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In the middle of the 18th century (1762 or thereabouts), Catherine the Great issued an invitation to Europeans to settle what was then the Russian frontier, an area of land bordering the Volga river. While the invitation was open to anyone, she got a very large number of German immigrants. They settled in German-speaking, mostly Lutheran and Roman Catholic enclaves, maintaining a German identity, referring to themselves as Volga Deutsche [1] (Volga Germans). Aside from the occasional pogrom, they lived pretty much as any farming folks do until the end of the 19th century, when Russia began to draft them. Most of them packed up and moved, nearly en masse, to the American midwest. My adopted great-grandfather, Johannes Jacob, was among them.
Johannes Jacob arrived in Seattle at the start of the 20th century. He headed out to a small town in Kansas [2] where a large number of his people lived. He spoke no English, but it made no difference- in Wakenee, just about everyone spoke German. He named his son, my grandfather, after himself, and referred to him as Johannesich, a Russian convention showing that he was the son of Johannes (roughly equivalent to calling someone "junior"
. [3] His son spoke German only until he was old enough to go to school. Later, during World War II, his son changed his name to John Jacob, enlisted in the Navy and claimed a Russian ethnicity, which he promptly dropped during the Red scare. All of his children had extremely English names.
My grandfather and his family moved to California in the 1950's. My father met and married my mother, and they adopted two children, first my brother, then me. I have early memories of "Papa Jake" teaching my brother and I to tell people we were "Germans from Russia" [4](note: I am not white, so this created more questions than it answered).
You know, every 100 years or so, our nation goes into a freaky fear meltdown about immigration. At the time my great-grandfather came over, the US was gripped by the dread "Yellow Peril", [5] the belief that Chinese immigrants would bring their cheap labor to the US and depress wages, lower our standard of living and change our culture irrevocably with their language, food, and customs (sound familiar [6]?). No one raised an eyebrow over old Johannes Jacob and the other Volga Deutsche, people who had maintained a separte identity and culture in Russia and came over to the US and pretty much did the same thing. At the time, they were embraced. The suspicion and angst over their German identity would come later [7].
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free, says the lady with the big torch. There's nothing in there about "so long as they only speak English" [8]. There's nothing in there about not flying the flag of their native land. [9] And if there were, there's a whole bunch of people who'd be fucked. [10] There's not even any reference whatsoever to Federal benefits [11], in fact, she's even inviting the wretched refuse and the homeless tempest-tost in, the very folks who are most likely to be in need of assistance at some point.
It's as though she thinks immigrants are the lifeblood of America or something.
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