Disclaimer: This blog entry has nothing to do with the president elect, Donald Trump. I wrote this for a former student who asked me to write about my personal immigration experience for a US history assignment she got in college. The timing is merely a coincidence, I assure you!
I've always been fascinated by the stories of my ancestors and was excited when my former student and close friend asked me to lend my voice to this topic. I am happy to share my personal experience as a first generation American on my dad's side and 3rd generation on my mom's side. My father was born in Mexico in 1939 and moved to the USA when he was 9 years old. He and his family officially petitioned for citizenship in 1952, but his immigration story began with his parents 20+ years earlier.
When my grandparents sailed to the US from Poland, they were denied admittance into the port and were told that they didn't have to go home but they would not be allowed into the United States. On their passports, their ethnicity was listed as "Hebrew" because they were of Jewish decent. I'm positive that their religious heritage and undesirable Eastern European ethnicity was the reason why they were put back onto a ship to anywhere but the US. During the 1920's the US government passed a series of immigration policies which legalized racial and ethnic quotas and selectively closed borders to many. Mexico, Canada, and Barbados were my grandparents' viable options and they went to Mexico where they became legal citizens. The Ribakowsky family spent 20 years moving from town to town and my Poppy sold pots and pans door to door until they finally settled just north of the Texas/Mexico border.
My father was not born an American citizen but he couldn't be more of a patriot. He got a green card and eventually became a naturalized citizen when he was in high school. His agreement to join the US army came with a promise of citizenship. He and his parents became legally American in San Antonio, Texas where I was born and raised.
My mom is a second generation American and her family moved here from Russia (present day Ukraine) via Germany in the 1880s-1890s. To say the least, they had it rough back in mother Russia! They were escaping the pogroms and anti-Jewish nativism. In fact, my great grandmother was said to have been hid in a barn in Kiev for several years like Anne Frank, but at the end of it, she escaped to the land of opportunity where she had religious freedom and a job in a hat store. The US did not have laws against the Jews or ethic quotas at this point. This was before the Red Scare and before pseudo-scientific notions of racial superiority against Eastern Europeans. The US had not experienced the Great Depression, or World War I and the horrors experienced through the entanglement in Europe. My mom's family's immigration story is fairly simple... imagine... Fiddler on the Roof but with a happy ending in Columbus, Georgia.
Thirty years makes a big difference when it comes to immigration reforms. All of my family that stayed in Europe was murdered in the Holocaust. All properties and records of their existence were erased from the planet. Regardless of the difficulties that my dad's side of the family experienced, they got out just in time. My father's first language was Spanish, but he spoke Yiddish and learned English within a few months of moving to Texas. It's so strange to me that "Hebrew" was listed as his nationality when he arrived. Today that is considered racist and ignorant. But in the 1950's it was acceptable and it was a good reason to Americanize. When my father became a citizen, the judge suggested that they cut off the end of their surname. He didn't have to say why... it was obvious why. My maiden name would have been Ribakowsky; becoming a Ribak was not a big deal considering they had just lost everything in WWII and all they wanted was to be American!
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