Today we hear most about the inhumane conditions imposed on refugees applying for asylum at our borders. In contrast, legal immigration into the U.S. is highly regulated, favoring those with money, education, and desirable skills. But even those who immigrate legally to the U.S. may have a very difficult time finding a foothold here despite being a very different “class” from those who arrived here in the mid to late 1800s.
During the Age of Mass Migration from 1850 to 1913, when U.S. borders were open, around 30 million Europeans, most poor and uneducated, came to America desperate for new opportunity. By the early 20th century, some 15 percent of the U.S. population was foreign born, roughly comparable to the share today.
We don’t make the transition to American life any easier by ensuring that every new immigrant is welcomed with opportunities for assistance with language and cultural assimilation, housing, job connections or specific city/community “survival” guides. A century ago, the impact of such neglect led to horrific living conditions in American cities: isolation, confusion, hunger, homelessness, disease and exploitation by corrupt and indifferent law enforcement.
My next documentary is a deep dive into the lives of our Sicilian relatives, the Campagna family, who came to the U.S. in the late 1800s to find freedom from poverty and the Palermo Mafia. Instead, they suffered threats from a Chicago Black Hand extortionist, and ultimate family tragedy.
Their immigration story -- the social pressures that led to tragic consequences -- continues in America today, and to some extent, affects even those immigrants who come here legally.
But our family story is unique in at least one respect from other ethnic groups. Scholars note that the Italians/Sicilians are the only ethnic group in the U.S. assumed to have ties to organized crime, a stereotype that began shortly after the arrival of Sicilian immigrants.
Jumbled facts about the Sicilian culture of honor and the violence of vengeance, wildly inaccurate newspaper reports of Black Hand crime, and Chicago corruption and indifference to the fate of Italian/Sicilian immigrants were all factors that very few understand even today.
Meanwhile, the character of American Italians / Sicilians is blackened by the assumption that all are related to Mafia crime families, a myth that continues unchallenged.