My mother's side is German and Polish. My great-grandmother on my mom's side was 100% Polish and arrived in the United States as an immigrant in the early 20th century. According to my mom, my great-grandmother was processed at Ellis Island and then had to wait for a relative to come to Chicago by train to pick her and her sister up to and head back to the midwest. I think they went to Illinois, as that is where most of my extended family lived. My grandfather was mostly German, and I think I remember my mom telling me there was some strife over my grandpa marrying my grandma because she was at least 50% Polish.
I'm less clear about the origin story on my dad's side. I know his ancestry is mostly German, but I believe there is also some Scottish in there as well. I've asked my dad about this and even isn't totally sure. I do know that my great-grandfather was a professor in Ohio in the early 20th century.
More recently, I can speak of my own experience of migration within the United States. It's not exactly an immigration story, but it certainly shaped who I am.
My parents both grew up in the Chicago area, went to high school together, and got married when they were in college. Dad studied geology in Colorado, and eventually got a job with an oil company. This eventually led my parents to move up to Alaska.
One quick note about Alaska. As the United States is a country of immigrants, Alaska is a state of migrants or transplants. There are very few people whose families have been in Alaska for more than generation or two; it was home to very few people until WWII, wasn't even officially a state until 1959, and didn't see a huge population boom until the discovery of oil in late 1970s. Consequently, there are few people in the state whose families have been there earlier than the 1970s or 80s when the oil economy boomed. In this sense, I feel like Alaska is a microcosm of the immigrant experience of America in the last 150 years.
Anyway, so I grew up in Alaska and was there for 9 years, then moved to Butte, Montana for 2.5 years, then Dallas, Texas for a year, then back to Alaska for another 6 years until I graduated from high school. One result of all this moving around--and being relatively isolated in Alaska and, so a lesser extent, Montana--is that I hardly know my extended family. This might be why my knowledge of my ancestry is so incomplete. I've only ever had a handful of rich, meaningful conversations with people outside of my nuclear family, especially with my grandparents (especially now that two of them are dead and the other two are tremendously old).
One potential way for to get some answers about where I come from is the DNA analysis website 23andme.com. If you send in a sample of your DNA, they will analyze it and tell you all sorts of things about genetic ancestry.
Seeing as how the United States is a nation of immigrants, the xenophobia that is so pervasive in our society is perhaps a bit confusing. I think there are two main reasons why Americans remain so rejecting of immigrants:
1. Economic fears. Many Americans, especially during these less-than-stellar economic conditions, are convinced that foreigners are flooding the country stealing their jobs. While there may be some truth to that, as the textbook points out, most of those jobs are low-wage, low-skill jobs that most Americans don't want anyway. The economic problems this country has bigger causes than immigration.
2. Racism. Immigration in the late 19th/early 20th century was mostly white people from Europe. While these groups certainly faced discrimination--because of their religion, because of language differences, because they were a different shade of white--they never had to deal with the hate that non-white immigrants have faced in this country. From the reprehensible laws of the late 19th/early 20th century banning immigration from China to the US building a massive fence on the border with Mexico, non-white immigrants have always faced more personal and institutional discrimination than white immigrants. I think that's especially so today, because the vast majority of immigrants in the last 30 years are from Latin America, Asia, or Africa: almost all non-white. This has brought out some racist animosity from xenophobic people who feel that the power structure of White Euro-Americans is being threatened by non-white people with different languages, different cultural traditions, and who, frankly, look different. The thing that xenophobic white Americans fail to understand is that this country has ALWAYS been a country of transplants and immigrants...and we have succeeded and thrived BECAUSE of that diversity. Adding more diversity America's cultural makeup can strengthen us.
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