#resistancegenealogy

[superman-2050]

#TrishaGoddardShow #TrishaGoddard #CraigCobb #SharazadAli #NoBlacksAllowedInMyAllWhiteTownSaysCraigCobb #Racism #NewBlackPantherParty #ResistanceGenealogy #KuKluxKlan #BlackSupremacists #WhiteSupremacists #BlackSupremacy #WhiteSupremacy https://www.instagram.com/p/CVsQBIvFDNnqVSBH6HX9McFc1JST0G1UufhvZE0/?utm_medium=tumblr

[superreader30]

#CaptainAmericavsNazis #PunchANazi #PigPunchers #PunchABunchOfNazis #PunchEmInTheFace #TheMostPunchableFace #ResistanceGenealogy #NationOfImmigrants #NazisAreFinePeople https://www.instagram.com/p/B_yPqUzhXujNVee0Q5S2yhNs3eDL1NNJ914AH80/?igshid=lvat6h47odah

[demsabroadgermany]

Believing that the past is prologue, #ResistanceGenealogy searches online archives for nuggets about the ancestors of public figures and politicians who disparage today’s immigrants. https://goo.gl/a96gjS

[ritware1850]

#Repost @my_heart_bleeds_blue ・・・ If you think the ongoing immigration debates don’t apply to you, Jennifer Mendelsohn has some news: They probably do. Mendelsohn, a journalist, author, and passionate genealogist, has been using people’s public family history to beat back some of the uglier claims about immigrants and how they fit into US history. She calls it#resistancegenealogy, and it only takes a few online tools and some instinctive sleuthing for her to call out public figures who oppose common forms of immigration. Take Tomi Lahren, for example. This week, the conservative pundit shared her thoughts on immigration during an interview with Fox News. “You don’t just come into this country with low skills, low education, not understanding the language and come into our country because someone says it makes them feel nice,” she said. “That’s not what this country is based on.” It didn’t take long for Mendelsohn to swoop in with some fascinating facts about Lahren’s own ancestors. “Except the 1930 census says Tomi’s 3x great-grandmother had been here for 41 years and still spoke German,” Mendelsohn tweeted, along with some records. “Her 2nd great-grandmother had been here for 10 yrs. Spoke no English.” Making facts go viral Mendelsohn’s latest work on Tomi Lahren was retweeted more than 26,000 times. That’s not uncommon; she’s been putting out viral genealogy facts about public figures for more than a year now. “I think the first person I worked on was Steve King,” Mendelsohn says of the Iowa congressman who in March 2017 said “you cannot rebuild civilization with somebody else’s babies.” “I kept thinking, ‘This is ridiculous,” she told CNN. “How do these people think they have a leg to stand on, looking down on immigrants when so many American people have an immigration story in their history?” Sure enough, her research pointed her toward King’s own immigrant history: His 4-year-old grandmother and her two young siblings arrived at Ellis Island in 1894. Mendelsohn pulled out similar historical receipts for Dan Scavino, the White House Director of Social Media. Earlier this month Scavino voiced his opposition to chain migration, by which families immigrate

[spankedbyspike]

So many illiterate, not speaking English, and poor white immigrants were able to reunite with their families and build a strong small business base, provide education their grand children couldn’t have hoped for before, let’s make sure others don’t get the same opportunities...

We are talking about direct family members that can only come if the sponsoring member makes enough money to take care of that parent or child for 2 years completely and yes it doesn’t allow cousins, uncles, etc to come in and the process is long and harrowing, nothing easy enough to bring that untold number of immigrants we are so worried about.

Crazy take on how families cannot contribute to improve the economy... No, let’s only take the rich and educated of other countries to create even more of an imbalance... That wall will need to be 60′ high at least...

(Of course it doesn’t apply to Mrs Trump parents who just took advantage of this process and took the American nationality a few weeks ago)

[guildworks]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by deborah risa mrantz (@guildworks)

RESISTANCE GENEALOGY PLASTERERS GUILDWORKScompanies ReIMAGINinG Our Humanity 👌🏼👊🏼⚒ So what does HOME mean for you? Is it a structure? A physical building or space; Mental or emotional or Spiritual construct? Or is it a Culture, or some combination of these, making beautiful mosaic patterns of our lives in the more grand mural of our greater Humanity? 🗺 #migration #anthropology #immigration #immigrants #mexican #latino #latinoamerica #immigrationreform #resistencia #resistancegenealogy #plaster #tradesmen #customcolor #saradeanplastercolor #santafe #newmexico (at Santa Fe, New Mexico)

[nancykells]

  #resistancegenealogy

[bountyofbeads]

https://medium.com/@CleverTitleTK/their-own-two-feet-8ddd1dbb1602

You have to read this article on the immigrant roots of Ken Cuccinelli and yes his public charge grandparents when they arrived in this country with no education or money. Jennifer has done a great job of documenting(See Website For Documents) his family's immigrant history. His hypocrisy is rich. PLEASE READ 📖 AND SHARE. TY 🤔

😂🤣😂🤣

Their Own Two Feet

Jennifer Mendelssohn | Published August 30, 2019 | Medium | Posted August 30, 2019 6:15 PM ET

As the new public face of the Trump administration’s draconian immigration policies, acting USCIS Director Ken Cuccinelli has wasted no time stirring up collective ire. Most notably, he set off a firestorm of criticism by rewriting the iconic Emma Lazarus poem that has long functioned as a kind of unofficial American immigration mantra. “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge,” he proudly told NPR’s Rachel Martin, who somehow resisted the urge to burst out laughing and/or slap him upside the head. (You can read several historians’ takes on the public charge rule here, but suffice it to say that the concept, which was meant to weed out only the very, very least desirable of immigrants, has never been enforced as rigorously as Cuccinelli is suggesting.)

Cuccinelli later elaborated thatLazarus’ poem was “referring back to people coming from Europe where they had class-based societies, where people were considered wretched if they weren’t in the right class.” Wink wink, nudge, nudge, we hear you! And if you had the word “Europe” in Bigotry Bingo, drink!

For the past two years, I’ve run a project called #resistancegenealogy, which looks at the family histories of public figures in order to show just how similar so many of our stories really are. Cuccinelli’s very public numbskullery definitely set a new record: never before I have I received so many texts, tweets, emails and Facebook messages from people so eager to learn about someone’s family tree. (Side note: Never before have I seen so many people who’ve never done genealogy try to do it themselves and get it so very very wrong. You realize more than one person in a town can have the same name, right? And that not all records are online? And that other people’s public family trees are very often…wrong? Here, read this.)

And never before has a family history — or at least the Italian half of that history that I’ll address here — been so utterly unsurprising. I mean, where did you all think the story of the Cuccinelli family of Hoboken, New Jersey was going to go, really? C’mon now.

And so, here I am, just a girl with some documents, standing in front of her country, asking it not to betray its immigrant past. Asking it to remember that welcoming the “wretched refuse of your teeming shore,” even when that “refuse” comes with little more than grit, determination and a desire to do better for their children, is a bedrock American value, a value that allowed many of you reading these words right now to be here. It’s a value that allowed Ken Cuccinelli — descended from Southern Italians of modest means and little education who would likely never pass muster under the proposed changes — to be here. I mean, hellooooo? Were you listening at allduring the 4th grade unit on immigration?

Cuccinelli called a New York Daily Newsarticle about his family history (albeit one that identifies the wrong ship’s manifest as his great-grandfather’s) “intellectually dishonest.” Any comparison to past immigrants, he maintained, was invalid because “the welfare state didn’t exist back then.”

Nativists love to fall back on this argument, but they also still love to contrast the behavior of current immigrants with what they believe to be their own ancestors’ spotless — and “legal!” — immigration and assimilation histories, despite the fact that comparisons to “legal” immigration at a time when there were almost no immigration laws for Europeans to break are inherently problematic. And despite the fact that the historical record is often at odds with their starry-eyed, mythologized understanding of their ancestors’ pasts.

“My great-grandfather knew upon arriving in the United States that he had to learn English and that he had to work hard to succeed in this country,” Cuccinelli told the Daily News.

“My family worked together to ensure that they could provide for their own needs, and they never expected the government to do it for them,” he said at a press briefing.

I’m so very very tired of telling you this very same story over and over again, but since so many of you asked — some less politely than others, btw, can we please work on that moving forward? — let’s go to the videotape and look at the Cuccinelli family story, shall we?

THE CUCCINELLIS

Ken Cuccinelli’s paternal grandfather, Dominick Luigi Cuccinelli, was born in Hoboken, New Jersey to — are you sitting down? — Italian immigrant parents who’d only been in the country for about ten years. Ken’s great-grandfather was Domenico Cuccinelli (né Cucciniello) born on the 6th of December, 1874 in Avellino, Italy. His 1897 marriage certificate  identifies him and his wife, Fortuna Preziosi, as farmers.

In March of 1901, Domenico became part of the massive wave of Italians who lit out for greater opportunity and stability in America, sailing on the SS Patria from Naples. Identified as a “laborer,” he arrived at Ellis Island with $8.75, equivalent to about $260 today. His contact in the U.S.? An unnamed cousin already living on Adams Street in Hoboken.

Ancestry indexed this record under “Camiello.” Which may be why you couldn’t find it.

Domenico’s wife Fortuna would follow her husband to America the following year on the Algeria, arriving at Ellis Island with their two small children and $20.

It’s important to remember that for all our talk of welcoming the huddled masses with open arms, American immigration history also has a pronounced strain of ugly nativism, a rather ironic twist for a nation founded on stolen land. (And we’re talking here only about immigrants by choice.) Which means that Ken Cuccinelli’s immigrant family was subjected to the very same brand of bigoted suspicion that he is now trying to inflict on others. The Ken Cuccinellis of the early twentieth century — though they didn’t typically have last names like Cuccinelli — were just as insistent that people like the Cuccinellis didn’t have the right to become Americans. That they wouldn’t fit in. That they had nothing to offer and would only be a drain on “our” resources.

“[Italians] are coming in waves and think they have a right to come….There has been a surfeit of unskilled illiterates for years and the people do not want any more of them,” opined the Jersey (City) Journal on November 29, 1902, just a few months after Ken’s great-grandmother arrived there.

So what became of the Cuccinellis? Well, the first we see of the family in American records is in the 1905 New Jersey state census. Father Domenico is employed as a laborer, supporting a family of six. And though they’ve been in the U.S. for three and four years at this point, neither parent reported being able to speak English.

But as is so often the case, the Cuccinelli family moved up in the world. By the 1915 census, both Domenico and Fortuna are listed as literate and English speaking, despite his having never had a formal education and her having only completed eighth grade. In 1919, Domenico, still working as a laborer and now living in nearby Jersey City, declared his intention to become an American citizen, a process he completed three years later.

You’ll notice the family’s 1922 address: 401 Monroe Street in Hoboken, where they are also listed in the 1925 city directory. Just a few houses down on Monroe (the entire neighborhood has streets grandly named after American presidents, incidentally) was another family headed by Italian immigrants — a boilermaker and a midwife. They had a son named Frank just a few years younger than Ken’s grandfather Dominick. Perhaps you’ll recognize the last name and wonder what would have been lost had his immigrant parents been barred.

By 1930, Domenico Cuccinelli owned a home on Madison Street. And by 1940, he and his wife were comfortably retired, living in a house worth $5000, the very picture of the American dream.

THE POLICASTROS

Ken’s grandmother Josephine Policastro Cuccinelli was also the Jersey-born daughter of Italian immigrants: Gaetano Policastro and Maria Ronga (also spelled Rongo) from Monte San Giacomo in Salerno.

A teenaged Maria Ronga (her birth certificate indicates she was 17) arrived at Ellis Island in November of 1903 with her widowed 48-year-old mother, Giuseppa Romano, who has no listed occupation, and three younger siblings. Giuseppa’s husband Giuseppe Ronga, a tailor, had died in 1901 at the age of 44, which may have played a role in their decision to move. With all of $5 between the five of them, they were detained at Ellis Island — as indicated by the “S.I.” for “Special Inquiry” stamped by their names in the margin of the manifest. The “Record of Aliens Held For Special Inquiry” list indicates the reason they were held, abbreviated as “L.P.C.;” it stands for “Likely Public Charge.” So yes, the great-grandmother of the man now beating the drums to tighten the public charge rule was…labeled a likely public charge herself.

After a day’s detainment and a hearing — at which Maria’s older brother Vincenzo, who paid for their passage, would have likely been called to testify that he could support his mother and siblings — the family was allowed to enter the United States, as were more than 98% of those who came through Ellis Island.

But make no mistake: there were many who would have happily sent the Rongas packing. Witness this Judgemagazine cartoon from the very year they arrived, which depicts southern European immigrants as filthy rats, bringing crime and anarchy into the country. (Nice Mafia hats, right?) Doesn’t this sound… familiar?

The new arrivals moved in with Maria’s older brother Vincenzo, now going by the name James, in Hoboken. Ken’s great-grandmother Maria found work as a candy maker, as shown in the 1905 census.

Two and a half years after her arrival, though she is somehow still only 17, Maria “Ronca” (age and spelling are slippery concepts, genealogically speaking) married Gaetano “Thomas” Policastro, a recently widowed father of two with an eighth grade education. Gaetano was also born in Monte San Giacomo and appears to have immigrated as a child in the 1880s.

In 1908, Thomas and Maria had the first of their eight children together, Ken’s grandmother Josephine. The 1910 census shows them living with Maria’s family, including her mother Josephine Romano Ronga. Thomas is working as a salesman at a market. Both the 1910 and 1920 census indicated that Ken’s great-great-grandmother Josephine never learned English, even after being in the country for 17 years. And…so what? Immigrants often took their sweet time learning to speak English, if at all. Their children learned to speak English at school so that one day their great-great-grandsons could become the attorney general of Virginia and maybe one day feel the need to cover up the naked statute in the state symbol. Problem solved.

Though the 1930 census shows the Policastros owning a home worth $12,000, as the nation tumbled deeper into the grips of the Great Depression, like so many Americans, they appear to have fallen on hard times. A series of legal notices in the Jersey Journal(available on GenealogyBank) gesture to the outlines of the story: A lawsuit over non-payment on a $8150 bank note. A foreclosure on the Policastro home on Paterson Plank Road. A bankruptcy hearing. A District Court judgment against Thomas for $450, filed by James Ronga. Would the Policastros have met their own great-grandson’s requirement that immigrants always “carry their own weight?” (According to the Annual report of the Attorney General of the United States, about 1300 of New Jersey’s approximately four million residents voluntarily filed for personal bankruptcy in the fiscal year ended 1931.)

But by 1940, now nearing 60, Thomas Policastro had rebounded. The census shows him renting a home in nearby North Bergen. He is listed as the proprietor of a scrap metal business, and earning $1300 a year, right around the national average. Two of his American-born sons served during World War II. The Policastros proved that they deserved the chance they were given — the chance to have ups and downs and everything in between, the chance to pave the way for future generations to soar.

But one last point. Like the Cuccinellis, the Policastros also had neighbors of note, though they may not have been as well-known as the Sinatras. In 1920, the Policastros lived just a mile away from another Jersey City family headed by a Jewish immigrant who never completed high school and worked for decades at an overalls factory in nearby Paterson. This family was from the former Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia, and had arrived in 1896. Much like the Policastros, this family also eventually found themselves in the pages of the local newspaper. In 1940, the patriarch was arrested with his son-in-law and two other men on charges of stealing from that very same overalls factory; the charges were later dropped and the sentence suspended after they made restitution. But all of that Jewish immigrant’s grandsons would go on to college and upstanding careers. Two served in the military. One became a lawyer. One had a master’s degree. And in the fall of 1986, one of that immigrant’s great-granddaughters left Long Island to enroll at the University of Virginia, a venerable institution founded by an American president. Here she is in the First Year Faces Book, resplendent in a Benetton vest and pearls.

And one of her classmates at that venerable institution? Well, she knew him by his nickname: “Cooch.”

So yes, the scions of two Jersey City families headed by those uneducated and sometimes troubled immigrants seemed to have done alright for themselves. It’s a quintessentially American story, one I see day in and day out doing genealogical research: immigrant narratives are messy and imperfect and complicated but almost universally, they ultimately end with those families in a much better place than they would have been otherwise. That same great-grandfather’s sister, for instance, stayed behind in their ancestral town of Sniatyn and is presumed murdered during the Holocaust. So was my maternal grandfather’s brother, despite his writing a desperate letter to President “Rosiwelt” begging for refuge for his family in America.

How many future Ken Cuccinellis are the Trump administration’s increasingly restrictive immigration policies going to keep out? Who or what are those policies protecting, other than unfounded racist fears that follow in the very worst of American traditions?

Just about twenty years after Ken Cuccinelli’s family arrived from Italy and began their ascent up the ladder of the American dream, the ladder that lifted him to the grounds of Mr. Jefferson’s University and to law school at George Mason, to elected office in the state of Virginia and to a nomination to head a federal agency, Congress enacted the infamous Johnson-Reed Act, which set up quotas specifically designed to keep out people just like them. The number of Italians arriving in America dropped from 200,000 a year in the first decade of the twentieth century to under 4,000.

As Cuccinelli’s own career makes clear, the critics were dead wrong about the potential contributions of humble immigrants like his ancestors. And so is he.

CREDITS: I’m grateful to Megan Smolenyak, Michael Cassara, Rich Venezia and Tammy Hepps, who provided research, translation and editorial assistance.

[immigrationnewsdigest]

"It's not that we oppose immigration. It's that these new immigrants aren't the kind who will make America great." Where I have heard this before? Oh that's right. In 1912.#resistancegenealogy pic.twitter.com/CyinHaHe5Y

— Jennifer Mendelsohn 🇺🇸 (@CleverTitleTK) April 10, 2019

[doktordab]

Daniel Bröckerhoff on Twitter

Warum die Versuche, Rechte und Konservative mit Fakten, Empathie und der eigenen Migrationsgeschichte zu Flüchtlingsverteidigern zu machen nicht funktionieren können: Der ideologische Graben sei einfach zu tief, meint @rebeccaonion. #resistancegenealogy from Pocket https://twitter.com/doktordab/status/997812602595086336 via IFTTT

[superman-2050]

#GeorgeLincolnRockwell #ElijahMuhammed #AmericanNaziParty #NationOfIslam #TrishaGoddard #TrishaGoddardShow #CraigCobb #SharazadAli #ResistanceGenealogy #Racism #StrangeBedfellows https://www.instagram.com/p/CVsPdeOlF9zHRti6FTg4Zh52pwS5BnaxUy-zkQ0/?utm_medium=tumblr

[tuesdayblogworld]

The Liberal Delusion of #ResistanceGenealogy

Its popularity showcases the left's inability to recognize how deeply racism is embedded in the Trump administration's approach to immigration, and to …

from Google Alert – immigration https://ift.tt/2k01xGV via IFTTT

from WordPress https://ift.tt/2L4g94q via BloggerTuesdays

[asylum-ireland-blog]

How John Kelly's family history compares with the immigrants he wants to keep from entering

New Post has been published on http://asylumireland.ml/how-john-kellys-family-history-compares-with-the-immigrants-he-wants-to-keep-from-entering/

How John Kelly's family history compares with the immigrants he wants to keep from entering

President Trump, left, and Chief of Staff John F. Kelly listen to the U.S. national anthem in New London, Conn., May 17, 2017. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, who came to that job after a stint establishing President Trump’s immigration policies at the Department of Homeland Security, gave an interview to NPR in which he explained why he thought it was important to block people seeking to immigrate illegally from Mexico.

“Let me step back and tell you that the vast majority of the people that move illegally into United States are not bad people,” he said. “They’re not criminals. They’re not MS-13. Some of them are not.”

This, one might remember, is the inverse of Trump’s presentation at the announcement of his campaign. According to Trump, those immigrants were rapists and criminals — though some were good people.

Kelly continued.

“But they’re also not people that would easily assimilate into the United States into our modern society,” he said. “They’re overwhelmingly rural people in the countries they come from — fourth-, fifth-, sixth-grade educations are kind of the norm. They don’t speak English; obviously that’s a big thing. They don’t speak English. They don’t integrate well; they don’t have skills. They’re not bad people. They’re coming here for a reason. And I sympathize with the reason. But the laws are the laws.”

That laws are laws is indisputable. Immigrating illegally is by definition illegal, and Kelly and Trump have prioritized enforcement of those laws.

The rest of Kelly’s claim, though, is a bit more subjective. And, as it turns out, ironic.

There are three claims regarding the immigrants arriving from Mexico that Kelly argued put them at a disadvantage in coming to the U.S.: lack of education, lack of familiarity with English and coming from rural areas. Those descriptors probably apply to several of Kelly’s own ancestors.

Genealogical researcher Monica Pattangall researched Kelly’s family tree earlier this year.

According to her research, seven of Kelly’s eight great-grandparents were immigrants. Four immigrated from Italy, three from Ireland.

We know the specific places of origin for three of Kelly’s great-grandparents.

His great-grandfather John Edward Kelly was born in Maine, the son of parents who immigrated from Canada. While the name “Kelly” implies Irish immigration, that probably resulted from the famine of the late 1840s. John Edward Kelly’s parents — Chief of Staff Kelly’s great-great-grandparents — were already in Canada when the famine began.

His great-grandmother Mary Connelly came to the United States after the famine from near Clifden, Ireland, in County Galway. (Most of Kelly’s immigrant ancestors came in the late 1800s.) It’s not clear specifically where she came from, but the town is a small one on the coast surrounded by farmland.

His great-grandfather Joseph (Giuseppe) Pedalino came from near the Italian town of Avellino. Researcher Jennifer Mendelsohn, with whom Pattangall shared her research, dug further into Kelly’s family history. (We’ve featured her research in the past.) She found Pedalino’s naturalization papers that indicate that he came from Quadrelle province, a small region in the Italian foothills.

Most people who immigrated to the United States in the 19th century were not doing so because they’d tired of their London mansions. They were seeking better work or an improvement in their lives. Many came from the countryside, as it’s likely Kelly’s great-grandfather and great-grandmother did. The reasons for immigrating to the United States haven’t changed much since.

As for employment, John Edward Kelly worked as a blacksmith at a cooper, making iron bands for barrels. Based in Maine, he worked in the shipping industry as had his father before him, according to Pattangall. (She’s written a book involving the maritime industry in Maine.) Perhaps because of the decline in the shipping industry, John’s son John Leo Kelly moved to Massachusetts and went to work for the railroad, holding a position as a brakeman. His father-in-law Coleman Curran (another of Chief of Staff Kelly’s great-grandfathers) also worked for the railroad. (It’s in Boston where the two sides of Chief of Staff Kelly’s family met. Kelly’s father worked as a mail carrier in the Brighton neighborhood.)

On his mother’s side, Kelly’s great-grandfathers worked as a wagon driver and fruit peddler, according to Mendelsohn’s research. These were not skilled positions, obviously. It’s not clear that any of Kelly’s immigrant ancestors had significant educational backgrounds.

Deep dive tk, but here is the 1910 census showing Kelly’s great-grandfather Giuseppe Pedalino and his second wife Concetta. (Kelly’s great-grandma died in 1898.)

He was a wagon driver. She was illiterate and could not speak English 10 years after arrival.#resistancegenealogy pic.twitter.com/N9AfuLNvb1

— Jennifer Mendelsohn (@CleverTitleTK) May 11, 2018

Then there’s the issue of language. This can be trickier to determine, but census forms used to include questions about languages spoken. From one such record, Mendelsohn learned that John DeMarco, the fruit peddler, still didn’t speak English after more than a decade in the country. His wife Crescenza — Kelly’s great-grandmother — lived in the United States for more than 30 years without learning the language.

There’s an obvious response to all of this, which Kelly gets to in his initial comments: That was then. Kelly pointedly says that these immigrants cannot assimilate “into our modern society.”

But things aren’t so different now from then. At the time that Kelly’s Italian ancestors were living in Boston, there was a large population of both Italian and Irish immigrants. You can see in the census documents that Mendelsohn shared on Twitter that the houses near Kelly’s ancestors were populated with people who’d mostly immigrated from Italy and Ireland. In the 19th century, these were neighborhoods in which one didn’t need to speak English to communicate.

Much as there are communities today where the primary language is Chinese or Spanish.

Education is more important now than it was then, but there is clearly work to be done by people with less than a high school education. That’s the point, really: Many immigrants come from Mexico and work in the agricultural industry here as laborers. They may not end up as White House chiefs of staff, but then neither did Giuseppe Pedalino. It took Pedalino’s family three more generations before it attained that level of  prominence.

Even had the Pedalinos and the Kellys and the DeMarcos and the Currans not wound up as the grandparents and great-grandparents of a Marine Corps general or chief of staff, it’s likely that Kelly wouldn’t have judged their arrival in the United States as unworthy. That’s much of the reason that Kelly’s comments to NPR earned the reaction that they did: Not all immigrants become prominent individuals or important members of society, but then neither do all native-born Americans.

Everyone on the family tree above who isn’t marked with a colored box is a natural-born citizen of the United States. None of them would be likely to exist had their immigrant parents never moved to the United States and met one another, meaning that Kelly wouldn’t exist, either. Most probably came from rural areas, many probably had little education or preparation for skilled employment, and at least some never assimilated into English-speaking society.

Kelly somehow nonetheless wound up as the top aide to the president of the United States.

, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/05/11/how-john-kellys-family-history-compares-to-the-immigrants-he-wants-to-keep-from-entering/

[alexwunderbuildt]

They spoke out against immigrants. So she unearthed their own immigrant ancestors

They spoke out against immigrants. So she unearthed their own immigrant ancestors

(CNN)If you think the ongoing immigration debates don’t apply to you, Jennifer Mendelsohn has some news: They probably do. She calls it #resistancegenealogy, and it only takes a few online tools and some instinctive sleuthing for her to call out public figures who oppose common forms of immigration. “I think the first person I worked on was Steve King,” Mendelsohn says of the Iowa congressman who…

[sethground]

They spoke out against immigrants. So she unearthed their own immigrant ancestors

(CNN)If you think the ongoing immigration debates don’t apply to you, Jennifer Mendelsohn has some news: They probably do. She calls it #resistancegenealogy, and it only takes a few online tools and some instinctive sleuthing for her to call out public figures who oppose common forms of immigration. “I think the first person I worked on was Steve King,” Mendelsohn says of the Iowa congressman who…

[trendingnewsb]

They spoke out against immigrants. So she unearthed their own immigrant ancestors

(CNN)If you think the ongoing immigration debates don’t apply to you, Jennifer Mendelsohn has some news: They probably do.

She calls it #resistancegenealogy, and it only takes a few online tools and some instinctive sleuthing for her to call out public figures who oppose common forms of immigration.

“I think the first person I worked on was Steve King,” Mendelsohn says of the Iowa congressman who in March 2017 said “you cannot rebuild civilization with somebody else’s babies.”

“I kept thinking, ‘This is ridiculous,” she told CNN. “How do these people think they have a leg to stand on, looking down on immigrants when so many American people have an immigration story in their history?”

Sure enough, her research pointed her toward King’s own immigrant history: His 4-year-old grandmother and her two young siblings arrived at Ellis Island in 1894.

Mendelsohn pulled out similar historical receipts for Dan Scavino, the White House Director of Social Media. Earlier this month Scavino voiced his opposition to chain migration, by which families immigrate to a country in small groups over time.

It only took a few hours for Mendelsohn to trace Scavino’s roots in America back to 1904, when his great-grandfather’s brother became the first of several Scavinos to immigrate from Italy in very similar fashion.

Proving prejudice is nothing new

But she says her project isn’t about shaming people with their immigrant history. It’s quite the opposite, says Mendelsohn.

“It shows how universal immigration is in so many American stories. Some people who’ve been in the country longer, it may not feel that close and it’s easy for them to forget.”

The obituaries, marriage announcements, ship manifests, historical archives, government documents and census data Mendelsohn uses don’t forget as easily.

Mendelsohn’s projects also help people realize that some of the more negative narratives of modern immigration aren’t actually that modern at all.

“So many people today are sort of looking askance at the next wave of immigrants and pearl-clutching, trying to put limits on them and what they may contribute to modern society. And I just laugh at that, because the same exact things were said about their ancestors 100 years ago,” Mendelsohn says.

In Scavino’s case, she pointed out on Twitter that his Italian immigrant ancestors were viewed with the same type of prejudice that today’s anti-immigration hard-liners sometimes cast on African, Hispanic or Middle Eastern immigrants.

And yes, there is an element of race at play that is difficult to pin down through family trees or vintage political cartoons.

“There’s a fear that immigrants are getting browner,” Mendelsohn says. “When the Steve Kings of the world talk about ‘someone else’s babies,’ they’re not talking about a little German baby like his grandmother was.”

Uncovering a shared history

When Tomi Lahren criticized Dreamers and their families as not “law-abiding citizens,” Mendelsohn was quick to point out Lahren’s own ancestor was indicted for forging naturalization papers.

While Mendelsohn’s followers have certainly enjoyed the apparent hypocrisy she has uncovered, there’s another, perhaps more productive side to #resistancegenealogy: Appreciating the brave, painful, diverse immigrant stories that made so many people Americans.

Mendelsohn herself is descended from Jewish ancestors.

“In my own family story, some of the people who chose not to immigrate lost their lives,” she said. “These things have real consequences.”

Mendelsohn hopes that embracing immigrants as a fundamental part of America — whether they are fleeing persecution, war or famine; whether they are coming for opportunity, safety or freedom; whether they hail from Mexico or Southern Europe or the Middle East — can help people see familiarity where they initially saw division.

“This is something that Tomi Lahren and I have in common. Something that Dan Scavino and I have in common,” Mendelsohn says. “To me, it is just such a fundamental and beautiful piece of being American.”

CNN has reached out to King, Scavino and Lahren for comment but hasn’t heard back.

Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2018/01/24/us/immigration-resistance-genealogy-jennifer-mendelsohn-trnd/index.html

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