By Frank Cerabino,
Palm Beach Post
There’s a lot of talk these days about the United States being “invaded” by the migration of poor, unskilled migrants seeking political or economic refuge here.
It’s really an old story. Here’s an example.
Her name was Luigia Colucci. She was an illiterate 40-year-old Italian migrant from a small town in the province of Avellino. She arrived in Ellis Island on Feb. 21, 1917, with her two teenage daughters and little to offer.
She didn’t have a visa. She wasn’t a lucky winner of an immigration lottery. She just showed up, hoping to start a new life here.
Oh yeah, and she was eight months pregnant.
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Just another immigrant story
If Luigia Colucci would have arrived unannounced at a U.S. immigration checkpoint in 2017 instead of 1917, the impending child in her womb would have been derisively called “an anchor baby. “
And because she was following a string of other family members who were previously admitted to the United States, she would be called the product of “chain migration” and put through a judicial system designed to kick her out because she would fail short of having any “merit” for entry.
Fox News’ Tucker Carlson could probably do a solid half-hour of alarm-drenched commentary on the folly of allowing the Luigia Coluccis of the world into the United States. About half of the Italians who came here were illiterate not just in English, but in their own language.
Two weeks before Luigia Colucci arrived, the anti-immigration forces of that day passed a tough new immigration law. The Immigration Act of 1917 created classes of people that would be kept from being allowed to emigrate to the United States.
Lucky for Colucci, it zeroed in on Chinese, Japanese and other Asian immigrants. Not
Italians. The new immigration law created an exclusion zone on the map designed to keep Asians out of America. It also barred “all idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded persons,” as well as anarchists, polygamists, and “physically defective” people.
It established a literacy test, too, but not in the English language. You just had to be able to read a string of common words in your native language.
No “anchor baby” concerns last century
The Immigration Act of 1917, which had been previously vetoed by three presidents as axenophobic constriction of immigration that violated our national character, didn’t actually go into effect until months after Colucci arrived. And it didn’t keep the pregnant Luigia Colucci and her teenage daughters from being welcomed into the United States.
Also, the governor of New York at the time, Charles Seymour Whitman, the chairman of the Republican National Convention, wasn’t flogging immigration as a campaign issue for his reelection that year.
He didn’t step in to claim that all these impoverished Italians were ruining his state. And he didn’t concoct a stunt to tell them a bunch of lies in order to round them up and put them on a train to Massachusetts.
Whitman was more focused on reorganizing the state’s finances and reviewing the salaries of civil service employees.
So, Colucci got to stay in the United States and give birth to an American child a month after her arrival.
Colucci died at the age of 80 in Pennsylvania in 1956. The reason I know about her life is because of professional genealogist Megan Smolenyak, of St. Petersburg.
Colucci not just any immigrant
Smolenyak wrote several books on genealogy and has worked as a consultant on the family history show on NBC-TV called “Who Do You Think You Are?”
She frequently researches the family background of notable public figures. She found out about Colucci while researching the family tree of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Luigia Colucci, she found, was DeSantis’ great-great grandmother from his mother’s side. DeSantis’ entire family tree is made up of down-and-out Italian immigrants who showed up unannounced at Ellis Island, Smolenyak found.
“Those who are less than welcoming of immigrants often proudly state that their ancestors came here legally, while failing to appreciate (or perhaps deliberately ignoring) how meaningless this claim is,” Smolenyak wrote.
“Until a century ago, unless you were Chinese or Japanese (nationalities targeted by earlier legislation), this amounted to showing up at a U.S. port of entry.
“This is exactly what Luigia did and what today’s asylum applicants are doing,” Smolenyak wrote. “The difference is that this process wasn’t criminalized until 2018.”
Last week, DeSantis used Florida taxpayer money to charter flights from Texas to the island of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts for 50 immigrants seeking asylum status in the United States.
Immigration lawyers said that the asylum seekers were induced to get on the planes after being told lies about jobs and housing that awaited them in Massachusetts. Apparently, the taxpayers of Florida also paid for a videographer to capture it all for DeSantis future political use.
Using Venezuelan asylum seekers as political pawns
The asylum seekers mostly came from Venezuela, a country that is frequently cited by DeSantis for its repressive Marxist government.
When Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro claimed victory in a disputed election in 2019,
DeSantis went out of his way to vocally oppose what he called Maduro’s “repressive regime. “
“Today, in my capacity as Governor, I am signing a proclamation that affirms Florida’s deep affection for Venezuela and decries the individual liberty that has been stripped away by a despot.”
And yet, when Venezuelans showed up in Texas to claim they were seeking political asylum from that despot, DeSantis didn’t show them “deep affection.” He went out of his way to round them up and made their already perilous journey worse by sabotaging their lawful asylum process.
Who’s the “despot” again?
It’s all the more egregious, considering that DeSantis championed a new law that requires all public-school students in Florida to observe “Victims of Communism Day” on Nov. 7 of each
year.
The law that DeSantis signed in May, also requires that all Florida students enrolled in a U.S. government class receive 45 minutes of course instruction on the evils of Communism.
Under the law, the instruction requires, in part, that Florida students learn about the abuses of “Nicolas Maduro and the Chavismo movement” in Venezuela, even though Venezuela isn’t one of the five Communist countries in the world. (China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos).
Sounds more like legislative propaganda, not real learning. But maybe we can fix it.
If we’re going to teach kids the whole story, it ought to include making the next day, Nov. 8, a required observance of the “Victims of Ron DeSantis Day” in Florida’s public schools.
And we can start by teaching kids how far we’ve fallen from the days we took in his great great grandmother, Luigia Colucci.
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