Immigration: A Long Story!

 

In the 1850’s, there were already people named Honicker in the town of Saint Clair, PA. I imagine I’m descended from them because Saint Clair is my father’s hometown. Honicker is an unusual family name, but the majority of people who bear it reside in Pennsylvania. In the middle of the 19^th century, the original Honickers got on a boat and sailed from Germany to find work in the mines.

They came at a good time. A federal Immigration Bureau for processing and regulating immigration was not established until 1891, and only in 1917 was a literacy requirement put in place. The first truly restrictive immigration law targeting Europeans was not enacted until 1921, the Emergency Quota Act. Its main purpose was to keep people from Eastern and Southern Europe out.

In the 19^th century, immigrants from outside Europe, along with Native Americans, did not fare well. Already in 1803, in response to the Haitian Revolution, led by slaves who freed themselves and chased out the French, Congress banned immigration of free Blacks to the United States. They feared their presence would disrupt a flourishing slave trade.

In 1830, under President Jackson, the Indian Removal Act was passed. The US government confiscated the lands of Native Americans and forced their removal to west of the Mississippi. Considered as “nations,” they were not granted US citizenship. Not until 1924 and the passage of the American Citizenship Act, did Native Americans gain the 14^th Amendment right of automatic citizenship. 

 

On June 2, 1924 Calvin Coolidge signs the Indian Citizenship Act

Conflict over immigration, foreigners, and new immigration laws are a constant of US history almost from the start. In 1790, Congress voted to limit naturalization to “free white men.” In 1882, the Chinese became the first group subjected to restrictive laws. With Executive Order 9066, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in 1942, authorized the internment of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps on the West Coast.

In 1965 the Immigration and Nationality Act established what remain the principles of American immigration law today: family reunification, the need for workers, and asylum for refugees. This law also put in place the first cap on immigration from the Americas.

The French Republic began regulating immigration and defining citizenship at about the same time as the US. At the time of the French Revolution of 1789, any man, regardless of his country of birth, was a citizen if he adhered to the principles of the Revolution. During the 1790’s, a time of war, the French favored naturalization by birth, but by 1804, Napoleon’s Civil Code based nationality on blood: a French child is born to a French father. However, the Code allowed a child born in France of foreign parents to request French nationality once of legal age.

As in the United States, immigration laws began to proliferate in the 1850’s with the industrialization of France, but not until 1889 was there a law to define French nationality and the criteria for naturalization: anyone born in France, once of legal age, was French. Until 1993, if we exclude Vichy France (1940-1944), this was the case. In that year, a new law was enacted requiring children born in France of foreign parents to declare their desire to become French before their 21^st birthday. In 1998, this law was abrogated as contrary to the principles of the French Republic.

Since the late 19^th century, much like in the United States, France has periodically opened wide its gates to immigration, especially when in dire need of workers, and just as often violently pulled them shut. As France industrialized rapidly in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, immigrants arrived from Belgium, Spain, Eastern Europe and Italy.

Between the two World Wars, France “imported” workers from its colonies in North Africa and French Indochina, today’s Viet Nam. Even after France’s war with Algeria ended in 1962, France continued to recruit workers from its former colony. 

 

In 1931 France medical students go on strike, protesting the invasion of foreigners. They call them "métèques," a pejorative term for aliens.

In 1981, socialist President François Mitterrand initiated a massive regularization of undocumented immigrants. In 1983, the far-right, anti-immigration party Front National, today known as National Rally, began its rise. In 1990, socialist prime minister Michel Rocard proclaimed, “we cannot take in all the world’s misery. France must remain a land of asylum, but nothing more.”

In our current decade, in the 2022 French presidential elections, National Rally candidate Marine Le Pen, running on a decidedly anti-immigration platform, won 41,5% of the vote. In 2017, running against Macron, she received 21,3%.

On December 19, 2023, the French Senate and Parliament voted into law a bill putting in place new and stricter laws on immigration. Critics argue President Macron’s right-of-center government has simply pushed through the National Rally anti-immigration program. Without its members in Parliament, the law would have never passed.

In a communiqué on its site, the French Senate claims the goals of the law are to 1) facilitate integration into French society; 2) make it easier to expulse foreigners who represent a serious danger for society; 3) improve border control; 4) ensure an overhaul of the asylum system; 5) simplify litigation concerning the entry, stay or expulsion of foreigners.

Those are the broad lines of the new law. In practice it has called into question one of the foundations of the French Republic: the right to equality and freedom from discrimination for all legal residents of France. The new law has created a two-tiered system where legal immigrants have fewer rights and protections than French citizens. It has also done away with, as was the case in 1993, naturalization by birth, and made it much more difficult to obtain the status of asylum seeker. 

The new law has been submitted to the Constitutional Council, which will soon announce whether it is conform to the French Constitution. Many argue it is not.

At least 149 immigrants died trying to cross the US southern border in 2023. The southern border of France is the Mediterranean Sea, where last year, an estimated 2,500 died in drownings. Already in 2024, a mother and her two children drowned in the Rio Grande, allegedly because Texan authorities prevented US border agents from helping them.

 

On February 26, 2023, at least 70 refugees died when their boat sank off the coast of Crotone, in the Calabria region of Italy. These are the remains of the boat, washed up on the shore.

For the United States and France, immigration is a long story. It is probably part of your story as well. At one time our immigrant ancestors may have been considered the “the vermin poisoning the blood” of “real” Americans.

Real Men Know How to Give

 

The church in Condé sur Huisne

 If Papy had lived in Bethlehem long ago, Mary and Joseph, no room at the inn, would have found a bed and food and love at his place. It may have been small, and the bed may have been of straw, but Papy would have given them his bed, his blankets and the food off his plate.

If he’d had a chicken, he would have killed it, plucked it and thrown it in a pot: a rich broth for the new mother, a drumstick for Joseph, and enough to share with the shepherds who’d somehow found their way to his door. With the feathers and the down, some scraps of fabric, an old straw basket, he’d have made a cradle where the little baby could lay down his sweet head.

Sacré Papy, as the French say. That’s Papy for you.

Except that Papy is no more. He died December 4^th. He was born March 2, 1949, in the town of Sochaux, France. Here, on a piece of swampy land along the Doubs River, not far from Switzerland, Peugeot built its automobile assembly lines in 1912. The site became a city onto itself where, in the 1960’s and 70’s, as many as 40,000 workers were employed. Today fewer than 8,000 are present on what was once the biggest industrial site in France.

 

Papy’s father worked for Peugeot. The family lived in company housing and Papy’s mother worked hard to raise her sons. Everyone worked hard and played hard. Soccer was the big sport and the town of Sochaux can boast being home to France’s first professional soccer team, Football Club Sochaux-Montbéliard, founded in 1928, the last year the Pottsville Maroons played in the NFL.

Papy came from a working-class family and lived in a working-class home, where there was always plenty to eat, but at night the heat was turned off to save on heating bills. Before they went to bed, Papy’s mother would give her sons 2-liter glass bottles filled with hot water to warm their beds.

In the daytime, Papy went to school. He was a good student but rowdy and left school when he was 14, which was common practice in France at a time when very few students finished high school. Fewer still obtained the high school diploma called the “baccalauréat,” which opened the door to French universities.

Papy earned his “junior-high diploma,” “le brevet.” It meant you could read and write French much better than many French high school graduates today. I know because these were my students and I spent as much time correcting their French as their English.

Papy had a favorite teacher, Madame Moreau, and he was her favorite too. She recognized his sharp mind, his energy and zest for life. She encouraged him to stay in school, but that’s not what his people did. Whenever he talked about her, he always exclaimed, Oh! I wish she could see me now, friends with a teacher. She would have never believed it.

Because Papy was my friend.

We met at the house I was remodeling in a country town called Condé-sur-Huisne. Our first conversation took place with me looking up at Papy as he laid new tiles on the roof. I was working too, sitting on a wall by the garden shed, chisel, hammer and metal brush in hand, as I cleaned the original 19^th century floor tiles from inside the house so they could be put down again. 

That's Papy in the striped sweater

For that, I earned Papy’s respect and when he took a break, he often came to talk to me. He knew we’d get along well when I showed interest, rather than repulsion, listening to his story about his pet boa constrictor.

When the house was done and the workers gone, Papy stayed in my life. He and his wife, Mamie, became my best friends in that little village, where some of the locals were none too kind. I’ll never forget my first meal at their home, a luscious pot au feu made with different cuts of tender beef, leeks, carrots and potatoes from their vegetable patch.

Mamie, whose name is Nicole, married Papy, whose name is Guy, in 1990. Till then, both of them had lived a lot of life and taken some hard knocks. I’d say their love saved them and those 33 years together were the happiest of their lives. They had no children together, but they raised one of Mamie’s grandchildren as their daughter and Papy was as proud of Mamie’s children as of his own.

In their home, I learned the meaning of hospitality and ate some of the best meals I’ve ever eaten in France: lapin chasseur, rabbit with mushrooms, langue de boeuf à la sauce piquante, beef tongue in a spicy tomato sauce, tripes à la mode de Caen—yes, I even enjoyed the tripe!!! French home-cooking at its best, served with love.

Anyone who showed up at mealtime was invited to sit down and there was always a lot of drinking—and smoking—during the meal. Thanks to Papy, yes, thanks to him, I’ve learned, not to enjoy, but to tolerate cigarette smoke. And perhaps to better understand those for whom a cigarette represents a brief respite from the pressures of daily life.

Papy lived hard, almost from the start. He loved to reminisce about the dances he went to as a youth, the drinking, the girls, the fights out back. Later he worked in Paris as a painter but lived far away. As soon as he got on the earliest train to the city, he’d meet his buddies and the poker game and smoking would begin.

Later, even when he was up on my roof, working hard, he was fighting cancer. It got him in the end. I saw him last in September, weak, confined to an easy chair, but still in love with life.

A couple of years ago, I gave him a t-shirt from Yuengling Brewery’s gift shop. He wore it with pride.

Papy didn’t use a computer, wasn’t on social media, didn’t much like his smartphone. He was too caught up in giving, living and loving life.

What the world needs now, in 2024, is more like him.

What Do We Know about War?

 

In November 1973, I went to Waterloo, Belgium, to see with my own eyes the battlefield where, on June 18, 1815, Napoleon met defeat. On that date, Europe, after more than two decades of revolution and war, entered a new era of what some might call peace; others, a period of localized conflicts. The continent was no longer a battlefield from the Atlantic to Moscow.

My visit to Waterloo took place exactly fifty years ago, at a time when World War II was still very much alive in the hearts, bodies and minds of those who lived it. It cast its shadow over the lives of those, like me, born in its aftermath. The most deadly military conflict in history ended May 8, 1945, V-E Day in Europe, and September 2, 1945, V-J Day, when the surrender of Japan became official. It is estimated that in the combined conflicts between 70 to 85 million people died.

At Waterloo, in one day, near 50,000 soldiers fell, wounded or killed in battle. In comparison, in the three days of the battle of Gettysburg, there were an estimated 10,000 deaths and 30,000 wounded, many of whom underwent brutal amputations.

My favorite war, or anti-war, novel is Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. The 1929 novel is based on the author’s experiences as an ambulance driver in the Italian army during World War I. The story’s narrator, Frederic Henry, is an ambulance driver, like the author. Frederic is injured by a bomb. He is hospitalized in Milan, cared for by Catherine Barkley, an English nurse, and they fall in love. By the story’s end, we understand Catherine is the bravest soldier of them all.

Agnes Von Kurowsky Stanfield (1892-1984), born in Germantown, PA. She is believed to be the inspiration for Hemingway's Catherine Barkley

In the novel’s first chapter, in a language close to poetry, Hemingway gives us the truth of war: when bombs fall, humans are reduced to their most elemental, blood, organs, limbs, with no more control over their destiny than a tree or a stone.

And as if war were not enough, cholera breaks out, and I quote here the chapter’s last paragraph, another powerful indictment of war: “At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army.”

Only 7,000. Only indeed, compared to the nearly 10 million military deaths and the 10 million civilian deaths of World War I. War remains an abstraction until the bombs fall on us.

But back to Waterloo. It was November, the plain was covered by low clouds, and there was a rainy mist in the air. My travelling companion and I climbed the Lion’s Mount, the artificial butte rising from the plain to commemorate the victory of the English and their allies. From the top, the mist was so thick, we could hardly see a thing. We climbed back down and hurried to a bus stop to wait for a bus back to Brussels.

When it finally arrived, it was empty except for an older couple. They smiled at us. We struck up a conversation. When we got off the bus at the same stop in the city, they invited us to their home.

I will never forget the time I spent with them.

They lived in the center of Brussels, in what to my American eye was a very old building. We climbed up steps to their apartment. Once inside, it was like a fairy tale. Everything glowed in soft light and I felt enveloped in gentle kindness. Even our porcelain teacups, so fine, were like embers in our hands.

We had tea, we stayed for dinner. In the space of one evening, we’d become a family, parents and children, protected by the power of love.

That’s when they showed us. They showed us the numbers tattooed in the flesh of their forearms. They’d been among the last transports to Auschwitz. They had survived.   

The entrance to the Auschwitz camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau

 

 I don’t know how many Holocaust survivors are alive in November 2023. A handful. In November 1973, I touched the Holocaust as our new friends warmly embraced us when we left their home late that night.

In December 1990 I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. I was living in Krakow, Poland, at the time. On that December day, icy snow was falling. My entire body was numb with cold. I went to the cafeteria in the Auschwitz camp, ordered a bowl of zupa grzybowa, mushroom soup. I had been alone in the camp and I had the entire dining room to myself. I have no words to describe the strangeness, the shame, of eating in that place.

Krakow is not far from the Ukrainian border. It is about 200 miles from the city of Lviv. Both cities were once part of the Austro Hungarian Empire. Lviv was a part of Poland at different periods in that country’s history until, in 1945, it became part of the Soviet Union. Today it is a city of independent Ukraine. At this date, it is estimated there are 500,000 dead and wounded in Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.  

I have never been under attack, unlike my father. He escaped bombs and death in the Philippines in WWII, but he died too young to tell me about his experience. I remember April 30, 1975, the fall of Saigon, as if it were yesterday, but I have never directly experienced war. Nor were my ancestors the victims of the pogroms that are a fact of European history.

In Europe, the victims were the Jews. On October 7, 2023, Israeli Jews once again experienced the horror of a pogrom. This time it was perpetrated by the Hamas, within the borders of the Israeli state declared independent in 1948. This was three years after the end of WWII, which brought death to an estimated 6 million European Jews out of a population of 9.5 million.

The Israeli riposte to the Hamas attack has been devastating to the people of Gaza. Hamas wants to wipe Israel from the map. Israelis fight for their lives, killing thousands in Gaza, as public opinion around the world turns against them for what is considered a cruel and unjustified show of force.

All wars eventually end, as history demonstrates. We know the years, the dates, the number of victims, but the suffering belongs to those who have known war.