The Italians Were All Called “Criminals” Too
A group of small, dark-skinned men gathers at dawn, desperate to be chosen for that day’s crew, eager to have an opportunity to perform hours of back-breaking, manual labor in exchange for the tiniest of wages. It’s demeaning to have to beg for work, sure, but they can’t expect to do anything else; they don’t speak the language here. And even though people in this new country seem to need their help—to man their factories and fix their houses and do all the rest of the unskilled jobs other, more established immigrants have “outgrown,” these newcomers and their families are considered “inferior peoples, deficient in intelligence and moral character, and prone to radicalism, pauperism and criminality—in short, threats to the American republic.”*
These men aren’t day laborers looking for work in the parking lot of your local Home Depot or one of the hundreds of delivery people whizzing around town ferrying pizza or sushi to your door. Their wives and daughters aren’t the diligent house cleaners scrubbing your toilet or the stooped farm hands picking your strawberries. They’re not Mexican or Guatemalan or a member of any of the groups that have been targeted in this country’s most recent wave of anti-immigrant sentiment.
They’re my great-grandparents and their friends and family (and maybe yours too). They’re the destitute, uneducated peasants from southern Italy who came to this country in mass numbers at the turn of the 20th century to escape political upheaval, starvation, and abuse at home. Only to be met with the same derision and hate being directed at other innocent people today. (Brent Staples’ 2019 New York Times article—“How Italians Became ‘White’”—offers a detailed description of Italian Americans’ struggle to overcome “vicious bigotry” and eventually achieve “reluctant acceptance,” as well as the lesser known details of how and why Columbus Day was first recognized.)
Of course, even before I started researching my historic novel set in the “Little Italy” of Newark, New Jersey in the 1920s, I knew a little about the anti-Italian/anti-Catholic prejudice that existed at the time. My grandmother and her sisters used to tell me about growing up in Newark and seeing signs in windows stating: “No Italians Need Apply.” They were too civilized to tell me about the derogatory names thrown at their community, but eventually I learned about those too. Dagos. Guineas. Wops.
One of our most longstanding and shameful national traditions, it seems, is to demonize the latest ethnic group trying to make the American dream their own.
But the Italians were different than today’s immigrants, people say, because they “assimilated,” they learned English and became integrated into American society.
Certainly, their children—my grandparents—did. But the first generation of Italians did what most first-generation immigrants do: they clustered with other immigrants from their same region or village and clung to their native language and traditions. I only ever got to meet one of my great-grandparents, my father’s mother’s mother. We called her “Teep,” a nickname apparently bestowed on her by my father’s buddies in honor of her famous “tomato pie” or “TP.” Despite spending decades here, she spoke only the Italian dialect of her hometown her entire life. And many Italian immigrants, trained by years of mistreatment at home to be suspicious of politicians and other authority figures, delayed becoming naturalized U.S. citizens. So, no, they didn’t all immediately “assimilate” as that term is commonly understood.
The Italians were different, people also say, because they came to the U.S. legally, they followed the rules.
Only because they were lucky. And they got here before there were any rules.
For many years, the U.S. allowed unrestrained immigration in order to get the workers that a growing country needed, especially as the industrial economy began to develop. Eventually, however, a nativist backlash against foreigners began, and legal restrictions on immigration were adopted. (For an excellent, concise overview of the history of U.S. immigration law and nativist views, you can read “Making America 1920 Again?” a 2017 paper by Julia G. Young, Associate Professor of History at Catholic University.)
Significantly for the Italians, the 1917 Immigration Act imposed a literacy requirement that no doubt would have disqualified vast numbers of earlier immigrants from southern Italy, where a large percentage of the population had little education and could not read. (A sample of the literacy test for Italian immigrants and description of its impact on one specific family can be found here.) And when the 1917 restrictions didn’t keep out enough people, Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Johnson-Reed Act of1924 establishing explicit quotas for immigrants of many nationalities, effectively shutting down the pipeline from southern Italy.
As the 20th century progressed, America once again grew more welcoming to immigrants, but that era has apparently ended. The unfortunate fact is that, as Professor Young noted, “nativism seems to spring anew with each new generation of Americans.” So, it’s disheartening but not surprising that some of the loudest voices warning of the "dangers" at our borders are descendants of those same Italian laborers who suffered through so much to give their families a better life.
That, of course, is what virtually every immigrant is hoping for—a better life. I keep thinking about the poor Italian seeking the 6204th visa to come to the U.S. in 1925, after the Johnson-Reed Act resulted in the issuance of only 6203. In all likelihood, he was no less eager, no less deserving of a new start in America than the 222,260 of his fellow countrymen who managed to come in 1921. But the doors were closed to him based on an arbitrary, probably unreliable number (2% of the number of foreign-born persons from the country at the time of the 1890 census).
The U.S. may not be able to accommodate uncontrolled, unplanned immigration from every country around the world. We need an equitable way to determine who gets in, as well as a fair and reasonable process for treating undocumented people, many of whom have been productive members of American society for years. What we don’t need are more unfounded and racist assumptions or stereotypes about the latest newcomers to our country, especially from people whose ancestors suffered similar attacks. Your family may have gotten here first but, at their heart, most immigrant stories begin in a similar way. The question now is how we’re going to let them end.
*Dennis J. Starr, The Italians of New Jersey: A Historical Introduction and Bibliography (N.J. Historical Society 1985).