President Obama’s changes to the immigration status of millions of illegal immigrants has caused the expected firestorm of controversy. I have previously criticized the decision to withhold the details of the plan until after voters went to the polls and I continue to view the changes as an assault upon the doctrine of separation of powers. While I have always recognized the wide latitude given to presidents in the past in prioritizing enforcement, this is an open circumvention of Congress to achieve by executive fiat what was denied in legislation. However, I have also been thinking about the families themselves and my own family’s history in coming to this country. Many Americans are finding themselves taking journeys of their own — retracing the often harrowing steps of their ancestors in coming to this country in looking for a better life.
With the release of the President’s new immigration measures, much of the national debate has focused on the constitutional implications of a president unilaterally ordering such sweeping changes. For the millions of immigrants, the new legal status means a new home and future. For those looking to the future, the immediate past is often a place to escape from; a prior identity shed at great cost and effort. However, that is likely to change as it has for so many American families when descendants find returning to the past is the only way to fully understand their own identity. That is a voyage that I took last month to retrace the steps of two people who came in the last massive immigration wave at the turn of the twentieth century. My journey took me to a small village on a mountain in Sicily. It took me to Cianciana.
My grandparents — Dominico Piazza and Josephine Moscato — came to this country from Sicily when the Statue of Liberty was still a relatively new addition to the New York harbor. They saw that statue from the decks of different wooden ships.
Finding answers about Cianciana proved a bit more perilous than a spin on ancestry.com. The roads in the Agrigento Province were built for carts so that two cars barely fit and the series of switchbacks leave you with what seems the choice between a front-end collision or a dive hundreds of feet off a cliff. The burning of fields being cleared adds a menacing smell and glow to trip. Then suddenly Cianciana appears like a time capsule with terracotta roofs and stone houses nestled into the side of the mountain.
First settled in 1269 and then rebuilt after an earthquake in 1646. The village remains much as it has always been. At night, the streets become full of people chatting for hours. Old men gather in coffee clutches as smoke waifs down the main street from the roasting of chestnuts. Children have the run of the town – scurrying around in packs into restaurants and stores.
Walking down the main street, I was called over by a group of old men who heard that my grandfather was named Dominico Piazza. They then proudly produced an elderly man, Dominico Piazza. While we could not confirm concretely that he was relative, he bore a striking resemblance to my grandfather. We were surrounded by men probing for other names from my family like Moscato and La Corte. In the end, it really did not matter. To them, a Ciancianese had returned home. Home. It meant something different here. Despite being half Irish and half Sicilian, they viewed this as my home and my return as completely obvious and inevitable.
The response continued wherever we went. A pizza shop owner, Maddalena Chiazza, would not let me pay for our meal when she discovered that I was a “paisan” returning home. Maddalena lived near Toronto, Canada and returned with her family to her father’s village. I asked her why she decided to stay and she looked perplexed by the question – as if I had asked about something incredibly obvious and evident. She simply said “we built this. Of course, we came home.”
It soon becomes clear that Americans return to places like Cianciana for the same reason that their relatives once left them: to find something essential. In the early 1900s, my grandparents came to find a life and escape dire economic conditions. It must have been a journey that was both exciting and terrifying that journey must have been for the families of my grandparents which never ventured beyond the nearest village: first to Palermo and then to New York and ultimately to Ohio.
The voyage back for so many to places like Cianciana is motivated by a similar pull to a distant place for something essential. We sense that part of who we are can only be found where we began. Where our ancestors sought a future in America, we seek a past in the old world.
Over 700 years, the world has changed around it but Cianciana remains the same in its pace and its people. On Sunday, we went to the main church and watched women bring their breads from long cuddura to twisted mafalda to loaves of pane siciliano to baskets of little Rosette rolls. The church smelled heavenly as the local priest blessed the bread laid before the statue of St. Anthony and the women returned home with blessed breads to feed their families.
There is a profound sense of belonging in this place – a feeling that is lost in the transience of modern life. This is their place. We built it, as Maddelena said. “We” is not used in the immediate but the generational sense. It is passed along to children as more than their legacy. It is their identity. This is why, when you come back, they remind you that this is your home; this is where you are from. We are all proud to be Americans, but part of that identity resonates in different lands.
On my last night in Cianciana, I sat with my wife Leslie next to the little fountain in front of the 17th Century Holy Trinity Mother Church where my grandparents were baptized. They found something wonderful in America but they also left something wonderful behind. It was left but not lost.
None of this, of course, offers any answers for the immigration debate. However, for those new seeking to remain in this country, they will discover that they left more behind than misery or poverty. Their descendants may find, as I did, an inexorable pull to these places in search not of a future but a past.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University.
I come from a family of immigrants. They followed the rules, learned the language and were proud to be Americans. They left their native land for a reason and did not want to see it replicated here. Sure they enjoyed the lovely traditions of the old country but it stopped there. America was a new place and they wanted to be a part of it. They asked no quarter and were given none. Today immigration reform is not about becoming a a part but rather standing apart and insisting that the country change to accommodate you.
I say come, follow the rules and then we are all in this together. Identity politics will destroy this country.
As for Obama, his intentions are rarely what they seem based on his rhetoric. I see no reason to think differently today.
@swarthmoremom. . . ‘the right thing’ would have been waiting to negotiate it with the new congress in 2015 but he couldn’t wait. He intentionally put US lawmakers in a quagmire with lawlessness and immigrants are the real victims and Obama’s tool to whip lash our Constitution, yet again.
The dirty secret is that dependent black voters resent the hell out of Hispanics as they work hard and climb out of the inner city into middle class. Brown Privilege?
The MCSO has been fighting with the Feds over this issue since Obama got in office.
Inga, What you said is true. My experiences in Texas have made me realize that this was something that needed to be done. I only hope that Boehner and his house republicans are willing to do the right thing and pass legislation. I did see that a member off Boehner’s caucus said that Obama should be jailed for this.
Inga – “Jim these immigrants will be paying into the Social Security system, think about that.”
Do you really believe that lawnmowers and nanny’s will be putting in more than they are going to take? Really?
The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department will be suing the President over this.
Mexicans work ethic is above reproach. They have entrepreneurial skills, strong families, and strong religious beliefs. That is why they will never be enslaved Dem voters. They still need to come here legally, not illegally. I stand w/ the vast majority of all US citizens on this, many being Hispanic.
Jim these immigrants will be paying into the Social Security system, think about that.
Of course they’d still want to be here Jettexas. Many or most of them get no assistance and work damn hard. Because they aren’t European immigrants are you suggesting the work ethnic is less? That isn’t what I’ve observed. These are nuclear families and hard working.
Inga, I had to laugh the other day on another post you mentioned your worry about $500/hour of tax payer money being wasted. But now millions get amnesty and you throw out fiscal responsibility.
Not really on the backs of working Americans…… most of the immigrants are working but working in the shadows as lawnmowers, housekeepers and nannies and, of course, not paying taxes. Obama did the right thing, and he probably should have done it before the election.
“This is a nation of laws, not men.” That is the only needed rebuttal to Obama’s pandering.
That clicking sound we heard last night was the irreversible cog moving another notch. Another successful move by our Emperor and there is nothing we can do to stop it.
Immigration then vs Immigration now might also be an interesting story. My grandfather came here in early 1900’s from England and brought my grandmother with him, as she was his nanny and she was from Oslo. But they came here to better themselves and worked. Never took handouts. If we did not give Welfare to new immigrant citizens, would they still want to be here? Again, more of Obama setting up the voting block base for the Democrats in 2016, and on the backs of working Americans!
My family came to the US after spending 10 years in a displaced persons camp in Austria from the years 1945 to 1955. We were ethnic Germans called Donauschwaben who originally hailed from Hesse, Germany. In 1720 they left in boats up the Danube to the wild eastern lands that had just been won back from the Turks. The Austro Hungarian Empress Maria Teresa wanted her subjects to pioneer and settle the lands that would become Hungary, Yugoslavia and Romania. My ancestors lived there peacefully coexisting with Serbs, Croations, Hungarians and even some Italians in the region until the end of WW 2, when they were ethnically cleansed out of Hungary, Romania and Croatia, Yugoslavia where my family resided in villages and towns. My grandmother had a bother who emigrated to the US, Wisconsin at the turn of the century. He sponsored may of my relatives after the war. Because the lands and farms of the ethnic Germans were divided as spoils of war to those who the Communists deemed worthy, my family could not retun to their homeland, Croatia.
My parents waited for ten years to get the go ahead to emigrate to the US and in August of 1955 we three young children and our parents boarded the USS General Langfitt a Navy Troop Carrier refitted as a refugee ship, in Bremerhaven Germany to the USA. While we came legally after waiting many years, I don’t begrudge the millions of people who were so desperate for a better life that they broke a law, their own chance at the American Dream, of a better existence.
Great piece. It is largely second generation Americans who seek out their routes. All four of my grandparents were immigrants, legal immigrants. The legal Hispanic immigrants resent those coming here illegally. Many also see this move as pure political pandering. Dems look upon Hispanics as a solid voting block like enslaved black voters. They are SO wrong. Two VERY different cultures.
I remember a story my mother used to tell me about how she landed on Ellis Island and was separated from her mother for three days, because she had a small cold sore on her face. In three days it was gone, probably something she picked up on the ship. Her poor mother sat on a bench in the main building on Ellis island and cried for her daughter. No one could understand my grandmother and didn’t help her.
Meanwhile, my mother recounted how people were sorted out, those with serious illnesses were sent back to their motherland, others were designated WOP’s (without papers) and returned to their country of origin. Allow millions came, it was not easy to be admitted into this country. People had to meet certain criteria according to the law.
My grandfather came three years before my grandmother and their two children. He had to apply for their visa, his background was checked, and he had to save for the passage.
Had my mothers cold sore not healed, she would probably had been sent back, and I know that my grandmother would have returned to Europe with her.
The problem isn’t Immigration, it’s the act the President committed. Obama’s act have tipped the hat of America’s Constitutional laws again. He had the chance to do this when democrats had the power in two branches of government and he did nothing. Now that America has declared a reckoning last election, he decides to spank us for the notice!
Speaking of Sicily and immigration, I recently saw on TV a segment on Sardinians who want to secede from Italy and join Switzerland. Wondered if you have an opinion on the legality of populations independently voting to secede and form their own country or join a different existing country – as in Scotland/Britain, Catalonia/Spain, Crimea/Ukraine, etc. Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2014 14:01:33 +0000 To: s1hoell@msn.com