I'm an Immigrant in America Thanks to Executive Action—Just Like Many of Your Ancestors Were

TNR ^ | 11/28/2014 | By Julia Ioffe

[SeekAndFind]

This year will be the fourth year that my family will celebrate Thanksgiving without my grandfather, Yankel. It’s safe to say that Thanksgiving was his favorite holiday: Sitting at a table groaning under the otherworldly quantity of food, surrounded by his children and successful, Americanized grandchildren, he would raise toast after toast to this great country, his eyes moist with gratitude that America opened its rich embrace to him and his progeny.

This year, after Obama’s executive immigration order, more than four million people might have the same impulse as my late grandfather. Even if the embrace proves temporary, it wouldn’t be a bad toast: Thanksgiving, after all, is the holiday of the immigrant, down to the very first Europeans who waded ashore centuries ago.

This year, in part because of my grandfather’s acutely felt absence and in part because the immigration debate rages on, I consider how my family got to these shores ourselves.

Back in the 1970s, when the Soviet Union was just starting to let out its persecuted Jewish minority and the United States was starting to accept them, my father’s cousin’s cousin arrived in Maryland. Then, in 1988, when the Soviet Union coughed up its next batch of Jews, that cousin brought over her cousin, just as my parents were applying for refugee status back in Moscow. The cousin happened to be my father’s cousin, and once she got to Maryland, she became my family’s guarantor as well as the guarantor of some other relatives. We arrived, pale and dazzled, on April 28, 1990, and also settled in Maryland.

[rmlew]

We are a nation that allowed in immigrants, not a nation of immigrants. There is a large difference between refugees from tyranny, and those who invaded America for economic reasons and who want to get WELFARE.
And Jews have every reason to oppose continued high levels of legal immigration, let alone criminal invasion. Leftist twits and traitors would have America turn in to Eurabia, where Jews are attacked by Muslims with the complicity of leftist regimes.

[Regulator]

No, that was my fathers line.

They were about the same time as you said - Out of Rotterdam, then London, then Staten Island in 1699: John Vannoy.

In my mothers case it was earlier, and they were English from York; but they too started out on Staten Island in 1681.

Must have been land availability or lack of it in New York.

[Kenny Bunk]

Mazeltov!

I am thankful Julia, that Oncle Yankel was properly invited here from the USSR. I am also thankful he was not accompanied by 3500 other Yankels who made it over the Southern Border the night before. Thankful too am I, that there are not "11 million" other uninvited Yankels wandering about the US.

Ms. Ioffe, you and Onkle Yankel are now free to resume kissing and caressing Obama's gluteal regions while he recreates in this country the very conditions The Good Yankel was attempting to escape. Thanks too for writing in English.

[gogeo]

May I?

Saying that immigration should not be checked is like surrendering sovereignty.

[gogeo]

maybe some other people deserve a shot at an American Thanksgiving rather than an ill-informed lecture on the ‘law’.”

Actually, because the law is so simple, I think we're all well informed.

And...lectures from last-minute Americans such as this wench make me less, not more open to immigration.

[Tennessee Nana]

My first English ancestors arrived in Winthrop’s Fleet to MASS in 1630

Not immigrants it was just like going from TN to GA...

Free friendly skies and roads now..free seas then..

:)

actually there was still lots of land in Manhattan and still farmed at that time..

The Bowery used to be Dutch farms..Dutch for farm

[zzwhale]

go home.....

[bluejean]

“And...lectures from last-minute Americans such as this wench make me less, not more open to immigration.”

Agreed. I think a moratorium on immigration for the next 2 years at a minimum goes without saying. And a frapping wall on the Mexican border with cameras, lasers, dogs, drones, etc.

[Does so]

We need as many Yankels as we can get, but they can be Lopez or Wu also. As long as they want to embrace America and her dream.

I just shopped in our local K-Mart for the first time in years. All the announcements were being made in Spanish. (This was in the Florida Keys).

[Mike Darancette]

I just shopped in our local K-Mart for the first time in years. All the announcements were being made in Spanish. (This was in the Florida Keys).

Speaking the common language is embracing the dream.

[Patton@Bastogne]

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