Category Archives: Anxiety

I’ve Got a Song …

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… it ain’t got no melody / I’m gonna sing it to my friends … Will it go ’round in circles? Will it fly high like a bird up in the sky?

Billy Preston & Bruce Fisher, Will It Go Round In Circles, 1972

Joey here.

We’ve been going ’round in circles on Manhattan Island.

Our vehicle for city traffic is our nimble Brompton folding bike. It’s part titanium.

Like Jeffrey’s leg.

People notice our Human Rights sign even more on the Brompton than they do on a recumbent. They aren’t distracted by an unusual machine.

Joey aboard the Brompton during a Hudson River sunset.

We’re up to 726 miles on this Ride.

But we haven’t just been spinning our wheels.

In light of our one-of-a-kind 16,000-mile 13-year journey, keeping us on the road for 9 months altogether, talking with thousands of people about immigration throughout the Lower 48 States, the National Park Service has offered to make an exception to its ban on public use of the Ellis Island bridge.

Congressman Jerrold Nadler’s backing helped.

So did my Kangaroo Court Puppet photogenicity.

Jeffrey and I will be allowed to pedal over that bridge to reach the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration.

Soon we’ll set a date. Stay tuned.

We have a personal link to Ellis Island and other early 20th Century immigration portals.

Jeffrey’s four grandparents, refugees from Czarist Russia, arrived in the USA between 1905 and 1910. Both couples met and married in the USA.

Grandpa Sam deserted the Russian Army around 1905. He, and Grandma Fannie with her family, fled what is now Belarus. They worked in Lower East Side sweatshops, met and married, and found their way to rural NY. Fannie was a marvelous homemaker. Sam became a peddler, then a farmer and cattle dealer. One of their kids went into business; three went to college. Both their sons were in the U.S. Army Air Corps in WW2.
Young Grandma Annie and master painter and paperhanger Grandpa Hymon fled what is now Lithuania. Hymon joined relatives in Cleveland, where he practiced his profession. Annie became a U.S. citizen in Montpelier, VT, when her father naturalized in 1914. In 1921, she married Hymon and lost her citizenship; Hymon had a green card and under the laws of the time, American women lost their citizenship by marrying foreign men. Annie naturalized a second time in 1942, when both her sons—a house painter and a college kid—were in the U.S. Army.

Fannie and Sam, Annie and Hymon, came from large families. Many of their aunts, uncles, and cousins remained in Europe.

American law sealed the deaths of those who stayed behind.

One hundred years ago today, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Immigration Act of 1924. The Act was intended to stop immigration of “inferior races”: Italians, Slavs, Greeks, Jews …

The Act established quotas for immigrant visas.

Here are the quotas for 1938, the year before Hitler’s army attacked Poland.

The quota for Germany was 27,370. For the United Kingdom, it was 65,721. For Ireland, it was 17,853.

The quota for the vast Soviet Union, where Sam and Fannie’s extended families lived, was 2,712. That’s less than 1/6 of tiny Ireland’s quota.

The quota for Lithuania, where Annie and Hymon’s families lived, was 386. Three hundred and eighty-six visas. For the entire country.

The 1924 Act shut America’s door to natives of the USSR and Lithuania. Other countries barred immigrants too.

The Act did its job.

Between 1939 and 1942, Jeffrey’s European relatives were murdered.

All of them.

Now there’s talk in America in the spirit of the 1924 Act.

Talk of roundups, deportations, and shutting America’s door.

Today’s xenophobes, including those at the benignly named Center for Immigration Studies, say that the 1924 Act was a gift to America.

Yup.

Billy Preston went on to sing:

I’ve got a story ain’t got no moral / Let the bad guy win every once in a while …

Is past prologue?

Will it go ’round in circles?

Will anguish fly high like a bird up in the sky?

Will the bad guys win?

If you haven’t already, and you are able … now is the time to donate to Human Rights First.