Suburban Immigrants Feel Arizona Heat

On Long Island, native residents have an ambivalent attitude toward immigration. Though they employ undocumented workers by the thousands--New York state harbors a greater percentage of illegal aliens than Arizona (five percent versus four percent of the national total from 2000 to 2006)--Long Island has become a flashpoint for anti-immigrant protest.

In 2005, the town of Farmingville was the site of one of the most controversial day-laborer shape-ups that have raised suburbanites' ire. On the exurban frontier of eastern Long Island, a tense court case recently wrapped up with the conviction of a teenager who knifed a man while "beaner hopping"--targeting Latino immigrants as a violent lark. Last week, an SUV was spotted in Nassau County with a homemade bumper sticker that read, "Go Arizona."

Yet Long Islanders who support Arizona's new immigration bill often cite not the current influx of foreigners, but their own family histories. "My grandfather was an illegal from Ulster," someone wrote on a Long Islander's Facebook recently, adding, for the record, "He left and came back legally. Plenty of people wait years to get a green card, why should other be able to cut in line?" A woman with an Italian last name wrote on the same thread about her grandparents. "Not only did they come through this country legally,but they got jobs, contributed to the economy, built lives and raised children who respected the country that afforded their families the opportunities for education and a decent life."

Nevermind that the implication here--that today's immigrants don't contribute to American society--have repeatedly been proven false. The grandparents of today's middle-aged homeowners were for the most part not legal immigrants, at least not in the sense that they secured green cards before stepping ashore.

Before 1924, when the first mass immigration measures were enacted, visas were not necessary to enter the country (unless you were Chinese, in which case you didn't come in). Even after quotas were imposed, those who were allowed in simply showed up. This system lasted until Ellis Island closed in the mid-1950s, and as immigration lawyer and Hofstra Law School professor Patrick Young points out, "If that system was in place today, there would be no illegal immigrants."

Not that second- and third-generation European-Americans shouldn't be proud of their forebears. And they are. The 2000 U.S. Census showed that Italian-Americans in particular are increasingly claiming their heritage. This trend is no doubt the result of the success of their group in American life. Or possibly today's Italian-Americans have finally recovered from the intense prejudice that greeted their grandparents when they arrived half a century ago.