IMMIGRATION NEWSMAN — THE NEWS SOURCE FOR ALL IMMIGRANTS IN THE UNITED STATES
IMMIGRATION FEATURES
» Opinion
» The Naked Reporter's Immigration Blogs
» About Us
Photos courtesy of the Ellis Island Museum
Though many of the immigrants came with few belongings, no money, and only the clothes on their backs, they worked hard, put down roots, became citizens, and raised families who would never experience the hardships their parents had left behind.
Ellis Island: An immigration experience of a lifetime
When the great steamships of the early 20th century sailed into New York Harbor, the faces of a thousand nations were on board. A broad, beaming, multicolored parade, these were the immigrants of the world: there were Russian Jews with fashioned beards, Irish farmers whose hands were weathered like the land they had left, Greeks in kilts and slippers, Italians with sharp moustaches, Cossacks with fierce swords, English in short knickers, and Arabs in long robes. The old world lay behind them.
Ahead was a new life, huge and promising. Gone were the monarchies and kings, the systems of caste and peasantry, of famine and numbing poverty. But also left behind were friends and family, as well as tradition and customs generations old.
As anchors slid into harbor silt, and whistles blew in rival chorus, this multitude clambered up from the steerage decks to fashion in their minds forever their first glimpse of America. The city skyline loomed over them like a great, blocky mountain range.
Below, the harbor teemed with activity as tugboats churned river water and dockhands wrestled cargo at America 's most populous port. Across the Hudson stood the mythic vision of America: salt-green and copper-clad, the Statue of Liberty offered a mute but powerful welcome. In the shadow of all the activity, on the New Jersey side of the river, were the red brick buildings of Ellis Island. The four towers of its largest building rose over 140 feet into the air, punctuating its already intimidating facade with ram-rod sternness. This was an official building, a place of rules and questions, of government and bureaucracy, where five thousand people a day were processed.
Men usually emigrated first, to find jobs and housing. Later they would send for their wives, children, and parents as part of the largest mass movement of people in world history. In all, close to 60 million people sought to find new opportunities during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Some merely crossed borders in Europe but many headed for countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Argentina, and Canada .
The majority, however, headed to the United States where they heard promise of jobs, freedom, and a fortune to be made. In the hundred years previous to 1924, when the country's open-door abruptly shut, 34 million immigrants landed on America 's soil. The earliest influx of new arrivals started in the mid 1840s when Europe felt the throes of a bitter famine.
This First Wave of immigrants — primarily Northern Europeans from Ireland, England, German , and Scandinavia — fled starvation, feudal governments, and the social upheaval brought about by the Industrial Revolution.
A Second Wave of immigrants streamed out of Southern and Eastern Europe from 1890-1924, accounting for the flood tide of new arrivals during America's peak immigration years.
Along with fleeing the burden of high taxes, poverty, and overpopulation, these “new” immigrants were also victims of oppression and religious persecution. Jews living in Romania, Russia, and Poland were being driven from their homes by a series of pogroms, riots, and discriminatory laws enforced by the Czarist government. Similarly the Croats and the Serbs in Hungary, the Poles in Germany, and the Irish persecuted under English rule all saw America as a land of freedom, as well as opportunity.
<
THE MAIN building at Ellis Island served as the primary immigration processing station in the U.S. from 1855 to 1890. More than eight million immigrants, about 5,000 per day, passed through this building.
Nun Takes Advantage of Language, Legal Skills To Help Hispanic Immigrants
In the rural, mountainous barrio of Lo Barnechea outside of Santiago, Chile, Sister Rose McSorley learned enough Spanish to teach poverty-stricken children to read and count.
The experience also made her aware that giving someone a little knowledge can help them decipher a lot about their world.
Nearly 30 years later, the Catholic nun, working from her non-profit office, is still using that awareness and her Spanish-language skills to help the poor with family and immigration problems.
"For my very first case I was able to use my Spanish ... It's much better now," McSorley said with a smile. "There are not enough Spanish-speaking attorneys, and it becomes difficult for both the client and the attorney."
She is one of two equal partners, with Sister Margaret Welch, at the Cornelian Community Counselors, believed to be the first law firm owned and operated by Roman Catholic nuns in New Jersey. The non-profit group, primarily funded by the church and private grants and assisted by volunteers, charges its clients on a sliding scale.
McSorley, the daughter of a Philadelphia lawyer and one of 14 children — six of whom became clergy members: three nuns and three priests — remembered her father's dedication to the profession.
Now the silver-haired McSorley has spent the past four years doing what she says she has done since becoming a nun at the age of 18: helping poor, working-class, and underrepresented people navigate a complex society.
"The legal system is cold and adversarial, and many times it creates a hostile environment for people, and they become scared," she said.
It was a series of unpleasant encounters with the judicial system that led McSorley to enroll at Seton Hall University Law School in 1987.
In one incident, McSorley was a supervising counselor at a religious camp where one of her students was injured while swimming during a weekend retreat. The nun and the diocese were sued, and the case dragged on for eight years before it was settled.
Soon afterward, McSorley was residing at a parish house when a parishioner called, complaining of an abusive husband. Instead of directing her to a social agency that deals with domestic abuse, McSorley invited the woman to live at the parish house, and controversy ensued. In retrospect, McSorley says, that was the wrong advice, because she did not allow the woman to help herself.
"After those experiences, I figured I could beat 'em or join 'em, and I certainly didn't know enough about the law to give people good answers," she said.
She graduated from law school in 1991 and a year later became a member of the New Jersey Bar Association. Now, McSorley spends her days and nights immersed in paperwork and client interviews at her simply decorated office in the Our Lady of Good Counsel parish house on Sunset Road. The rewards come when she goes to court and successfully pleads a client's civil case.
She does so with a veteran's confidence and expertise: Since the law firm opened in 1995, it has handled more than 400 cases involving everything from family disputes to immigration tangles.
"There is a need for lawyers to serve those who have little or no money, and that is obvious, considering there are other law firms like ours," she said.
In recent years, there have been many religious non-profit law firms formed in the United States. Among them are six Catholic-funded law offices and six to 10 others funded by other religious denominations. They include the Boston-based Matthew 23, run by an evangelical Protestant group, and a Los Angeles-based Jewish center that assists the low-income elderly.
Sue Ann Shay, a Catholic nun and lawyer at The Communities Law Center in Hartford, Conn., said more and more religious people are becoming civil lawyers and using it as a tool for equality and justice on behalf of the poor. It is estimated there are more than 300 religious leaders in practice or in law school.
Shay, a sister of Notre Dame de Namur, said the idea for The Communities Law Center came from a similar law firm founded in 1985 in Camden by Jesuit priest David Brooks, now an immigration lawyer at the Spanish Catholic Center in Washington. Community law fims serve people who earn too little to afford a private attorney but too much to qualify for legal aid programs.
Religious leaders or priests who are civil lawyers meet annually during the Labor Day weekend at the Intercommunity Legal Conference — a nationwide support network for attorneys and law students. Both McSorley and Shay attend the conference.
Dawn Galvao, one of McSorley's clients, said she was being "raked over the coals" by her former attorneys handling her divorce.
"It was all about the money with the other lawyers," said a soft-spoken Galvao. "She [McSorley] did it out of charity; and besides, she made me feel better about myself."
Galvao said her situation has turned around since visiting McSorley. "More people should volunteer to help her ... I am," she said.
Gratified that her work is educational, too, McSorley says: "We enable clients to help themselves, and among our clients there are many who have gained confidence because they've seen a different side of the system.
Border Crossing:
What takes place if you leave the U.S. without green card? A reporter tries to find out.
By Abdel Sala
The Rio Grande, or Rio Bravo to those from the opposite bank, winds its way down from the Rockies, cutting a path that twists and bends for hundreds of miles through deserts, hills, and valleys. The river has been likened to a wound, a scar that separates a people who have for generations accepted the river's dubious distinction as a national boundary with more than a shade of skepticism. Dammed up at several points along its meandering route to the sea, the river is no more than a small stream by the time it reaches Brownsville, Texas, the southernmost city along its trajectory.
Through Laredo, the Rio Grande is still recognizable as a river, although national and international attention has shifted to its role as a border, a frontier through which the promised land of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) can be more profitably realized. The results of NAFTA have become increasingly tangible, with the armada of eighteen-wheeler trucks lining up daily to cross the border bridges, as many as 3,000 a day in Laredo alone. The rumbling diesel-fueled monsters eat their way through border-town streets as they gear up to storm the South Texas highways on their way to industrial and commercial centers throughout the country. But while high-profile, fast-track, NAFTA-generated business booms, there is another side to the border question ... a human side.
Every day, the undeniable ebb and flow of human traffic moves briskly back and forth across south Texas bridges in Nuevo Laredo/Laredo, Reynosa / McAllen , Matamoros/Brownsville. It was at these gateways that I decided to test a theory. With an increase in human traffic along the border, I wondered what the impact would be on locals, campesinos, and tourists with the increased focus on illegal immigration, and how the U.S. Border Patrol would behave. Unfortunately, the performance exceeded my expectations.
"U.S. citizen," I said, in response to the predictable question you get at any gate that separates the U.S. and Mexico . Dressed in silver-tipped cowboy boots, black western shirt, black jeans, and a white hat similar to those worn by leading Tejano musicians and patterned on a style long popular in northern Mexico, I carried a cloth briefcase and a plastic shopping bag containing a change of clothes.
The federal agent, a slight Hispanic with hair in an early Beatles bang cut, offered me a steely-eyed stare and followed the expected question with, "Where are you coming from?"
"Mocambo's," I replied, naming a well-known seafood restaurant one block across the border in Matamoros . With no hint of recognition, he sized me up warily.
"Where's your ID?" he asked. "In my bag – it's a press pass," I answered. "Step over there," he ordered curtly, pointing to a table in a small room immediately beyond the turnstile, which would, with a click, record my passage. Following me into the cubicle, he proceeded to empty my bags and spread their contents across the table, poring over them with care.
Examining a press credential complete with my photo and signature issued by the local daily for free-lance assignments, he fired away his next round of questions, giving me barely enough time to respond, rephrasing and repeating some of the same questions to see if I could be confused into changing my answers.
"Where's your birth certificate? What do you do? Where do you work? Where do you live? What were you doing in Mexico ? Where are you going? Where were you born? How did you get to the interior of Mexico without the proper documents?
Welcome to the United States of America. So much for a hassle-free lunch break, I thought, retracing my steps over the bridge that spans what has become little more than a creekbed, a border that has given the little man behind the table the authority to make me feel like a three-year-old, babbling uncomfortably while being informed that I was responsible for proving my right to be within U.S. territorial boundaries. Based on his less-than-courteous, if thorough, search through letters addressed to me at a Brownsville address, copies of articles bearing my by-line, and other pretty solid evidence that I was who and what I claimed to be, I was not carrying sufficient proof of citizenship.
Of the laminated press badge, he scoffed, "Anybody can get one of these. And can you tell me the name of the head honcho over at the Herald, the guy in charge? … because I know who he is. And so far you haven't given me any reason to let you in."
Still unconvinced and perhaps to add to the insult, he handed me a yellow slip of paper and ordered me into an office where more-thorough ID checks are run by computer and travel permits are issued to those seeking to visit places in the U.S. more than 25 miles from the border. Behind the counter a Mexican American woman with bleached hair and a federal agent's badge gave me more of the same textbook explanations.
"Oh, you're a reporter? Maybe you can write something about us for the paper," she said brightly after looking at my ID.
"I don't think so. Not at this point," I answered.
Although the border divides families, friends, and co-workers at the political level, it has never really kept them apart. As a recent border resident, I wondered how the issues of national sovereignty and citizenship status were being resolved amidst the growing notion that our borders have become uncontrollable.
Walking often across the bridge from Mexico into the United States, I was learning firsthand. I was eager to uncover what goes through the mind of a Border Patrol agent when faced with verifying the legality of a person's visit to this country.
Why was I singled out while elderly Winter Texans in Bermuda shorts and Hawaiian-print shirts waltzed merrily through the turnstile, entering with a smile and a "Gee, it's great to be back" sigh of relief? What were the criteria used by the Border Patrol to establish an individual's citizenship, residency, or guest status?
Thousands cross the border from Brownsville to Matamoros daily. The same is true of Laredo and Nuevo Laredo . What are those charged with policing our frontiers trained to look for and how do they implement their standards? What exactly is it that they check for when trying to spot an illegal immigrant? Falsified documents? An accent? These were all considerations as I crossed the border into the United States, changing my appearance in several significant ways and entering at various intervals.
Somewhat familiar with cities from Juarez/El Paso to Matamoros/Brownsville, I'd been straddling the Texas-Mexico border both figuratively and literally from the time I was three and was taken by my father to witness the wrestling theatrics of masked luchadores. My father still tells the story of how I jumped into his lap behind the steering wheel of his car during one early border crossing to declare that I was an "American city." Twenty-seven years later, the questions of identity and nationality cropped up again as I attempted the border crossing wearing several dress-code variations.
For the first series of border entries, elaborated in Brownsville, I wore extremely baggy pants in the homeboy or modern cholo tradition. With a pair of thick-soled sneakers and a coat modeled on the jail-house blues uniform, I chose not to add the knit cap or even a bright bandanna for fear of overdoing the costume.
On return from a reception in Matamoros with a Mexican friend and an Anglo kid who had moved to Brownsville from Austin several months before, I reached the turnstile inside the customs check building first. There I was asked by a severe looking Mexican American whether I was a citizen and what I was bringing back.
"Nada," I said, raising my empty hands. Hardly hesitating, the officer proceeded to frisk me, checking my pockets physically and finding a pair of sunglasses along with a nearly empty pack of Mexican filterless cigarettes. Opening up the package of smokes, he lifted it to his nose, apparently checking for drugs. Talk about personal discomfort. Both of my companions came through immediately afterward with no trouble whatsoever. A response to my appearance? More than likely.
Several nights later, I again found myself in Matamoros, accompanying two friends, a male and a female, both employed at a large photocopy chain. I happened to be the only one in our group of three not wearing Birkenstock sandals. At the border check, another officer, also Hispanic, asked us if we were together. I was wearing a denim jacket, jeans, and lace-up hiking boots. Telling him we were indeed together, we were shuttled through. Our female companion, a strawberry blonde with blue eyes, held her driver's license out in the event that she might be asked for an ID. As we walked past, a tall uniformed officer, who just happened to be female and noticeably non-Hispanic, said snidely, "That doesn't prove anything, it just shows you can pass a driving test in Texas." Yet nothing came of her comment. We were not questioned at all.
The confrontation I was most unprepared for, described at the beginning of this article, occurred during my attempt to look like a norteño, with pointed yellow cowboy boots and a beat-up Resistol hat complimenting faded black jeans and a poly-cotton blend western shirt. Interestingly enough, the same clothing didn't register as vehemently in Reynosa, a border crossing near McAllen, or with the officer who greeted me, a light-skinned Chicano much closer to my age. "U.S. citizen?" he asked. "Yes, sir," I said, a little tired after the two-hour bus trip there on the Mexican side of the border. In my arms I carried a change of clothing on a coat hangar covered in plastic. It seemed that because the bridge at Reynosa is eight miles from McAllen , officials might not be so concerned about those crossing on foot. At any rate, the building was unmistakably newer, the waiting room for permits more comfortably furnished, and the whole process definitely less intimidating than the parallel structure at the Matamoros/Brownsville border.
In the Reynosa bus station bathroom, I gave myself a meticulous shave before boarding. During the bus ride back to Matamoros, I donned the spare set of clothes, aiming for the licenciado, or young professional effect. Sporting a white double-breasted blazer, a tie, and slip-on loafers, I approached the familiar customs check just over the bridge, where I went unrecognized. In addition to the cowboy clothing, which I'd transferred to several small plastic shopping bags, I carried two carton-sized packages of Delicados, a brand of Mexican cigarettes, one extra than the one carton allowed by immigration officials.
Clean-shaven and neatly attired, I was met with a friendly smile. Once I declared my citizenship, the officer simply asked about the contents of my shopping bags. When I mentioned the cigarettes, he waved me through and said simply, "Next time just bring one carton of cigarettes, okay?"
I found it almost ironic that he hadn't even bothered to ask for any sort of identification in light of my previous experiences. That I was allowed to bring more than one bulk pack of cigarettes was further proof of the arbitrary and superficial criteria being implemented at the personal whim of whichever agent happened to be manning the border check at the time.
The variables along the border and at the gates are numerous and often change, but in my experience, it's apparent that looks are important and that U.S. Latinos are targeted for scrutiny. I might also suggest that if you don't have obviously Anglo or European features, you might consider getting yourself a green card before making that quaint border-town excursion you've always planned. Otherwise, they might not let you back in.
READ MORE IMMIGRATION FEATURES:
The News Source for Immigrants in America
“Everything about U.S. immigration”