Ira Stoll on Immigration and Thanksgiving

In his latest column, Ira Stoll
writes:

An elderly relative of mine recently let me in on what she
described as a family secret: her housepainter father, she said,
could never get a steady indoor job here in America because he
didn’t have proper working papers.

I knew about my grandfather on one side of the family who had
arrived at Ellis Island in the 1920s and served in the navy in
World War II. But the possibility that one of my
great-grandparents on the other side was an illegal immigrant
brought a smile to the face of this columnist, an Eagle Scout
Harvard graduate and the author of biographies of Samuel Adams and
John F. Kennedy.

For if those ancestors of mine hadn’t made it here, legally or
illegally, the odds are they’d have been killed either by the Nazis
or the Soviet Communists, and I wouldn’t even exist, let alone be
writing books on American history or opining on American
immigration policy. My reaction to the disclosure wasn’t shame or
embarrassment, but relief: thank God they got in before it was too
late.

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