This Is An Immigrant Country-Let Them Stay-Full Citizenship Rights For Those Who Make It Here

This Is An Immigrant Country-Let Them Stay-Full Citizenship Rights For Those Who Make It Here

By Allan Jackson

My old corner boy leader from back in the 1960s Frankie Riley, a successful attorney in Boston whose law firm has taken a fair amount of immigrant asylum appeal cases of late on a pro bono basis, said he had to laugh (this before the racist hatred ignited down in North Carolina recently make things much grimmer and dangerous for citizens never mind asylum seekers) when the white nationalists and others go on and on about immigrants and keeping them out by any means necessary it appears.     

See Frankie is very sensitive about the immigration question because his grandparents on his mother’s side had come to this country from the old country (Ireland) illegally and never did become citizens because they had overstayed without papers during the last immigrant scare and both had died before the coast was clear to try.  (This I did not know growing up and hanging around with him in front of Tonio’s Pizza Parlor in heavily Irish North Adamsville south of Boston but I can see today why he would have kept quiet about it then). This meant something today’s “illegal” immigrants know all too well that they contributed to the American economy, paid taxes and all the other regular ordinary attributes of the average citizen without the benefits.     

When I mentioned that I had seen a poster or maybe it was a newspaper arguing that all those innocent immigrants who made it here should be given full citizen rights he raised both hands in agreement. Overwhelmingly people, families do not uproot themselves from their home countries unless they have run out of room, have faced a blank wall, have to flee.  That means the refugees photographed below should have the same opportunity to stay here and make citizenship.  

*I should explain my own American immigrant story since after all with the exceptions of Native Americans who were already here and black slaves who were forced here this is an immigrant county and we are all immigrants one way or another. On my mother’s side her great-great grandparents, both sides, came over in the late 1840s during the British-created “potato famine” (a good example of people leaving when there was no other recourse). On my father’s side some forebears early in the 1800s were given “the choice” after stealing some pigs regularly from some lord of the manor in England of the hangman or “emigration.”