In 1923, my father, Bernard Wieder stepped off the boat at
Ellis Island, having fled the Rumanian Army where his older brother died in
World War I. Dad did not wish to
suffer the same fate for a blatantly anti Semitic Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was of military age and he would
have none of it.
Bidding a sorrowful good bye to his parents and five
brothers and sisters, he took a
train from Budapest travelling to Hamburg and boarded a ship for
America, in below deck steerage class.
As a child, reading
"Nick Carter" mysteries centered in New York, he had decided that was
where his future would lie.
People rode in Automobiles, dressed in fancy clothes, and
lived in heated houses with indoor plumbing. And Nick always found the
murderer.
The following year the US Congress passed the Immigration
and Nationality Act of 1924, discriminating against Eastern Europeans (Jews)
who wished to come to America, frustrating Dad's plans to bring the remainder
of his family to America. Every
year, he returned to Hungary for the Jewish High Holy Days, and dutifully
throughout his time here until 1939 when the war erupted, he sent his diabetic
father insulin. Dad married in
1939 and planned to take his bride to meet his parents that September. After the war started, his Dad, my
grandfather, died of diabetic shock in 1940, unable to receive the life saving
medication from his son. Dad said
his father was lucky.
All of the rest of his family, his mother, and brothers and
sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins all perished in Auschwitz, except for two
sisters who survived and also came to America as immigrants after the war, in
1945. They lived into old
age and had children, my cousins, who married and lived, as did I, the American
dream.
Dad used to quote the well known, Emma Lazarus who talked
about the "huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the tempest
tossed," words found at the base of the Statue of Liberty. And from his
first days bought and read the New York Times to learn English and of America
Dad made a success of his life, working industriously in
Miami Beach and in New York City in all manner of jobs and in his own
businesses. His first job
was at the Nemo hotel on 1st street here in Miami Beach as a busboy. My mothers parents, landed in 1900 also having fled Hungary. So I am really only a first generation
American, born in New York City during the darkest days of World War II.
Many of my friends tell a similar story, although I do have some friends who grew up
in Georgia and whose ancestors employed slaves, but had a relative who fought
in the Civil War, although on the Union side over the darkest stain in American
history, involving African
Americans who travelled here in suffocating below deck slave ships, their arms
and legs in shackles. They too
were immigrants.
Some clichés bear repeating. We are and always will be a nation of immigrants. It is just that some of us have
conveniently forgotten our heritage, and seek to exclude others who are
currently fleeing the same deprivations their ancestors did decades and centuries
ago.
The economic forces that have created migrations are people
who seek a better life--that is what America represents.
It does not stand for leaders ripping children from their
parents. It does not stand for
values that are un-American. If we
are a nation of immigrants, we should be taking in as many as we can. No matter what price we pay, no matter what the
cost. History will look kindly on
us if we do. The economic benefits
bestowed on this country by immigrants has always been positive. We remained Ronald Reagan's shining
city on the hill. We remained
Roosevelt's arsenal of democracy.
Edmund Burke said that evil triumphs when good men say
nothing and Republicans in congress should remember who their first President
was and what he stood for. They
should re-read Lincoln's second inaugural address. They should read the Constitution, and the lives of our
founding fathers who understood deeply what we should be as a nation. Alexander Hamilton was an
immigrant too.
