The Right Way

How our immigrant ancestors got here

We are all descended from immigrants.

If you are like me and you live in the Americas, you are bound to have ancestors from somewhere else. Even if one of your ancestors was among the earliest known people to arrive on a pristine, post-glacial continent from Asia¹ (and assuming you don’t count that as “immigrating”) you also have approximately 1,024 8x-great grandparents who lived around 200 years ago, so your odds of not being descended from someone who came from elsewhere are pretty slim.

I’ve been having a lot of fun researching my wife’s family tree because she has a lot of relatively recent immigrants for me to study. Her Swedish great-grandfather, Arvid Holmquist, arrived in 1910. Other branches arrived from the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and Germany during the mid-19th century. My family’s earliest arrivals were probably Joseph Frey who came to New York from Germany, or the Greenlees who came from Ireland during the infamous famine - both in the 1840s.

Is this a good time to share one of my favorite songs?

Thousands are sailing
Across the western ocean
Where the hand of opportunity
Draws tickets in a lottery
Where e'er we go, we celebrate
The land that makes us refugees
From fear of priests with empty plates
From guilt and weeping effigies
Still we dance to the music
And we dance

Most of my ancestors have been in North America for longer than there have been immigration laws. It wasn’t until 1882 that the first general immigration law was enacted. The Immigration Act of 1891 established a Bureau of Immigration in the Treasury Department. The Immigration Act of 1924 (the Johnson-Reed Act) finally set up the first “consular control system,” which required that visas be obtained abroad from a U.S. consulate before admission.²

The earliest European folks who came here were (most likely/most often) religious dissidents or non-conformists fleeing Europe, or they were “transported” - meaning their emigration from England was involuntary and they became someone’s property for a period of service when they arrived. My earliest known Bellamy ancestor started his time in North America as an indentured servant. We also have to acknowledge that many, many people were stolen from their homelands and brought to the Americas to spend their entire lives performing the labor that made the country viable.

The point is that if any of my ancestors had been required to follow our current immigration laws, I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be. And neither would most of you.

That’s why I find the common insistence that immigrants who want to come here should come in “the right way, the way my family did!” to be so odd. When people say that, they seem unaware that their ancestors most likely did come in the way modern migrants come in - they showed up unannounced and did their best to find land or work to feed their families. That’s what my ancestors did!

The sad thing about this insistence that there is a “right way” to immigrate is the cruelty this inflicts on people who are fleeing here for many of the same reasons my ancestors came. Most Americans don’t even know who their immigrant ancestors were - they might know they were “German” or “Irish” and they might even know some of their names - but I have learned over the years that they are rarely interested in the details. (Details like, “What did ‘German’ mean before 1870?” or “Which kind of Irish were they?”)

Coming to America used to require a dangerous ocean voyage with no guarantee of work or prospects upon arrival. There were risks from diseases or being exploited upon arrival, and little chance of a welcome from the people already living here. Modern Americans seem to believe that our immigration laws have changed those factors when the truth is we have only made it harder on the poor, the vulnerable, and the desperate while doing nothing to bar the people the laws are intended to keep out.

When I look at the people trying to make America their home today, I see my ancestors. They’re from countries torn apart by war, they speak dozens of languages, and they just want the same breathing room to raise their children that my ancestors wanted. And if you judge today’s immigrants by the yardstick of my ancestors, they are coming in “the right way” - making a long and dangerous journey and showing up, hoping for their chance to be one of us.

Maybe the problem isn’t them, or how they get here, as much as it is how we treat them - and how we contribute to the causes that drove them to leave their home countries in the first place.

1. Archaeological and genetic evidence suggests the first humans arrived in North America between approximately 25,000 and 16,000 years ago. (University of Oregon, “New data suggests a timeline for arrival of the first Americans” by Becky Raines, Museum of Natural and Cultural History, 24 Feb 2023.)

2. American Immigration Council, Did My Family Really Come “Legally”? 10 Aug 2016.