Stories, poems and art
What I needed to I named
paid attention to what I couldn’t see
What I couldn’t spare I gave away
My left hand didn’t know
I emptied what needed filling
sang words without notes
counted pebbles in the well
slept until the stars had faces
Who travels slow
will travel far
Who dreams of dying
will wake in joy
So do not grudge me
a coat of colors
I weave together
all I dream
She loves us, she loves us not. She loves us, she loves us not. So the petals of the daisy tell the story of America’s love-hate relationship with her immigrant people—homesteaders and refugees, migrants and asylum seekers, those fleeing poverty, war, persecution and famine.
President Donald Trump, aide Stephen Miller, DHS’s Kristi Noem, and ICE tsar Tom Holman are not the first ones in our nation’s history to tilt America against immigrants. Anti-immigrant sentiment has been fanned into flames on and off from our earliest days. Posing as populists, politicians have railed against foreigners “poisoning the blood of our country,” as Trump put it in during his presidential campaign.
Since the first Europeans arrived without visas, and Africans arrived in chains, America has opened doors to newcomers, then shut them, opened, then shut them again. In the 19th century, we needed workers for our factories and farmers for our prairies. We needed merchants and tradesmen, engineers and inventors. It helped if you were Protestant and white. It wasn’t good if you were Chinese or Irish or Mexican.
Although doors for a while swung open to “your tired, your hungry, your masses yearning to breathe free,” by the 1920s they had all but closed again. Laws approved by Congress in 1917 and 1921 slowed immigration to a trickle, setting quotas based on national origin. These laws and anti-Semitic sentiment kept out thousands of Jews attempting to flee Nazi Germany. Included among them were 907 passengers–men, women and children–aboard the M.S. St. Louis. Refused permission to dock in Miami, the ship turned back to Europe. Some 250 perished in concentration camps.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 preserved a restrictive quota system favoring Europeans, but made an important change. The bill abolished the “alien ineligible to citizenship” category applied to Asians, although it limited the number of those who could qualify.
Deciding who to allow in America is one thing. What to do with those already in is another. The answer has often been harsh. For example, the Chinese and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. For example, the braceros invited in to plant and harvest our crops.
In 1954, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) brought out “Operation Wetback.” Under this federal program, officials used military-like tactics to arrest tens of thousands of immigrants across the country. Caught up in the raids were farm and factory workers, including some American citizens. Deemed unwelcome, they were flown, trucked or shipped across the border.
I was thinking of all this as I sat in a café in Woburn the other night, listening to the stories of three immigrants. From Nicaragua, Turkey and India, they shared stories of their arrival and the challenges and obstacles they faced. As they pursue remarkable careers in science, health care and technology, they are reaching out to others, mentoring and building community.
Above all, they are sharing their love for America. She loves me. She loves me not.
Like many Americans, I am pained by the policies and actions of our government, by the slamming of doors to thousands of refugees who were already been vetted for resettlement. By the ending of legal protections for thousands fleeing violence and persecution in their home countries. By the brutal and cruel tactics of ICE agents as they take parents from children and children from families.
The simple truth is, we need immigrants. We need them, not only for economic reasons, to bring young life to an aging demographic, but for their love ethic.
It’s time to love our immigrants again.
Last week we flew home from Edinburgh, and on the seven-hour flight I got to thinking of Patrick Hay, who made a similar journey. Flying now-a-days is no fun, but it certainly is easier than the journey the young Scotsman took by ship more than three and a half centuries ago.
It happened like this. Around 1675, escaping from an apprenticeship in Edinburgh, Hay stole aboard a ship leaving for the New World. Arriving in Salem, Massachusetts, with no means to pay for his passage, he indentured himself again, this time for “six or seven years” to a farmer in Lynnfield, who paid off the captain. After this, Hay came to Stoneham, then a sparsely settled area known as Charleston End. As historian Silas Dean writes, Hay “came over from Lynnfield with his axe and gun.”
Clearing land around Cobble Hill, Hay “stood somewhat in fear of the Indians, although he purchased his land of them, at the rate of two coppers per acre.” Here he built a log house.
From this modest beginning, Hay went on to become one of Stoneham’s most prominent citizens and land owners and one of its most colorful characters. Dean writes: “During his life time he is said to have married no less than five wives. At the last marriage ceremony, (which took place after he was seventy years old) he is said to have displayed his youthful buoyancy, by dancing on the occasion.”
In 1730 Hay was “admitted to full communion” in the First Church of Christ in Stoneham.
William B. Stevens in his History of Stoneham has more to say about Hays. “He must have been a man of great force and character, buying as he did numerous tracks of land, clearing farms, and erecting buildings.”
Stevens continues: “[Patrick] Hay was not only the owner of houses and land and man-servants and maid-servants, but he had a multitude of wives, no less than four. He was one of the first selectmen when the town was organized. After having lived the life of a patriarch, so far as such a life was possible in the eighteenth century, and in Puritan New England, he died at the age of ninety in 1748.”
Not long after Hay arrived, he was instrumental in the establishment of another Stoneham family, the Gerrys. The first Gerry arrived in Boston as a boatswain in the British Royal Navy. While stationed here, Gerry met Hay, who brought him out to Charlestown End.
“Being pleased with the prospect of taking up his residence here, [Gerry] returned to Boston, got permission to return here and live, with the promise that if ever called for to go on an expedition against the enemy, (the French), he must go.”
It was Gerry, Dean writes, who with his axe slew a pack of wolves that attacked him on his return home one night. Finding a bride in Boston, Gerry and his wife raised several children, whose lives played important roles in Stoneham and beyond. Gerry himself, however, being called back into war service, “left his wife and children, never to return; as it is said he fell during an engagement with a foreign enemy.”
The children of Patrick Hay were also major players in the life of our town. James became a well-off shopkeeper, having inherited a 60-acre farm from his father. Another son, Captain Peter Hay, “was one of the most consequential men in Stoneham of his time . . . holding many offices and possessing a considerable estate.”
Like his father and his son, Peter Hay owned slaves.
Much has changed in Stoneham since then. Likewise, in Edinburgh, Scotland, the birthplace of Patrick Hay. Visiting there last week, we found the city eminently beautiful and accommodating. People are friendly and tolerant of our American accents. The modern parliament building stands in striking contrast to the castles and medieval streets of the Old Town.
The glories of the past are still there. So are the centers of education and invention. But I could find no remnants of the harshness that drove so many poor and oppressed to America—that brought a teenager, unhappy with his condition, to find a prosperous and influential life in Stoneham.
Note: Ben Jacques writes about local history in his book, If the Shoe Fits: Stories of Stoneham Then & Now. His articles have appeared in a number of magazines and newspapers, including the Boston Globe.
Ben Jacques Stories 