Etaoin
12-08-2005, 09:43 AM
The American Way
What does it mean that your first act on entering a country is breaking its laws?
Thursday, December 8, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
As Congress considers the Bush administration's guest-worker plan, as Republicans try to figure out what their immigration philosophy is, and as political observers parse the implications of yesterday's California House race, here are some small and human questions on immigration to the United States.
I recently found out through one of her daughters that my grandmother spent her first night in America on a park bench in downtown Manhattan. She had made her way from Ireland to Ellis Island, and a cousin was to meet the ship. It was about 1920. The cousin didn't show. So Mary Dorian, age roughly 20, all alone, with no connections and no relatives interested enough to remember her arrival in the new world, spent her first night in America alone on a bench, in the dark, in a strange country. Later she found her way to Brooklyn and became a bathroom attendant at the big Abraham & Straus department store on Fulton Street. (It's now a Macy's. I buy Christmas gifts there.)
Two generations after my grandmother arrived, I was in the Oval Office of the American president saying, "I think you oughta." And amazingly enough he was listening.
In two generations. Two.
What a country.
THE REST (http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110007648)
What does it mean that your first act on entering a country is breaking its laws?
Thursday, December 8, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
As Congress considers the Bush administration's guest-worker plan, as Republicans try to figure out what their immigration philosophy is, and as political observers parse the implications of yesterday's California House race, here are some small and human questions on immigration to the United States.
I recently found out through one of her daughters that my grandmother spent her first night in America on a park bench in downtown Manhattan. She had made her way from Ireland to Ellis Island, and a cousin was to meet the ship. It was about 1920. The cousin didn't show. So Mary Dorian, age roughly 20, all alone, with no connections and no relatives interested enough to remember her arrival in the new world, spent her first night in America alone on a bench, in the dark, in a strange country. Later she found her way to Brooklyn and became a bathroom attendant at the big Abraham & Straus department store on Fulton Street. (It's now a Macy's. I buy Christmas gifts there.)
Two generations after my grandmother arrived, I was in the Oval Office of the American president saying, "I think you oughta." And amazingly enough he was listening.
In two generations. Two.
What a country.
THE REST (http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110007648)