Comments | jrittenhouse: For the immigrants:

jrittenhouse

For the immigrants:

Feb 08, 2009 00:26

Harbors open their doors to the young searching foreigner
Come to live in the light of the big L of liberty
Plains and open skies billboards would advertise
Was it anything like that when you arrived?
Dream boats carried the future to the heart of America
People were waiting in line for a place by the river!

It was time when strangers were ( Read more... )

children, sad, immigration, family, patriotism, orphans, usa, adoption

Comments 3

jennlk February 8 2009, 06:06:35 UTC

Turning away, she remembers she once heard a legend
That spoke of a mystical magical land called America…

and this is different from when? It's always been a legend, unless you were the 'right kind' of immigrant. Anyone who claims otherwise isn't paying attention. There were immigration quotas in the Teens and Twenties, and depending on the country of origin, the quota could be filled by mid-January, just from the people waiting at the borders.

One grandmother lived in a shared one room walkup in Windsor for seven years until my grandfather became a US citizen, despite the fact that they were already married. A great-grandmother on the other side (and her sisters) were indentured servants, only allowed in because they had jobs.

tlunquist February 8 2009, 20:18:40 UTC

I think this particular song is really about the 1700s -- before immigration quotas, before slavery, before all the racist institutions could be institutionalized in America because America did not yet have any idea what it was.

The golden age is never the present age, nor any age that any living human accurately recalls.

But it is a really wonderful sentiment - the kind of warm, fuzzy, Pollyanna kind of song that Neil Sedaka was notorious for. I must confess, I kind of like them that way.

jrittenhouse February 9 2009, 05:50:46 UTC

It helps if you have an immigrant in the house.

In my case, the vast majority was here prior to America becoming a country, with the exception of some Germans and Alsatian Franco-Germans who showed up just before the Civil War. In Susan's case, they showed up in the last couple of decades of the 1800s.

Among the ugly past parts is the Chinese Exclusion Act, which basically choked off immigration to America from China from 1880 to the time of WW2.

For all practical purposes, the Exclusion Act, along with the restrictions that followed it, froze the Chinese community in place in 1882, and prevented it from growing and assimilating into U.S. society as European immigrant groups did. However, limited immigration from China did still occur until the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943. From 1910 to 1940, the Angel Island Immigration Station on what is now Angel Island State Park in San Francisco Bay served as the processing center for most of the 56,113 Chinese immigrants who are recorded as immigrating or returning from ( ... )