sorry for this now, with no knowledge of how or when he became a U.S. citizen; no tales from his childhood in the old country; no stories of adjusting to his new life here. Family lore has it that his own mother missed her birthplace so profoundly that relatives scraped up funds to send her back. The story goes that she stayed put for a few months, then returned to the U.S. and never spoke of her homeland again.
Tangential as this connection was and is, it’s left me with a kind of border-erasing sense of self. With no real connection to my grandfather’s birthplace, I can’t claim any hyphenated-Americanism; yet at the same time, I’m deeply aware that, to be American in the ordinary, non-native way, is to carry within one some fraction of the world beyond U.S. borders. Most of us, whether we know this or not, acknowledge it or not, carry some smidge of Otherness.
So it’s with alarm and dismay that I read of demonstrators lobbying to drive newcomers out and a proposed Trump effort to deport friends and neighbors by the thousands, possibly millions. After all, for those of us not native, we’re either newcomers ourselves or not far removed from one or more ancestors who were.
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Another branch of my family has lived in New Hampshire for at least six generations, possibly more going back to the pre-Revolution 1700s. But where were they before that? I have no idea, but they almost certainly weren’t native.
It’s worth considering what would drive you, in the here and now, to up sticks and transplant yourself to a place whose language, laws, and customs were all unknown to you, determined to remain there, whatever that took, for the rest of your life. How bad would life have to get before you’d be driven to such extremes, ending up in a place where you might not know one face, or even enough of the local language to say, “Please help me” or “I’m hungry”?
I ask because that’s pretty much who and what we’re talking about when we talk about immigration. These are not criminal masterminds intent on fleecing us and despoiling our daughters, any more than my grandfather was. These are people driven, by want or fear or prejudice or barbarity, to abandon the one place they’ve ever known, to gather up their courage and desperation and whatever scraps of hope life has left them, to strive for a better, freer, more livable existence for themselves and their families.
They are the founders of new American families, very much like the scared and courageous folks who founded, and are founding, ours.