Columnist's Crossing Confirmed

Cape Breton Post columnist Rannie Gillis recently wrote of a childhood trip to the U.S. One of his readers thought his story needed documentation.

It was only two weeks ago — Monday March 31 — when I received the following e-mail. “Hello Rannie, I was just reading your column “Columnist relives bus trip to Boston when he was a toddler” and thought you might like a souvenir of that trip. Here are the United States border crossing cards for you, your brother and your mother. I enjoy reading your column. Regards: Juanita MacDonald, Whycocomagh.”

Enclosed, as attachments, were scanned images of three United States Custom’s border crossing cards. The cards, dated August 3, 1946, appeared to be a little bit larger than a traditional recipe card and contained a wealth of personal information on myself, my brother and my mother.

As this was the same day that my column about travelling from Sydney to Boston on a bus appeared, you can well imagine my shock and surprise at receiving this very personal information and from an unknown woman in Whycocomagh, of all places. [Link]

Yes, Ancestry.com's Canada to U.S. Border Crossings database is available even in Whycocomagh.

A Pretty Normal American Family

Stanford University history professor Richard White knows that not every illegal immigrant speaks Spanish.

White found that his grandfather tried to immigrate from Ireland through Canada in 1936 because he could not get a visa under the quota laws.

"He tried to come through Detroit. It was hard to get caught at Detroit, but he managed to get caught," White said. Back in Canada, his grandfather called his brother, a Chicago police officer, who crossed the border and met him there. The two then walked to Detroit, his brother flashing his Chicago policeman's badge to U.S. customs officers who waved the pair through.

"I wouldn't be here, my brothers wouldn't be here if illegal aliens had been rounded up and dragged out," said White, a 1992 Pulitzer Prize finalist. [Link]

As White argued in a 2006 article, our public discourse on immigration should focus less on abstract principles and more on the concrete, complicated practices that shaped family histories like his own.

My other grandfather nearly got deported back to Russia, where he was born, for crimes of "moral turpitude," until he became, as my father liked to say, the only Democrat ever pardoned by Herbert Hoover. My wife's father spent his last demented year in Arizona trying to persuade his wife to rent a jackhammer to cut into their slab foundation and hide the money from the Mexicans, whom he thought were about cross the border en masse. My brother-in-law was born in Mexico, and became a citizen in the last amnesty.

I consider myself part of a pretty normal American family.

Campaign Rocked by Immigration Scandal

The records of U.S.-Mexico Border Crossings recently put online by Ancestry.com reveal something shocking about a certain presidential candidate whose father was born in Mexico.

Ancestry.com couldn't locate records showing when Mitt Romney's parents and grandparents returned to the United States to live.... [Link]

Before you get alarmed, let me assure you that I have already notified the Department of Homeland Security about this situation, and that proceedings are underway to deport Mr. Romney and his fence-jumping family back to Chihuahua.

President Bush has weighed in on the issue, saying that if Congress would promptly institute his guest-worker program, the Romneys could stay in this country and do the jobs that Americans don't want to do—like picking lettuce and talking to Bill O'Reilly.

Did Sitting Bull Jump the Border?

Now comes news that the bones of Sitting Bull his descendants want to move may actually be in Canada.

Jerome First, a 70-year-old Montana Sioux and the great-grandson of Sitting Bull's close friend, Chief Medicine Bear, claims the latest uproar over the bones is irrelevant because Sitting Bull was secretly buried in the Turtle Mountains of southern Manitoba.

The Turtle Mountains straddle the border between southwestern Manitoba and North Dakota.

"They faked his grave," First told CanWest News Service on Friday, "because Sitting Bull had visions that there would be a fight over his body." [Link]

Look for the Gretna Green

Arlene H. Eakle blogged last night about "Gretna Greens"—out-of-town spots that welcomed eloping couples.

Military posts on the frontier, like Crown Point NY, Southwest Point TN, could be gretnas. People from border states along international boundaries for Canada and Mexico often slipped over the boundary to marry. River Towns along the Ohio, the Mississippi, the Connecticut, the Hudson, the Missouri Rivers. Keokuk, Lee County, IA was a gretna green along the Mississippi; it was also a favored place of marriage for Irish ancestors coming both from the Eastern states and up the River. [Link]

Some Longoria Historia

Desperate Latina housewife Eva Longoria talks about her American ancestry in today's San Bernadino County Sun:

[B]y any measure, Longoria is far more authentically Texan than a certain president we could name.

"Something like eighth, ninth, 10th," she says of her generation, which includes three older sisters, that grew up on the family ranch outside of Corpus Christi. "We didn't cross the border; the border crossed us. We've got the same Spanish land grants our Mexican ancestors did." [Link]

Raul N. Longoria includes Eva on his Longoria genealogy website, which shows she is the great-great-granddaughter of Ponciano Longoria—born about 1852, and "probably the first 'American' born ancestor from the Longoria branch." (The 1860 census for Rio Grande City, Starr County, Texas, says that Ponciano was born in Mexico, but who am I to argue?)

My father, Raul Longoria, recalls hearing stories about Ponciano's stubbornness. He recalled one story about a time when Ponciano was standing in a pasture talking to two other men. One of the men, Celso Villarreal, noticed that Ponciano was standing on a hill of fire ants and told Ponciano that he should move to avoid being bit. Ponciano, in his stubbornness, responded that the fire ants could not harm him and he continued standing on the ant hill while resuming the conversation. Though the ants bit, he refused to acknowledge that they were there or that they even bothered him. [Link]

The website also has some info on Eva's less ant-bitten maternal lines, in case anyone wants to try proving her wrong.

Disorder at the Border

In the current immigration debate, one argument has arisen that demands response. Daneen G. Peterson has voiced it in a particularly bold-faced way, insisting that we are not a nation of immigrants:

Most Americans today are NATIVE BORN and therefore NOT IMMIGRANTS! What is left unsaid in the above phrase is the significant fact that our American ancestors came to this country as LEGAL immigrants, which is the antithesis of the current invasion of ILLEGAL ALIENS supported by the open borders, pro-illegal alien crowd! [Link]

What is left unsaid in the above screed is that our borders were far more open in our early history than today. (Does it even make sense to distinguish "legal" from "illegal" immigrants where there are no immigration laws?) And that immigrants sought ways to avoid U.S. border inspectors even in the 19th century.

Take this passage from Marian L. Smith's 2000 article on immigration by way of Canada:

In earlier years immigrants landing in Canada were largely from Britain, Scandinavia, northern Europe, or Russia. In the 1880s, as the United States began to impose more stringent immigration rules at its own ports of entry, even more immigrants from the same regions and elsewhere chose to travel via Canada to avoid the trouble and delay of U.S. immigrant inspection. By the 1890s, steamship companies began to advertise passage through Canada as a more desirable route for immigrants who wished to avoid U.S. inspectors. While much of this traffic remained Irish, Swedish, Norwegian, or Russian, the business of carrying Italians, Greeks, and others from Mediterranean ports to Canada grew. [Link]

The Mexican border was no less porous than the Canadian, and the people aiming to start a new life in America no less determined than our modern-day border-crossers.

We can all agree that illegal immigration is a problem in urgent need of a solution, but let's not mistake our ancestors for saints. Or dismiss them as criminals.