Posted on 11/28/2014 8:01:17 AM PST by 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at newrepublic.com ...
Funny, my ancestors came here not because of some dude with a pen in the White House.
The two do not equate, but they won’t admit that.
She escaped the Soviet Union to write for New Republic and cheerlead for Obama?
>>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,
And this is the difference between the old immigration and the new immigration. Yankel wanted his grandchildren to be AMERICANS. Jose wants his children to be Latino-Americans, Mexican-Americans, or just plain Hispanics. He wants them speaking Spanish for a thousand years and he wants us speaking Spanish as well. Yankel did not want to bring Russia to America. He left Russia and became American.
Fine. Then shut down ICE and INS (or whatever they changed the name to) and the Border Patrol and every other bloated bureaucracy taxpayers are paying for that are SUPPOSED to address immigration issues.
Bad habits are hard to break.
Nobody’s an American if the Constitution is set aside.
Dishonest piece.
They were legitimate refugees.
The tens of millions who have invaded our country in recent decades are not.
We used to pride ourselves on being a Constitutional Republic and a nation of laws, not a dictatorship headed for third world status where a personality cult for a tyrannical, bobble-headed, paste eating, dope fiend have replaced the US Constitution.
MY ancestors either became citizens via the system Oath of Citizenship and all that OR they stepped off the ships to an almost empty continent. (mostly the latter)
Much different than taking over a nation full of people by the whim of a commie, Muslim, radical, man-of-lawlessness and his friends.
Yea, I know the natives picked flowers, chased bunnies and never wielded knives./sarc
My ancestors were immigrants too.
The difference is that we came legally and we have generations (from two generations to twelve generation, depending on which branch on the family) of history upholding the law and preserving, protecting, and defending the Constitution. I even have the original Ellis Island papers for several of my ancestors, all of whom entered legally.
My family is, like most American families, the exact opposite of illegal immigrants and of the criminal in our White House.
When my wife's people got here, no one knows, but they were here long before that.
That just isn't the same thing.
Julia Ioffe is comparing apples and oranges. She and her ancestors followed certain guidelines. She said: “...my father wrote to our local congressman.....and my father’s cousin had been a guarantor for (other Jewish relatives who were oppressed in the Soviet Union).” OK.....
They followed some facsimile of a Process and Protocol. They did not enter our borders by taking a submarine up to the port of New York and sneaking in. They were NOT lawbreakers the moment they sat foot on American soil.
Exactly.
Having some effeminate creep wave a pen and declare crap to be gold doesn’t make it so, and does not equate to migrants from history.
Oh Good.
Just what we need, another lecture from the very same ethnic cohort who gave us Immanuel Cellar and the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act which touched off chain immigration.
Complete with the usual “you’re just a bunch of immigrants too”....as if the 330 years since my mother’s ancestors set up camp on Staten Island was just a blink in time.
Oh, and she argues for an ominpotent Executive, just like Good Tsar!
Gosh Yulia...didn’t you guys have a problem with Tsar, overthrew him for the promise of a Socialist Paradise under the rule of the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union?
Guess that didn’t work out so good. Oh well, just another stupid scheme. What’s a 100 million people or so dead because of that? You can always split for the U.S. where you can show up and lecture us about what our country is all about....even though you were never here, and you and your families did everything you could to burn down the U.S. back when you were good little Bolshevikii.
And that’s an argument for simply standing aside and letting tens of millions of Mexicans to simply invade and occupy?
Think it’s the opposite.
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.
None of the prior immigrant populations who came here legally (such as my four Yiddische grandparents) ever made it necessary for Americans to press “1” for English.
Do they have to press “1” for Spanish in Mexico nowadays? I didn’t think so.
And by the way, how come nobody ever complains about Spanish speaking Mexicans stealing the land from the poor Native Mexicans?
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